Grace Chicago Church

In this homily, from weeks past, Bob dives into the gospel of Luke. Here, Jesus is speaking to the disciples about both being ware and being forgiving. Join us as we explore what it means to forgive as Jesus does and continues to do.

Caleb says that he feels a responsibility to make Christianity seem modest, reasonable, not foolish. He also feels an obligation to retain some of the foolishness of the Christian faith. We are onto our third week of 1 Corinthians 1, where Paul contrasts wisdom and foolishness and embraces the foolishness of the Christian story, particularly the cross. What does it mean to allow our Christian faith to be foolish in today's complicated world? We'll think about this question together in this homily.

In this homily we will be interacting with Paul’s concerns about two issues with which this particular church struggled: the cult of personality and being impressed with form over content with regard to the preaching of the gospel. The culture of the city of Corinth was not unlike ours and the struggles they faced as a church to follow Jesus instead of the spirit of the age are similar to our temptations today.

At the second Sunday after Christmas Caleb wonders that if anyone else has trouble contemplating the significance of the birth of Christ during the hustle and bustle of the Christmas season. John 1 is the text for this homily. This is one of the richest, simplest, and most layered texts in all of scripture. In this homily he wonders the question, “How then shall we live?”.

We are getting nearer and nearer to Christmas! This week, we will hear Matthew's account of Jesus' birth and we will light the fourth Advent candle. The theme running throughout Sunday's service is Emmanuel, God with Us. What does it mean for God to be with us? For Joseph and Mary, this news brought frightening circumstances in the form of an unexpected pregnancy. For the wisemen, it meant falling into the clutches of Herod. 

God is with us. Yet this good news is cloaked immediately by a broken world. We'll consider all of this together on Sunday. 

This lesson was the the Second Sunday of Advent. The text for the homily is Matthew 3 where we are introduced to John the Baptist. John the Baptist has one main focus: to get people ready to meet Jesus. What does it mean to get ready to meet Jesus then and now? That's what we will ponder during this lesson.

On Christ the King Sunday we celebrate that Jesus is the rightful King of this world and that one day his reign over the world and all people will be realized fully. The image of a sovereign ruling over people is a tough image to get excited about given humankind’s history. However, Jesus’s rule is fundamentally unlike the deeply flawed and downright evil rulers that we have known. Jesus is the King that says: trust me because I have no agenda that is other than your well being. Jesus is never working an angle. We’ll talk about this wonderful and quintessential aspect of the gospel this Sunday with an eye to how it can transform our lives.

On Baptism Sunday churches all over the world celebrate Jesus' baptism. When Jesus comes for baptism, John the Baptist is shocked. He thinks that Jesus should be the one baptizing him. John's is a baptism where people are coming to confess their sins. Jesus is the lamb of God without sin. But Jesus will go into the water along with the mass of broken humanity not because he needs to but because of his oneness with us. In this way, the baptism of Jesus is a continuation of the incarnation: God with us all the way to the bottom of what it means to be a frail human being. In the homily we hear this theme of Jesus's solidarity with us and about how we are implicated in Jesus' baptism. It is all good news, from start to finish.

You choose your friends. You don't choose your family. One of the pillars that we settled on during our branding process was: Grace is committed to cultivating a community that feels like family. But family is hard. Maybe we should just cultivate community that feels like friends? Do we really want to "feel" like family? This week's text from 2 Thessalonians is a complicated one dealing with the complications of living among people who were chosen for you. Together we'll consider what it means to follow Christ in community together.