Sermon Illustrations for Proper 6 | OT 11, Cycle B (2018)
Illustration
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 and Psalm 20
Stephen Hawking was one of the best-known physicist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Hawking was also an outspoken atheist. According to Hawking, since God could not be scientifically proven or studied, there could be no God. Hawking wrote, “Since the events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory and say that time began at the Big Bang.” The Big Bang occurred billions of years ago. What happened before that explosion didn’t matter to Hawking because it was outside the universe we live in, and therefore irrelevant to it.
Application: Samuel was able to select David for the Lord instructed him “they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” The Psalmist confesses that God will be able to complete his plans for creation. The problem with atheists, as seen in the teachings of Stephen Hawking, is that they will not believe what they cannot see.
Ron L.
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 and Psalm 20
Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. (1 Samuel 15:35).
The scripture tells us that Samuel did not see Saul again until the day he died. But Samuel was dead when he evidently met up with Saul one final time -- in 1 Samuel 28:6ff. The scene is illustrated in one of the strangest paintings of a biblical scene that you don’t hear much about: “The Shade of Samuel Invoked by Saul,” (about 1650-1656 by Bernard Cavalino). You don’t remember? King Saul asked the Witch of Endor to summon the prophet Samuel back from the dead. Samuel wasn’t very happy about it. He’s this grey spectral figure glaring at a kneeling king giving him bad news he doesn’t want to hear. Next time don’t ask.
Frank R.
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 and Psalm 20
One morning I was attempting to make freshly squeezed orange juice. This is not something I do often, after all, the carton orange juice is fine for me, but I had people visiting and they hoped for freshly squeezed juice. So, I selected oranges from the refrigerator. I’m not always a discriminating shopper, so four of the five I chose appeared to be less than perfect. A couple had spots on the outside and one of them looked as if it had been squashed by a truck. I took them anyway. Only one of the oranges looked really nice. I began the process of squeezing the oranges. Though the first two were kind of banged up on the outside, they were great on the inside. I was pleasantly surprised. Then I picked up the “perfect” one, but when I cut it to squeeze it, I found that it had lots of rotten spots on the inside. I had to throw it away.
That’s just a simple story of making orange juice, but it came back to me as I read though this passage again. Samuel was reminded that “the Lord does not see as mortals see.” People tend to look on the outward appearance. God looks at the heart. I think, regarding oranges, the outside can be deceiving. How much truer is it for people?
Bill T.
2 Corinthians 5:6-10 (11-13), 14-17
Commenting on Paul’s claim that all will be judged by Christ (v.10), the great 20th-century martyr for the faith Dietrich Bonhoeffer offered a Word of comfort and grace:
2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17
Verse 16 in this passage from the NRSV reads: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.”
The verse causes me to pause. How many of us look at others from a purely human point of view? I know that I usually do? No matter how frequently I remind myself that Christ, a divine holiness, is in every person, I still respond to individuals as solely human. Do you? How different the world might be if we approached every human being as we would approach Jesus if he were in front of us. How might we respond to the driver that cuts us off in traffic? How would we react to those who vehemently disagree with us? Would we view those with different ideologies or faiths differently? What about immigrants, the poor, the homeless? Would we respond differently if we saw others as the presence of Jesus in the world? This week, maybe this month or this year, I am going to endeavor to remember that everyone, every -- one -- is my sister or brother and carries the divine spark of Christ within them. Maybe others will do me the same courtesy.
Bonnie B.
2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17
When am I in the body? Watching TV? Eating a meal? Sleeping? Playing golf? etc. When I am not thinking of our Lord and his church, when I am doing all these other things that I enjoy more than serving our Lord, then am I in the body?
I am with the Lord when I am reading his word, when I am in prayer or in church, listening to most sermons. Does that mean that when you go home you are in the body again? One denomination tells us to roll down our shades on Sunday so we don’t sit looking out a window which could distract us from thinking about our Lord. So we should keep them down.
It takes faith to go to the Lord and ignore the body. The bodily temptations are always with us. When I finished some of my sermon notes I sometimes paused to play a computer game, before I went to my comfortable chair in the living room. I can sit there and pray or read my Bible or other religious material, but chances are I will turn to a tempting magazine or a mystery novel. When I go to bed I usually recite some scripture that I have memorized. Sometimes I even go to sleep before I finish.
I sense that this passage, when it mentions body, it may be thinking of bodily temptations such as sex, pride, envy over someone else’s possessions or their fame or glory that we desire.
It may be helpful for us to make a couple lists of bodily desires compared to acts of faith. We may learn something about ourselves if we examine those two lists to find out which is the longest.
No we should not be afraid of the Lord. We should only fear hurting him. Children shouldn’t be afraid of their parents when they tell them to eat their veggies. Fear should be in hurting their feelings. We don’t have to love our veggies -- only our parents.
Our parents love should control us as Christ’s love compels us to obey him.
Our church helps us in both respects.
We are not out of our minds because of what our faith leads us to do. It may seem that way to non-believers, but hopefully they will change and join us crazies.
Non-believers must meet the Lord first and love him and then they will want to serve the one they love.
Bob O.
Mark 4:26-34
Many of us grew up with Aesop’s fables. Whether in a children’s book or a school book, we encountered samples of the fables in which animals stood in for humans, short stories which had a sharp, wry, ironic, or funny point. Then, at the end of the fable, there was the moral, a single line that encapsulated the thing just in case we didn’t get it.
The thing is, we usually got it without the moral. The stories speak for themselves. And in the oldest collections of fables that have come down to us from the ancient world, there are no morals. Just the fables.
The parables of Jesus are not technically fables, but they are stories about everyday things that delight us and make a point. Mark tells us “With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it…(4:33-34).” Jesus did not explain the meaning of the parables to his hearers, but honestly, don’t you suppose that most of them “got it” when they heard these parables? Why was it, I wonder, that the disciples need them explained?
Frank R.
Mark 4:26-34
“Big things have small beginnings.” Depending on how old you are, this is either a famous line spoken by T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia or by the android David in Prometheus. A 19-year-old named Mark Zuckerberg launched a social network site when he was a Harvard sophomore on February 4, 2004. He called it “thefacebook.com," and the site was an instant hit. Now, fourteen years later, the site has become one of the biggest web sites in the world, where more than 1.3 billion people log on daily. While there has been some controversy regarding whether Zuckerberg had the original idea, or he’d taken it from others, one thing is unmistakable: Facebook is huge.
I was thinking about how Facebook got to where it is today as I read this parable of Jesus. The mustard seed is one of the smallest seeds, the smallest seed that a first-century Palestinian farmer would plant. The black mustard seed in Israel, the one of which Jesus spoke, typically grew to heights of 3.7 meters, or 12 feet -- plenty large enough to hold a bird nest. Just as the mustard seed would start small and grow large, Jesus notes the kingdom of God will do the same.
Bill T.
Mark 4:26-34
N.T. Wright is an established and highly regarded New Testament scholar. Though he writes on various topics, his expertise is in interpreting the life and theology of the Apostle Paul. In March 2018 he agreed to be interviewed by Emily Miller, who writes for Christian Headlines, on his book Paul: A Biography. According to Wright, Paul saw the death and resurrection of Jesus as an “extraordinary” event for with it “the world turned a great corner.” That turning of the great corner was the restoration of the world back to the original state of creation. Write said, “For Paul, the great thing there is we are people of a new creation. The creation has been renewed. The original purpose of Genesis 1 and 2 is now re-established. Jesus says exactly the same thing in Mark 10 and elsewhere -- in fact, all through: This is what the kingdom of God is all about -- getting the creation project back on track. When you start to think morally from that point of view, all sorts of things look different.”
Application: In Mark we learn that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. It is the smallest of all seeds but soon bursts into the greatest of all shrubs. The kingdom of God does restore us to the original creative event.
Ron L.
Stephen Hawking was one of the best-known physicist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Hawking was also an outspoken atheist. According to Hawking, since God could not be scientifically proven or studied, there could be no God. Hawking wrote, “Since the events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory and say that time began at the Big Bang.” The Big Bang occurred billions of years ago. What happened before that explosion didn’t matter to Hawking because it was outside the universe we live in, and therefore irrelevant to it.
Application: Samuel was able to select David for the Lord instructed him “they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” The Psalmist confesses that God will be able to complete his plans for creation. The problem with atheists, as seen in the teachings of Stephen Hawking, is that they will not believe what they cannot see.
Ron L.
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 and Psalm 20
Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. (1 Samuel 15:35).
The scripture tells us that Samuel did not see Saul again until the day he died. But Samuel was dead when he evidently met up with Saul one final time -- in 1 Samuel 28:6ff. The scene is illustrated in one of the strangest paintings of a biblical scene that you don’t hear much about: “The Shade of Samuel Invoked by Saul,” (about 1650-1656 by Bernard Cavalino). You don’t remember? King Saul asked the Witch of Endor to summon the prophet Samuel back from the dead. Samuel wasn’t very happy about it. He’s this grey spectral figure glaring at a kneeling king giving him bad news he doesn’t want to hear. Next time don’t ask.
Frank R.
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 and Psalm 20
One morning I was attempting to make freshly squeezed orange juice. This is not something I do often, after all, the carton orange juice is fine for me, but I had people visiting and they hoped for freshly squeezed juice. So, I selected oranges from the refrigerator. I’m not always a discriminating shopper, so four of the five I chose appeared to be less than perfect. A couple had spots on the outside and one of them looked as if it had been squashed by a truck. I took them anyway. Only one of the oranges looked really nice. I began the process of squeezing the oranges. Though the first two were kind of banged up on the outside, they were great on the inside. I was pleasantly surprised. Then I picked up the “perfect” one, but when I cut it to squeeze it, I found that it had lots of rotten spots on the inside. I had to throw it away.
That’s just a simple story of making orange juice, but it came back to me as I read though this passage again. Samuel was reminded that “the Lord does not see as mortals see.” People tend to look on the outward appearance. God looks at the heart. I think, regarding oranges, the outside can be deceiving. How much truer is it for people?
Bill T.
2 Corinthians 5:6-10 (11-13), 14-17
Commenting on Paul’s claim that all will be judged by Christ (v.10), the great 20th-century martyr for the faith Dietrich Bonhoeffer offered a Word of comfort and grace:
God does not want to frighten people; He sends us the Word about judgment so that we may all the more passionately, all the more eagerly, seize the promise of grace, so that we recognize that we do not stand before God in our own strength, lest we should perish before him; that in spite of everything He does not desire our death, but rather our life. (A Testament to Freedom, p.230)We are new, as the Apostle claims (v.17), in the sense that sin has no ultimate power. It belongs only to the past, as famed modern theologian Karl Barth once claimed:
Because Jesus Christ is the power of this decisive happening of the forgiveness of sins, the sin forgiven is now the old thing -- the essence of all that is old, something which is past and done with, which is only the past, which is not the present and has no future. (Church Dogmatics, Vol.IV/1, p.256)Mark E.
2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17
Verse 16 in this passage from the NRSV reads: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.”
The verse causes me to pause. How many of us look at others from a purely human point of view? I know that I usually do? No matter how frequently I remind myself that Christ, a divine holiness, is in every person, I still respond to individuals as solely human. Do you? How different the world might be if we approached every human being as we would approach Jesus if he were in front of us. How might we respond to the driver that cuts us off in traffic? How would we react to those who vehemently disagree with us? Would we view those with different ideologies or faiths differently? What about immigrants, the poor, the homeless? Would we respond differently if we saw others as the presence of Jesus in the world? This week, maybe this month or this year, I am going to endeavor to remember that everyone, every -- one -- is my sister or brother and carries the divine spark of Christ within them. Maybe others will do me the same courtesy.
Bonnie B.
2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17
When am I in the body? Watching TV? Eating a meal? Sleeping? Playing golf? etc. When I am not thinking of our Lord and his church, when I am doing all these other things that I enjoy more than serving our Lord, then am I in the body?
I am with the Lord when I am reading his word, when I am in prayer or in church, listening to most sermons. Does that mean that when you go home you are in the body again? One denomination tells us to roll down our shades on Sunday so we don’t sit looking out a window which could distract us from thinking about our Lord. So we should keep them down.
It takes faith to go to the Lord and ignore the body. The bodily temptations are always with us. When I finished some of my sermon notes I sometimes paused to play a computer game, before I went to my comfortable chair in the living room. I can sit there and pray or read my Bible or other religious material, but chances are I will turn to a tempting magazine or a mystery novel. When I go to bed I usually recite some scripture that I have memorized. Sometimes I even go to sleep before I finish.
I sense that this passage, when it mentions body, it may be thinking of bodily temptations such as sex, pride, envy over someone else’s possessions or their fame or glory that we desire.
It may be helpful for us to make a couple lists of bodily desires compared to acts of faith. We may learn something about ourselves if we examine those two lists to find out which is the longest.
No we should not be afraid of the Lord. We should only fear hurting him. Children shouldn’t be afraid of their parents when they tell them to eat their veggies. Fear should be in hurting their feelings. We don’t have to love our veggies -- only our parents.
Our parents love should control us as Christ’s love compels us to obey him.
Our church helps us in both respects.
We are not out of our minds because of what our faith leads us to do. It may seem that way to non-believers, but hopefully they will change and join us crazies.
Non-believers must meet the Lord first and love him and then they will want to serve the one they love.
Bob O.
Mark 4:26-34
Many of us grew up with Aesop’s fables. Whether in a children’s book or a school book, we encountered samples of the fables in which animals stood in for humans, short stories which had a sharp, wry, ironic, or funny point. Then, at the end of the fable, there was the moral, a single line that encapsulated the thing just in case we didn’t get it.
The thing is, we usually got it without the moral. The stories speak for themselves. And in the oldest collections of fables that have come down to us from the ancient world, there are no morals. Just the fables.
The parables of Jesus are not technically fables, but they are stories about everyday things that delight us and make a point. Mark tells us “With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it…(4:33-34).” Jesus did not explain the meaning of the parables to his hearers, but honestly, don’t you suppose that most of them “got it” when they heard these parables? Why was it, I wonder, that the disciples need them explained?
Frank R.
Mark 4:26-34
“Big things have small beginnings.” Depending on how old you are, this is either a famous line spoken by T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia or by the android David in Prometheus. A 19-year-old named Mark Zuckerberg launched a social network site when he was a Harvard sophomore on February 4, 2004. He called it “thefacebook.com," and the site was an instant hit. Now, fourteen years later, the site has become one of the biggest web sites in the world, where more than 1.3 billion people log on daily. While there has been some controversy regarding whether Zuckerberg had the original idea, or he’d taken it from others, one thing is unmistakable: Facebook is huge.
I was thinking about how Facebook got to where it is today as I read this parable of Jesus. The mustard seed is one of the smallest seeds, the smallest seed that a first-century Palestinian farmer would plant. The black mustard seed in Israel, the one of which Jesus spoke, typically grew to heights of 3.7 meters, or 12 feet -- plenty large enough to hold a bird nest. Just as the mustard seed would start small and grow large, Jesus notes the kingdom of God will do the same.
Bill T.
Mark 4:26-34
N.T. Wright is an established and highly regarded New Testament scholar. Though he writes on various topics, his expertise is in interpreting the life and theology of the Apostle Paul. In March 2018 he agreed to be interviewed by Emily Miller, who writes for Christian Headlines, on his book Paul: A Biography. According to Wright, Paul saw the death and resurrection of Jesus as an “extraordinary” event for with it “the world turned a great corner.” That turning of the great corner was the restoration of the world back to the original state of creation. Write said, “For Paul, the great thing there is we are people of a new creation. The creation has been renewed. The original purpose of Genesis 1 and 2 is now re-established. Jesus says exactly the same thing in Mark 10 and elsewhere -- in fact, all through: This is what the kingdom of God is all about -- getting the creation project back on track. When you start to think morally from that point of view, all sorts of things look different.”
Application: In Mark we learn that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. It is the smallest of all seeds but soon bursts into the greatest of all shrubs. The kingdom of God does restore us to the original creative event.
Ron L.
