This Week at UPC

Matthew 17:1-9 And so the Season after the Epiphany closes: on a holy mountain where God may be found. It is a place of sacred mystery, where shining and shadow convey a holy presence. It is a place of community across time, where God’s people of past and present meet. It is a place of silence and witness, where visions are kept quiet and God says of Jesus, “Listen to him.” From here, we go forward into Lent: the 40 days and 6 Sundays that take us through Jesus’ progress toward Jerusalem and the conflict with the government of Palestine that would lead to his crucifixion. We will have special worship stations in the sanctuary, for reflection and prayer; a Tuesday morning prayer group; a book study on “Gifts of the Dark Wood,” a book that reflects on the hard places and what we find there; and in worship, we will tell the stories of Jesus and his encounters with people who were on the margins, that he brought into the center.  So this week, we pause to reflect on the insight tha...

Matthew 5: 38–48 Jesus says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Some might take Jesus’ words to (wrongly) mean that perfection is a matter of gritting your moral teeth and “loving” a person who let you down or injured you so that God can heap blessings on your head for going so against your natural impulse to feel anger. However, in New Testament Greek, the term “perfect” here is teleios, meaning “unblemished, complete, finished, full-grown.” But how can we hear Jesus’ encouragement as anything but an insistence on the impossible? The word perfection has many rich connotations throughout the Bible. Though the New Testament was written in Greek, Jesus used Aramaic, where the word for perfect (gmar) is closer to “ripe,” “fully flavored,” or “fully flowered.” Perfection involves a fulfillment of the potential a thing has within itself all along from the seed state. In Latin, the word means “completely formed or performed,” and the verb “to perfect” means “to ...

Matthew 5: 21-37 This portion of the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s gospel contains the first four of what are called “the six antitheses.” In each antithesis Jesus will posit what has been said (from the law), and then answer with a response that begins, “but I say to you ….” In these antitheses, Jesus is quite willing to take the Scriptures and to re-form them—sometimes expanding the meaning, sometimes re-focusing the point, and in the last two cases (in next week’s reading, verses 38-48) simply overturning them. What I find fascinating is that Matthew, in writing this gospel for his audience, is quite willing to show Jesus taking Scriptures and re-forming them. In our age, many Christians have been trained to think that “biblical authority” means saying, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” or “where the Bible speaks, we speak; where the Bible is silent, we are silent.” In this text, Jesus does not share that view of biblical authority. Jesus’ willingness to stat...

Letting the Light Through Jesus tells us that we are salt and light as we seek to live as God’s people in the world. With the Spirit’s help, we offer our gifts and talents to extend the reach of God’s realm. With Isaiah and the psalmist, we learn what it means to practice righteousness and restore beauty in community as we live out the heart of our faith. Matthew 5:13–20 This week, we continue to read from the collection of Jesus’ teachings known as the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus uses powerful images of salt and light as he describes what it means to live according to the ways of God’s realm. The same images of salt and light are used in the Hebrew Scriptures to describe covenant and law. David and his descendants are called a lamp before God. Jesus continues and expands the message found in the scriptures. Jesus tells his followers that at this very moment they are salt – cleansing, preserving, adding flavour. At this moment they are light – revealing what is hidden, allowing ...