Sermons by Rev. Jason S. Glombicki (Page 72)

An estimated 2.8 million graduates will hit the workforce this May.There’s one phrase that will make these graduates cringe when they hit the job market: “experience required.” Ugh. After years of studying along with a burning desire to make an impact in addition to mounds of debt these graduates will wonder, “does experience really matter?” Well, the emerging “experience economy” might argue that experience does matter, a lot. Economically speaking, we’ve seen the progression from undifferentiated commodities turned into goods, then into services, and now into staged experiences. If you have no idea what that means, basically it’s moving from, say, accessing coffee beans, to buying roasted or ground coffee, to purchasing brewed coffee from a store, to having a coffee “experience,” like at Starbucks or Intelligentsia. Sure, we could make coffee at home for pennies a day, but it’s an unparalleled experience to walk into a coffee shop with the smell in the air, the sight of mounds of coffee beans, all the while listening to the sounds of baristas preparing and delivering an encounter with coffee…

Maundy Thursday. It’s a weird title. Often people think I’m saying “Monday Thursday,” like I’m rearranging the order of the week. Maundy means “commandment.” The commandment we focus on today is what I read from John: to “love one another” (John 13:34), and we look to Jesus’ act of washing the disciples’ feet as an example of how to lovingly serve…

You may know today as “the first day of spring” or liturgically as “Palm Sunday.” This day also comes with the title “Passion Sunday,” which is attributed to the fact that we read the Passion narrative today. One of the things I appreciate most about Passion Sunday is that we get a different “flavor” of the passion story each year. The taste we get of today is different from what we’ll hear on Good Friday and will be different for the next two Palm/Passion Sundays. Each biblical author takes a different approach. On Good Friday we always read the passion according to John. Power dynamics and the identity of Jesus are main things that John emphasizes in his telling. In Matthew and Mark they both draw us into the suffering, agony, and turmoil of Jesus. Luke, however, Luke is different. Luke has some distinctive scenes and phrases that can easily be missed if we’re not careful. These differences, I believe, suggest that one question Luke explores is: “how do we die well?”…