Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 27, 2009
Well, Christmas is over. Or at least, out in the world it’s over. Out in the world Christmas pretty much ends on December 25. Oh sure. We may still have the tree up. The stores may still have their decorations up, hoping we’ll come in and spend any money we received as a Christmas gift. But the feeling is different. It feels like after Christmas, not like Christmas any more. Here in the church it’s different. In the church Christmas begins on December 25—or on the evening of December 24—and continues until Epiphany twelve days after Christmas. This is a Christmas Sunday, not an after Christmas Sunday. So this morning I want to do some more musing with you on what Christmas means.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 25, 2009
Scripture:
There is a common and much loved image of Christ in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. It often appears on the inside of those big domes that are such a prominent part of much Orthodox church architecture. It’s called Christ Pantocrator, which means Christ the ruler of all, the ruler of the universe. Christ Pantocrator is the risen Christ seated on a heavenly throne. He looks stern, or perhaps impassive. He is clearly above it all, above all the samsara as the Buddhists call it, above all the inconstancy, the change, the flux of human life. He is above all the suffering, above all the poverty, pain, and death that are so much a part of life in creation. He is imperious and impervious. He is the Christ of power and glory.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 13, 2009
Scripture:
We all know the stereotype—the scraggly-bearded, disheveled man with a wild look in his eye standing on a street corner holding a big, coarsely hand-lettered sign and calling out in a loud voice over and over again: “Repent! The end is near! Repent! The end is near!” It’s the stuff of New Yorker cartoons. We sneer and feel superior. We’re so much more enlightened and sophisticated than that! Fair enough, but here’s my concern about all that this morning. That image has given repentance a bad name. It’s made repentance a joke. It’s made repentance into something serious people don’t take seriously. And that’s unfortunate because, you see, repentance is a serious thing and a serious part of the life of faith. So this morning, despite the stereotype of people who shout it on the street corner, I’m going to take repentance seriously and consider what it is and what it might mean for us today.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 6, 2009
Scripture:
That passage we just heard from Luke is called the Song of Zechariah. I have fond memories of singing the Song of Zechariah in traditional Psalm style in the beautiful St. Ignatius Chapel at Seattle University. In that Psalm style one verse is repeated a various points as kind of refrain. In the arrangement of the Song of Zechariah that I sang at St. Ignatius all those years ago that line was “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us.” To this day I can hardly speak that line. I have to sing it. “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us.” I love that line, so this morning I want to delve into it a bit and see what it has to say to us beyond reminding me of good times back in seminary.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 29, 2009
Scripture:
I’m really glad that I’m not one of the people who puts together the Revised Common Lectionary. That’s the schedule of Bible readings for each Sunday that I use most of the time in designing worship here. I’m especially glad that I’m not the person assigned the responsibility for choosing the Bible texts for the Sundays in Advent. Advent, which begins today, is of course that season in the church calendar that leads up to Christmas. The RCL folks do the best they can to select texts that have something do to with anticipating the birth of Jesus, but in doing that they resort to two interpretive devices that I have a lot of trouble with. One is reading some of the Hebrew Scripture texts that talk about a coming king who would restore the kingdoms of Judah and Israel as being predictions of the coming of Jesus. Trust me, they aren’t. And taking them to be predictions of Jesus doesn’t let Jewish scripture be Jewish. It appropriates that great scripture for a use so far removed from the intention of the original authors as to be totally inappropriate. The other problematic device they use is taking texts from the New Testament that speak of a second coming of Jesus as being about the first coming of Jesus, the one we celebrate on Christmas. Doing that just doesn’t make any sense to me. So I’m glad I don’t have to select the lectionary texts for Advent, because when you reject those two devices there really is very little in the Bible that talk in any legitimate way about the coming birth of Jesus.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 22, 2009
Scripture:
You know, the longer I’m in this business of being a professional Christian the more it seems to me that the elements of our tradition are, if anything, more important for the questions they raise than they are for the answers they give. This Sunday is one of those things that raises more questions than it answers. There are various ways of referring to this Sunday in the Christian calendar. It is the last Sunday before Advent. It is the last Sunday of ordinary time. And it is Christ the King Sunday, or as we call it in the politically correct UCC, Reign of Christ Sunday. Our tradition has a Sunday called Christ the King Sunday because it has always proclaimed Christ as King. And while it may at one time have been obvious to Christians what that means, it sure isn’t obvious today what it means. Not to us. Christ the King? We Americans say “We don’t need no stinking kings!” We rebelled against a king over 230 years ago and haven’t had one since. Yet here we are on Christ the King Sunday. So what in heaven’s name is that supposed to mean to us, anyway? How precisely is Jesus Christ a king? What does it mean for us to call him king? Well, to get at one meaningful answer to those questions let’s take a look at our passage from John, that interchange between Jesus and Pilate about whether or not Jesus is a king.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 15, 2009
Scripture:
Sometimes, when I’m reading from the Bible, a particular line will just jump out at me. A line will strike me as somehow really important, even though it may not be at all clear why it seems so important and I may have no idea what it means. I’m very grateful when it happens because the experience is usually telling me that that’s the verse I need to preach on. Or I guess I should say that I’m sometimes grateful when it happens. Sometimes I’m not at all grateful because sometimes a line jumps out at me and says “I’m what you need to preach on” that I desperately don’t want to preach on.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 8, 2009
Scripture:
The widow in Mark’s story that we just heard is about to die. Unlike the story we heard about Elijah and the widow of Zarephath which says that that widow is expecting to die, Mark doesn’t say that the widow in his story is going to die, not in so many words. He does say that she has put into the temple treasury “all she had to live on.” Christians often over look that line, or take it mean only that what she put in was a lot for her; but we need to take Mark’s words seriously and, although its odd for me to say it, literally if we are really going to understand this story. Today is Stewardship Sunday in the UCC, and I could give you a traditional stewardship sermon on this text that says “see how generous the poor widow is toward the church. Go and do likewise.” I’m sure many pastors are doing just that today. The problem is that I am convinced that generosity is not what this text is about. This text isn’t about generosity; it’s about oppression. Some of you have heard or read this from me before, but let me explain.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 1, 2009
Scripture:
So this morning we have what is a favorite New Testament passage for a great many Christians. We know it as The Great Commandment. In Mark’s version, a scribe asks Jesus which commandment is the first. Jesus replies that the first commandment is to know that God is one and to love God with all our being, quoting the creed of Judaism from Deuteronomy. Then he adds a second commandment, to love our neighbor as ourselves. These two commandments really do sum up the life of faith.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 25, 2009
Scripture:
In our service last Sunday God responded to Job, and we considered that response. We considered the mystery of God and said that we need to let God be God God’s way. In our reading from Job this week Job responds to God, and the task before us today is to consider that response. Job’s response is, basically: O My God! I really didn’t get it, did I? Who did I think I was to question God? Who was I to think that I could understand God? Job buys into God’s answer to him. I was wrong, he says. Fair enough. That’s what we’d expect from a story like this, that the storyteller would have his human protagonist concede that God, the way the storyteller has portrayed God, was right. But then Job expresses how he reacts to his new insight about God. He says: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” That Job would eventually admit that God is right is predictable. Job’s response to that admission is, I think, a lot more interesting than the admission itself; and that’s what I want to focus on this morning, in this last of my sermon series on Job.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 18, 2009
Scripture:
So. This week Job finally gets his answer from God. All through the book to this point, as Job has suffered calamity after calamity, he has insisted that what has happened to him is unjust and that God should therefore fix it, or should have prevented it from happening in the first place. The calamities that have befallen him are unjust because he is a righteous man, and God, he is absolutely certain, doesn’t do these bad things to righteous people. Job is certain that he knows God and how God is, how God works, how God behaves. Job is certain that he knows that God rewards the righteous and punished the wicked. He knows that God is the cause of whatever happens. He knows that God does not reward the wicked or punish the righteous, and he expects—no, he demands—that God be God the way Job knows God is.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 11, 2009
Scripture:
Some of you have seen my handwriting. It’s not something I am—or my elementary school teachers would be—proud of. Sometimes I can’t even read it myself. Thank God for computers and printers! Lately, however, I’ve noticed one odd thing about my handwriting in particular. Often when I write the word “bad” it looks a lot like “God.” I make a small b look like a type of g, and my o’s are indistinguishable from my a’s. And of course the last letters of bad and God are the same. So, magically, bad becomes God. I’ll often go back and rewrite the word “bad” more carefully so it doesn’t look so much like God; but as I was doing that earlier this past week, it suddenly seemed to me that maybe my writing “bad” to look like “God” wasn’t a mere coincidence. I thought I saw a possible meaning in it. I asked: Is this quirk of my handwriting trying to tell me something, like maybe there’s a connection between the bad and God? Then it occurred to me to ask: Are the bad times the God times? And immediately the answer came to me Yes! Yes, the bad times are—or at least can be—the God times, the times when God is particularly close, when we can feel our strongest connection to God. That has in fact been my experience. Perhaps it has been your experience too.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 4, 2009
Scripture:
We’ve all heard it. Maybe we’ve even said it. Something bad happens. We get sick. We lose a job. Or a loved one gets sick or even dies. And we cry out in anger and despair: “Why, God?! Why have you done this thing?!” People have been crying out to God like that for as long as people have had a conception of God. We certainly see it in the Bible. It is, for example, the question that lies behind the Book of Job in the Old Testament. The lectionary readings for the Sundays in October all contain a reading from Job, so I have decided to do a four part sermon series this month on the profound theological and pastoral questions that Job raises. This is the first of those four sermons.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 27, 2009
Scripture:
The world of ancient Israel was a very dangerous place. Throughout Old Testament times warfare was virtually constant. The little Jewish state battled constantly with the other small states on its borders to the south, east, and north. Worse, it was constantly threatened and attacked by the great empires of the day—Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia among others. When they lost a war the Hebrew people faced death, destruction, enslavement, and exile. It’s easy for us to romanticize the ancient past and to think of the world of the Bible in images drawn from Sunday School books for young children. That’s not how it was. Not at all. It wasn’t anywhere near that pretty.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 20, 2009
Scripture:
I’ve been thinking a lot about life and death lately. Burying your faith, or another loved one, as I have just done, will do that to you. That’s why I included as one of the reading in this service that passage from the Wisdom of Solomon that Hans just read even though it isn’t in Protestant Bibles. In the Protestant tradition the Wisdom of Solomon is considered “apocryphal.” That means that it’s not in the Bible proper but is part of a sort of secondary scripture. It’s OK to read but it doesn’t quite rise to the level of the actual books of the Bible. It is Hebrew literature like the books of the Old Testament except that it was written in Greek not Hebrew, which is why the Protestant tradition doesn’t include it in its Bible. It is part of the Bible in the Catholic tradition. It raises for me in a powerful way the question of why, given the fact that we all die, there is any reason to be virtuous, to live what our faith tradition considers a good, moral life.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 13, 2009
Scripture:
Let’s be honest here. Some, maybe most or all of you, think that I always make things more complicated than they need to be. I hear that critique. I know that my approach to things can make them more complex and difficult than they may appear on the surface. To the charge of making things complicated I plead guilty. After all, when I dedicated my book to my father I wrote that he taught me never to be satisfied with superficial answers. So I plead guilty, but I also plead extenuating circumstances. Or rather, to take a concept from the law of defamation, I plead truth as a defense. In law, you can say as nasty a thing as you want about someone else, and they won’t have a claim against you as long as what you said is true. So, I plead truth as a defense. You see, things, especially the things of the Christian faith, really aren’t simple. Or at least they aren’t as simple as a lot of people make them. And he Christian life isn’t simple. It just isn’t. More about that in a bit.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 6, 2009
Scripture:
We just heard a reading from the Letter of James. It’s not a part of the New Testament that we spend much time with, but there’s an important thing to know about it. Martin Luther wanted to throw it out of the Bible. Yeah. He disliked it that much. He called it a “book of straw.” He thought it contains false teaching, even though it had been in Christian Bibles for over a thousand years by Luther’s time. You see, Luther’s theological insight, the one that sparked the whole Protestant revolution, was that we are not saved, or justified to use Luther’s term, through good works, through obeying religious laws and performing religious duties. We are saved, Luther said, by grace through faith. Faith is what gets us right with God, he said, not good works.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 30, 2009
Scripture:
Yesterday, as we were waiting for the parade to start, Kim asked me what today’s sermon was about. She sometimes asks me about the sermon when she’s going to be doing the children’s time in hopes that she can somehow tie what she shares with the kids to what I’m going to share with you. Usually, I just tell her, and that’s all there is to it. Yesterday, however, her question actually changed what I’m going to preach on. Or not so much changed the subject as changed the way I’m approaching the subject. You see, the thesis of this sermon is that Christian morality is not about rigid rules of what is right and what is wrong, about what is permissible and what is impermissible. Rather, Christian morality is a matter of responsibility in freedom, a matter of responding in freedom to God’s love in ways that are loving under the particular circumstances in which we must act. Yet as I was trying to explain that thesis to Kim yesterday in the context of what she would say to the children this morning I had an insight about my thesis that I hadn’t had before. As I talked to Kim it dawned on me that my thesis may not be the right thing to say to young children. I occurred to me that young children need clarity and certainty in what they are told about right and wrong. They need to know what the rules are, what they can do and what they can’t do, what’s right and what’s wrong. They aren’t mature enough yet to enter into the kind of freedom I’m talking about. They need to learn the rules so that they will have a solid basis on which to make their own decisions as they grow into mature adults. It dawned on me that the kind of Christian freedom that I want to talk about is something we have to grow into. It is something that comes with maturity.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 23, 2009
Scripture:
Well, we did it. We replaced the roofs on the sanctuary and on the fellowship hall building, all in one summer. We still have some money to raise, but the roofs are done; and it is traditional in the Christian church to dedicate new buildings, or parts of buildings, upon their completion. So today we dedicate our new roofs. But you know what they say about me: Tom can make anything complicated! So I, of course, am not content with doing a dedication of the roofs just because it is traditional to do it. I have to ask: What does it mean to do it? I want to explore why we do it at a level deeper than “Tradition!” That may be good enough for Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” but it’s not good enough for me. So bear with me as I dig a bit deeper into the question of what it means to say that we dedicate our new roofs.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 16, 2009
Scripture:
Perhaps some of remember the satirist Tom Lehrer. Apparently he’s still around, but I know him from satirical songs he wrote and recorded back in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of his songs were really funny, but Lehrer’s satire could also be macabre or bitter. He sang his anger, and even his despair, at much of what he saw, at all of the cruelty, violence, and hypocrisy that is indeed so rampant in the world. And in his anger and his despair he sometimes expressed profound truth and raised many vital issues.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 9, 2009
Scripture:
There's an old saying that comes out of people's experience with warfare. They say: "There are no atheists in foxholes." Something about the hellish experience of being under fire in a battle zone tends to make people turn to God, it seems. And we've all heard of "jailhouse conversions," where someone who's been convicted of a crime and is doing time for it finds Jesus, converts, and becomes a zealous proselytizer for the faith. One of the most famous of these jailhouse converters is Chuck Colson, the convicted Watergate felon, who claims to have had a "born again" experience while in prison for his crime and now is a prominent conservative Christian speaker and writer. And if you're like me, you're powerfully skeptical of these kinds of conversions. About the soldier who gets religion in a foxhole I want to ask: Is a conversion based on fear really an authentic conversion? Will it last once the source of the fear is gone? About people like Colson I want to say: "O really? Did you really find faith, or are you just trying to make yourself look good, make yourself look forgiven, and maybe make a good deal of money selling accounts of your supposed conversion?" I have a hard time forgiving people like Colson, even though I know that forgiving them is my calling as a Christian; so I tend to find their claims to have turned their lives around to be pretty dubious. Their newly proclaimed piety can sound awfully self-serving and not very genuine.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 2, 2009
Scripture:
Well, it’s Communion Sunday again. Today we participate once more in one of the most sacred and one of the most ancient rituals of the Christian faith. Christians have been coming to the table of the Lord to eat the bread and drink the cup for nearly two thousand years. The Christian tradition insists that the Sacrament of the Eucharist, the technical name for what we usually call Communion, has great spiritual power. Indeed, it must have great spiritual power, for any religious ritual that did not have great spiritual power would hardly have lasted for two millennia.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 26, 2009
Scripture:
I know that many of you are aware of this Gospel truth, that is, this truth about the Gospels, but the Gospel of John is really, really different from the other three. There are significant differences between the first three Gospels, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke; but there are also even more significant similarities. They all occupy the same theological world. In all three of them, Jesus is primarily all about proclaiming the Kingdom of God. When you spend time with them you get used to Jesus talking in a certain way and acting in a certain way. You get comfortable with those ways of Jesus talking and acting. Then, when you turn to John. You have the overwhelming sense that you have been transported to the planet Venus, so different is the theological world of John from the theological world of the other three canonical Gospels.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 19, 2009
Scripture:
Well, we did it. Or at least, we’re doing it. The new roof on this sanctuary building is finished. Or at least the contractor told us that it would be finished yesterday. We are doing what we need to do to maintain and preserve this great old building, this beautiful place where we come each week to worship God, where people have come each week for over one hundred years to worship God, save for an occasional freak snow storm. The generosity that you demonstrated in response to the call for contributions for the new roof points, I think, to something important about us. It points in general to the commitment that you as a congregation have to this church. And I think that it points in particular to something more specific than that. It points in particular to the commitment that we have to this building. This building, the building that we call the church, is important to us. We care about it. We give our money, and many of us from time to time give our labor, to preserve it.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 12, 2009
Scripture:
Last week we talked about prophets. Specifically, we talked about how societies generally don’t want to hear what true prophets have to say. It’s easy to blame societies for not listening to what we consider to be true prophecy. We get frustrated. We may even get angry. Why don’t they get it? We don’t understand, but that’s just how it is with societies in general, our own not least of all. Even churches usually don’t get it, closing their ears to the true prophets and retreating behind traditional beliefs and traditional prejudices all dolled up with biblical quotes and pious assertions that they are God’s will. Frustrating, isn’t it.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 5, 2009
Scripture:
“Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown.” So says Jesus in the passage we just heard from Mark. And it’s certainly true. Indeed, I would go farther than that. It seems to me that true prophets are generally without honor not just in their hometowns but in society in general. That certainly is how the Bible as a whole sees the matter. The Biblical prophets from Amos and Micah in the eighth century BCE to Jesus in the first century CE are generally rejected by the society to which they prophesied. Some of them were killed by their society, most notably of course Jesus. We see this Biblical attitude toward the fate of prophets in our passage from Ezekiel. There, God commissions Ezekiel as a prophet to Israel. But God is suffering under no illusions about how Ezekiel will be received when he begins to proclaim God’s word to the people. God anticipates that the people probably will not receive Ezekiel and his prophecy favorably. God tells Ezekiel not to be afraid of the people, a statement that hardly would have been necessary if God had expected him to be received positively. God expects the people to be like briars, thorns, and scorpions with Ezekiel. He’s hardly going to be received with honor, but God says: Go anyway. At least they’ll know that there was a prophet among them.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 28, 2009
Scripture:
If my years of study of scripture and of work as a professional Christian has convinced me of one thing, it is that God desires life for each and every one of God’s children. That may seem paradoxical, given the fact that because we are creatures not gods we are all mortal; but then all profound religious truth is paradoxical. If someone is pushing something as religious truth that is not paradoxical, be very suspicious. God desires life for God’s mortal children, of that I have no doubt. One of the foundational lines from the Bible for me is John 10:10, where the Evangelist has Jesus say “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” Life is God’s desire for each and every one of us.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 21, 2009
Scripture:
Jesus calms the storm. It’s a familiar story, one of the best known in the Gospels. Jesus and his Disciples are in a small boat on the Sea of Galilee when a violent storm comes up. The boat is about to be swamped, drowning them all. So the Disciples turn to Jesus, wake him up, and he calms the storm. In broad outline at least the metaphorical meaning of this little miracle story is pretty clear. We all experience storms in our lives, metaphorically speaking. When we turn to Jesus for help, he can calm those storms. That doesn’t mean he keeps bad things from happening. It means that he can give us the strength, peace, and courage to face whatever comes our way in life. I developed that meaning of the story in more depth in the sermon I gave on this text three years ago titled “Be Still My Soul.” It’s on the website. You can look it up.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 14, 2009
Scripture:
It’s a puzzling thing. What Jesus says about mustard in Mark’s Gospel just doesn’t make sense. He says that the mustard is “the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” And we all know that that’s just wrong. A mustard seed may indeed be very small, but the mustard plant is hardly “the greatest of all shrubs,” with large branches providing shelter for birds. A mustard plant just isn’t anywhere near that big or that grand, that imposing. It’s just a small plant. A useful plant to be sure. I certainly enjoy a preparation made from it, or from its seeds, on my hot dogs. But the plant isn’t particularly impressive. And it’s hard to imagine that Jesus would have made that mistake. He was a rural person, well acquainted with the agriculture of his time and place. So what’s going on here? Did Jesus just get mixed up about mustard plants?
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 7, 2009
Scripture:
“We take the Bible seriously, not literally.” We proclaim that way of looking at Scripture every Sunday on our bulletin. Indeed, it is one of the things that distinguishes this church from most, if not quite all, of the other churches in the area. Most Christians in these parts are Biblical literalists. We are not. Most Christians today are unaware that there is any way to understand the Bible other than literally. Most people in our culture today are unaware that there is any way to understand anything other than literally, and that cultural assumption determines even how Christians see their sacred text, the Bible. Now, it is no surprise to any of you who have read the work of Marcus Borg, or the work of my favorite author—me—that there is indeed another way to understand the Bible. It is the way of metaphor, of analogy, of myth, with myth understood as a story that serves to mediate God to us and to connect us with God.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 31, 2009
Scripture:
It’s one of those all too familiar stories. The earliest disciples of Jesus are gathered together in one place. And we’re not talking the Louisiana Superdome here. All together in one place means a very small place, no more than a small room in a small house. That’s all there was in those days except for the very rich, and the disciples weren’t very rich. So when the evangelist we know as Luke, the author of Acts, tells us that the disciples were all together in one place he’s telling us that there weren’t very many of them. Probably not as many as there are of us here this morning. In any event it’s a very small group, and we can infer some other things about the group. The one they had followed, the one in whom they had believed, the one to whom they had devoted their lives has been crucified by the Romans. But then he rose from the dead, and they had seen him and talked with him. Then he had been taken away from them up into heaven. At least, that’s the way Luke tells the story. They have chosen Matthias to replace the traitor Judas. I imagine that they are scared, puzzle and perplexed. Surely they were sitting around wondering: What now? What are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to do anything? Should we just break up and go home? How can we do anything else? He’s gone. We’re alone. We’re a small group of ordinary people, of no particular account in the world. Surely we have no future. We might as well pack it in.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 24, 2009
Scripture:
Some of us here are old enough to remember the Cold War, the ideological struggle backed by massive military might, between the Soviet Union and the western democracies led by the United States. In those days many of us learned at least a little bit about Marxist Communism, the official ideology of the Soviet Union. Many of us learned a catchphrase that characterized the social vision of Marxism—in theory at least if hardly in practice. It went: “From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.” We were taught to be appalled by those words. They represented “godless Communism,” the greatest threat there was to everything we believed in—freedom, individualism, capitalism, the American Way. Certainly Soviet-style Communism represented a great deal that was evil. I know. I studied it professionally. I lived under it for a year, in the belly of the beast as it were, in the capital city of Moscow. I have no illusions about Soviet Communism and the evil it did.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 17, 2009
Scripture:
The author of the First Letter of John says that our faith in Jesus Christ conquers the world. He says that the one who has faith in Jesus Christ conquers the world. Now, I know that those lines were written in and for a very small, powerless community of counter-cultural people in the late first or early second century CE in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. But I also know that within 250 years of the writing of those lines the faith of that small, powerless, counter-cultural community had become the official, established religion of the power that ruled the world, the Roman Empire. And I know what became of that faith in the succeeding centuries. It truly did conquer the world. Sometimes preceding the forces of empire, sometimes following in their wake, Christianity spread around the world. It converted people all over the world, sometimes by the power of its message but more often and more significantly by force. Christianity conquered the indigenous faiths of native peoples especially here in the Americas but in other parts of the world too. Christianity was so successful at conquering the world that today it is by far the largest religion in the world. The author of 1 John sure seems to have been prescient, doesn’t he. A reel seer, able to predict the future centuries before that future became a reality.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 10, 2009
Scripture:
Maybe some of you have seen it. I’ve seen in on two separate churches. It’s a sign on some of the churches in Sultan that reads “What if it is true?” It went up around Holy Week, and it has a picture of a crown of thorns on it. Now, I don’t know for sure what the people who put up those signs mean by it. I can’t speak for them, but I know that the churches that are displaying the sign are very conservative, Evangelical or even Fundamentalist churches; and that gives me a pretty good idea of what they mean by it. At least, I can tell you what I hear in it.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 3, 2009
Scripture:
We all know it. We all love it. Many of us can recite it from memory, probably in the King James Version. So I was surprised recently to learn something I didn’t know about the twenty-third Psalm. Some scholars, it seems, say something about the image of the shepherd that I hadn’t heard before. When we hear Psalm 23, I suspect that most of see an image of Jesus in a white robe with a shepherd’s crook in a lush green meadow surrounded by contented, well-fed, wooly sheep. Psalm 23 isn’t about Jesus, of course. It was written hundreds of years before Jesus lived, and the word translated as Lord is the Hebrew name of God, but never mind. That doesn’t stop us from seeing Jesus the Good Shepherd every time we hear this Psalm. But those scholars I mentioned say that that image isn’t what the Psalmist intended at all, and not just because the Psalm isn’t about Jesus. They say that shepherd is a common Biblical image for a king and that what the Psalmist intended isn’t a literal shepherd with sheep but rather an image of God as a good king who brings the people peace.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 19, 2009
Scripture:
This is Thomas Sunday. The Gospel reading in the lectionary is always the same on the first Sunday after Easter, the story of Doubting Thomas. But did you notice that the lectionary reading doesn’t actually end when the story of doubting Thomas ends? It goes on for two more verses. Those verses read: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name. “ John 20:30-31 Many scholars think this is where the Gospel of John originally ended, although there’s a whole Chapter 21 after these lines in that Gospel as we presently have it. Those lines sure sound like the end, and we’re a little surprised when the Gospel continues after them. Be that as it may, those lines struck me this past week as I was working on today’s service. The author says that he has written what he has written “so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah….” By “you” he means his audience, the community for which he was writing. And I think we can expand the meaning of “you” to include ourselves.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 12, 2009
Scripture:
A couple of Sundays ago one of our members asked for a prayer during our time of prayers of the people for a friend who was feeling overwhelmed by her mortality, by the reality of death. She was having trouble dealing with that final reality of human life. I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t have any trouble understanding the struggle that troubled soul is having. I’ve been where she is. I’ve been there within the past two weeks, what with the reality of the death of our sister in Christ Betty Stewart, of my father’s recent life-threatening conditions, and our member Manny’s life-threatening condition and difficult surgery. Beyond that, what passes for news among us is often nothing but a list of deaths, always sensational, whether by natural disaster or criminal act. As I was driving to Eugene to be with my dad almost two weeks ago as he faced risky surgery I too had the thought: There’s just too much death!
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 10, 2009
It doesn't make any sense. It is a mystery beyond final comprehension. Paul called it a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. The cross of Jesus Christ ought to be a scandal. The cross ought to have been the end of it all. It should have been a crushing conclusion to the whole Jesus movement. It should have meant that his whole project was a total, abject failure. He'd lost. The Romans swatted him down like an annoying gnat, and just as easily. And make no mistake about it. It was the Romans who did it, not the Jews, two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism to the contrary notwithstanding. They saw him as a threat, or at least an annoyance, because he told poor people they were God's favorites. Because he taught nonviolence. Because he contradicted the teachings of their Jewish collaborators in the temple. He had a following, and the Romans didn't like people with followings. People with followings caused trouble. They got people listening to someone other than their Roman rulers, and the Romans didn't like that at all. So they killed him. They had killed hundreds, maybe thousands, before him for much the same reasons. They killed thousands after him for much the same reasons. It worked. We don't know who any of those other people are, except for maybe one or two. Getting yourself crucified meant you had failed and the Romans had won. The cross should have meant that there was no more Jesus movement. That's what the Romans wanted. That's what they expected. Only with Jesus it didn't happen that way. Within a few years his followers were saying with Paul that they proclaimed Christ, and specifically him crucified. It doesn't make any sense. It shouldn't be. But it is, and so we have to ask why.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 5, 2009
Scripture:
It is truly a bizarre scene. Jesus comes riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, and he is hailed as a king. Jesus coming on a donkey is a royal procession. We know that because of how the crowd greets him, with “Hosanna!” and with branches to soften the step of his animal. We know that Mark intends the scene to be a royal procession, and we know that the animal that Mark calls only a colt is a donkey, because the picture he paints comes straight out of Zechariah 9:9, which has a king riding into the city on a donkey. And because Mark is so clearly echoing Zechariah we know that this royal procession is not just any entry of a king into his city. It is a victory parade. Zechariah says “Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he.” A grand triumphal victory march with the victorious king riding on a donkey.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 22, 2009
Scripture:
Not that you need me to do it, but last week I once again gave you permission to discard the theory of substitutionary sacrificial atonement, also known as the classical theory of atonement. That’s the theory that says that God sent God’s Son in the person of Jesus for the purpose of suffering and drying to pay the price that God required to paid before God could or would forgive human sin. It’s a theory that most of the world, Christian and non-Christian alike, equates with the Christian faith. Most Christians probably can’t imagine what Christianity would or could be without it. Yet last week I called turning Jesus into the ultimate sacrifice, as this theory does, a betrayal of Jesus, as indeed I have done in print. I won’t go into the theological objections to the theory here. If you want to review them read the chapter “Beyond the Classical Theory of Atonement” in my book. There’s a copy of it in the church library if you don’t have it.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 15, 2009
Scripture:
I’ve said before in these Lenten sermons that the cross is a big deal in Christianity. It has become the defining symbol of the faith around the world. Every Christian denomination I know of uses it. Giving up the cross amounts to giving up Christianity. Our faith is inconceivable without it.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 8, 2009
Scripture:
Jesus died. That much is undeniable. Beyond that, he not only died, he was crucified. That means that he was executed—murdered—by the Romans as a common political prisoner. He was a threat, they thought, or at least a nuisance. So they did to him what they did to everyone they thought was a threat, or even a nuisance. They killed him, and they did it in the most brutal, miserable, demeaning way they could think of so that he—and all the others—would not just die but would be a warning to everyone with similar ideas not to mess with the Roman Empire.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 1, 2009
Scripture:
A few days ago one of our number asked me what the Ash Wednesday service was all about. When I said that it was mostly about the imposition of ashes and “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” she said “That sounds gloomy!” I replied that yes, it is rather gloomy; but it marks the beginning of Lent, and Lent is a somber is not necessarily a gloomy season in the church calendar. Lent is a somber season because it is the time of preparation for commemorating a somber event. You see, Lent isn’t really about preparation for Easter. At least to me it isn’t. Lent is primarily preparation for Holy Week. Lent reaches its culmination on Good Friday. It reaches its culmination, for me at least, not in Christ’s glorious Resurrection but in his decidedly inglorious Crucifixion.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 15, 2009
Scripture:
There are some characters in the Bible that I just love. I love them because they’re so human. They are so fallible. They are so much like us. Jonah is my favorite. When God tells him to go preach God’s word to the enemy capital Nineveh he wants no part of it. He says I’m outta here! That’s why he ends up in the belly of a whale and gets vomited up onto the beach. When he finally does go to Nineveh he assumes that they won’t listen to him, or to God, and that therefore God will destroy them. When they do listen and God decides not to destroy them, Jonah goes off and sulks. He’s angry because God didn’t do what Jonah wanted. God did it God’s way not Jonah’s way, and Jonah wasn’t the least bit happy about it.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 8, 2009
Scripture:
After worship today we will gather for our regular annual congregational meeting—preceded by a potluck of course. One thing you can say for churches is that, if nothing else, they keep alive the grand old tradition of the potluck. After the potluck we will convene to do the work of the church, to approve a budget for 2009, to elect boards and officers, and formally to kick off the capital campaign for the roof work that needs to be done. Every bit as much as is the case when we gather here in the sanctuary each Sunday morning we will gather as part of the Body of Christ. We will pray for the Holy Spirit to inform and inspire our deliberations and our decisions. Knowing that, I was struck by the way two of the lectionary readings for today speak to us as we gather to do the work of the church. One of them speaks to us in a rather negative way, the other in a more positive way. I want to look at both passages, and I want to start with the negative one.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 1, 2009
Scripture:
Jesus did exorcisms. That seems quite clear from the Gospel record. Time and again Jesus encountered people who, in the understanding of the time, were possessed by demons, and he drove them out of the possessed person. Now, many of us modern people, or post-modern people, or whatever we are, have a good deal of trouble believing these stories. I’ve got a story about that that I want to tell you. Sermons are supposed to have stories, right? Well, this one has the virtue of being true.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 25, 2009
Scripture:
So we start at the beginning. We start going through the Gospel of Mark in this first year of the lectionary cycle with the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry in Galilee. That’s what the verses we just heard are. Jesus has just been baptized by John in the river Jordan, and Mark says that John has been arrested. It seems likely that Jesus was originally a disciple of John the Baptist. Now that his mentor and teacher has been arrested, Jesus strikes out on his own and begins his own public ministry. He begins it with a particular proclamation. According to Mark, Jesus’ very first public proclamation was: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” That’s basically the same proclamation John the Baptist had been making. It’s a very short proclamation, but I suspect it’s also a pretty puzzling one to most of us. It certainly is to me. So let’s take a closer look at it to see what it might have to say to us.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 18, 2009
Scripture:
The Christian tradition certainly does make a big deal out of baptism, doesn’t it? Christians used to believe that only people who had received Christian baptism could be saved. They even believed that newborn infants who died without being baptized would spend eternity in limbo and could never get to heaven. Most of us don’t believe that superstitious nonsense any more, but we still make a big deal out of baptism. We say that it is the sacrament through which a person becomes a member of the church, a part of the body of Christ. Some churches—not ours but some others—offer Communion only to people who have been baptized. All in all, baptism is a pretty big deal for us.
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 11, 2009
Scripture:
Do you see it? What is it? I’ve never seen anything like it! It’s so bright! It’s so low! It looks like a star, but it’s not like any star I’ve ever seen before. What can it mean? Or does it mean anything at all? I wonder. The stars hold meaning. I spend my life studying that meaning. But I sure don’t know what this one means. I wonder what it can be. Is it moving? It seems to be moving, but not like a normal star. It’s not moving slowly in a path we’ve seen before like other stars. What can it be? What can it mean?