Sermon 9/6/15 - "Those Difficult Verses in Scripture"

Trinity Lutheran Church, Reliance, South Dakota

This past Sunday's sermon covered the verses found in the Gospel of Mark 7:24-30.

Mark 7:24-30

24 From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, 25 but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. 26 Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 27 He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” 28 But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 29 Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” 30 So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

These verses are some of those that make one want to say "really Jesus, seriously...".  They're difficult because of course Jesus sounds like... well like a jerk to be honest.  In my sermon, I encouraged everyone to not take the easy way out of this problem.  The easy way out of course is the all too common and wrong in my opinion, statement that "Jesus is just testing the woman", I'm afraid it's not that easy nor that painless.

We need to bear in mind that the Gospel of Mark is (of the four canonical gospels) the one where we find the most 'human' Jesus.  As I say in the sermon, here we find Jesus letting his 'human' show.  It may be a more difficult reality for us, but ultimately it also speaks more to us as human beings.  Here we find a Jesus that is also human, one that we can relate to far better than we are used to being able to.

Well, that's all I'm going to say about it... to find out more you'll just have to watch the video and hear the sermon.

As always please remember to "be a blessing to someone today!"

In His Love and unending Grace,
Roy

PS: This coming weekend we will be celebrating our 150th 'birthday' for the congregation here at Woodlawn Christian Church.  We're all very excited and looking forward to having an outdoor service and then a picnic afterward.  One of the other things that we're doing to celebrate is collecting items to bury in a 'time capsule' to be exhumed in the year 2040.  This evening while I was getting ready for my workout the doorbell rang and I found Lonnie Daisy at the front door.  He had just found out tonight from his younger brother that the Vacation Bible School class back in the summer of 1974 had buried a time capsule in the yard near the Chapel.  Lonnie had come down to look near where his brother told him it was buried and not too far away he discovered a rock just showing out of the ground near the base of an old tree that many of the old vbs classes had taken their class photos in front of.

Long story short, not many people knew of this 'time capsule' being buried and even fewer are still members.  We'll be investigating further and hopefully, we'll find this long forgotten 'time capsule' it will be great to see what a group of youngsters felt they wanted to leave for the future.  It's been buried in the Church lawn for 41 years and if Lonnie hadn't mentioned to his brother that we were getting ready to bury another time capsule, this one might have remained there for only God knows how many years.

I'll report back...

Woodlawn Christian Church, Lake City, Iowa
Pastor Roy Karlen's photograph