[The audio for this sermon can be found here.]

LUKE 24:13-35

Really there are two main ideas from the Emmaus story that struck me right off the bat. One, we’re not in control of receiving salvation. Of seeing the risen Christ. God has to open our eyes. But secondly, God isn’t going to open our eyes until we let go of that attempt to be in control, and let him become our host. Only then will we be able to see the saving nature of his suffering.

It tells us right at the beginning of the story in vs. 15 that:

As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along  with them; 16 but they were kept from recognizing him.

Now, this last line, “They were kept from recognizing him,” is not a very comforting line. It almost sounds like God was playing tricks on them or trying to deceive them and manipulate things. But I think it’s very important for us to note that neither God nor Jesus is mentioned in this verse as the agent, or as the subject, the one who is preventing them from recognizing Jesus. This is no small detail. Because Jesus doesn’t force his way in. It’s just not his style!

Because we know what this is like — to be in a state when we’re just not open, we’re just not receptive or ready to hear certain things, or to learn something new. We’re just closed off, and no matter what we hear, or how many times something is explained, we’re not going to understand or change our thinking.

And when we’re in this place, it’s funny, no one is forcing us to stay that way, or to stay stuck or closed off, or tunnel-visioned, and yet, it certainly feels like we’re trapped and we cannot help the state that we’re in. We’re powerless to change it. We’re not in control.

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Matthew 27:27-66

This week we’ve especially been talking about and looking at the way Jesus’s journey to the cross reveals our sin and the weight of it, the cost and consequences of it — just how devastating and serious it really is. And this is really important. It’s something we can’t lose sight of and that we should indeed focus on and remember during Holy Week. Our violence, our selfishness, our fear, our anger, leads Jesus to the Cross.

And somehow, because Jesus is both human and God, he stands in for us. He’s our representative suffer. He takes on what we would otherwise have to bear for ourselves, and takes it away — sets us free of it. This is central to the gospel and to the hope that we have as Christians.

But of all the words that were just read from Matthew’s gospel, maybe none of them so much as Jesus’ last words have struck Christians and baffled them throughout the Centuries as the ones that Jesus uttered from the cross in his dying breathe: (v. 46) “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

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[The audio for this sermon can be found here.]

Matthew 21:1-11; 27:11-26

Last Sunday we begin to take a turn in a slightly different direction in our sermons as we are preparing for Holy week. And we talked about the story of the golden calf, and about God’s mercy and justice in response to that sin, and then specifically this idea of generational sin — sin that gets inherited, in a sense or passed down, because it’s in our family or environment — it’s just around us, and we may not even realize it.

Sometimes we’re perpetuating it, it’s sin that we’re committing and we’re caught up in, but other times it’s sin that’s been perpetrated against us, and we’re the victim of it. So we’re wounded, and there needs to be awareness, first of all. Because if it isn’t acknowledged, then it can’t be healed, and there can’t be reconciliation in our relationships.

But in the story this morning for Palm Sunday, a different kind of sin is highlighted. It isn’t so much generational sin, and it isn’t necessarily even just individual sin — though it certainly includes those two. What we see in the Palm Sunday episode, and then in the passage I read a moment ago, which takes place only a few days later, is the showcasing of what I think we can just call social sin.

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[The following is from the sermon I preached on March 12, 2017 at Saint Peter’s Church. It is based on Mark 1:29-39, and the audio can be found here.]

For the whole year of 2017 so far, and now in the season of Lent, we’ve basically been talking about following Jesus: how to be with him, do what he did, and, as a result, become like him. Moreover, we follow him in community with others, and this following and community happens in the presence and by the power of the Holy Spirit.

For the first Sunday in Lent, we heard about Jesus’s most basic requirement for following him, which was this: if anyone wants to be my disciple, he or she must deny themselves, pick up their cross, and follow me. It’s a discipline of self-denial and self- renunciation. It’s requires a certain kind of self-imposed suffering, in other words — suffering on purpose, you could say, so that suffering on accident doesn’t overtake us. So that we can remain who we are in Christ, and live like him, even when life becomes overwhelming.

And the Christian way of doing this and preparing ourselves for this is through the regular practice of various spiritual disciplines. And not surprisingly, to learn what those disciplines are, again — we look to Jesus and ask how we can do what he did. So this morning we’re getting very specific and asking about one particular practice Jesus observed.

It tells us in Mark 1 that

³⁵ Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.

In other words, Jesus had a regularly rhythm not only of prayer in his life — it does say he went to pray, of course, and we could talk about prayer — but prayer is something we do talk about fairly often.

It also tells us that Jesus had a regular rhythm of moving into silence and solitude. Two things we don’t tend to talk about as much.

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