Covenant Church

In this second sermon on Jonah 1, Zack explains how Jonah shows us much, much more than than God loves foreigners; it shows us that God loves those who seem outside the story, those whom we don't think God can, does, or should love.

After setting the historical scene (Ninevah, Tarshish, etc.) Zack explains how Jonah 1 teaches us that God loves the ninety-nine as well as the one -- and, through Jonah, shows us the lengths to which He will go to reach the one.

How, exactly, does the Gospel of Mark end (at verse 8 or at verse 20)? What is the significance of the fact that we can ask this question? If this gospel ends at v. 8, how do we understand an ending of seeming failure? This sermon concludes our 2+ year journey through the Gospel of Mark.

The stones would cry out: Zack meditates on this detail from Luke's telling of Palm Sunday to reflect on the cosmic scope of that day.

Zack traces a trajectory in the Bible's teachings about women -- as an example of how to read the Bible dynamically and faithfully.

Zack tells the story of St. Patrick -- and how St. Patrick's life mission to the Irish exemplifies Jesus' teaching to love your enemies. Like Jesus on the cross, like our own calling, Patrick loved with God's love.

Zack wrestles with how to understand the so-called cry of dereliction and, more broadly, the cross.

Simon of Cyrene helped carry Jesus' cross: Zack reflects on our also carrying crosses.

What turns a crowd into a mob and how does this affect our daily life? Why is Pontius Pilate mentioned in the Apostles' Creed? Zack explores both questions.

When a biblical story is not your story but the story of your people.

Reflecting on the slave whose ear was cut off, Zack makes a case for Christian pacifism.

Jesus in Gethsemane: Musing on four strange features of the story leads Zack to four observations.

How deep is God's forgiveness? Drawing upon a real historical situation from the third century A.D. and on the story of Peter's threefold denial, Zack attempts an answer.

Why did Judas betray Jesus? The question is surprisingly difficult to answer -- but some informed speculation can help illuminate some very important dynamics for Christian faith.

In this Epiphany sermon, Zack contrast two ways of Christ "illuminating" the world -- and argues that God often works in mustard-seed ways.

Why does the Christmas story include this horrible story of infants being slaughtered? Zack attempts to answer that question and, in doing so, explores the implications of our need for systematizing our faith.

In this short sermon, Zack tells the story of Damien of Molokai as an analogy for understanding the mystery of the incarnation.

What is our ultimate Christian hope? This Advent, as in Advents past, Zack sketches some of the answers to this question. This week, he focuses on what our hope for Sabbath Rest means.

What is our ultimate Christian hope? This Advent, as in Advents past, Zack sketches some of the answers to this question. This week, he focuses on how God intends to go beyond even restoring to fullness all that He had created.

What, exactly, is "the Gospel"? Zack argues that it depends on who you are talking to. And this story -- of the woman who gives everything to anoint Jesus -- is a great way to understand the Gospel for many today.

Zack confesses that he has no idea what to do with Jesus' statement in Mark 13:30. This confession launches reflection on trust, knowing, and living out a fully human faith.

What, exactly, should we do with Jesus' end-times prophecy in Mark 13? Zack suggests that the text pressures us in three important ways.

Should we imitate Jesus' angry and polemical speech? Zack struggles with faithfulness in our context.

Zack muses about Jesus' strange way of speaking -- and suggests that, in this passage, it helps make a profound point about his both-and, expansive identity.

Continuing last week's reflection on Christian politics, Zack offers five suggestions.

In this first sermon of a two-part series, Zack explores what Jesus teaches us about politics -- and argues that the vision of Scripture has rarely been adopted and may shock us today.

Teresa of Avila; the problem with "love languages"; learning to cook: Zack mediates a passage which brings us to the heart of our faith.

"Radical altruists"; expanding our love; expanding our worship: in this more interactive "sermon," Zack examines Jesus' teachings on resurrection and marriage in this passage.

Called back to a war-torn country; seeing your wife assault a stranger; a fable or an allegory: Zack uses the Parable of the Wicked Tenants as a way to understand reading Scripture more broadly.

Our moral taste receptors; Milgram's electric shock experiments; a friend's willingness to suffer: Discussing Mark 11:27-33, Zack explains why we should embrace God's authority.

The one thing we do in the Lord's Prayer; moving millions of miles away from others; forgiveness as for-getting and as for-giving: reading Mark 11:20-26, Zack tackles prayer and forgiveness. Why are some prayers seemingly not answered? Why is forgiveness a non-negotiable aspect of the Christian life.

Jesus' cursing the fig tree has always been hard to understand. What is going on with Jesus' one destructive miracle that seems so out of character for our Lord? Zack argues that, like the other Prophets, Jesus is here engaging in a symbolic “sign-act”—a weird, attention-grabbing action that proclaims the deeper spiritual truth that the Temple will be no more. We learn, then, that we are all meant to bear fruit. Moreover, we learn that God is relentless—institutions are judged and fail only because God will do whatever it takes to reach all with His love.

In a second sermon on Bartimaeus, Zack discusses his persistence -- crying out (praying?) for mercy despite the crowds' trying to silence him. Persistent prayer recurs in Scripture. It changes us. Zack offers not only biblical examples but also the profound witness of Romanian pastor Richard Wurmbrand.

Zack mines Scripture and offers two modern examples to help us appreciate the point that the Spirit's spectacular acts on that first-century Pentecost, like so many of the Spirit's acts, creates a people where there was not a people.

In Mark 10:4-52, a blind man sees better than most with sight: Zack explores the significance of the Bartimaeus story and its important application to our lives.

Scripture often tells us “Do not fear” and setsfaith and fear in opposition. However, we have to be careful at this point: through a close reading of the people's actions in Mark 10:32-45 and Scripture more broadly, Zack makes the case that the *emotion* of fear is human, natural,not sinful, and not problematic; it is our *response* to fear that matters. The sermon ends with two powerful examples of Christians overcoming their fear through faith: Perpetua and Martin Luther King, Jr.

This sermon explores the meaning of Jesus'scommand in Mark 10:13-16 to ‘receive the kingdom of God as a little child.' Zack explains how Jesus' primary point is probably about a child's (non)status—like other teachings in this gospel, Jesus challenges our status evaluations. Morethan this, though, this teaching encourages us towards a childlike spirituality—exemplified by people like Therese of Lisieux and Henri Nouwen.

This sermon wrestles with the difficult topic ofdivorce. Zack offers seven suggestions.

While we are tempted to focus on hell, salvation, or disability in this passage, doing so would cause us to miss its fundamental -- and critical -- message. With hyperbole, Jesus makes painfully clear how serious sin is and offers us a strategy for cutting it out of our lives.

“Easter is about more than we realize”: In this Easter sermon, Zack attempts to expand our imagination as Scripture expands our imagination. Jesus not only forgives our sins—but also liberates us, defeats death, and redeems all things. No system captures the fullness of Easter—which is precisely why Scripture has so many different ways of talking about Jesus' death and resurrection.

The donkey, clothes, palms, and Hosanna all point to the crowd's hope for political salvation -- a hope all too common in our world today. Zack offers seven suggestions drawn from reflecting on the Palm Sunday story to help us live more faithful political lives in this moment.

"Whoever is not against us is for us" is a very hard saying: it seems to conflict with another, similar statement in the Gospels (Luke 11:2); it is hard to reconcile with the sons of Sceva in Acts 19; it is complicated by Jesus' teachings about judging by fruits in Matthew 7; it is hard to know what "being against" even means. Zack reads these difficulties as an invitation away from systematic theology and towards increasing dependence on God's Holy Spirit. Moreover, he draws out important principles here with which we should reckon. Works, while not the basis of our salvation, reveal Christ-in-us. Our moment of hyper-Protestantism and church decline demands increasing ecumenism. Finally, perhaps most importantly, we must remain open to the new -- to God's surprising, scandalous work outside our own walls.

"I believe; help my unbelief!" Drawing deeply from Scripture, Zack connects this cry with other honest, vulnerable, pained cries to God. True faith, then, is not without confusion, pain, and failure, and its opposite is not doubt but apathy. God can handle *anything* that humans offer. In addition, that Jesus commands the demon rather than prays for its removal --despite his statement about the necessity of prayer -- displays his power. And so we do well to affirm it alongside our struggles.

Why does Jesus identify John the Baptist as Elijah but John does not think that he is Elijah? To answer this question, Zack tells the story of two unknown men, as well as stories from his own life, to make the point that God's Kingdom grows through the work mustard seeds who, like John, never understanding their own significance.

In this Ash Wednesday service, Zack begins by explaining that Christians have had two emphases on this day -- repentance and mortality (our being dust). But, he argues, these are two sides of the same coin: without God's Spirit enabling us to turn (repent), we remain mired in earthly desires, behaviors, and frameworks. Yet repentance is not simply turning *from* sin; more importantly, it is turning *to* God.

The story of Jesus' transfiguration on the mount before Peter, James, and John prompts three reflections. Zack first reflects on holiness -- that quality that makes God God, that cannot be attained but only caught contagiously from Him, that takes the form of shining face. Second, Zack examines fear. While fear can function to motivate people in Scripture, here, as often elsewhere, it more properly means something like "intense awe" -- the sort that God sometimes grants us as encouragement at the exact point we need that. Finally, Zack argues for the importance of Jesus being a (capital P) Person (to use classic Trinitarian language) and not a mere abstraction.

How do we understand this strange story of Jesus only partially -- and then, ultimately -- healing a blind man? After making the case that the text invites us to interpret symbolically, Zack discusses our (and the original apostles') partial sight -- Jesus is Messiah, but we don't really know what that means. He then expounds Messiahship in terms of humility, in terms of servant-of-all. Do we really appreciate what Jesus' Messiahship means?

In this sermon, Zack offers another, more tentative, reason why Mark might include the story of the Feeding of the 4,000 shortly after telling the story of the Feeding of the 5,000. In the story of the 5,000, Jesus feeds primarily Jews; in the story of the 4,000, Jesus feeds primarily Gentiles. After making a literary case -- and teaching about how to interpret the details/form of a text from Scripture -- Zack mines the implications. While categories are sometimes necessary, they should often be resisted.

Why does Mark tell us about the feeding of the 4,000 shortly after telling us about the feeding of the 5,000? Zack offers some suggestions. We learn about the role of understanding (catching up with faith); about hardened hearts (endemic to humans, even saints); about memory (a critical spiritual reality to re-examine).

What is Epiphany? One way of understanding it is that it is God's bringing all of creation -- including "the nations" (represented by the Magi) -- into His Kingdom. At a moment when, if we are honest, we worry that that is not happening, Zack reminds us that God works through mustard seeds. These faithful people's actions grow, usually unknown to us, into the great tree of God's Kingdom.

Mary's song in Luke 1:46-55, known as the Magnificat, is a powerful declaration of God's favor toward the humble and lowly. Zack reflects on the revolutionary nature of this song—and its exemplifying one of the major notes found throughout almost every page of Scripture. But this note—God's deep love for the marginalized—is not (just) a claim about God or an ethical imperative for us. Instead, it is one of many ways to articulate the Gospel itself. We have been Freed-From the world's givens of accumulation, self-securing, and resulting inequalities and Freed-For sharing God's own heart of putting others ahead of oneself.