Proper 9

I'm preaching this Sunday at our "contemporary" service. The Gospel lesson for this week is Mark 6:1-13: the rejection at Nazareth and the sending of the apostles in mission. I'm still struggling through the early fog of what to say. So far, the only thing that has occurred to me is what NOT to say. The Old Testament lesson, 2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10 tells of David's covenantal installation as king of Israel. What better occasion than the Fourth of July to conflate biblical Israel with the United States? The Methodist Church's General Board of Discipleship stands at the ready.

Theolog has their weekly lectionary post up, and Ekklesia Project usually publishes theirs on Wednesday. I'm planning on steering clear of both King David and George Washington, and zeroing in instead on the "virtue" of insulating ourselves from risk and failure. I'm an extremely conservative person in this way, so passages like this week's reading from Mark are a true challenge for me. We'll see what direction the sermon takes. I had to turn in a title to the church office yesterday, so I went with the sufficiently generic, "Go With God."