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This Month Archive
St. Mark's Lutheran Church

 

 2015

 Sermons



Dez 27 - The Cost of Christmas

Dez 27 - Living in God's Peace

Dez 24 - Not "Hide and Seek"

Dez 20 - Barren

Dez 13 - What Are We to Do?

Dez 8 - What is next?

Dez 6 - Imagination

Nov 29 - Perseverance

Nov 22 - What is truth?

Nov 15 - Live today for tomorrow

Nov 8 - Remembering, Focusing, Anticipating

Nov 1 - In the end, God

Okt 25 - Automatic Blessings?

Okt 18 - Worth-ship

Okt 11 - Donkey Tracks and Skid Marks

Okt 4 - As Beggars

Sep 27 - Living in Unity with other Christians - don't hurt them!

Sep 20 - On the Way to Capernaum

Sep 13 - Strange Places, Persons, and Actions

Sep 6 - Life in Focus

Aug 30 - Work-Shoe Faith

Aug 23 - Our Captain in the well-fought fight

Aug 20 - Time for hospitality

Aug 16 - It Is About Jesus

Aug 14 - Remember

Aug 9 - Bread of Life

Aug 2 - A Hard Teaching

Jul 26 - Peter, and Us

Jul 19 - Need for a Shepherd

Jul 12 - How Can I Keep From Singing?

Jul 5 - Making a Sale?

Jun 28 - The Healer and the Healing Community

Jun 21 - Two Kinds of Fear

Jun 14 - Unlikely

Jun 7 - Where the Fingers Point

Mai 31 - Just Do It

Mai 24 - To declare the wonderful deeds of God....

Mai 17 - Everyone named "Justus"

Mai 16 - In God's Good Time

Mai 12 - Take Hold of Life

Mai 10 - Holy People, Holy Time, Holy Fruit

Mai 3 - The Master Gardener

Apr 26 - The Good Shepherd

Apr 19 - Mission Possible

Apr 12 - With Scars

Apr 5 - Afraid

Apr 4 - This Program presented by....God

Apr 3 - How much does he care?

Apr 3 - God's answer to cruelty

Apr 2 - Actions of the Covenant

Mrz 29 - Extravagance!

Mrz 22 - Sir, We Wish to See Jesus

Mrz 18 - The Church's song in peace and joy

Mrz 15 - Doxology

Mrz 11 - This Is the Feast

Mrz 8 - Why keep them?

Mrz 1 - Hope Does Not Disappoint

Feb 25 - The Church's Song of Hope and Confidence

Feb 22 - Jesus vs. the Wild Things

Feb 18 - Psalm 51: The Church's Song in praise of God's Forgiveness

Feb 15 - In Wonder

Feb 8 - Sent, Under Orders

Feb 2 - In praise of routine

Feb 1 - Tied up in Impossible Knots

Jan 25 - What kind of God?

Jan 18 - What Kind of Stone?

Jan 13 - In the Fullness of Time

Jan 11 - A pile of dirt?

Jan 4 - By another way…


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2014 Sermons

What is truth?

Read: John 18:38

 
Christ the King  - November 22, 2015

The Rev. Kenneth R. Elkin

 

Jesus the prisoner stands before Pilate, seemingly powerless.

He has been judged, beaten, mocked, dragged here and there.

Pilate determine quickly that there is no political threat from this man.

It is another of those interminable religious squabbles that are often roiling up things in Jerusalem.

So Pilate then decides to engage in a little philosophizing with the prisoner.

“What is truth?” he queries.

A little distraction in the middle of this ghastly business; this should be amusing for the Roman governor.

 

Some years back there was a movie A Few Good Men.

In the climactic courtroom scene, the prosecuting attorney (played by Tom Cruise) angrily demands of his witness, “I want the truth!”

The colonel who is the witness (played by Jack Nicholson) screams back at him “You can't handle the truth!”

 

Was that colonel right?

Would we rather look at the world through pastel glasses that obscure what is really going on, and make it all nice, and manageable?

The politicians of whatever stripe, from Pilate to today, seem to think so.

“Truth” is whatever buys the most votes.

Many claim that there is no universal truth.

What is true for one is not necessarily true for another, or at another time.

Some seem to be holding multiple contradictory truths at the same time, and are not bothered by that.

Truth becomes relative, not fixed, and one person's truth is related to someone else's truth in various ways, including contradiction.

We can babble on and on, trying to convince ourselves about how wise and thoughtful we are, so advanced in our thinking, so far beyond those primitive people of 2,000 years ago.

But sooner or later we will run into some hard words that are either true as they stand, or else the whole enterprise is a foolish waste of time.

I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other.

That promise and that command are either true always and everywhere, or else in this building and this gathering we are engaged in a great deception.

Christ is King always and everywhere, or else we're living a fantasy.

Pilate was not equipped to handle the truth; are we?

 

They are not called the Ten Suggestions, but the Ten Commandments.

And with every thought and action in daily life we are banging into them, and as good theologians such as Martin Luther regularly remind us, we are brought up short by the encounter, and we are either  reshaped and redirected, or else we stumble into the swamp of self-deception.

Oh, we would love for things to be other than that!

We want to be in control of things ourselves.

 

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, Third President, visionary of the Louisiana Purchase, and other good things, was still caught on this point as are so many others.

He sat down with two old Bibles and a pair of scissors and literally cut them apart, and pasted the parts he liked into a blank book, discarding the rest.

Things like the miracles, Christ's divinity and oneness with the Father, and the resurrection were ...gone.

What was left he titled The Philosophy of Jesus, and he read from it regularly.

But lest we be too hard on Jefferson, we must realize that all of us play the same game; perhaps not as dramatically, but still the same old thing

Jesus may be King on Sunday morning, but not so much the rest of the time.

We may not use scissors and paste, but still we pick and choose what makes us comfortable or not.

We tend to edit out the things that are difficult to hear, the law that accuses us, the judgments that bring us up short.

In scripture we find things that are unpleasant or inconvenient.

 

Last week our Sunday School group was studying the speeches of Paul in Acts and we imagined what he might have said if he had been on one of those shows where folks are to give testimonials about how their lives are wonderful now that they have found Jesus: “earlier I was miserable, but with Jesus now I'm so happy with new car, new wife...etc.”

What would Paul have said?

“Earlier I was quite satisfied, educated, a rising star among the Pharisees.

Then Jesus got hold of me, and since then I have been stoned, beaten, shipwrecked, ostracized, and more; and there is more to come.

And still, I am filled with the deepest kind of joy, in being known by Jesus, and serving him.”

 

Here we get to the center of things.

What is truth? Jesus, Son of God, true God and true man at one and the same time, one with the Father and the Spirit in creating, saving, and making us holy, King from beginning to end.

Like it or not, convenient or not easy to take or not, there it is.

 

There was a church in the Berkeley California area that had in its narthex large portraits of various people such as Mahatma Ghandi, Abraham Lincoln, Socrates, and Jesus.  Above them was a bronze engraving “You are all the children of God...” with Galatians 3:26 as the reference.

But when one checks out that passage, one sees immediately how the artist edited out what he didn't like.

The whole passage is “You are all children of God through faith in Jesus Christ.”

I don't know what God is doing with Socrates and Ghandi; that is his business, not mine.

The commission that you and I have received is to help everyone we can know Jesus Christ, born of the virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, resurrected on the third day, ultimate cause, ultimate future, ultimate and present reality, from before the “big bang”to after the last breath, truth for all time and every person and place.

 

Sure, we continue to have lots of questions, some serious, some silly.

What is heaven like?

What is God's will for my life right now?

When will Christ make his final return?

WWJD...What would Jesus drive?

Like Pilate, we have questions about truth, but we do not ask the questions with half-bored flippancy.

We open our hearts and minds to study the scriptures; we open our hearts and mouths to the food of the Holy Communion.

Remember how John's Gospel ends: These signs are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

And little by little, we will know truth; and his name is Jesus Christ, the King. Amen.

 

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.