April 12, 2009    John 20:1-18

    The young hero in John Irving’s book A Prayer for Owen Meany recounts growing up with a diminutive and provocative boy named Owen Meany.  One incident which particularly stands out in his mind is sitting in church with Owen every Easter and hearing the story of the empty tomb as it is recorded in the Gospel of John.  He says, “I remember what Owen used to say about that passage; every Easter, he would lean against me in the pew and whisper into my ear.  ‘THIS IS THE PART THAT ALWAYS GIVES ME THE SHIVERS.’”

    I suspect that for many of us there is a degree of existential anxiety that comes with Easter - maybe to the point of even giving us the shivers.  Every year as we approach Easter the major news magazines seem to run articles, dealing with the subject of resurrection.  This year there was an article in Newsweek called “God’s Miraculous Makeover” which reflected this ongoing fascination and pointed to some of the current arguments, affirmations, and rebuttals that have recently emerged around the subject.  While 80% of Americans believe they will go to heaven when they die, the article says, there is no consensus about what that means.  And so Jewish scholars, Christian scholars, conservatives and progressives continue to wrestle with one of the great mysteries of the church. 

A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — April 5, 2009
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Isaiah 50:4-9;  Mark 11:1-11  —  Palm Sunday
[After the sermon, read Mark 15:1-39  —  Passion Sunday]

The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher,

to listen as those who are taught. — Isaiah 50:4

Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their
cloaks on it; and he sat on it. — Mark 11:7

It can be really hard to see and learn anything truly new.  The quote in our bulletin describes education as beginning “to learn how to learn.”  But once we know something, we may have to struggle to learn anything new that doesn’t fit into the pattern of what we already know.  What we already know creates expectations in us for how the world will be, expectations that all too readily become old, established truths we are reluctant to set aside.

A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — March 22, 2009
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Text:  Mark 3:7-35

Hearing [what was happening]… his family…

“He has gone out of his mind.” — Mark 3:21

[Jesus] said, “Here are my mothers and brothers!

sister and mother.” — Mark 3:34b-35

We’re only in Chapter 3 of Mark’s telling of “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” [Mk 1:1] and already we know Jesus as a man of nearly constant action.  Everything happens immediately in Mark, leading readers to wonder constantly, “What now?  What’s next?”  In Chapter 1, immediately after John baptizes Jesus, the Spirit drives him into the wilderness where he struggles with evil incarnate.  Upon leaving the desert, he takes his struggle with evil into the most populous town in the region, Capernaum, where he comes up against the symptoms of evil in the world—sickness and disease, epilepsy and blindness, spells and fits, as well as poverty and all kinds of oppression.  The picture of Jesus that Mark’s Gospel offers is of someone working against evil in all its forms.

 

A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — March 8, 2009
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts: Psalm 14;  Mark 2:13 – 3:6

They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse;
there is no one who does good, no, not one. — Psalm 14:3

[Jesus said,] “Those who are well have no need of a

not the righteous but sinners. — Mark 2:17

In today’s reading, the author of Mark makes it really clear that Jesus just infuriates his opponents, the Pharisees.  Four straight controversies, and each time Jesus has the last word.  In fact, by the fourth the Pharisees don’t get a word in edgewise and begin to conspire to kill Jesus.  No one likes to lose, after all—not all the time, and especially when you are the self-proclaimed and generally accepted experts.  It’s even worse when all those losses happen out in public in front of God and everybody, and Jesus makes them so downright embarrassing to the Pharisees.