Divine Impossibilities

A Church article with View Comments posted 12 October 2009.
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Occasion: 19th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B (Proper 23)
Text: Mark 10.17-31

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This sermon was prepared for services at St. John’s Lutheran Church, Sterling, IL on October 7 and 11 and for services at three area nursing homes.

Today we have a Gospel story that we love to explain away. No wonder – it’s very challenging. It is, after all, impossible for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Here are some ways that people like us have tried to get around this parable:

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A Human Point of View

A Church article with View Comments posted 22 March 2009.
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Occasion: Lent 4, Year C
Text: 2 Corinthians 5.16-21

This sermon was prepared for an assignment for my Preaching class at Wartburg Theological Seminary and was delivered on 18 March 2009.

Several years ago, I had the privilege of participating in a service trip to Charleston, South Carolina. At the time, I was studying computer science in college, and when we visited a local Lutheran Social Services center, it turned out that they had computer problems galore. That was bad news for them but good news for me: who said that service trips can’t be fun? So I set to work on fixing up the computers at the agency. While I was busily fixing computers, I also got set on the task of getting all of the computers networked together. This was the age when wireless internet hardware was still pretty expensive, so we decided to use wires to hook everything up.

The only problem was, there were three buildings to connect together. I knew my way around a cable puller and drill well enough to run the cabling inside the buildings, but I had no idea how to get the cables to go underground between the buildings. That’s when I met a guy I’ll call Mike.

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