Little did I know that some people in the South say of their relatives who live in Baltimore, Yep, we got kin up North. My favorite story about my time in Baltimore has to do with one of my parishioners, who was then an 80 year old woman named Ditty Smith. She had originally hailed from Mobile, Alabama, and had come North to Baltimore after she married. I remember complaining to Ditty about the traffic in Baltimore. Ms. Ditty, I said, where I come from, we are taught that when you are a traffic light and it changes to yellow, you are to slow down and proceed with caution.
Every body here seems to accelerate instead.
In Christ there is no East or West, in Him no North or South. Let me begin by telling you first what this is not going to be. This is not going to be an AIDS 101 Sermon. I m not going to take the text about divorce and try to make it fit into some kind of post modern interpretation of what our culture would like the church to say about marriage and divorce. Jesus was always being tested by the Pharisees in matters of the Law, but this time Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem.