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Showing posts with the label Messiah

Who is Jesus to Us?

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This is the sermon I preached Sun. 9/13 at St.Timothy Lutheran Church and St. Mark Lutheran Church . The gospel was Mark 8:27-38. Before marrying my husband, Ray, I had a part time job at a call center in Rochester, conducting opinion polls over the phone. Sometimes they were political, oftentimes they were about various products and services. In the first few verses of this gospel reading, doesn't it seem that Jesus is conducting an opinion poll of his own? His question was simply regarding who people thought he was. This brings us to a turning point in Mark's gospel. Just who is Jesus? Who do people say he is? Jesus wasn't taking a survey to see what people thought of him. The answers others gave were all high evaluations of Jesus, but they did not confess Jesus as the definitive revelation of God, The important question is not the identity of Jesus, but the identity of God: Is God the one who is definitively acting in the Christ event or not? The discussio

Palm/Passion Sunday Sermon: Who is Jesus?

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The text I’m preaching from is Matthew chapter 21 which was read in the processional liturgy.             Jesus is coming into Jerusalem. Something new is in the air. This could really change everything. How many of us have experienced an event like that in our lives—whether it be a new job, graduating from school, getting married, having a child, retiring…the list goes on. I don’t know about you, but when there’s something exciting on the horizon in my life, I fantasize about it. I imagine just how it will be. I can’t wait for the occasion to take place.             Let me give you an example. When Ray and I first got married, I thought when he retired; we’d just ride off into the sunset together and live happily ever after. That just sounded great. I couldn’t imagine anything much better than that.             Those were my plans. But God had other ideas. Ray did retire in 2008. We rode off into the sunset but we only got as far as Gettysburg. And I started attending a seminary. An