Word and Table

After scouring the internet for sermon and worship helps this afternoon, here are links and excerpts from some of the best resources I found.  Click on the links to read more.  Also, check out the following sites for further materials for your use:

The Text This Week

SAMUEL

Dylan’s Lectionary Blog

Sermons and Liturgies - Richard J. Fairchild

Laughing Bird Liturgical Resources

Resources: Based on the Revised Common Lectionary

THE TEXTS

The Revised Common Lectionary

The Book of Common Prayer Lectionary

Vanderbilt Divinity Library

Roman Catholic Lectionary Readings

IMAGES

Destruction of the Temple - Black and White

Destruction of the Temple

Jesus Teaches at the Temple - Black and White

Jesus and the Destruction of the Temple - Black and White

Bulletin cover for Sunday, November 18, Ordinary 33C, Proper 28C, Pentecost 25C. Based on Isaiah 65:17. Black and White

PPT background for Sunday, November 18, Ordinary 33C, Proper 28C, Pentecost 25C. Based on Isaiah 65:17.

SERMON PREPARATION

From Preaching Peace, we find this quote from Gil Bailie’s book Violence Unveiled concerning the apocalyptic chapters of Luke:

The word "apocalypse" means "unveiling." What, then, is veiled, the unveiling of which can have apocalyptic consequences? The answer is: violence. Veiled violence is violence whose religious or historical justifications still provide it with an aura of respectability and give it a moral and religious monopoly over any "unofficial" violence whose claim to "official" status it preempts. Unveiled violence is apocalyptic violence precisely because, once shorn of its religious and historical justifications, it cannot sufficiently distinguish itself from the counter-violence it opposes. Without benefit of religious and cultural privilege, violence simply does what unveiled violence always does: it incites more violence. In such situations, the scope of violence grows while the ability of its perpetrators to reclaim that religious and moral privilege diminishes. The reciprocities of violence and counter-violence threaten to spin completely out of control. (p. 15)

Gerald Darring in The Perspective of Justice on The Center for Liturgy Sunday Web Site writes:

As we approach the end of the liturgical year, today’s liturgy paints a frightening picture of the end time: nation rising against nation, plagues and famines, fearful omens and great signs, persecutions and trials. The biblical “day of the Lord” will be a time when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire.

There is no biblical basis for a false hope in inevitable progress. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that things will gradually get better until at last the kingdom is present, and in fact it is closer to the biblical truth to say that things will get worse before they get better.

Consider, for example, the matter of deaths caused by war: in the 18th century, about 4 million people died in wars; in the 19th century, about 8 million people died in wars; in the 20th century, nearly 100 million people died in wars.

On Calvin Theological Seminary’s Excellence in Preaching site, we read:

. . . another striking feature here is how Jesus promises in the end that not a hair of their heads will “perish.” Clearly he is speaking in something other than literal terms in that if there is one thing clear from everything else in this passage it is that bodily harm and even physical death is all-but a certainty in the times that are to come. And indeed, in the Greek the word often rendered “perish” in Luke 21:18 is the word APOLUMAI, which is the word for utter destruction. The world can (and will) do its level best to the followers of Jesus even as they shortly will do to Jesus himself. But in the paradox that is the gospel and its grand reversals of all things typically expected, no ultimate harm can come to those in Christ because the Savior we follow has already triumphed over those very things (having passed through them himself). As for us as followers of Jesus, so for Jesus himself: the path to life paradoxically leads through the worst things we have to face and the worst things the world can throw at us.

Sarah Dylan Breuer ends her reflection about this week’s passage from Luke in this way:

The rulers of this world put on a convincing show of power, but we who know Jesus know what real power is and what it’s doing among us. In a meditation called "until the end of the world" that I contributed to Get Up Off Your Knees (pp. 28-29), I put it this way:

    The world of darkness and violence, of injustice and hatred, has ended, is ending, will end. The world [the prophets] proclaim can’t be stopped with the sword, the might of institutions, or the betrayal of a brother. The universe arcs toward the justice for which it aches,  and the whole world — martyrs and traitors, soldiers and healers, lovers and  lawyers — will one day echo the song of the angels: Holy, holy, holy is the God who is Love, who is now, who is then,  who is ever. Amen.

… and thanks be to God!

On his blog The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself, Dan Clendenin reflects on endings:

If you’re a male in Liberia, your life expectancy at birth is 39 years. If you’re lucky enough to be born a woman in Japan, demographers estimate that you’ll live more than twice that long, about 84.7 years. But no matter who you are or where you’re born, mortality rates are 100%. Then comes your personal End . . .

The End of the earth is a given; it will just take a while. My friend and solar physicist Charles says that in about 5 billion years the sun will expand into a red giant 10,000,000 times its present volume, at which time it will incinerate and eventually swallow the Earth. If the sun is about 4.6 billion years old, as many scientists estimate, we’re about half way to the End of the earth.

As hard as it is to fathom a Milky Way with no planet earth, that’s nothing, astronomically-speaking, compared to the cosmic End of the universe as we know it. Physicists are divided, but equally bleak. If the expansion of the Big Bang continues to propel everything outward, our galaxies will fly apart forever, although individual galaxies will collapse into black holes. But if the forces of gravity prevail, the expanding universe will eventually reverse its expansion and collapse into a Big Crunch. "It is as sure as can be," writes the particle physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne, "that humanity, and all forms of carbon-based life, will prove a transient episode in the history of the cosmos."

FULL SERMONS

Dr. Susan Fleming McGurgan speaks about witnessing, both in her own past and the need for it now:

In fact,
where I live, 
religious testimony is about as welcome
as an update on cousin Myrtle’s gall stones,
or an invitation to a neighbor’s harmonica recital.

But back home when I was growing up,
just about everyone I knew
had a testimony—
a witness story to tell.
And they told it,
whether you really wanted to hear it,
or not.

Old men stood up in Wednesday night meetings
to give a testimony honed by years of practice—
reciting an epic tale of temptation and sin,
and of the time Jesus himself
pulled them from the gutter
and washed them whiter than snow.

I knew of preachers
whose testimonies could curl your hair
and make you sorry that you ever teased your brother
or sassed your mother—
Preachers who urged you to give a witness to the clerk at Safeway; 
            to the music teacher down the road; 
                        to the man who changed your Daddy’s oil.

Even the very young learned how to testify
and share what God was doing in their lives. 
And no matter your age or station in life,
if you couldn’t tell that story
in public,
out loud,
well…
then you weren’t really
much of a Christian.

Rev. Dr. Luke Bouman of Valparaiso University writes:

The evident seasons are one thing to read, but the changes from epoch to epoch of history are another.  What of the signs of these changes.  At times the words of the bible, the words of Jesus himself, proclaim these signs as there for the reading as well (just continue reading in Luke’s gospel after today’s text for an example of this).  At other times, we are warned that the days and weeks are coming, but at an unexpected time, and thus we should stand ready to meet them at all times (and we’ll get a firm dose of that medicine in the season of Advent come this December). 

But in our text for today, the disciples puzzle over Jesus words of warning.  The beauty that they see, signified by the splendor of the Jerusalem temple, seems so much more permanent than the trees that change with the season.  Yet Jesus warns that it will all pass away.  What will this grand destruction mean?  Is it the start of a new epoch of history?  Is the age of Messiah and Israel’s vindication upon them?  If so, then the destruction of so important a national symbol seems to bode ill for the whole enterprise.  Puzzled, the disciples as Jesus what it all means.

Jesus answer is surprising.  The wars, the destructions, the persecutions, all will take place.  Lots of the kinds of spectacular events associated with "the end of the world" will happen.  But the end is not associated with those things.  They are almost like the colors of the fall.  They will happen and will continue to happen (as they have for nearly two thousand years).  But these signs are not to be read as the time when history will change from one era to another.  THAT change is also happening, but not with the spectacular cosmic events expected. 

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