“Hello . . . Joseph? It’s Mary. “Say, I’ve got some great news. Remember how we said we wanted to start a family sooner rather than later? Well, we’ve got our start – I’m pregnant! “Joseph? Joseph? Yes, of course I know you can’t be the father. Mother and I had ‘the talk’ a long [...]
This season of Advent, we have been pointing out, is a season of preparation for Christians. And not just preparing in the sense of decorating the house, and baking the cookies, and shopping for the presents for Christmas; but also the preparing of our selves, a look inside, a time for reflection and any needed repentance. How do we do that kind of preparation? Where do we look to find out how to prepare? Well, perhaps some guidance is available from some of the people who prepared themselves for the first coming of Jesus, so long ago. Perhaps they can in some ways serve as a model or example for us, as we seek to do our preparation now. […]
At the back of our Old Testament is a collection of books often called “the minor prophets.” “Minor” not because the messages of those pages are any less important than the messages of the other pages of the Bible, but because they are short books. Compared to Isaiah’s sixty-six chapters or Jeremiah’s fifty-two, some of these books are only one or two chapters long. They have names like Obadiah, and Zephaniah, and Habakkuk, whom we looked at two Sundays ago. The Lectionary, that list of recommended Scripture passages for our worship services, only steers us to the minor prophets for one brief period in its three years’ worth of readings. That period is late Summer and early Fall, of “Year 3” – and that is now. So today we’re going to take advantage of this short Lectionary window of opportunity to look at part of the book by the minor prophet Zechariah. […]
Laurie has two sisters. One of them, Beth, lives in Pittsburgh, and we see her when we do our twice-a-year “Pennsylvania loops” to visit both of our families. The other, Debbi, lives in Massachusetts with her family. We have often visited them at Thanksgiving – a New England Thanksgiving. When we visit Debbi, we often spend one day in Boston, joining many tourists who visit many tourist attractions there. And one of the still-popular tourist attractions, even though the TV show has only been available in reruns for many years now, is the bar that’s shown on the opening of “Cheers.” Yes, there is a bar called “Cheers” in Boston, just off Beacon Hill – but tourists need to be warned of something before they go there: while the outside of the bar is exactly the same as you see on the opening credits of the TV show, the interior, I’m afraid, was something just created for the show. The real Cheers looks nothing like that inside. The real Cheers, in fact, is more of a restaurant than a bar, with lots of booths and little rooms. I think it even has ferns in it, and regular fans of the show know that Norm and Cliff just hate ferns in a bar. […]
Our Gospel passage today is not an especially famous one, but as we shall see, it is a key passage for Luke, in the development of his account of Jesus’ life. We’ll look at the passage in three parts this morning, and you may want to keep it in front of you; we won’t be going, however, exactly in the order of the verses. The first of the three sections is a short one, consisting only of the first verse: “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” The phrase “set his face” attracts our attention, as it is not one we usually use in our everyday speech. Set the table, yes; set your hair, maybe; “set the stage” – but not “set his face.” Yet it is a phrase that makes sense, once we visualize it. To “set” is to place or put; to set one’s face, then, would be to place it pointed toward a certain direction. To set one’s face to go to Jerusalem, then, would mean to face Jerusalem, to look toward the destination of Jerusalem. Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem: he faced the direction he had decided to go next. […]