brucewriter.com

(A Lection Reflection on Luke 4:21-30)

If you want to say something happened in an unusually short amount of time, using “in sixty seconds” seems both specific and pretty short. This post’s title references, of course, the well-known Nicolas Cage film Gone in Sixty Seconds, about a car thief’s ability to steal a car in a minute or less.

Today’s scripture is not about stealing cars, but in its own way it’s about as violent as that film. Jesus returns to his childhood home of Nazareth, having begun his ministry elsewhere and thus being proceeded by a little reputation. He reads the scripture from Isaiah that speaks of being anointed to preach good news to the poor, freedom to the prisoners, recovery of sight to the blind. He then tells his hometown neighbors, many of whom surely remember him as a boy, that “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And the townspeople, realizing that Jesus has just said he is the Messiah, are so enraged by his arrogance and possible blasphemy that they drag him out to the cliff outside of town to throw him over the edge and kill him.

Wait — that’s not right? Continue reading →

If you grew up going to some sort of church Bible class, you probably remember getting old enough to ask those questions that drive the teacher crazy: Could God make something so big he couldn’t pick it up? If God can do anything, could he destroy himself? Nothing blows up a class faster than a good paradox, and we certainly enjoyed our paradoxes (paradi?).

This week, though, we come to one of the more puzzling, and ultimately one of the saddest, questions like this in the New Testament: If God is the All-Powerful, can a group of humans tie God’s hands? And the answer, surprisingly, is Yes.

Continue reading →

Who said this?

Nothing left over to the one with the most,
Nothing lacking to the one with the least.

Are you sitting there, saying to yourself “wow, that sure sounds like Marx. Didn’t I read that in college?”
Well, sort of, but not exactly. Here is the Karl Marx quote:

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

So, if Marx didn’t say our opening quote, who did? Continue reading →

I’m a big fan of the early Saturday Night Live sketches (perhaps because I’m old enough to have watched them the first time they aired!). One of the great catch-phrases of those first seasons was the opening of the Weekend Update with Chevy Chase dead-panning, “I’m Chevy Chase … and you’re not.”

In this week’s lections, we come across a scripture that seems as if God is saying to some of us, “I’m God … and you’re not.” And according to the Psalmist, one of the main targets of God’s catch-phrase is … tall people.

“Wait, what? God’s got it in for tall people? He doesn’t like basketball? What is this, payback for Short People?”

Hold on — before you leap to conclusions, let me explain. Continue reading →