Greenfield Presbyterian Podcast

Greenfield Presbyterian Podcast is a sermon feed, recorded in worship with people in the room. Scripture comes first, read aloud at length, often after the invitation 'Listen now for God's word to you.' So a listener hears the texts in full, not only the explanation of them. The Rev. Anders Edstrom preaches most of the recent episodes, and The Rev Dr Melissa Allison preaches 'The Morning Star Rises'. Edstrom's Lenten series, 'Letters from Cell 92', is named for the cell in Tegel Prison where Dietrich Bonhoeffer was held until his execution about a month before the end of World War II. The sermons introduce Bonhoeffer as a Lutheran pastor who resisted the Nazis and wrote to a friend from prison about what it means to live out faith in a world that has drastically changed. He never finished those ideas. Edstrom's view is that philosophers, theologians, pastors and now the congregation get to wrestle with them, and he admits it is not entirely clear what Bonhoeffer meant by religionless Christianity. The question he calls the most important one anyone could ask is Bonhoeffer's own: who is Jesus Christ for us today? In the Bonhoeffer series the readings stay close to Paul: Philippians 2 on Christ emptying himself, 1 Corinthians 1 on the foolishness of the cross, Colossians 1 on Christ as the image of the invisible God, and Acts 17, where Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debate Paul in Athens. The preaching is not solemn from start to finish. Reading Acts, Edstrom stops to tell the room it is okay to laugh when the philosophers call Paul a babbler. In 'Transcendent Descent' he goes through a claim, credited to Andrew Gaines, that Jesus was rich: Judas as his accountant, clothing worth three years' wages, Louis Vuitton and red bottom shoes. He points out that blackjack had not been invented yet, and he teases someone in the room by name for looking confused. The joke has a point. He closes on God's abundance as something that belongs to all people, then asks a harder question: who are we? 'Jesus is Lord' starts somewhere ordinary, with the light that greets a person on waking, whether it comes through a window, from a light switch or from a phone alarm. A separate series on strange encounters of the divine kind reads 1 Kings 19, where Elijah flees Jezebel, asks to die under a broom tree, and sleeps until an angel touches him and tells him to get up and eat. Elijah appears again in the Transfiguration reading in 'The Morning Star Rises', where Jesus touches the frightened disciples and tells them to get up and not be afraid. Heard back to back, the two readings share the same gesture. For a first listen, 'Deus Ex Machina' is where Edstrom lays out the background to the Bonhoeffer series. A large back catalog sits behind the recent episodes.