What do you want me to do?

Kenilworth Union Church

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What do you want me to do?

2024 Fall

September 29, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Mark 10:46–52

There are all kinds of good and bad reasons to come to church, but it’s good to pause for a moment and consider what we hope will happen here between us and Jesus.

Maybe we want Jesus to do for us the same thing that he did for Blind Bartimaeus—open our blind eyes. Open our eyes to the fact that not implacable wrath but unfailing love is the beating heart of the universe. He loves us enough to go to Golgotha. We are indeed beautifully loved.

In one of his novels Czech author Milan Kundera puts it like this: “All [our] faults are redeemed by love’s magic eyes.”[1] Do you see what he means? That only when we see ourselves with the magic eyes of God’s love can we live up to and into the person God knows we have the capacity to become?

[1]Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 122.

WDJA (What Did Jesus Ask?), IX: If it were not so, would I have told you?

November 3, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • John 14:1–3

It’s not an accident that Halloween and All Saints’ Day are adjacent to each other on consecutive days. As you know, the word “Halloween” is a contraction of “All Hallow’s Eve,” the Eve of All Saints’ Day. Both holidays are trying to answer the same question: What happens to us when we die? or What are the dead doing? Ghosts and souls are adjacent concepts. What do you make of the way Halloween has exploded in prominence in the last ten years or so? All of my neighbors are trying to scare me to death. Americans will spend almost $12 billion on Halloween this year; that’s a tiny fraction of the $900 billion we’ll spend on Christmas, but still…

WJDA? (What Did Jesus Ask) VIII: Whose image is on this coin?

October 27, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Mark 12:13–17

You see why it’s so much fun to be a Christian: Jesus is just so good. With one slick move, he manages to elude the Pharisees’ trap like Lamar Jackson with one of his patented scrambles in the backfield. There’s the long heave! Bam! Touchdown Jesus! Not only does he manage to escape the Pharisees’ clutches, he also says enough about government and God in one sentence to fill a whole bookshelf full of esoteric volumes.

WJDA? (What Did Jesus Ask?), VII: Why are you afraid?

October 20, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Mark 4:35–41

The disciples complain “Jesus, we’re dying here! Don’t you care?” And Jesus responds with one of the 307 questions he asks in the four Gospels: “Why are you afraid?” It’s a question he’s been asking all of us ever since: “Why are you afraid?”