Tag: Christian symbols
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Studying Matthew 26 17-30
What do we think of when we think of “the Last Supper”? Whatever it is, it is probably less than Matthew packed into his account of the event. The text we are studying for Sunday, April 10 – Matthew 26:17-30 – is packed with significant symbols and ambiguities and, we will probably find, personal meaning.…
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Ear Worms
People need music. It’s built in to us. We can stop gathering for choir practice, we can make a rule that we will only sing in the sanctuary softly behind masks so that we don’t spew potentially fatal aerosols all over the air commons, we can make a thing out of those craftily edited Zoom…
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Fourth Sunday of Easter
Today’s lectionary readings pick up on God as a shepherd, or Christ the good shepherd. The logic of the metaphor positions Christians or the faithful as sheep. In our culture, “sheep” often symbolize mindless followers – an unflattering trait. “Do you really want to be a sheep?” That presupposes that we get to pick. Aside…
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Christmas Eve – Lessons and Carols
Even if the distinctly non-liturgical church of my childhood had had anything like “Lessons and Carols,” which it didn’t, our family always had a party at our house on Christmas Eve, so we wouldn’t have been there.[*] I had to grow up and move here and become a Presbyterian to learn that there is something…
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Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
It turned out to be a big theology day. In not-that-early Sunday school, as we were thinking about 1 Peter 1:13-25, we got all wrapped up in some of the big stories of the Bible, thanks to some concerns about blood and sacrifice (which seems coercive) vs. grace (which seems like a gift): the story…
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Seventh Sunday in Easter
We talked about Passover, and its connections to the communion and covenant language in Mark, in class this morning. It comes as news to people, even when we’ve been around the Bible for a long time, which makes sense, because we don’t always get these connections discussed for us. In Exodus (chapter 12), at the…
Matters of Interpretation 