[RCL] Judges 4:1-7; Psalm 123; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 25:14-30 In the fifth century BC, Xenophanes famously attacked the tendency of human beings to make gods in their own image. He writes, “Mortals fancy that gods are born, and wear clothes, and have voice and form like themselves. Yet if oxen and lions had hands…

What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? You would try something pretty risky, right? After all, if you knew you wouldn’t fail, why try something easy? What risky thing would you do? Would you write the Great American Novel or sail around the world? Would you tell someone, “I love you,” or…

Today we should remember something that all of us sometimes forget – that what God requires of us is not success, but faithfulness. The gospel we just heard is known as “The Parable of the Talents.” That word “talent” has a double meaning. Its original meaning in the Greek of the New Testament refers to…

Today is Remembrance Sunday – the Sunday closest to November eleventh – the day World War I ended nearly a hundred years ago at the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918. In the United Kingdom and in many Commonwealth countries, Remembrance Sunday is kept with great solemnity as an…

Jesus was good at providing difficult stories. No doubt they were as hard to hear standing in a group in Palestine as they are from our pews today. If we have sympathy for anyone in today’s gospel reading, it is probably for the poor person who was deprived of the gift once given, just because…

Among the biggest mysteries of daily life is the passage of time. What happens to it? Why are we so bound by it? Why does time pass so slowly when we are young and so rapidly when we are old? It seems that the opposite should be true. And above all—when loved ones leave us,…

[A special note to the reader or preacher: this sermon is built around a poem or kind of “rap” lyric that is designed for antiphonal call and response. The reader reads a line and the congregation repeats that line. Of course, the lyric can simply be read as a poem. But if it is done…

This parable as reported by Matthew has some powerful images that have influenced our thinking and our language profoundly. The word talanto (singular) and talanta (plural) in the koine Greek (the Greek of the New Testament writers), represented, according to scholars, fifteen years’ wages of one person’s labor. Somewhere else it says that it was worth $1,000. So, for his time,…