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Fellowship of Saints and Sinners

These days my denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), finds itself bracing for the possibility of further membership losses with more congregations jumping ship- this after a majority of presbyteries voted to remove the constitutional requirement that all ministers, elders and deacons  live “in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or…

I heard this song sung by Alanis Morisette the other day on the radio.  It’s actually a wonderful reflection on the doctrine that makes Christianity so distinctive- the notion that in Jesus Christ God became “one of us,” laying aside God’s claims to divinity in order to be with us.  We use a fancy name…

“‘Go!  I am sending you out like lambs among wolves.'” Luke 10:3   “These were his instructions:  ‘Take nothing for the journey except a staff- no bread, no bag, no money in your belts.  Wear sandals but not an extra tunic.  Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town.  And if…

“When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it.  Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’  When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order.  Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked…

“No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth onto an old coat.  The patch will simply pull away from the coat, and you’ll have a worse hole than you started with. People don’t put new wine into old wineskins, otherwise the skins will be split; then the wine will be lost, and the skins will…

“A Canaanite woman from [Tyre and Sidon] came out and shouted,  ‘Have pity on me, son of David!  My daughter is demon-possessed!  She’s  in a bad way!’  Jesus, however, said nothing at all to her.  His disciples came up.  ‘Please send her away!,’ they asked.  ‘She’s shouting after us.’  ‘I was only sent,’ replied Jesus,…

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth.  I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law- a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.'”…

Another disciple said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”  But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” Matthew 8:21,22 This is politically incorrect Jesus at, arguably, His best.  The one thing that every good Jew knew must take precedence even before daily morning prayers…

“If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.  It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.  And if your right eye causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.  It is…

“But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. ‘Get behind me, Satan!,’ he said.  ‘You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.” (Mark 8:33) The bumper sticker at the interminably long red light in front of me this morning, as I was driving the…
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