Psalm 91 is one of the best known of all the Psalms. It has been a source of comfort and assurance to Jews and Christians for many centuries. Whenever I read it, I am reminded of the monks at Mepkin Abbey. They have seven services a day, most of which have a few Psalms sung as part of each service. The abbey is cruciform in shape, and the monks sit in two rows of seats on each side of the “long part” of the cross, facing one another. One half of the community sings one verse, and then the other half sing the following verse, and so it goes all the way through the Psalm. The words are not exactly the same as what we find in the Bible, but they are a paraphrase of that, which makes the metric feet of the poetry work out better. If you don’t know what I mean, don’t worry, and if you do know, don’t feel smug. But in my mind I can hear the Marvelous Men of Mepkin singing Psalm 91, and it puts chills down my spine.

Only faith can authenticate Easter. It is impossible to ascertain it as fact. Trust alone can make it real to us. Whatever ending we choose to give to Easter, it is not the end. We must become committed to something we cannot validate through the normal processes by which we are able to verify other realities.

During Lent I have been preaching a series of sermons based on the events of Holy Week according to the Gospel of Mark. The first one began with what is known as the “cleansing of the temple.” Mark said this occurred on the day after Palm Sunday, while Matthew and Luke said the temple incident took place immediately after the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Whatever may have been the historical fact, we have been following the chronology of Holy Week as Mark recorded it. Today, because this is Palm Sunday, we shall go back to Mark’s telling of the Palm Sunday processional, and then jump forward to part of his account of Jesus with the disciples at the Last Supper.

Jesus believed the world would come to a cataclysmic end shortly after his death. He seemed to have no doubt of that. There are hints of the Apocalypse here and there in the Galilean ministry, but it was in Holy Week where his concepts of the Apocalypse are most apparent. The word “apocalypse” is derived from Greek. It means “unveiling.” Something huge was going to happen in the near future, but it would be fully unveiled only when it happened. Jesus said, “But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Sopn, but only the Father.” Therefore there inevitably was a mystery to it, with many unanswered and unanswerable questions.

To understand the nature of Jesus’ many skirmishes with his theological enemies during his public ministry, we need first to think about the innate nature of theological conservatives and theological liberals. Theological conservatives, or for that matter, nearly all conservatives, are resistant to change. What has long worked smoothly in any organization or institution is resisted by conservatives, simply because the old seems to be tried and true, and has operated so well for so long. The continuation of tradition is thus of high importance to conservatives.

Jesus had been thinking for some time about what he would do when he came into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. He intended to make the dramatic statement of an irrepressible religious reformer. Thus he drove out of the temple the money-changers and those who sold animals for sacrifice. He also overturned their tables in a display of puritanical fury. He was completely convinced this is what God wanted him to do.

what Jesus did in driving out those who bought and sold sacrificial animals and those who changed money in the temple was a major symbolic religious and political statement. He was strongly expressing disapproval of practices which had been going on in the temple for ten centuries and the religious politics which supported the concept of animal sacrifice. What specifically, we might therefore ask, was his opposition?

The apostle Paul believed in the doctrine of predestination. According to John Calvin, predestination means this, and only this: Before anyone is born, God decides whether that person will go to heaven or hell, and there is nothing anyone can do to alter that outcome. Technically that is double predestination, meaning that each of us is predestined either one way or the other: for heaven, or for hell. What predestination doesn’t mean is that God preordains everything that happens in our lives. Many people think that’s what predestination is, but it isn’t. And if you have never heard that before, you have now heard it here first.

This sermon is probably going to sound much more like an academic lecture in political/military strategy than a sermon in an ecclesiastical setting. I confess to you that through the years my preaching has become more and more academic and intellectually-oriented. I want you to know I am aware of that, and I presume you are aware that the tendency is not abating. In any case, this sermon is based on what I believe to be a fundamental biblical tenet, namely, that war under any circumstances is always morally unacceptable. To be sure, there are several instances, especially in the Books of Joshua and Judges and the historical books of the kings of Israel which clearly indicate that God intended the Israelites to wage fierce and total wars against some of their neighbors. I further believe, however, that was a human attempt to impose a purported divine mandate on a very human decision of the Israelites to attack those they chose to perceive as enemies.

This sermon shall be largely devoted to a summary of how the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, understood the subject of what the Bible calls “strangers” or “sojourners.” In our terminology, we call such people either “immigrants” or “refugees.” But as we consider how God directed the Hebrews or Israelites or Jews to treat immigrants or refugees, we need also to ask ourselves, “How does the USA --- or the world --- treat strangers or refugees from Central America, the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere?”

“Global warming” has been abandoned as a term intended to evoke widespread attention among climate watchers. Far more places are getting warmer than are getting colder, but still, “climate change” is now the operative expression. Nevertheless, there is almost as much strong opposition to the idea as there is strong support for it. Nothing I shall say in this sermon will change the mind of anyone who denies the concept of climate change, nor shall anything herein add fuel to the disputatious fire that is already burning. The debate shall continue whether or not a preacher preaches anything about this.

The French have a proverb, “To know all is to forgive all.” It also can be translated as “To understand all is to forgive all.” What does that mean? It does not refer to academic knowledge or understanding. Rather it has to do with a knowledge or understanding of people’s behavior, and in particular the behavior of people other than ourselves. If we knew the complete life story of everyone we encounter, we might more readily forgive their failings and foibles.

A metaphor is a simile that is enlarged or extended or expanded to a much bigger concept than a mere simile. In Coleridge’s long poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he tells of a lone sailor, lost somewhere in the South Seas, i.e., the South Pacific. It says of him that “he sailed upon a painted ship upon a painted ocean.” The ancient mariner didn’t literally do that, because he was in a small sailboat upon the actual ocean. However, he was actually becalmed in a vast expanse of placid water from which he might never escape, if wind should never again appear. In a short poetic figurative phrase, Coleridge captured the predicament of the old sailor all by himself in a tropical and potentially lethal oceanic calm.

Certain events leave an indelible impression on us, and we cannot find words which sufficiently describe what we experience. Seeing the Grand Canyon is always like that for me. Seeing a newborn baby the first time, especially one’s own child or grandchild, may create a similar awe-stricken moment.

Being a pastor of a congregation our size also has been the happiest pastorate I have had in 54 years of ministry. Large churches are more stressful than small churches, and greater numbers of people in worship invariably affects the nature of worship. Things are more casual here than they were even in Bayfield, Wisconsin, where there were almost a hundred in attendance each Sunday, or Warren, Ohio, where there were about seventy-five. I can honestly report to you that it is almost a totally unmitigated pleasure and not at all a burden to be the pastor of The Chapel Without Walls!

In the Genesis account of creation, it is God who is ascribed to be the Creator. When Abraham left the city of Ur in the land of Mesopotamia and ultimately went to the land of Canaan, God is the one the Hebrews ascribed to inspire Abraham to make that courageous journey. When the very elderly Abraham and his wife Sarah became parents of a son, the Bible gives the ascription for that birth to God. When baby Moses was rescued from the Nile River by the Pharaoh’s daughter, that highly unlikely occurrence was ascribed to the intervention of God. When the Red Sea parted, when Joshua and the Israelites conquered Canaan, when Gideon led the Israelites to defeat the Midianites, these occurrences were ascribed to God. The Israelites had no doubt God was the cause of all these things, and therefore they ascribed them to God.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. The word “Advent” is taken from a Latin root which means “Coming.” During Advent, which always begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, and includes however many days there are in the actual week preceding Christmas Day, we prepare for the coming of Jesus Christ into the world. And so to be forewarned is to be forearmed: these “Christmas Song sermons” will be expository. That is, their essence will be an exposition of the verses upon which they are based. Not much more, and not much less. So, as they say in the Boy Scouts, Be Prepared.

It seemed like an innocent enough question. There was a man in a large crowd who had come out to listen to Jesus speaking. “Rabbi, bid my brother divide the inheritance with me.” Apparently the brother wanted either to keep all of the inheritance for himself or not to have their inheritance divided up at that particular time. We may deduce from this question that “the brother” had to be older than the man asking the question, because only the oldest son could delay the division of an inheritance, should he choose to do so. Most oldest brothers probably would not want to do that, because there normally would be no reason to prolong the distribution. Probably the greedy sibling wanted to keep the whole bundle for himself; Luke didn’t explain it.

Jesus had a special affinity for the dispossessed. Perhaps it is because he was born dispossessed. If the Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke are accurate, especially Matthew, Mary gave birth to Jesus in very trying circumstances. “There was room no in the inn,” Luke tells us. Thus Mary birthed Jesus when she and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem in the only available space for the holy family, a stable. Because King Herod wanted no usurper to seize his throne from him, he ordered all the male babies born in and around Bethlehem to be killed. Therefore Joseph and Mary left everything they owned back in Nazareth and fled to Egypt as political refugees, says Matthew. Thus Jesus always had an affinity for refugees, because he was born one.

Presumably Jesus of Nazareth was a poor man. We cannot know that for certain, but we may properly deduce it from those among whom Jesus spent most of his time in his three-year ministry in the Galilee. Only one verse in one Gospel indicates what Jesus’ occupation was. Mark 6:3 has a crowd in Jesus’ home synagogue say this about Jesus: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” Whether carpenters were generally poor in the time of Jesus is debatable, but most Church traditions have always assumed Jesus was poor. Apparently Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth thought he was much too uppity as a poor man to be talking to them about anything.