A Famine Not of Bread

Click here to listen to this sermon. [Jesus said]: “But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just” (Luke 14:13-14). Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ! On first reading, this text appears to be an assortment of different, unconnected moments in the ministry of Jesus. We have a healing (vv. 1-6), a parable (vv. 7-11), and then a teaching about concern for the poor (vv. 12-14). When you look at the text more closely, however, you see that this all happens on one occasion. The text begins with a reference to a meal on the Sabbath at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees in verse 1, and it is not until verse 25 that we leave this occasion. Recognizing this unity encourages us to look for the connection among these seemingly unrelated events. Like a friend telling us what happened last night at dinner, Luke re...

Click here to listen to this sermon. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ! Jim and Rebecca: When I asked you what readings you would like to have for today, you indicated that you wanted something different. Not the usual 1 Corinthians 13, “Love is…” or the Genesis account of marriage, or Matthew 19, where Jesus talks about marriage. By now, you probably noticed we still had those readings. They are too important to ignore. But I think you’ll find I’ve kept my promise to bring in something different with our text from Proverbs 30:18-19: “Three things are too wonderful for me; four I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a serpent on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a virgin.” How is that for different? I would guess that most everyone here this afternoon  had two immediate reactions to the passage I just read: First, what a strange text for a wedding address! Second, what a stran...