July 2019

On Sunday I preached for our sister church, Christ Presbyterian Church, Fairfield again as part of their sermon series on the parables of Luke. I preached on Luke 13:18-21 where Jesus, challenged by the religious leaders, responded by pointing out that their expectation of what the Kingdom of God would be like was too small. The leaders were looking for a kingdom that was basically more of the same, but better for them: a kingdom that looked like their ethnic/religious/tradition/political tribe, but with power (rather than being subservient to Rome). Jesus’ Word continues to speak into our context to challenge our expectations that God’s Kingdom will fit our expectations of looking “like us, but but with more stuff” with the reality that His kingdom is quantitatively and qualitatively better, bigger, fuller, both here-and-now and in eternity.

In the churches of Puritan New England, “Sunday after Sunday, week after week, year after year, even generation after generation, the same underlying narrative provided the interpretative horizon for reading and hearing the Scriptures. The narrative of Scripture was found in the order of salvation. Salvation, however, was not understood as individual participation within the biblical narrative that told how the God of creation made a promise to Abraham that was fulfilled in Jesus in order to bring about a witness in the life of the church as a foretaste of the new creation. Instead, salvation was limited to a story of the individual moving from sin to salvation to service in preparation for eternity in heaven. The spiritual movement of an individual’s life became deeply encoded as the meaning of Scripture within the emerging European-based North American culture.”

— John W. Wright, Telling God’s Story, 55.