First Presbyterian Church Of San Anselmo

Luke 9:28-43: In this highly symbolic story, called the Transfiguration, the disciples see Jesus transformed before their eyes.  Moses and Elijah appear, connecting Jesus with the long history of God’s deliverance and God’s word to a sometimes unfaithful, but always beloved, people.  We’re told they speak about Jesus’ “departure,” which in Greek is literally, “exodus.”  This is not a random word.  It points to the meaning of the cross waiting for Jesus; it is about release and freedom.  In his first sermon in Nazareth, back in Chapter 4, freedom was the overarching theme.  It’s easy to forget that the cross is not simply, or perhaps even primarily, about making forgiveness possible – Jesus has already been doing a lot of forgiving up to this point – much less about paying God off for our sin, which is a traditional and highly problematic way of talking about the cross.  Rather, it is about freedom, release from captivity, the possibility of an open future.  Jesus, Moses and Elijah talk about what Jesus will “

Luke 6:27-38: The Golden Rule isn’t so much setting up one more rule we have to figure out how to follow correctly, and get just right.  Instead, each of the verses in the passage from Jesus' "sermon on the plain," including the Golden Rule, is not a command or a rule, but a promise.  The promise, essentially, that the world doesn’t have to be the way it is.  That there is another option, an option grounded in active love – in love that does for others.

Scott Clark Dean of Student Life and Chaplain of San Francisco Theological Seminary preached from 1 Corinthians 13: Love is the plumb line and the polestar of our everyday life and all we do.

1 Corinthians 12:12-14, 27-31; Luke 4:14-21: When Jesus reads the Isaiah scroll, it is not only a promise and a declaration, but an invitation to us to participate with God in fulfilling the good news of God's kingdom, today, tomorrow, and always.

Isaiah 43:1-7;  Luke 3:15-17, 21-22: Seminary intern Heather Gordon explored the way God claims us as God's beloved children. 

Isaiah 60:1-6, Matthew 2:1-12: Matthew’s Christmas story is the story of two different human communities: Jerusalem, the big city center of the elite, and Bethlehem, with its rural peasants.   In 2019, you don’t have to be from the country to be marginalized, and you don’t have to be from a big city to be arrogant.  So for us, it’s less about urban verses rural, and more about world view.  It is still a choice between two stories.  A choice between the story that leads to death and darkness, and a story that leads to light and life. Political powers still claim to be our savior, our redeemer, and our lord.  This is truly fake news in the worst sense of the word, and it is precisely how political power tempts us.  It is also what the followers of Jesus reject, for if Jesus is Lord, Caesar and Herod are not   

Luke 1:39-56: The video, "An Unexpected Christmas," [produced in 2012 by St. Paul’s Church in Auckland, New Zealand, a church with a ministry called St. Paul’s Arts and Kids.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM1XusYVqNY.] captures precisely what Luke intended in the first two chapters of his gospel, in the story of Elizabeth and Mary and in the Christmas story.  “Brilliant!  They won’t be expecting that!”  Luke’s version is much edgier.  Luke gives center stage to these two women, ordinary women chosen by God and unhindered by men.  Luke has God sending the rich away empty, and bringing down the powerful from their thrones; you can imagine how well that goes over.  There have been times and places when the Magnificat was been banned from public reading.   Luke’s Christmas story names Augustus Caesar and Quirinius, governor of Syria,  for a reason.  It’s kind of like one of those long pan shots in a movie.  In the Christmas story, the opening shot includes the whole Roman Empire, and the camera zooms

Colossians 2:2-4, Mark 12:38-44: The story of the wdow's mite isn't a "Wow! I should be more like her!" story.  It's a story about connection and the way our lives are interwoven.  Jesus doesn't hold her up as a role model, but as an example of how the brokenness of the institutions and the establishment impact the lives of human beings.  He shows us we need to see people, as he saw the easily ignored widow, and let their lives and situations touch our hearts, so that we change the systems that cause injustice and misery. 

Psalm 146, Mark 12:28-34: The Psalm celebrates the lifelong praise of the God who is trustworthy, who stands up for the oppressed and sides with the most vulnerable.  Praising God, which is what we do in worshiping communities, transforms us into people of hope, resilience and resistance to the forces that would worship power, wealth, status or security, turning, "me and my" into "we and our." 

Mark 10:46-52: Bartimaeus recognizes that his condition as a blind beggar is not normal, and so he cries out.  The crowd attempts to silence him.  The crowd always has a stake in pretending that something that really is abnormal – in this case, blind begging – is normal, because it means no one has to change.  If being a blind beggar is just normal, then the society doesn’t have to ask, “Why are some people forced to beg in order to survive, while others have more than enough?  Why aren’t we taking steps to fix that?"  The Church is constantly challenged to decide whether to sign on with the silencers or the silence breakers.  This story reminds us that breaking the silence has deep roots in the biblical witness.   

Mark 10:2-16: This sermon explains how Jesus' comments about divorce and his welcoming the children are connected. In 1st century Palestine, divorce meant economic and social ruin for the wife. Jesus is saying human beings are not disposable, and a case in point is the children seeking Jesus' blessing. They have no status in the culture, they have no way to "earn" God's love, which is how we are all to receive it: as a gift of grace for all. God's concern is for the hurt, the suffering, the impoverished, the tossed aside. Jesus shows us this by saying, "Let them come,"

The Book of Esther: God is not mentioned in the Book of Esther. Are we intended to understand that God was involved - that God was a character ion this story, even thought never mentioned? How do we detect God's action and comprehend God's intention when, as someone put it, "God is subtle to a fault?" Borrowing from author Frederick Buechner, we trust that God offers the possibility of new life and healing. God the director conveys to us, somehow, from the wings, “if we have our eyes, ears, hearts open and sometimes even if we don’t, how we can play [our] roles in a way to enrich and ennoble and hallow the whole vast drama of things including our own small but crucial parts in it.”

Mark 9:30-37: The disciples are afraid to ask Jesus what he meant when they didn't understand his prediction about betrayal, death and resurrection. They're worried about their image, as is revealed by their subsequent bickering about being the greatest. Jesus shows them a child, vulnerable, with no status, and identifies with the child: those who are great will welcome the vulnerable. Including their questions. The disciples need to already know points to their obsession with greatness. The humility it takes to say, "I don't know" and ask questions is the vulnerability Jesus models, both because it allows us to be open to learn, and because it does not create insiders who believe or know the correct answers.

Mark 7:25-37: Jesus learned from listening to the religious and ethnic "other." So can we.

Jeremiah 29:4-7, 10-11: This sermon concludes the summer sermon series on the ways we are created for community. Jeremiah told the exiles to Babylon to make a life there, and to pray for the city in which they found themselves, for in its welfare was their welfare. The American church is not in exile, but can feel at odds with the culture. Our mission statement is to seek the welfare of the city, town, location where we are, because just as God was the God of the Babylonians as well as the Jews, God is the God of our neighbors, and already at work in and through them to bring about God's plans.

Leviticus 19:15-18, Luke 10:25-37: People often assume that the lesson of the Parable of the Good Samaritan is "Anybody could be my neighbor," which is comfortable and doesn't raise our prejudices. But Jesus chose the Samaritan precisely because "A Samaritan is my neighbor" would have stuck in the throats of his listeners. Jesus chose the despised outcast and heretic as the person through whom God is working, while the properly religious people who believe the "right" things failed the test,

Ephesians 4:25-5:2: In a list of ethical instructions about how to live the new life in Christ, the writer acknowledges that feeling anger is not a problem; what we DO with our anger is the issue. Anger alerts us to unfairness, and is a valuable tool when transformed to courage, love, or justice.

Ephesians 4:1-16: In the face of a threat to unity, which is the goal and measure of Christian maturity, the writer's advice to the churches to "speak the truth in love." This is a calling to pursue the truth, even if it is painful, we don't like the source, or it requires us to change. It is also a calling to speak it, to voice the truth, but "in love," which means genuine compassion and caring for the person or group to whom we speak.

July 29, 2018 sermon on lectionary texts Psalm 14 and Gospel of John 6.1-21