Words of Welcome

Jeremiah 31:1-6 It may have come early this year, but today is Easter Sunday. Therefore, it’s time to celebrate. Easter is one of those holidays that combines religious and nonreligious elements, and you get to choose which part to emphasize. For many people, it’s a time to color eggs and hide them; a time to eat chocolate bunnies, and it’s a time to bring out our new spring clothes. Yes, today is a day to wear our spring best; maybe, even put on a new hat. Back in the day, if you can believe the movies, Easter was the day when people got all dressed up and paraded their new stuff in front of their neighbors. Irving Berlin wrote the music for a movie with the title Easter Parade , starring Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. Now that musical really didn’t have anything to do with Easter, but apparently they did have fashion parades back in the old days – before any of us were around. Easter is also a celebration of spring. We celebrate the rebirth of nature, of the flowers and the trees, wh

John 12:12-19 Have you ever misinterpreted something someone said or did? Anyone who has tried dating knows how easy it is to "misread signals." I’ve done it on many an occasion – just ask Cheryl. Maybe she looks at you in a certain way, and you think: My, she must like me. Later on you discover that she didn’t even know you were there. She was looking somewhere else and missed you in the foreground. Sometimes you get lucky. You’ve misread the signals, or the lack thereof, but you get the courage to go up and talk to her, or maybe make a fateful phone call and invite her on a date. Now, of course, I’m speaking from my own experiences, yours might be different. Then there are those pesky dreams – you know those visions you get in the middle of the night, which seem to be a sense of God’s calling. When you have those kinds of dreams, how do you know whether its God or not? Maybe the reason you can’t sleep isn’t that God is talking you, but is instead that pizza you ate at 9 P.M

John 11:1-45 We can try to put it off for as long as possible, but death is part of life. We all have a terminal illness – even if it takes decades to manifest itself. Although there are two things in life that are inevitable – death and taxes – we don’t like dealing with either of them. One of the reasons we don’t like to deal with death is that it means saying goodbye, and we don’t like to say goodbye. It"s as novelist George Eliot says: "Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love." I realize this isn’t a very happy way to start a sermon, but John’s story is about life and death. Like the earlier stories in John there are words with double meanings and there are also revelatory statements. Last week we heard Jesus say, "I’m the light of the world." This week we hear another statement, and whether or not he made the statements himself, the statements reveal how the early church, especially John’s community viewed Jesus. In John 11 we meet

John 9:1-41 I went to the eye doctor the other day, and after she looked into my eyes, she told me that a cataract was in its early stages of forming. Now, I’ve had bad eyesight since I was a kid, but that bit of information was unexpected. I asked her: how long? She said 3 to 5 years. I said: aren’t I little young? And she said – well, a little young! Of course the good news is that if I have cataract surgery I might end up not having to wear glasses! Now, I’m not blind, but without my glasses everything is blurry. In fact, if I was living in the first century I might be considered blind. And so, even though I’m not legally blind, I can sympathize with those who are, because without my glasses I’d miss out on a lot – things like the beauty of the mountains or the sea. I couldn’t drive or watch a baseball game. Life would be very different. I. Who's at Fault? As we’ve wandered through John’s gospel these past few weeks, we’ve noticed that John likes to use words and ideas that ha