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Sermon: People of God, Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed! While we profess this great truth in this Resurrection Season, others call it foolishness. The Gospel of the death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Christ is a divisive declaration. Calvin once wrote that while the teachings of Christ gained many disciples, He also gained many adversaries.[1] It was true in the first century and it is true today. “(Jesus) was always asserting the truth and defending it, even when doing so placed his life in danger. Here he spoke the truth, unwelcome as it was, and the Jews picked up stones to stone him because his denial of their cherished but absolutely false religious opinions.”[2]

John 10 is a familiar passage. It echoes our Psalm 23 reading. In our passage, truth is that the Great Shepherd promises only to protect those in His own care, under His protective Hands. Continue reading “Sermon/Easter: The Shepherd/King; John 10:22-30”

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Sermon: People of God, Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed! C.S. Lewis once wrote: that “Symbols are the natural speech of the soul, a language older and more universal than words.”[1] The gospel of St. John is profoundly rooted in symbolic language. Approaching John with an American and Western mindset will minimize the fullness of the resurrection story. We need to embrace a biblical orientation; a way of looking at the Bible that would do justice to the text and its intended purpose. We need to look at the Bible Through New Eyes[2] as our resident theologian would say.

This narrative in the end of John contains two central ideas. The first is that Jesus’ resurrection brings in a new world. Continue reading “John 20:1-14 Two Fires, Two Communities, One Lord”