Rev. John M. Edgerton

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If you’re new to the church, maybe you look around worship and see that people seem to know all kinds of rituals and prayers that you don’t know, and people seem to believe all kinds of things that you aren’t sure you can believe, it might make you wonder: is there a place in this church for me? Or maybe you’ve been here a long time and church isn’t how you remember it, it might make you wonder, is there a place in this church for me?

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I love the Christmas stories from scripture. But to be honest, in my rational mind I find the familiar scriptures to be hard to believe in sometimes. The angels with their wings aflutter, shepherds with their hearts aflutter. The wise men traveling from far away, guided by starlight to encounter something new and necessary. A young woman believing the impossible was true, a young man believing she was telling the truth. These things stretch credulity, it’s true. But these are not what I find so hard to believe. It’s what the prophet Isaiah says:

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Jesus got in a lot of trouble. He got in trouble because of what he said, true. But he got in a whole lot more trouble because of what he did. And of all the things he did that got him in trouble, the one thing that got him in hot water more than anything else, was his behavior on the Sabbath. People everywhere he went would confront Jesus about why he did not rest on the day of rest, why he did not honor the Sabbath.

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It was the earliest days of the faith, just a few months after the very public execution of Jesus. A handful of his followers had come to believe that though Jesus had been killed, yet he had been raised up from the dead and was now alive. They said they had seen him, that they had spoken with him, and because Jesus was alive again, they would never be the same again. Because he was alive again the whole world was going to change.

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It was so much sooner than the Disciples would have expected when their lives changed. The Disciples had seen so much since they had begun following Jesus just a brief while before. And even though it had only been for a brief while, the Disciples saw that he was like no one else they had ever known, even though it had only been for a brief while, they had already seen the world turned upside down.