Irreverently Reverend

  Ordinary Time:  first Sunday at a new congregation Did you know that Ann Arbor is where the University of Michigan is?           I grew up in Indiana; until about February of this year, the university was about all I knew about Ann Arbor and I barely understood even that.   My big rivalry was Purdue versus Indiana University (go Hoosiers!), not Spartans and Wolverines.   I got my first master’s from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and served a church in Bay City, neatly bracketing the center of the state and not learning a thing about cities like Ann Arbor other than there was a university and, apparently, a really good deli.           “To the saints and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ in Colossae,” begins Paul in this letter probably written some 30 or 40 years after Christ’s resurrection.   “In our prayers for you we always thank God…for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints”.           The speed at which

  Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,  2  through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.  3  And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance,  4  and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,  5  and hope does not put us to shame , because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (NRSVUE)             It is a strange thing—and it was not my intention—that my first sermon and my last at St. Luke’s both come from Paul’s letter to the Romans.   This is what comes of keeping to the lectionary; it is fairly consistent in its connecting patterns.           Romans, while dense, is one of my favorite letters in the New Testament because it is a primer to Pauline theology.   Because he had not met the churches in Rome when he wrote,