Dan's Marinations

Currently in our church I am doing a series of sermons on the miracles of Jesus.  This upcoming Sunday, Jan. 30, 2011 the sermon is about an exorcism in Matthew 12:22-29.  Rather than load the sermon with background material, caveats, and hedges, I've decided to let this blog do that work.  For starters the world in which Jesus lived was very conscious of angels and demons.  Nearly everyone- Gentile or Jew- believed in supernatural powers that were at work in the world.  When Paul refers to "powers and principalities" he is referring to such powers.  It was a world in which it was widely assumed that a person could be actively controlled by an evil spirit.  In this environment there were any number of exorcists practicing their art.  Even pagan religions had specified rites and incantations to free someone from demonic possession.  There were also Jewish exorcists at work calling on the power of the true God, Yahweh .  In this environm...

Fear is one of those human emotions that we all feel at times, and which can be healthy.  Fear of deadly snakes is good, fear of big trucks going 75 mph can be healthy.  At times scripture itself says we should fear God.  All too often though, fear exerts a paralyzing grip on us, even preventing us from accomplishing the very things we say we want.  A couple of generations ago, in his first of four inaugural addresses Franklin Roosevelt said that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."  At that point the country had been mired in the Great Depression for a couple of years and we were three and a half years removed from the disastrous crashes of October 1929.  In this context Roosevelt spoke what amounted to brilliant words.  I've heard that FDR had a second rate intellect, but a first rate temperament.  The first rate temperament was on display in those words.  He correctly realized that as long as the nation was gripped in fear, ban...

My suggested resolution for New Year's is to not make one!  I confess that I'm pretty skeptical of the whole enterprise of making the resolutions.  Admittedly, many of the resolutions are for worthy goals:  losing those pesky 15 pounds, exercising more, reading more, praying more, drinking or smoking less.  I tend to be leary of resolutions simply because they set us up for failure.  I'm far too much of a realist to be too optimistic about human ability.  Far too often what happens is that we make a grand resolution, but then only 3 months into the new year our grand plans fall apart.  The running peters out, the cake sneaks back into the diet, the commitment to pray a certain amount each day falls short; that is the way it is with us frail humans.  Our tendancy toward sin, toward failure of all sorts is far too great.  The resolution lasts a couple of months and sometime later we realize that we didn't and couldn't live up to it and the resu...