St George's Sermon Blog

Judges 4:1-9,14-20; 5:2-3, 6-9, 12-13, 24-27, 31 After a couple of weeks off, the women are back in our lessons and we get some truly great ones over the next couple of weeks.  And I bet this one we read today was pretty unfamiliar.  How many of you have ever even heard this story?  Especially about Jael.  It appears absolutely nowhere in the regular lectionary.  I bet some of you were vaguely aware of Deborah.  Deborah is a pretty common name so there is probably at least some awareness that it is biblical.  Some may even know that she was a judge engaged in battle.  She at least made it into my kids’ children’s story bible.  And I am pretty sure I taught her story at VBS at some point.  But Jael’s story is almost never told.  Maybe it’s the intimate nature of her activities, or the obvious violence (though rarely a problem in Biblical stories featuring men), but her story just doesn’t make the rounds much.  It rarely gets tol...

Mark 10:17-31 So we are taking a bit of a break from our Season of Women this week.   There’s no women in our lectionary this week and a whole lot of us are going to be at Crossroads this week so we are are taking a couple of weeks off.   But don’t worry, the women will be back at the end of the month and there are some bangers coming.   But alas, I apparently didn’t plan this well because we return to Mark this week with a humdinger of a text (Maybe I should have just found a woman to talk about).   But that’s okay, we can work with this, because you know what, I like this passage.   Quite a lot actually.   And it contains a lot more good news that one might think at first glance. Our story opens with a man who approaches Jesus on the road asking for guidance.   He is a religious man and he wants to know what he must do to inherit eternal life.   And so after questioning him and discovering that he is already a devout man who knows and keeps ...

  Genesis 2:4b-9, 18-24 Season of Women Alright everybody, buckle up because today in our season of women we are going to go all the way back to the beginning.   To the very first woman.   To Eve and to the story of the beginning of humanity that we see in Genesis.   And I am going to invite you to go ahead and get out your bulletins and flip them over to the 1 st Lesson and follow along if you want because we are going to look really closely at this text today.   And I am willing to be bet that you are going to discover a bunch of things that you have never seen before.   But first before we begin, I need to give a big shout out to the Rev Dr Wil Gafney, the incomparable black female scholar, who did a lot of the Hebrew work I am going to share with you today because my Hebrew was never all that great but she has shown me so many amazing things about the Old Testament.   So here we go. Now I bet unlike some other stuff we have read in this se...