If you can believe it….
…they have me preach once a year at my Congregational church. Here’s this year’s effort. Nothing new to anyone who commits the sin of reading this blog. It’s very internetty — not a good theological effort — so I could make some specific points about our congregation. But I was glad to be able to quote a few blog friends (the latter from the VC monastary).
: I asked my sister for relevant scripture (handy having a Rev in the family) and she gave me Galatians 5:1-6, which is about not being enslaved to the law. The law under discussion happens to be one about circumcision. The associate pastor called rather confused: Uh… was I preaching about circumcision? No, I explained. She deftly desexed the verse.
: Here’s an earlier, better effort.
Tags: sermon
October 31st, 2005 at 10:59 am
I asked my sister for relevant scripture (handy having a Rev in the family) and she gave me Galatians 5:1-6, which is about not being enslaved to the law.
….there’s a quite a page on that subject at
http://bible-truths.com/lawvslaw.htm#Defining%20Righteousness
The “letter” of the law, while being “abolished” for those “in Christ,” is established as the “schoolmaster” to bring us all to Christ.
Speaking of the law, the first covenant, we are told “…He taketh away the first that he might establish the second” (Heb. 10:9). “The law [of Moses] is not made for a righteous man but for the lawless and disobedient” (I Tim. 1:9).
Seems it’s even stricter when one is “in Christ”. Behavior becomes more righteous than with the Laws. ie: before you had to actually physically kill to be guilty of it; when “in Christ”, merely becoming unjustly angry at your brother in your heart is considered unrighteous - as the righteous man asks not what is permissible, “but what is commendable”.
October 31st, 2005 at 2:45 pm
That was a very, very good speech. Could almost make an atheist like myself convert. ; )
October 31st, 2005 at 6:41 pm
No disrespect to the excellent anti-legalistic lesson offered by the Rev Cynthia from Galatians…
But since you argue that the Age of One cannot empowered individualistically but only when individuals combine to work collectively, how about Matthew 18:20: “When two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” If we human beings do not live in society, we live nowhere.
October 31st, 2005 at 7:00 pm
Or as St. Fred the Flatulent (one of the more obscure of the Algerian saints) put it:
“Ponder the ease with which one can drive away one’s closest companions with the frivolous consumption of an ill-considered plate of beans!”
Forgive me, but fourteen years of Irish catholic sermons, followed by approximately two years of pretending to go to church while circling the same block twenty or thirty times in order to avoid said sermons has affected me on a deep and meaningful level. Whenever I hear someone quote a saint or apostle, the devil rises up inside me and forces my fingers upon the keyboard. ; )
November 1st, 2005 at 3:46 pm
Jeepers Jeff! I used to see Ken Wildrick at least twice a year when I worked at CTI in Princeton, NJ….my this is a super-smaller world than any of us think….