Will Vaus

Photo by  Amanda Dalbjörn  on  Unsplash One day when I was young, my mother asked me a very interesting question… If you had to lose either your sight or your hearing, and you had a choice about which to lose and which to keep, which would you choose? As a sighted, hearing person, I cannot fully imagine what it would be like to lose either my sight or my hearing. And of course, this is something we seldom, if ever, have a choice about. I don’t remember how I answered that question on the day my mother asked me, but I do know what my choice would be now. I would choose to give up my hearing before I would give up my vision. Human vision is an amazing gift, as is human hearing. But in both cases, what we see and what we hear is in many ways determined by what we have in our hearts. That is in evidence in our lectionary reading for today from Luke 14:1-14. Listen for God’s word to you… On one occasion when Jesus   was going to the house of...

As some of you know, our family used to live in the South. Some people think I have a Southern accent. I tell them that’s just because practically everything in the USA is south of Vermont. They have a different way of life down South, as you may have encountered at one time or another, maybe while you were driving through on your way to Florida. Did you know that true Southerners say that Florida is as far north as you can go in the United States? Well, one time when we were living in South Carolina I went to our local Piggly Wiggly on a Sunday. That’s a grocery store just in case you didn’t know.  I tried to buy a bottle of wine only to find out when I got to the checkout counter that I could not make the purchase because it was Sunday. Piggly Wiggly was open on Sunday. They had wine on their shelves. But I could not purchase it because it was Sunday. That’s called a Blue Law. And all the time we lived in the South, I never figured out why Blue Laws were blue...

The passage we are going to read today from Luke 12:49-56 is, according to New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, “high on the list of Things We Would Rather Jesus Hadn’t Said. It’s not gentle, it’s not meek and mild; it’s not even nice. Parents and children at loggerheads, in-laws getting across one another—what can Jesus have had in mind?” Well, the only way to find out is to read the passage and explore it a bit. Listen for God’s word to you from Luke 12:49-56… “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son     and son against father, mother against daughter     and d...