Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 22, 2012

Scripture:

Most of you have heard me say it before. I've been preaching it here for ten years now. God's grace is free. God's grace is universal. Everyone is saved. No exceptions. Not one. There is nothing we can do to save ourselves. There is nothing we need to do to save ourselves. As far as God is concerned it's already done. It's already done because God has done it. We know that God has done it because we know Jesus Christ. If grace is truly grace and not something else, it is free; and it is for everyone. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 15, 2012

Scripture:

All of you, or most of you anyway, come to Sunday worship here fairly regularly—some more regularly than others, but still, most of you come more or less regularly. You are all, most of you, friends or members of this Christian church. I imagine that if I asked each of you if you believe in God and in Jesus Christ most if not all of you would answer yes, I believe in God and in Jesus Christ. But let me ask you something. Though you may say that you believe in God and in Jesus Christ, do you sometimes have doubts about that? Or do you always have doubts about that? If you do—and frankly I think that if we’re honest we all have to say that we do, at least times—does it bother you that you have doubts? Do you wish you didn’t? I suspect that we all wish we didn’t have doubts about God and about Jesus Christ. In the story of “Doubting Thomas” that we just heard we hear the risen Christ say to Thomas “do not doubt, but believe,” and we feel guilty because of our doubts, don’t we. At least I know I do. We wish we didn’t have doubts: Is God real? Is Jesus really the Son of God? Did he really rise from the grave? We wish we could answer all of those questions with an unqualified yes, but in our hearts we know that, at times at least, we can’t. We know our hearts and our minds have doubts about those things, and we wish they didn’t. Those doubt that I am pretty sure all of us have are what I want to talk about this morning.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 8, 2012

Scripture:

We Christians so love to celebrate Easter. It’s the biggest celebration of the Christian year. It’s the biggest celebration of the Christian life. It really is something to celebrate. Jesus the Christ, the one whom we confess to be our Lord and Savior, was dead; and then somehow he wasn’t. It wasn’t possible, of course. It was just true, that’s all. Jesus Christ rose up from the grave. The grave couldn’t hold him. Death couldn’t stop him. What could be better than that? Nothing! Nothing at all could be better than that. So we celebrate, and rightly so.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 1, 2012

Scripture:

They didn’t get it. The crowds I mean. The crowds that greeted Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem on a borrowed burro. They didn’t get it. They didn’t get what Jesus riding into the seat of political and religious power on a donkey meant. What was going on here? Why would Jesus ride into Jerusalem on a donkey when whenever he went anywhere else he walked? He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey because doing so wasn’t just a way to get into the city. It was a prophetic act. In riding into Jerusalem on a donkey Jesus was enacting that scene from Zechariah that we heard. It probably isn’t obvious to us that when Jesus rode into the city that way he was precisely presenting himself as a king; but he was, and the people of Jerusalem would have known that he was presenting himself as a king because, I think we can assume, they knew that passage from Zechariah. But what kind of king rides a donkey? That’s what the crowd didn’t get.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 25, 2012

Scripture:

We’ve all heard it. A great many people who will have nothing to do with any organized religion say “I’m spiritual but not religious.” I always wonder what they mean by that claim. Whatever they mean when they say I’m spiritual but not religious, the claim certainly makes some major assumptions, namely, that spirituality and religion are not the same thing, that they are two separate things, and that it is possible to separate them. The claim implies that it is possible to be spiritual without being religious and that it is also possible to be religious without being spiritual. People do indeed separate religion and spirituality all the time, and the most common form of that separation is for people to claim spirituality and to reject religion.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 18, 2012

Scripture:

We’ve all heard it countless times before. We’ve heard it read. We’ve heard it sung. We’ve seen the citation held up on signs in football stadiums. It’s often called the most famous verse in the Bible. Many of us, I suspect, can recite it from memory, probably in its King James version. It’s John 3:16, which in the NRSV translation we heard reads:. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” On the one hand it’s so familiar to most Christians that it’s almost trite. On the other hand it is for many Christians a concise summary of the entire Christian faith. John 3:16 is so familiar that I’m afraid most Christians who hear it never stop to think about what it really means. Most of us don’t take the time to delve into the verse to discover its depth and its different shades of meaning. Beyond that, for many of us in the more progressive Christian churches we dismiss John 3:16 because it has become so associated with conservative, evangelical Christianity that we think that the only meaning it can have is one we don’t much like, namely, that if you believe in Jesus you’ll go to heaven, and if you don’t believe in Jesus you won’t. I actually think that we make a mistake when we dismiss John 3:16 or react negatively to what we think it means. You see, John 3:16 is actually one of the most linguistically and theologically complex verses in the New Testament. It is also one with immense power and spiritual potential. So let’s take a closer look at it and see if maybe John 3:16 doesn’t turn out to be worth our while after all.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 11, 2012

Scripture:

Paul’s kidding right? The cross the wisdom of God? The cross the power of God? I mean, either he’s kidding or he’s an idiot. Some of us may have some problems with Paul, but I don’t think he’s an idiot; so he must be kidding. Or maybe he’s saying something absurd to make some kind of point. His point can’t really be that the cross of Christ is the wisdom and the power of God, can it? After all, what was the cross? It was a Roman torture and execution device. The Romans used it essentially as an instrument of terror to scare off anyone who even though about defying or threatening Roman power. Besides getting rid of a troublemaker, the purpose of the cross as far as the Romans were concerned was to terrify people into passivity, into compliance with Roman domination. How does that get to be the wisdom and the power of God? Isn’t the cross pretty much the wisdom and the power of the world on full display?

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 4, 2012

Scripture:

Last week PBS ran a documentary about the Amish, that Christian sect mostly in Pennsylvania characterized by their horse-drawn buggies, plain, old fashioned clothes, and their practice of nonviolent living. Part of that documentary told the story of the time a few years ago when a man shot and killed several young Amish girls at their school. Several of the Amish, including the parents of some of the children who were killed, went to the funeral of the killer. They didn’t go to protest. They went to forgive. One of those parents said of that experience that he felt such a sense of relief because he had given up all need to judge the man who shot those children and could leave judgment entirely up to God. I honestly don’t think I could have done what he did or said what he said; but there is, I think, a powerful lesson for us in what that Amish man said. He had gained a great blessing by losing something. He gained the blessing of peace in his soul by losing his need to judge another, even another who had done great evil.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 26, 2012

Scripture:

The Christian calendar is big on preparation. It has two fairly long seasons of preparation in it. The first is Advent. Advent, of course, is the season of preparation for receiving Jesus Christ at his birth on Christmas. The second season of preparation in the Christian calendar is Lent, the season we now enter. It is the season of preparation for the commemorative days of Holy Week—Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday—and the joyous celebration of Christ’s Resurrection on Easter Sunday. This second season of preparation is longer than the first, six Sundays (counting Palm Sunday, which is technically the sixth Sunday of Lent) rather than the four Sundays of Advent. Nonetheless, both Advent and Lent are seasons of preparation for our commemorative marking of major events in the life of Jesus Christ, first his birth and then his death and resurrection. The Christian calendar does indeed spend a lot of time on preparation before it gets to actual commemoration and celebration.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 22, 2012

Scripture:

In the Christian tradition Lent is a time of fasting. That’s why we have that tradition of giving up something for Lent. Fasting is an ancient and universal spiritual tradition. It is practiced to take a person’s mind off of worldly things and put it onto spiritual things, the things of God. Lent with its tradition of fasting and deprivation is supposed to be a time of introspection, a time of personal soul searching, a time of confession and thus a time of drawing closer to God. The emphasis in Lent tends to be very personal, focusing our attention on the state of our spirits and the health of our souls.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 19, 2012

Scripture:

When you’re talking about spiritual things you just can’t use simple, declarative language. When you’re talking about connecting with the spiritual dimension of reality, that is, with God, ordinary factual language just won’t do the trick. So we use a lot of metaphors. Metaphors are words or phrases that talk about a thing by saying something else. They are using images expressed in ordinary words to point to an extraordinary experience. For example: For as long as there have been humans, humans have had extraordinary experiences of the presence of God, experiences of an unusually immediate presence of the spiritual, of the holy, of the numinous. There are no words to describe those experiences directly, so people created metaphors for them. One of those metaphors is “mountaintop experience”. A mountaintop is of course a real, physical place. In a prosaic sense standing on top of Mount Rainier is a mountaintop experience, an experience of being on a literal mountaintop. Used as a metaphor, however, the phrase mountaintop experience doesn’t really have anything directly to do with being on top of a mountain. You may a metaphorical mountaintop experience of feeling the immediate presence of God on top of a mountain, but you can also have that experience in the deepest valley. It is still, metaphorically, a mountaintop experience. As a metaphor, mountaintop experience points to a closeness of God. The ancients thought that being up on a mountain brought you literally closer to God, which is, I suppose, where the metaphor comes from; but for us the phrase is a metaphor that conveys a spiritual experience, not a literal one.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 12, 2012

Scripture:

We just heard stories of the healing of a person we have always called a leper, as if a disease someone has defines that person. It doesn’t, of course, so let’s call it the healing of someone suffering from some sort of skin disease that the ancient world called leprosy. Maybe Naaman and the unnamed man from the story in Mark had what science today would call leprosy, or maybe they had eczema, psoriasis, or acne. The ancient world didn’t make distinctions between different kinds of skin disease. They just called them all leprosy. Having leprosy in the ancient world was a pretty big deal, especially in Israel. It made you “unclean,” impure. It made you an untouchable, an outcast, someone shunned by society, even by your family. Having a skin disease in that world excluded you from society, from family, from friends, from the synagogue or temple. Having a skin disease was a very big deal in that world. It excluded you from fullness of life. Those poor souls afflicted with it were in a sense the walking dead.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 5, 2012

Scripture:

I beg your pardon
I never promised you a rose garden
Along with the sunshine
There’s got to be a little rain sometime.

I’m not a big country and western fan, but sometimes country and western songs express quite profound truths in very simple words. Maybe it isn’t what the lyricist intended—see my handout from a couple of weeks ago on how texts have an excess of meaning—but I can hear God singing that song to us. Our culture tries to sell us on an image of life as a rose garden. Just buy these diamonds, use this make up, take this dietary supplement, wear these clothes, drive this car and your life will be all roses and no thorns. Our Declaration of Independence says that all of us have as an “inalienable” right the pursuit of happiness, claiming happiness as one of the goals of life and at least implying that we can indeed attain pure happiness in this life, otherwise why would we bother to pursue it? Yet we all know, don’t we, that life doesn’t consist only of happiness. We all know, don’t we, that however much they may claim that they can do it all those products we see advertized all the time won’t bring us into a land of uninterrupted bliss. Life just isn’t like that.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 29, 2012

Scripture:

So today we come in where Jesus has just called the first disciples, and they have come to Capernaum, a town on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Mark tells a story about what happened. Jesus went into the local synagogue, the house of prayer and study for Jews who were not then at the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus, being I guess a sort of visiting rabbi, began to teach the people in the synagogue. Mark says that the people were “astounded” at his teaching and with the authority with which he did it. Mark doesn’t explicitly tell us what Jesus taught them, but we can assume I think that it was something along the lines of Jesus’ first public proclamation in Mark. It comes a few verses earlier, where Jesus says “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.” Surely Jesus was teaching about the Kingdom of God, which, after all, is what he teaches in all three of the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Then Mark says that as Jesus was teaching there was a man “with an unclean spirit” in the synagogue. The unclean spirit recognized who Jesus was, then Jesus commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. It did. Then the people in the synagogue reacted to what they had seen and heard by saying “What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 22, 2012

Scripture:

Christianity is about believing in Jesus, right? It’s about believing the right things about Jesus, right? Christianity is about believing that Jesus is the Son of God Incarnate who came to earth to die as an atonement for human sin so that we could go to heaven when we die, right? Christianity is about creeds, about complex statements of right belief To be a Christian you have to be able to recite the Apostles’ Creed without mental reservation. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ his Son our Lord” etc etc. We get saved when we say that we believe that Jesus is our personal Lord and Savior. Isn’t that pretty much what we were all taught? That Christianity is about belief, and that belief means taking certain statements about Jesus to be factually true? I know that at least quite a few of us were once that all of those things about what Christianity is.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 15, 2012

Scripture:

Today we mark the Baptism of Jesus Christ. We actually are dealing with an historical event here because there really is no doubt that Jesus of Nazareth was baptized by John the Baptist. The first three Gospels, Matthew Mark and Luke, all tell a story of Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist. The fourth Gospel, and the latest, John, tells a story of an encounter between Jesus and John the Baptist, although in that one Jesus doesn’t actually get baptized. Still, we can safely assume that Jesus was indeed baptized by John the Baptist.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 8, 2012

Scripture:

The life of faith is, or at least should be, a life of questions. Faith raises so many questions. We all have questions, lots of questions. Very conservative Christian churches to the contrary notwithstanding, asking questions about the faith is good. It is necessary. The Letter of James says that faith without works is dead; and, Martin Luther to the contrary notwithstanding, there is a sense in which that is true. But I believe that it is more true that faith without questions is dead. It becomes passive acceptance and acquiescence, not a vital, living faith. Sometimes, however, we find ourselves asking the wrong questions. That happened to me this last week as I grappled with Matthew’s story of the visit of the magi to the infant Jesus. I thought: The star led the magi to Jesus, and I asked: What is our star? What, if anything, guides us to Jesus? Is it the Bible? Or the church? Is it prayer? It’s not that those are bad questions. It’s not that there are any impermissible questions. There aren’t. But as I pondered that question of what our star is that leads us to Jesus I thought of one answer that made me think that I had been asking the wrong question all along. I wondered if our star were the lives of the saints of the Christian tradition. That is, was our star the witness of Christian people in their lives to the truth and the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? And I thought: Wait a minute! We shouldn’t be asking “what is our star.” We should be asking “Are we a star for others, and how can we be a star for others, guiding them to the truth and the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?” So that’s what I want to talk to you about this morning, about being a star.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 1, 2012

Scripture:

One of my favorite movies is The Blues Brothers, starring John Belushi and Dan Akroyd. In that movie John Belushi’s character Jake Blues has just been released from the Illinois state prison at Joliet (which is why he is called Joliet Jake). He discovers that the Catholic children’s home where he grew up is about to close unless it can raise some significant amount of money in short order to pay off a tax lien. So he sets out with his brother Elwood, played by Dan Akroyd, to put his old band back together and make some money for the children’s home. The brothers have a whole string of misadventures, running from the law and from a mysterious woman who is out to get them played by Carrie Fisher. They encounter Aretha Franklin, Cab Calloway, and others. The movie has a sort of happy ending. The orphanage is saved, but the Blues Brothers and their band end up in prison back in Joliet.