Words of Welcome

Luke 10:25-37 Who wouldn’t want to be a “Good Samaritan?” We’re so used to connecting the word “good” to the character of the Samaritan it’s easy to miss the scandalous nature of this parable. What if there’s nothing good about a Samaritan? No one in Jesus’ audience would have applied the word “good” to a “Samaritan.” Do you still want to be a Good Samaritan?  If you go back to chapter nine, you’ll discover that Jesus ran into trouble in Samaria. He was turned away from a village because he was heading toward Jerusalem. Fortunately, Jesus didn’t follow the advice of James and John who wanted to call down fire from heaven to consume the village, but that goes to show that something is up in the story of the Good Samaritan ( Lk 9:51-56 ).   Not long after Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan villagers, he sent out the seventy to preach. After they returned from their mission trip, Jesus was approached by a lawyer. Now, I need to let you know that Luke doesn’t seem to like l

Luke 7:36-50 The Fourth of July holiday celebrates freedom, but freedom can come in forms that have nothing to do with where you live. Sometimes freedom is internal, which is the case in the story we’ve heard today. It’s a story about a woman who lived in a certain town, who heard that Jesus was having dinner at the home of a wealthy and influential man named Simon. She decided to crash the party. We need to use our imaginations to picture the scene. Simon and his guests would have been lying on cushions, with their feet toward the wall and the tables probably laid out in an u-shape in front of them. The woman, whose name Luke doesn’t reveal, slipped in unnoticed. She stood at the feet of Jesus and began to weep. When her tears fell on his dusty feet, she knelt down, loosened her hair, and began to wipe the wetness of her tears from his feet. Then she kissed them. Finally, in an act of great sacrifice, she broke open an alabaster jar of ointment and began to anoint