The Best Gifts Luke 2.22-40 12/28/14 By Jon Glenn Have you ever heard the expression, “The best gifts come in small packages?” This phrase was never truer for me than in January, 2012. Melissa and I have a tradition that we started during our first Christmas together. Every year we give each other 12 gifts, one for each day of Christmas. That Christmas the best gift that I gave came in a rather small package: a 2x2x1.5 inch box with a hinged lid. I imagine that some of you can probably … [Read more...]
Raised to New Life
A Part of the Pattern
The phrase "I am the bread of life" starts a pattern of "I am..." statements which runs through the gospel of John. But these aren't the only "I am..." statements that God makes to us. They are part of a pattern that reaches all the way back to the prophet Moses and continues on with us today when Jesus speaks a unique "I am..." statement to each one of us. … [Read more...]
Finishing Well
For the past month during our weekly meetings, Scott and I have included a time to talk about endings. My time at Lakeridge will be coming to an end in the middle of June. At that time I will also be finishing up my studies at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. With each one of these formal endings come more informal ones. The schedule that I have known over the last year will be changing. I will be saying goodbye to people in the congregation as well as to friends that I made … [Read more...]
Just the Facts
There are always three truths in every situation: yours, mine, and what actually happened. The same is true of the life of Jesus. Each gospel writer tells the story a little bit differently. The way that Luke tells the story means that even contemporary Christians who have never seen the resurrected Christ have a story to tell. Their own story of repentance and forgiveness. … [Read more...]
Let’s hear It Again!
Have you ever had a song stuck in your head? A song that you find yourself humming or singing over and over again? A song that no matter how hard you try and forget it just doesnʼt go away? That song is what Easter should be for the church. Every year we come back to this same story of Jesus being crucified, buried, and raised again. But it isnʼt just today that we hear this story, we are going to be hearing about Christʼs resurrection for the next 7 weeks as we move through a season of the … [Read more...]
Coming back to Church
A few weeks ago, Lakeridge held its yearly congregational meeting to remember what the congregation has done in the past year and to begin planning for the year to come. The difficult thing about the democratic process that is used in meetings like this one is that everyone has an opinion, but not every opinion will get carried out. So it should be no surprise that there was some heated dialogue during the meeting. As people were leaving after the meeting I was aware of how much passion and … [Read more...]
The Bigger God
During the medieval period, Christian scholars spent a lot of time thinking about pins. More specifically, they spent time thinking about how many angels could sit on the head of a pin. This may seem like a silly debate, but what these thinkers were really interested in was space. Specifically how much space spiritual beings like angels or God took up. Space is an important thing to us humans, even though we may not talk about it a lot. Unlike the infinite number of angelic bodies medieval … [Read more...]
Different Voices
Last week Pastor Scott and I attended the Byberg Preaching Conference, an annual Northwest conference primarily for Lutheran clergy. The sessions led by Craig Satterlee were great and wonderfully informative and the time to meet up with other Lutheran clergy and do a little networking were invaluable. Like most conferences, one of the first questions that anyone asks is "Where are you from?" In this context, the question was more about what church you were from then what area of the Northwest … [Read more...]
Limited!
There have been a slew of films featuring comic book heroes over the course of the last few years. One of the conventions in all these films is to tell the superheroʼs origin story, which unpacks who the character was before they got their superpowers. This plot device is based on the assumption that how a character begins is important for audiences to understand where they end up. Those who compiled the scriptures had a similar idea. Our origin story is written right into the beginning of the … [Read more...]