August 24, 2008    Matthew 16:13-20

    My husband and I have a fondness for church buildings, and when we travel, we always seem drawn to them.   In Williamsburg, Virginia, we attended a concert at the historic Bruton Parish Church.  When we visit my daughter in California, we always go to one of the California missions, and just this past June were at the mission of San Luis Rey in Oceanside.  When we were in Wisconsin earlier this month, we went to the tiny Church of the Atonement in Fish Creek - a church that holds maybe 50 people and has the musty smell of many years by the waters of Green Bay.   These churches I have mentioned are all on the register of historic places, but the historic register aside . . . the church is not a museum.

    Perhaps nowhere in the scriptures are we reminded of this truth more profoundly than in the gospel reading we have just heard.  Today we find Jesus and his disciples at Caesarea Philippi, a town twenty miles north of the Sea of Galilee on the luxuriant slopes of Mt. Hermon and overlooking the fertile north end of the Jordan River valley.  It is to this place that Jesus now goes; it is to this place that Jesus’s disciples follow him; it is here that we begin to learn what the church of Jesus Christ really is.

August 17, 2008    Matthew 15:21-28

    The dictionary says that an angel is either a spiritual being that is superior to human beings both in power and intelligence . . . or . . . some kind of spiritual guardian . . . or . . . some sort of a messenger . . . or . . .  perhaps a person believed to resemble an angel.   Whatever definition you prefer, there is no question that our society is quite smitten with these creatures.  There are not only Christmas ornaments, figurines, books, and a host of other items devoted to them, but even entire stores!  

    For the most part we also have a common understanding about what an angel is.  They are imagined to be gentle, kind spirits that hover around us and our homes, saving us from disaster and dispensing wisdom in our thoughts and dreams.   Remember that old song about true love that says, “You and I have a guardian angel with nothing else to do but to give to you and to give to me, love forever true”?  Given such sentiment about angels, do I dare suggest that a loud, intrusive, demanding woman from Canaan could be an angel for Jesus?   After all, angels in the Bible seldom, if ever, are cute little cherubs.  It may not just be a figure of speech that angels often introduce themselves with the greeting, “Fear not!”  Biblical angels are never china dolls but are startling messengers who do things like announce to a frightened teenaged named Mary that she will have a child, or with arresting power erupt the night sky above innocent shepherds who are just minding their own business.   Biblical angels disrupt the old age of Abraham and Sarah, and they issue warnings to people like Lot.  And so I don’t think it is too far off the mark to wonder if a pushy and desperate Gentile mother might indeed be an angel in disguise.