Words of Welcome

  Gustav Dore, Jesus in the Wilderness Luke 4:1-13 The Lenten season begins on Ash Wednesday, which reminds us that we begin as dust and to dust we will return. The Gospel reading for the First Sunday of Lent takes us into the wilderness, where Jesus undergoes a series of tests given to him by the devil. This wilderness ordeal takes place immediately after Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan. According to Luke, after his baptism, Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit, who then led him into the wilderness. While he was in the Wilderness, Jesus fasted for forty days and nights, after which he was tempted by the devil. The forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness form the basis of our Lenten season, whether or not we join Jesus in his fast.  Over the centuries many have followed Jesus into the desert, hoping to purge themselves of spiritual distractions and sin. Desert fathers like St. Anthony went into the desert and practiced extreme forms of asceticism. According to their testimo...

  Genesis 12:1-4 The words bless, blessed, and blessing, appear regularly in the Bible. Jesus offers nine blessings to begin the Sermon on the Mount ( Mt 5:1-12 ). We find many words of blessing filling the Psalms. The same is true of the Book of Genesis. In the first chapter of Genesis, we read that God blessed God’s human creation and then told them: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” ( Gen. 1:28 ). This morning in our reading from Genesis 12 we hear God make a covenant of blessings with Abram, better known to us as Abraham. God tells Abram to pack up the family and head off to an unknown land. If Abram does this, God promises to bless him and make him a blessing to all the families of the earth. The promise of blessings sounds good, but on the flip side, this promise involves quite a bit of risk on Abram’s part. Nevertheless, ...

  1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50 The commercials promise eternal youth. Just buy this product, apply it to your face or other body parts, and you can take years off your appearance. Or maybe it’s a pill. Either way, you can turn back the clock. The truth is, as we’ve already discovered, death is inevitable. Yet, there is the promise of something more.  When it comes to the afterlife, there are quite a few options, even for Christians. While reincarnation has become quite popular, it’s not one of the options that Christian tradition has embraced. So, if we leave that option off the table, what are the options?  There are those who look forward to leaving behind their bodies so they can enjoy life as a disembodied immortal soul. Of course, there are still others, even within the Christian community, who believe that when we die, that’s it. Death is the end of the road. The majority of us, however, live somewhere between the two extremes of disembodied soul and death be...