Painting Fakes

This evening I get to preach on what for me is one of the most intriguing passages in the Bible, the first two chapters of Paul's letter to the Galatians.  Here's roughly what I'm going to say. Galatians is a passionate letter written by Paul to a group of churches in Galatia, shown on the map.  It's not entirely clear who he's writing to but the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that the recipients were the churches in the south of the province - at Iconium, Lystra, Derbe and Pisidian Antioch - which he and Barnabas founded on the first journey they took after being commissioned by the church in Syrian Antioch.  He certainly seems to have known his correspondents personally and talks to them as a spiritual father.  These cities were multicultural communities, Greek colonies in a region inhabited by Celts, ruled by Roman overlords, and the churches there would almost certainly have been multiracial. The letter addresses one of the most cruc

So everyone, here's the gist of tomorrow's sermon. Readings are 1 Corinthians 1:1-9 and Romans 12:1-13. But first, a story about Mohandas Gandhi.  In the 1930s and 1940s if you wanted to do anything in the Indian independence movement it was important to have Gandhi's blessing. So when Shriman Narayan returned to India from England in the early 1930s with a PhD in Economics and a head full of schemes for economic reform, he went to visit Gandhi in his ashram.  He explained his ideas and plans and asked Gandhi for his blessing.  Gandhi, however, said that first he wanted Narayan to clean the ashram toilets. This was not a pleasant job. The toilets were not water closets they were latrines, and cleaning them involved a shovel and bucket. Narayan had probably never done it before. Traditional Hindu society has a strict caste system. Higher caste people, like Gandhi and Narayan, do important things like running the government and trading. Lower castes do less important t

I'm preaching on June 2 - next Sunday.  Here's what I think I'll say. The main passage is from Luke 8:1-21, which includes the Parable of the Sower plus a couple of stories which reinforce its central message.  Supporting passages come from Isaiah 6:1-13 and 1Peter 1:17-25. The Parable of the Sower is one of those stories of Jesus that we learnt about in Sunday School, and it's unique in being the only one of Jesus' parables which comes with its own explanation attached.  This can mean we think we understand it.  However, I wonder if we really do get it's full message, or if our familiarity blinds us.  The story starts off with the parable itself. 4 When a great crowd gathered and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable: 5 ‘A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell on the path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. 6 Some fell on the rock; and as it grew up, it withered for lack of moisture.

On Good Friday I gave a short meditation on two passages - the story of Jesus before Pilate as told in John 18 and 19, and for a bit of background the story of David's plan to build a temple from 1 Chronicles 17. David certainly had plenty of faults, but he is often protrayed as the archetypal King of the Jews, the man who first established them as a secure, powerful nation.  1 Chronicles 17 recounts how, after fighting various wars and establishing his kingdom securely, David had the notion to build a temple to Yahweh.  Even his household prophet Nathan thought it was a good idea.  Yahweh disagreed, and sent David a message.  The essence of it was that he didn't need a house, and if any house-building was to be done he, Yahweh, would do it.  He would establish Israel in their home, and build a house (that is, a dynasty) for David.  David was put firmly in his place.  He may have had a household prophet, but he didn't have a household God.  He served Yahweh, not the o

So, I get to preach again after a long break, and my subject this Sunday is Psalm 116.  Here's what I think I'm going to say, or something like it. The Book of Psalms is a song book, an anthology of works by different authors written at different times in Israel's history.  It probably came together in its current form in the post-exilic period, but many of the songs it contains are pre-exilic, with a lot attributed to King David.  No musical notation has survived (it's possible that none ever existed) and we have no way of knowing how the songs were sung, but what appear to be musical instructions appear in some of the psalms and the title of the book itself comes from the Greek word for songs accompanied by stringed instruments. In principle, this collection is similar to the collections we use today for church worship - The Australian Hymn Book, say, or the various collections of Scripture in Song or The Source.   Like these contemporary collections, it conta

So to continue where I left off yesterday .... While Mark and Matthew place this story late in Jesus ministry, John places it at the start.  It forms part of John's counterpart to Matthew and Mark's "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand", and Luke's story of Jesus preaching in Nazareth . John has two commencement stories.  The first, the story of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana, is not quite a public act, because although the wedding itself is a public event most of those present don't seem to know what has happened.  The story is also a deeply symbolic one.  The wine is symbolic of the life and vitality of the Kingdom of God.  Hence, when the original wine supplied for the wedding runs out, we should take this as indicating the bankruptcy of the old order, the order of priests and sacrifices which Jesus was confronting.  Jesus' response is to ask them to fill with water, and then draw from, the jars which the household woul

After my sermon on Jesus preaching at Nazareth some of us talked further on the question of how you should treat your enemies, if you're not supposed to kill them.  During this discussion we got onto the story of Jesus clearing the temple and I thought it would be worth a closer look. The story appears in three of the gospels.  In Mark 11:15-19 and Matthew 21:12-17 it comes in the final week of Jesus' life, right after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  In John 2:12-25 it plays a somewhat similar role to the story of Jesus in Nazareth in Luke, a public introduction to the purpose of his ministry.  I have read some commentators who think this means Jesus did it twice, but this seems to be an absurd concession to the idea of inerrancy .  John has placed the story in a different place but it serves the same purpose - to introduce Jesus' terminal conflict with the Jewish authorities. Here is the story as it appears in Mark. On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temp

So, to continue from Part 1 ... One of the things that many of the writers on the life of Jesus agree on - including Albert Schweitzer , Albert Nolan and NT Wright - is that Jesus was a prophet of the "end times", that the core of his message was that a crisis was coming and they needed to get ready.  This is shown in the way Jesus begins his public ministry in all four Gospels.  Matthew and Mark begin with a summary statement: "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand."  The first public acts of Jesus in John's gospel are the changing of water into wine, symbolising renewal, and the cleansing of the temple, which presents a clear challenge to the Jewish authorities to reform or be destroyed.  Likewise, the scene in Luke 4:16-30 shows Jesus announcing that the prophecy of the coming kingdom was in the process of fulfillment, and talking about what sort of kingdom it would be. It didn't take any special message from God to know that a crisis was loo