Colourful Dreamer

On April 3, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis to help galvanize striking sanitation workers. He was asked at the last minute to speak at Mason Temple church. As he spoke, he joined Moses on mountain top, and looked over to the promised land. He invited those who listened that night to not loose hope but to keep working for that land. We are invited to join that work too. So, what does that land look like for us? Our gospel today, Matthew 22:34-46, is another one of these familiar readings. Jesus was not the first rabbi to offer this “new” way of understanding Torah. But it is central to what Jesus taught. By bringing together two texts: Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, he makes them equally important, and the basis for reading the whole of Torah (Law). Many understood them as separate requirements. Loving the Lord their God was done through obedience to the Law. Loving our neighbour was then a second requirement – with the added questions around who my neighb...

The gospel reading this week is again well known, and it seems pretty straight forward. Some of the Jerusalem leadership – Pharisees and Herodian’s, are trying to trick Jesus with a question about Roman taxes. They are either hoping he will say yes, and lose the support of the masses who are impoverished by the Roman taxes; or no, which would be treasonous and lead to Rome dealing with him. Either way he will be silenced, and the Jesus problem resolved. Instead Jesus seems to play the Anglican card and takes the middle way – pay to Caesar what is Caesars, and to God what is God’s. It all seems straight forward. Except it isn’t.   For Romans’ Caesar was god (the coins carried an image of Caesar’s head with the title “son of God” making them idolatrous to Jews) and all things were deemed to belong to that god Caesar. For Jews the opposite was true – all things belong to God, nothing to Caesar. What was Jesus saying – well not the separation of church and state that we keep hearing....

You can listen to this sermon here   Gate Pa – Year A - 28 th Sunday of Ordinary Time - 2020 Readings: Psalm              Psalm 106:1-6,19-23                                                                First Reading:      Exodus 32:1-14                                             Second Reading: Phil 4:1-9               ...