Worship at First Presbyterian Church of Marion, Illinois

Matthew 20:1-16

Continuing to ask the question of why Jesus would tell the

           And so,

A story of faith, drawing from Mark 14:3-9, preached as part of the 2019 Community Lenten Series of the Marion Ministerial Alliance, preach at First Presbyterian Church of Marion, Illinois.

Matthew 18:15-35

Sometimes we get wrapped up in the parables. We think about the symbolism, and spend our time trying to figure out what they mean. We spend a lot of time figuring out who we are, who God is, what the metaphor is about, and what it means. We sometimes get so wrapped up in figuring out what the parables mean that we forget to ask why Jesus might tell them.

           This

           Jesus ends

           Is this a

Matthew 16:24–17:8 Passion prediction, bearing the cross, Transfiguration
(Psalm 41:7-10)
This passage is really all about the previews. This is what’s coming,
people. Coming soon to a theater near you… These previews are approved for all audiences…
Take up your cross and follow, has become a byword, and a slogan.
Things are just our cross to bear. Listen to more than the soundbite. Deny
themselves (ourselves) and follow Christ. Desire to save our lives, and lose them. Lose our lives for the sake of Christ, and gain them.
We focus on this as a discipleship passage. And it is. It is a passage
the should refocus us on what Jesus does, and that we are to be like
Jesus. Jesus gives up his life. Jesus carries his cross. For Jesus to save
his life would be to make his life a lie. We hear that temptation from the foot of the cross, though. Jesus manages to shift the focus off of himself and onto those around him. They (we) are the reason for his actions and for his life. How do our lives change when we are no longer at the center, but have chosen to place others at the center?

Matthew 14:13-33 Feeding the 5,000, walking on the sea
(Psalm 95:1-5)
Jesus is trying to get away in this passage. He’s trying to get away
from the crowds after the death of John the Baptist. He just wants to be
alone. He needs some space, perhaps to grieve, perhaps to pray, perhaps
to prepare for what will come next.
He can’t get away. The crowds follow him. Jesus feels compassion
for them, and he heals their sick. The disciples ask Jesus to send the
people away so that they crowd can feed itself in the nearby villages and
towns. Jesus isn’t fine with that. He tells the disciples to feed the crowd.
They protest that they don’t have enough. Jesus asks them to give it to
him, and he makes it enough. Enough with leftovers.
The they go away again. The disciples stay in the boat while Jesus
goes off to pray. There’s a storm, and they are afraid. Peter is Peter, and
insists on walking to Jesus across the water. He’s afraid and he falls in.
The storm ends when Jesus gets to the boat. And then the disciples
believe.
Both the feeding and the walking on water are almost incidental.
They’re a part of who Jesus is, but not really anything special. They’re
designed for us to learn something about Jesus. So what do we learn?
What do we fail to learn when we treat them as huge miracles, and not the
very reality of Immanuel?

Matt 13:24-43 Parable of wheat and weeds
(Psalm 84:1-7)
The parables are tough things. They are words from Jesus, that often
don’t quite make as much sense as we’d like them to, and they are all over the place. Many of the narratives depend on us understanding some sort of agrarian economy and way of life, and often, they assume things that we just don’t know. Rarely does Jesus explain them.
But he does explain 2 parables back to back in Matthew. We’re on the second one of them today. So, what happens in the parable? Wheat is
planted, and weeds are planted among the wheat. They both sprout and
bear grain. Should we get rid of the weeds? No, that will destroy the good stuff. Just wait. That’s basically the explanation as well.
So what do you make of this parable? Do we believe that this is how
the end times will work? Read it carefully. “All people who sin” thrown out?
Is the parable complete, or do we hold it in tension with the one just after it about yeast, or about mustard seeds? How do we hold this parable, one of the explained, in tension with those that stand on their own, no explanation provided?

Matthew 7:1-14, 24-29 Speck in the eye, narrow gate, wise man builds house on rock
(Psalm 37:16-18)
Lots of stuff going on here. Almost too much, to be honest. Judge not,
logs and specks, pearls before swine, holy to the dogs. Ask, seek, find,
Good gifts. Golden Rule. Narrow gate, wide road to destruction. I think we can find one or two more cliché type sayings to cram in here. And then we get to houses on sand and rock.
What happens if we lump all these things together? Instead of
treating them as separate proverbs to be painted on boards and hung
around the home for decoration, what if they are a paragraph, a short story, a novella? What if they belong together?
We hear judge not, and we also get to hear to unto others as we
would have them do to us. Judge a good gift. Be aware of the logs in our
eyes, and the specks in those of others. What happens if we apply the
Golden Rule to those sayings?
What our filter for texts like this? They’re hard, uncomfortable and
easier to deal with if we make them proverbs and not principles. Our filter should be Jesus Christ. Failing that, perhaps verse 12. How do thing look different if we read them all through the lens of the Golden Rule? Do we help people find rock to build their homes on? Do we give good gifts? Do we help people fine the narrow gate and walk the harder path? What is our filter for hearing these texts?

Matthew 6:7-21 [25-34] Lord’s prayer, treasure in heaven
and/or Matt 6:25-34, Lilies of the field
(Psalm 20:7)
The Lord’s prayer is something that many of us have burned into our
memories. Church schools have it on their list of things to be memorized by
the end of first grade. And so, we know the prayer itself. What we don’t
quite seem to remember is that it comes as a part of a set.
When Jesus teaches us how to pray, It comes amid a series of “don’t
do it like that” commands. There is one about religion, one about prayer,
then the Lord’s prayer, then one about fasting, one about collecting
treasures, and one about worry. The Lord’s prayer actually comes as an
antidote to certain types of prayers, a “do this” as opposed to a “don’t do
this.”
So what do we hear in the command to pray like this that we don’t
here in the “not like that” sections that surround it? What do you hear that is
different about the Lord’s prayer from what Jesus wants us to avoid? Is that
what we hear when we pray the Lord’s prayer?

Matthew 5:1-20 Beatitudes, salt of the earth, let your light shine
(Psalm 1:1-3)
The sermon on the mount is a tough passage. We have words like
‘meek,’ and ‘hungry,’ and the notion that those are good things to be. This tends to run counter to what we’re told and what we teach in other aspects of our lives. The meek get run over by the assertive, and no one wants to go to bed hungry, or thirsty, that’s for poor people. And people are poor because they’re lazy. We don’t value peacemakers, they’re weak. The sermon on the mount runs against most of what we actually value, so we don’t spend a whole lot of time on it.
What would happen if we did?
What if we took this sermon and applied it to our priorities and ideas
about what makes the world work? Then add some salt, add some light?
Would things look differently than they do now? Would they look more like the kingdom of the one who preaches on the mount?

Matthew 4:1-17 Jesus tempted in the wilderness
(Psalm 91:9-12)
When Matthew tells us the story of Jesus, he is quite intentionally
linking the story of Jesus to the story of those who have gone before.
Matthew will use John the Baptist for foreshadowing, and he will use the
story of Moses as a powerful leader of the people of God to set up how
important Jesus is.
This is a great passage for seeing some of those connections. What
parts of the story sound familiar? What have you heard before? What
happens next in those stories? Where do they go? What happens next in
this story? Where does it go?
Matthew is more than willing to link Jesus’ story to the story of the
huge figures in the faith of Israel. Are we willing to connect our stories to
the story of God? To the stories of those huge figures of faith who have
gone before us? Perhaps our Puritan humility keeps us from making those
connections, or assertions of those connections. But what if we looked at
our stories through the filters of the stories of faith that have gone before
us? What would we learn then?