“Increase our faith.”  I suppose that’s something all of us want, really.  In an increasingly confusing world where it feels like you can’t trust your neighbors, much less the government, to do what’s right, we as humans want something to hold on to, something stable, something that will never let you down.  In times of turmoil, people turn to their traditions, their own ability to reason, or to their conception of God in order to mark a path forward.  What motivates them, what gives them any sense of hope for the future, is their faith—faith in others, faith in themselves, or faith in the supernatural.  And frankly, that faith too often wears dangerously thin.

Some days Jesus’ parables just don’t make sense.  This is one of those days.

Those of you who’ve been around this summer know my penchant for exploring words.  I love to look at the breadth of their meanings and see how alternate translations can help us uproot our mental barriers, expanding our knowledge and practice of the Christian faith.  Word studies like that are an important tool for pastors and preachers.  You’ve also probably noticed my preference to allow difficult texts to remain difficult.

It’s easy to look at the leader of the synagogue as some sort of legalist or party pooper.  He’s a prime target to vilify, and historically, Christians have used passages like this to “other” Jewish people and to stereotype the Jewish religion as inferior to Christianity, of being “works-based” instead of “faith-based.”  But that’s a misinterpretation of what’s going on (in both religions, to be honest).

Isaiah has always been one of my favorite books of the Bible.  It has everything—mystery, intrigue, betrayal, supernatural events and foresight, condemnation, reconciliation, warfare, promises of deliverance—all packed into 66 chapters, most of which are some of the world’s greatest classical poetry.  Isaiah releases the romantic I keep buried deep inside me.  The writing sets my imagination free.

For the last few weeks we’ve had what appear to be pretty straightforward moral lessons from each of our Gospel readings: the Good Samaritan—be kind; Mary and Martha—don’t complain; the neighbor with the midnight guest—be persistent.  Along those lines, we could easily summarize the parable of the rich farmer as “don’t be greedy.”  But if those are all the things we really need to know from the Bible, I would have preferred it if God gave us a list of rules instead of all these stories—not to mention having to deal with the whole complexity of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit working through Scripture.  True, stories may help us remember lessons better than lists, but they take up a lot of time doing so and often leave way too much room for disagreement and misinterpretation.

I spent most of this week avoiding today’s Gospel passage.  After all, it’s familiar and looks pretty straightforward.  Amos and the Psalm, on the other hand, are much more intriguing, somehow speaking, despite their antiquity, directly to what is going on in our society right now.  It isn’t hard to recognize that what’s currently happening in our country is not in keeping with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and emphasizing practical living and social justice is one of the most important roles of a preacher in modern America, right?  That practically obligates me to speak on Amos!  Yet one of my undergrad film teacher’s mantras kept running through my head: “Trust your audience.”

Today, the story of the Good Samaritan has become something of a cliché.  Even in secular culture, we hear of Good Samaritan laws or of some Good Samaritan performing an unexpected act of kindness on the evening news.  With such a familiar story, it almost seems like a waste of time to talk about this parable.

Almost.

For Americans, “freedom” is a powerful word.  We talk about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom in a variety of other forms.  Citizens of the United States know their personal rights, and we tend to be pretty vocal whenever we feel like someone else is impinging on them.  But with Independence Day coming this Thursday, even as we celebrate our country’s founding, we note that “freedom isn’t free.”  It has a cost.  It’s founded on something deeper and more expensive than itself, things like hard work, generosity, and sacrifice.

Thomas and I have had a rough couple of weeks getting to know each other.  He’s both bold and enigmatic.  Nearly as famous as the more vocal apostles like Peter, Andrew, James, and John, he doesn’t actually speak up all that often.  But when he does, like in today’s Gospel reading, he really takes center stage.  Which becomes a bit of a problem for me, because I think Jesus is still supposed to be the main character in the story.  However, with such a famous supporting cast member, it’s hard to focus a sermon on anything other than “Doubting Thomas.”

422 years ago, nearly half a millennium, twenty native Japanese and six foreigners walked up a hill in Nagasaki, ascending toward a grove of unusual trees.  It was no surprise that the branches were bare—only the waxy tsubaki and the thorny yuzu kept their leaves at this time of year.  Nor, despite being arranged like a small orchard, did any bear a hint of withered fruit drying in the bright winter sun.  Yet even from a distance, the trees remained strange.  Unless their eyes deceived, the trunks appeared too straight, the branches too regular, too perfectly spaced for a natural tree.  Trees like these were not to be found in Japan.  No, they were foreign, imported from an older time, from another far away empire.

Advent is a strange time of year.  It doesn’t really fit into the secular calendar at all anymore.  The church calendar isn’t a whole lot better about it—after all, we just celebrated the reign of Jesus on Christ the King Sunday four weeks ago.  Now we’re preparing for another coming?  Even the lectionary readings seem to be of a split mind about the season.  Today we heard a whole lot of “Rejoice!  Rejoice!  Rejoice!” followed immediately with a pretty harsh “Repent!  Repent!  Repent!”  That conflict seems to sum up the dueling faces of the season.

Do you ever wonder how the world is going to end?  Do you ever wonder when?  Do you ever look at society or the government or the environment and wonder just how long it can all keep going?  Right now, California’s burning—in the off season.  Small town coastal Texas is still recovering from Harvey’s landfall last year—not to mention poor Puerto Rico and Hurricane Maria.  The local weather can’t make up its mind if it wants to be hot or cold or wet or dry.  The recent midterm elections were supposed to be a blue wave but instead…turned into a red tide?…or was that a rainbow ripple?

This weekend a group of people from my field placement, Good Shepherd on the Hill, are participating in a walk to support the Austin branch of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.  NAMI provides support and education both for people who have a mental illness and for those families trying to survive life with a mentally ill member.  People like me, and families like mine.  Because as much as I sometimes feel perfectly normal, as much as I want to wish it away, every day I swallow a small regimen of reminders that I’m not okay.  Innocuous-looking medicine—just 142 milligrams of dust—keeps my own brain from trying to kill me.

I am not often a socially perceptive person.  I can find the patterns and structures in writing and numbers pretty easily, but when it comes to interacting with another person, to understand how someone else is feeling (especially why they’re feeling a certain way), I feel completely lost.  For those times I get it right, it’s either blind luck or truly a work of God.  So when Shannon and I were starting to date, my friend’s wife, Lisa, must have been either highly amused or highly annoyed by my constant stream of questions. 

…how a person introduces him- or herself is extremely important, revealing the core essence of their character and being in their opening actions and statements.  And Jesus’ first words in the Gospel of Mark, and therefore his oldest recorded words in the Bible, are, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”  It’s a simple statement, one that’s easy for us to skip over.  But as the first revelation of Jesus’ message, I’d like to take some time reflecting on it this morning.

 “Where are you from?”

It’s a common question, one of the first we ask people when meeting them.  Maybe we’ve visited their area and can strike up a conversation about our own experiences and impressions.  Maybe it’s somewhere we’re hoping to go, and we want to get some inside information on what to do once we’re there.  Maybe it’s somewhere new to us, and we have a ton of questions: “What’s the weather like?  What kinds of food do you eat?  What do people do for fun?”  Learning about a place helps us understand just a little bit more about the person and how they relate to their home.  Plus, it’s pretty a safe question—everybody’s from somewhere.

After reading today’s Gospel passage, I had grand ideas for a sermon about selfishness and how God would like us to rejoice when good things happen to other people.  The parable of the generous gentleman seems like a perfect setting for that, and it’s a message I often need to hear.  At some point in the future, I probably will preach that sermon.  But this week, once I opened my Bible to start studying our passage, something else struck my eye and started digging in my brain: the verse immediately before today’s Gospel used almost the exact same phrasing as the one at the end of our reading.