AN INTIMACY-DEPRIVED WORLD Several years ago Eric Segal, a professor of English in Yale University, wrote a simple little volume about love. Amid the complex, abstract movie scripts replete with symbolism that flood contemporary movie offices, his seemed to be quite absurd. He simply produced a story of the intimate relationship between a Harvard hockey player and a Radcliffe coed. Equally simple and trite was the title applied to both the book and movie - Love Story. Most of you are aware that Love Story ...
As you sit before your television set, the program, "To Tell the Truth," flashes on the tube. The host, Gary Moore, introduces the panel members and the game is soon underway. Three persons come onto the stage and all claim to be the same person. Two are pretenders; one is the real person. The object of the game is for the panelists to discover the right one so they ask questions and then attempt an educated guess. As they toss out their questions, the audience both in the studio and at home is also ...
There is a story that a university in Scotland once wished to honor a scholar who had done some significant inquiry into the life and work of one of its own most illustrious former scholars, the 16th century Scottish reformer, John Knox. The tradition in that and several other universities was that, if possible, a cap belonging to the subject of the study - in this case John Knox - would be given to the person being honored, if such a cap could be found. In that way the honoree would have something ...
Perhaps you have heard this story. It's a great story: Many years ago, when Hitler's forces occupied Denmark, the order came that all Jews in Denmark were to identify themselves by wearing armbands with yellow stars of David. The Danes had seen the extermination of Jews in other countries and guessed that this was the first step in that process in their countries. The King did not defy the orders. He had every Jew wear the star and he himself wore the Star of David. He told his people that he expected ...
In the Gospel of Mark, the story of Jesus’ dramatic encounter with Blind Bartimaeus in Jerich takes up only seven verses of scripture, and yet within these seven verses, we see the crux of the Christian gospel in a swiftly drawn portrait of Christian love. As Jesus encounters Bartimaeus here, He portrays for us the ways in which we as Christians are called to love other people. Now, love is difficult to define (as we all know) but it can be demonstrated, and that is precisely what Jesus does here. He ...
Good Friday For Chester Szuber, it was the gift of life. The cost, however, was so dear he almost didn't accept it. The youngest of his 6 children an exuberant 22-year-old nursing student had been killed in a car accident and it quickly became clear her heart could be transplanted into his chest. According to an Associated Press story, the family had little time to decide. Patti's death on a mountain road in Tennessee came while she was on a trip with a friend before her return to nursing school. The car ...
In 1939, a coast guard vessel was cruising the Canadian Arctic when the men spotted a polar bear stranded on an ice floe. It was quite a novelty for the seamen, who threw the bear salami, peanut butter, and chocolate bars. Then they ran out of the food. Unfortunately, the polar bear hadn't run out of appetite, so he proceeded to board their vessel. The men on ship were terrified and opened the fire hoses on the bear. The polar bear loved it and raised his paws in the air to get the water under his armpits ...
There was a rock musical in the 1960s called Jesus Christ Superstar. In the musical, Judas Iscariot mocks Jesus with the theme song of the musical. The lyrics of one of the verses are something like this: "If you'd come today you could have reached the whole nation-- Israel in four B.C. had no mass communication . . . Jesus Christ Superstar, Do you think you're what they say you are?" (1) Makes sense, doesn't it? Judas' line of thinking indicates that God should have hired someone to handle public ...
Halford Luccock once told of a woman in a certain American city, who called a local minister on the telephone a week or so before Christmas. She was in much agitation, and explained that she was in charge of the community Christmas tree lighting ceremony. What disturbed her was the limited selection of carols to be sung. She could not, she said, find just the right songs for such an occasion. “Most of the Christmas songs,” she said, “are so distressingly theological.” “Well, replied the minister, “ ...
I have often shared with congregations that the key sometimes to unlocking the meaning of a certain Biblical passage is to read what has happened in the book before the particular passage we are reading, and what is going to take place after the passage we are studying. No where is this principle more apparent than in our reading about the mysterious but marvelous story of the TRANSFIGURATION OF OUR LORD. Another key to understanding this passage and other sacred writings is to look not only at the story, ...
You can never tell what people are going to do. I was reading recently about some of the wacky moments on the popular TV game show “The Price Is Right.” The wackiest moments were not scripted. They came as a total surprise. One time, a model was sitting at the wheel of a car being offered as a prize. Since the car was inside, on the production set, crew members were to manually push it to where it would be displayed for the winner. Unfortunately, as the crew pushed it from behind, the car smashed through ...
Convictions and opinions are not the same, are they? Someone has said, “Opinions are many, convictions are few; opinions change often, convictions rarely do.” Opinions live on the surface; convictions go deep. Opinions thrive around the gossipy edges; convictions live near the center of life. One way to tell the difference is to ask, What would you make a sacrifice for- of real money, of significant time, of patient suffering, even of life if necessary? The more you would pay, the closer you move to the ...
I once saw a list of professions ranked according to the degree of stress that can be found in that vocation. I looked for "minister." It wasn't there. I assumed there must be a mistake, so I looked under "clergy." It wasn't there, either. I looked under "pastor," and "priest." Not there. Later somebody told me that, as a matter of fact, ministry is considered one of the least stressful vocations. Which meant that all the worrying I've done for the last thirty years was for nothing. The fact of the matter ...
Our text says that Jesus "went up to the mountain" and, oh, what a beautiful mountain it is! The Mount of the Beatitudes is not all that high, but in Galilee it is the equivalent of Mount Everest. Stretched out below is the most fertile agricultural land in Israel, intricately laid out next to the jeweled sea, that breathtaking, blue prism reflecting the hot beauty of the Middle Eastern sun. A few years ago, after wandering around on the hilltop for a while, our pilgrim group decided that this was the ...
Today's gospel story is all about a miracle molecule called water. Any water people here? I don't mean sun people who gather at the water because of the sun. I mean true water people. Swimmers? Surfers? Fishermen/women? Boaters? Bathers? Hot-tubbers? Islanders? Anyone here ever spend a night on an island somewhere? If you live on an island (like we do Orcas Island, Washington State), you're surrounded on all sides by water, cut off from easy access to the rest of the state, and the country. Islanders are ...
An increasing number of responsible pet owners have now “micro-chipped” their dogs and cats. A small “chip” is injected under the skin and when a special scanner is run over the chip, the creature’s whole history is made available—-pet’s name, owner’s name, home address, home phone, vet’s name, vet’s phone, medications taken. It’s all there. Most animal shelters now have these scanners. When a lost or wandering animal is brought in, “scanning” is the first procedure. Often the “lost” is “found,” ...
You probably heard about this – it was in all the papers; it was in radio and television news reports; it was a “hot topic” on the call-in-talk shows. A minister in North Carolina had members of his church voted out of the church because they had voted for a Presidential Candidate different from the one he voted for and supported. In October last year (2004) he preached a sermon in which he told the congregation who he was supporting for President of the United States… and he said that if any of them were ...
Disney World. It is the most popular tourist attraction on the planet. The four theme parks, The Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney MGM, and Animal Kingdom individually rank among the top ten theme parks in all of the world. In 1998, forty-two million people went through the turnstiles at Disney World alone. It sits on forty-three square miles of some of the most prime property in the entire state of Florida. It is twice the size of Manhattan Island. Originally, it took seven years to plan, and four and one-half ...
A teacher was working with a grammar lesson and she said to one of her students, "Willie, what is it when I say ‘I love you, you love me, he loves me?'" Willie replied, "That's one of those triangles where somebody gets shot." Well, it used to be a situation where somebody would get shot—with a gun. Today it's a situation that gets shot with a television camera. Television refers to adultery, to sex outside of marriages, 13 times more frequently than it mentions intimacy between a husband and a wife. There ...
I want to begin by asking you a question. Who is sitting in your seat? Now I know you think I’ve lost my mind because you just said “I am.” Well, let me ask you a follow-up question: Which “you” is sitting in your seat? You say, “What do you mean?” Well, there are actually three people in your seat. There is the person that you think you are, there is the person others think you are, and there is the person God knows you are. When I was a boy one of my heroes was someone very familiar to all of you. I’m ...
A parable, a statistic and a post script… The Parable Once upon a time, a group of people in a small town realized their town was in trouble. So they built a swimming pool, opened it to the neighborhood and invited everyone to come. And the people came. And they were happy. They discovered a new sense of community and the whole town was renewed. The idea spread to other towns and soon there were swimming pools in every town and every neighborhood. Soon there were so many swimming pools, they decided to ...
Jeremiah has always held a special appeal. He is a vision of strength and commitment yet is a somewhat sorrowful character with whom it is easy to sympathize. Perhaps the reason Jeremiah has always found favor is that two basic factors have always defined life _ things always change and people don't like change. Nearly all people can look at their own age, their own times, and deplore the fact that they have been born into a period of tremendous upheaval and change. It always appears that past generations ...
When it's all been said and done, only two kinds of people populate the earth. There are those who put in more than they take out; and there are those who take out more than they put in. A getter or a giver, which are you? There are many positive things that could be said of Jesus Christ. He was a brilliant teacher, a prophetic change agent, even the Savior of the world. In our scripture for today, Peter describes Him this way: “Jesus of Nazareth went about doing good!" O, that all of us who call him Lord ...
There is a candy shop in the city of Keystone, South Dakota, just a few hundred yards down the mountain from that infamous Mount Rushmore monument. I can't tell you the name of that candy store, but I can certainly recall the sign on the counter that stands at just about eyeball-level for the average seven-year-old. The sign says this: "If Mom says, ‘No,' ask Grandma!" Within the obvious humor of that single sentence, there are two truths revealed. The first, and more obvious of the two, is that all ...
The earliest recounting of the event we commemorate this evening comes from the Apostle Paul. In 1 Corinthians 11, he writes, “For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of ...