March 26, 2023 Lent 5 Jesus Greater than Abraham
Lent 5 March 29, 2020 The Sunday of Jesus Greater than Death
Lent 5 Judica
John 8:42-59 & Hebrews 9:11-15
March 29, 2020
“The Pure Blood of Christ”
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
When I was growing up on the dairy farm, my dad had bought a couple dogs that were purebred Border Collies. Border collies were supposed to be especially good at herding dairy cows. We had a couple large pastures and the idea was that the dogs would be helpful in bringing in cows in the dark early morning hours. It didn’t ever really pan out that way. The dogs basically did what they wanted. Yet we kids didn’t mind. Because when you have two purebred dogs, one male and one female, you get puppies. And we ended up with a lot of those. And we loved them all. (We loved all the many dogs we also rescued from the animal shelter as well.)
There’s an interesting argument in the Gospel reading today between Jesus and the Jews about who’s purebred. Right before our reading starts the Jews tell Jesus, “We’re purebred sons of Abraham.” Check out our pedigree! But Jesus insinuates that their father isn’t Abraham like they think he is but the devil! To this the Jews exclaim, “We weren’t born of sexual immorality.” So they turn it around on Jesus and say, “You’re the one who isn’t purebred. You were born in sexual immorality.” Because, of course, remember that Mary wasn’t yet married to Joseph when she conceived her son
…Lent 5 April 7, 2019 The Sunday of Jesus Greater than Abraham
Lent 5
John 8:42-59
April 7, 2019
“From Above or From Below? How do you Judge?”
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Latin name for this Sunday is Judica. The word means “judge”. So we literally have a Sunday today called “Judge Sunday”. Do you think this will go over well in the world today—Judge Sunday? Yikes. What is this, a Sunday where all you Christians are trained in being judgmental? Is this a Sunday where you learn how to judge others? Where you learn how to be a bunch of hypocrites who go around judging everyone but yourselves?
It comes from the first word of the Introit. Now our translation of the Introit today, which is from Psalm 43, says “vindicate” instead of “judge”. But the old King James has “judge”. And who is the Introit asking God to judge? “Judge me, O God.” Aha. There it is. Judge me, O God. This will be where we end up eventually again—judge me, O God. But first we’ve got to do some work on this word judge in the Scriptures.
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