RoboPreacher

by ninety million lonely miles The Acts of the Apostles Chapter 15 : Sometimes you read a passage of the Bible, and its concerns are so contemporary they nearly leap off the page! …Today’s Scripture is not one of those passages. Or, so it would seem . With its concern for something as icky and private as circumcision , today’s passage seems primitive to enlightened modern people like us . Really, though, the subject matter of this passage is just as burning for us now as it was for them then, over two thousand years ago ! Circumcision may not be our particular bugaboo. And I’m not altogether sure it isn’t. Regardless, we have just as many, if not more , causes and concerns we presume the Gospel is contingent upon! And like circumcision, all our Gospel considerations are good and honorable . Which is what makes them so insidious . …A few months ago, Amanda got me onto the fantastic podcast, Heavyweight. In this program, host Jonathan Goldstein helps people resolve issues from

past place, been tainted The Acts of the Apostles, chapter 8, verses 26 - 39 ! Today’s Scripture sounds so  simply , well, simple . Doesn’t it? God sends Philip down that road, where he promptly bumps into a potential convert. After just a little Bible study, it all ends with a baptism!   It’s all so neat and tidy . Isn’t it? It’s enough to make you wonder, why can’t it be like that for me ? Because the truth is, life rarely feels so cut and dried . More often than not, life seems to go the opposite way. The paths we tend to find ourselves on aren’t clear-cut. They’re rocky , meandering , and we’re not altogether sure if they’re leading anywhere at all. Much less to a destination God would have us reach… In fact, that may be why you’re here today. I know for many of us, church is something of a last stop. We think a little religion might help us make heads and tails of the path we’re on. We hope the pastor will have some words to get off the Godless track and onto the blesse

but i see a brand-new day dawning The holy gospel according to St. Luke the 24th chapter ! Opening Day coincided with Holy Week this year, and I have to think a little divine  provenance was at work there. All sports, but especially baseball, have a bit of the cross baked into them. Ostensibly, baseball is a game of handling your losses much more than it’s a game of racking up victories.   No documentary captures this upside - down dimension of the sport better than the “ Battered, so-and-so’s of Baseball .” *I’ve changed the title, by the way. Just in case there are any pious ears among us. You can find the documentary in question by googling “the Battered “b-a-s-…” of Baseball.” Or just googling “Portland Mavericks documentary.” Back in 1973, the Minor League team, the Portland Mavericks were on their last legs after seasons of dwindling ticket sales and even fewer wins. An unexpected future for the team comes in Bing Russel from Hollywood.   Bing was an actor . In fact, he’s

tell me you love me anyway The holy gospel according to St. Luke the 24th chapter ! Easter, so says Scripture, begins with a strange ritual. At least strange to us … “On the first day of the week , at early dawn, the women came to the tomb , taking the spices they had prepared.”   No, the women aren’t going to Jesus’ tomb to do a little baking . They were there to finish the work of preparing Jesus’ body for burial . You see, the ancients didn’t dump the work of death off to professionals like we do. There were complex rituals about how to make the dead suitable for burial. And while this may sound strange to us, I want to suggest that we are just as ritualistic. Perhaps even more so, now that we have denied ourselves the opportunity to reckon with death so closely and candidly.   It’s not that we’ve done away with rituals. It’s that we’ve transferred them from death to life . And the outcome is that our rituals have only become more involved. And we’ve only grown more fervent