Words of Welcome

Matthew 6:7-13; Luke 4:1-15 We began this morning’s service with a procession of palms, singing “All Glory, Laud, and Honor,” thereby celebrating Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  According to the gospels, Jesus rode into the city of Jerusalem on a donkey as a large crowd hailed him as their king.  The authorities, as they watched this scene unfold, would have seen this as a rejection of Caesar’s rule.  Many others in the crowd might have wondered whether they were witnessing the inauguration of God’s reign in the world.  Yes, it would seem as if Jesus had the city in the palm of his hand.  It must have been tempting to hear the cries of the crowd.  If he chose this moment to launch a revolution, surely the people would have come out in force to overturn the system.  Yes, it must have been tempting, but Jesus understood that God’s kingdom would come into the world in a very different way.       The journey that led to this apparent day of triumph begins in the desert after Jes

Matthew 6:7-15; Luke 6:37-42     As much as we like to say the words “don’t judge,” every one of us has served as judge and jury.  I think it must be human nature!   Maybe it’s the way some person dresses or the car they drive.  Driving a Toyota in Michigan might get you stares, while driving a Prius in Southern California will get you words of praise.   Yes, we love Jesus’s command:  “don’t judge, lest you be judged.”  But, we all find it difficult to remove the log that sits there in our own eyes, even as we try to pick out the speck in the eye of the other.      As we come to the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, having prayed that God would hallow God’s name, that God would reveal God’s reign, and having asked that God would provide us our daily bread, we come to the matter of forgiveness.  How should we hear this promise of forgiveness, which seems to be contingent on our willingness to forgive others?        1.  Debts, Sins, and Trespasses     Perhaps we should start wi

Luke 11:1-4; Luke 12:22-34 We’ve come to the third petition of the Lord’s Prayer.  In the previous two petitions we’ve asked God to make God’s name holy in our lives, and we’ve asked that God’s reign would be made known in our midst, even as we seek to know and do God’s will.  Having made these requests, which focus on God holiness and God’s reign on earth as well as in heaven, we make our first request of God.  And in this request, we focus on our most basic of needs – our daily bread.  Yes, food, water, shelter, these are the basics, and so it’s not surprising that this is where Jesus begins.         The idea that God is the provider of our daily bread goes back at least to the Exodus story, where the people of Israel find themselves wandering for forty years in the desert of Sinai.  Reading the story, you might think that the people expected a quick trip across the desert, and on into the promised land.  Yes, just a hop, skip, and a jump, and they’d move from slavery to the good