March 8, 2020 - Lent 2A

Lectionary Readings

In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.

            Have you ever had to start over? Maybe it was after being laid off from a job and having to start from scratch. Maybe it was after getting divorced and realizing that life isn’t playing out the way you thought it would. Maybe it was after not getting into the school that you hoped to attend and you had to go back to the drawing board. Maybe an idea you had just didn’t go as planned and was a total flop. Starting over is scary, full of uncertainty, and even if it leads to a good, or better, end result, the process of disorientation is not often a pleasant one.

March 15, 2015 - Lent 4B

Lectionary Readings

Note: The substitute first reading was 2 Samuel 7:1-14 and the Gospel text was expanded to John 3:1-21.

In the name of God, who creates, redeems, and sustains. Amen.

            When you study a foreign language, one of the exercises that you often do is conjugating verbs- I run, you run, she runs. But when you do this, sometimes you’ll run into verb forms that you can’t really think of a situation in which you’d need to use it, such as the first person perfect tense of “to die”- I have died. Another conjugation that you’ll probably never hear is the first person future of “to be born”- I will be born. And yet, Jesus says “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” So that we’re all on the same page, the Greek of that sentence can be translated either as “being born from above” or “being born again.” But either way, it seems that Jesus might indeed have a use for that verbal form- I will be born.