Corinthians 1:3-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18 November 29, 2020



Record on phone!
We are starting with English 401 today. Who remembers doing this? (show slide of diagramming sentence) Lots of parts to a sentence! Here's an easy question from English 101, what two parts of speech are necessary for a complete sentence; what are they? Subject and verb. I have an example from the bible, the shortest verse in the bible. Anybody know it? “Jesus wept.” (John 11: 35) Subject—Jesus. Verb—wept. And what is a verb? An action word; past action, wept, present, weeps, future will weep. Or if you saw the Grinch on Friday night, stink, stank, stunk.
In today's psalm, I went through and listed a bunch of the verbs. Some are actions of God and some are actions for God's people. God's verbs: hear, leading, shine, stir up, come, restore, show, have fed, have given, have made, give. Our action words: shall be saved, never turn away, call (upon your Name), shall be saved.
Let's look first at what God has done; past tense. Fed, given, and made. They sound good, but they are actions God has taken in opposition to the sins of the people. They were fed... with tears, they were given...bowls of tears, God made...neighbors and enemies laugh with scorn. God brought judgment on the people.
But let's look forward. Today is the first Sunday of Advent. It is a time for looking ahead. So what kind of future verbs does the Psalmist use? ​

The Psalm for today, Psalm 100, reads “Make a joyful noise to the
LORD, all the earth!” Most often, we think of joyful noise as music,
singing - singing praises to the Lord.
Although Psalm 98 describes the sea roaring, the rivers clapping their
hands & the hills breaking forth in song. The Psalms together create a
vision of all of creation - people & land, so to speak - joining together in
noisy worship of God.
The word “noisy” can throw us - especially those of us who enjoy
quieter music or are seeking calm & quiet in our worship. Some of us
have a lot of noise in our day-to-day world. Some of us have too much
silence in our lives, especially in our Covid separations.

Amos 5: 18-24; Matthew 25: 1-13
​A common theme in the various commentaries I looked at studying the parable or story in Matthew all suggested that this is not a fun passage to preach. It appears to be a rather harsh judgment of the young women who failed to bring extra oil for their lamps. Not to take away from the clear focus of the call to be prepared, I'm going to suggest there is room for more judgments of the characters in the story.
Ten young women were waiting for the bridegroom. They all fell asleep. They all started the evening with sufficient oil in their lamps. The “wise” attendants could've shared some of the extra oil they brought. And where would they go at midnight to buy more oil? And what about the groom; why was he delayed and if he came that late, couldn't he have waited for all the bridesmaids to join the banquet? Lots of questions that leave us wondering about the interpretation of this passage.