The Song of Cicadas and Sparrows

Jesus keeps surprising us!

That is where this book begins, and it is not a small claim. Stephen C. Bond has been a pastor for twenty years. He has heard these texts from Mark's Gospel since childhood, preached them dozens of times, and read every word of the lectionary commentary written about them. And still, the rabbi from Nazareth keeps slipping his grip and pointing somewhere unexpected.

This Cycle B preaching resource covers the Sundays of Ordinary Time from Proper 17 through the Reign of Christ and Thanksgiving Day, following Mark's counter-cultural Gospel through the season when many churches call it "ordinary." But nothing in Mark is ordinary. In these fourteen sermons, Bond finds Jesus in all the places we weren't looking — diagnosing the malignancy of sin like an x-ray that cannot be fooled by how nicely we dressed for the appointment; crossing deliberately into Gentile territory to go on record that God's grace has no border; turning the disciples' arguments about greatness upside-down by placing a child in the center of the room.

Theologically rich and culturally fluent, these sermons move easily between Luther's Latin and James Baldwin's prose, between Tolkien's Strider and Mark's Syrophoenician woman, between the cicadas outside the window and the living Christ who keeps turning the music right-side up just when we thought we had it figured out.

For anyone who has gotten comfortable with Mark's Gospel — and needs to be surprised again.

Stephen C. Bond serves as pastor of Community of Christ Lutheran Church in Whitehouse, Ohio. He has been in ministry for twenty years. The Song of Cicadas and Sparrows is a collection of sermons drawn from his ministry both in the greater Toledo area and in congregations he served previously in western Pennsylvania, all of whom continue to teach him about the character of God and the way of Jesus.