Faith in Progress

July 31, 2016 Hosea 11:1-11 My dad and stepmom are in the early stages of organizing in order to downsize from my childhood  home.   It’s a good decision for them and will make their lives simpler, but I’ve found myself getting a little sad thinking about that place no longer being part of my life.  No longer having a connection to the spot where so much of my formation happened and where so many memories were made.  My bedroom where I had sleepovers and listened to music and talked on the phone for hours.  The porch where I’d go to read with my mom under the fan in the summer.  The family room where I’d spread out with the funny pages and throw Christmas wrapping paper into the fire.  The kitchen where my sister and I did dishes together.  The dining room where we had so many family discussions and debates.  The basement where I learned how to do 14 double-unders in a row so I could get on the travel jumprope team.  Probably because of the rising up of those bitterswe

July 3, 2016 Luke 10:1-11, 16-20 If you know my great love for sermon props, you can thank me later for not bringing in snakes and scorpions this morning for us all to tread on.   I nstead, the prop today is either completely intangible, or maybe the most utterly tangible thing possible, depending on how we look at it and whether we are paying attention: the Kingdom of God. In our story from Luke today, Jesus sends out ambassadors far and wide.  We are told he appoints 70 of them to prepare the way, but that is really intended not so much as a descriptive number as it is a reminder of the 70 descendants of Noah’s sons listed in the book of Genesis.  In Genesis, we get an exhaustive and largely unpronounceable list of the descendants of Shem, Ham and Japheth, and are told that “from these, the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood.”   So the number 70 is Luke’s way of telling us that all of humanity is represented in Jesus’ choice of messengers, and