Sermons by the Rev. Michael Love
January 29, 2011 - The Gift of Boldness - The Rev. Michael Love (audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's January 29, 2012 sermon.
The reading was Luke 10:1-9.
This was the fourth and last sermon in the "Twas the Day After Christmas" series.
January 15, 2011 - The Gift of Prayer - The Rev. Michael Love (audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's January 15, 2012 sermon.
The reading was Matthew 6:5-15.
January 8, 2011 - The Gift of Belonging - The Rev. Michael Love (audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's January 8, 2012 sermon.
The reading was John 21:1-8.
January 1, 2011 - Sorting Things Out - The Rev. Michael Love (audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's January 1, 2012 sermon.
The reading was John 21:1-8.
Christmas Eve 2011 Sermon - The Right Place, the Right Time - The Rev. Michael Love (audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's 11:00pm Chirstmas Eve 2011 sermon.
The reading was Luke 2:9-20.
December 18, 2011 - Are We There Yet? - The Rev. Michael Love (audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's December 18, 2011 sermon.
The reading was Luke 2:1-7.
December 11, 2011 - Blessed is She Who Believes - The Rev. Michael Love (audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's December 11, 2011 sermon.
The reading was Luke 1:39-45.
November 20, 2011 - The Power of a Grateful Heart - The Rev. Michael Love (audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's November 20, 2011 sermon.
The reading was 2 Corinthians 9:1-12.
November 6, 2011 - Managing Your (God's) Money - The Rev. Michael Love (audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's November 6, 2011 sermon.
The reading was Matthew 19:16-22.
October 9, 2011 - Each Day a New Beginning - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's October 9, 2011 sermon.
This was the last sermon in the "Exploring Questions of Faith" series.
The reading was Matthew 6:25-34.
September 18 to October 9, 2011 Sermon Series
Exploring Questions of Faith : If you've ever wondered why the innocent suffer or why prayers go unanswered, you don't want to miss this series. We'll take a careful look from a posture of faith and caring at some tough questions.
October 2, 2011 - When the Lead Breaks - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's October 2, 2011 sermon.
This was the third sermon in the "Exploring Questions of Faith" series.
The reading was Mark 4:35-41.
September 18 to October 9, 2011 Sermon Series
Exploring Questions of Faith : If you've ever wondered why the innocent suffer or why prayers go unanswered, you don't want to miss this series. We'll take a careful look from a posture of faith and caring at some tough questions.
September 25, 2011 - Fitting In or Becoming Fit - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's September 25, 2011 sermon.
This was the second sermon in the "Exploring Questions of Faith" series.
The reading was John 5:1-17.
September 18 to October 9, 2011 Sermon Series
Exploring Questions of Faith : If you've ever wondered why the innocent suffer or why prayers go unanswered, you don't want to miss this series. We'll take a careful look from a posture of faith and caring at some tough questions.
August 21, 2011 - Cleaning House - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's August 21, 2011 sermon.
This was the first sermon in the "Getting Ready for Company" series.
The reading was Revelation 21:1-7.
August 21 to September 11, 2011 Sermon Series
August 21 to September 11: Getting Ready for Company : We'll explore the ways that God calls us to make ready to meet our neighbors. Ever need help taking your place in a community? Whether that's a town, a job, a school, a church, or anywhere people try to get together and get along, this series has something for you.
August 7, 2011 - True Friendship - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's August 7, 2011 sermon.
This was the third sermon in the "Life of David" series.
The reading was 1 Samuel 20:4-9, 16-17.
July 24, 2011 - God's Unlikely Heroes - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's July 24, 2011 sermon.
This was the first sermon in the "Life Lessons" series.
The reading was 1 Samuel 16:1, 4-12.
July 24 to August 14, 2011 Sermon Series
Life Lessons : We'll take a look at topics close to our life experiences through the lens of the life of King David. Join us for these 4 sermons: "God's Unlikely Heroes", "Stabbed in the Back", "True Friendship" and "Faithfulness."
July 3, 2011 - Scars and Stripes : Liberty and the Trial of Rev. Amy DeLong - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Read and listen to Pastors Michael's July 3, 2011 sermon.
The reading was Galatians 6:1-10.
Download Michael's sermon here.
Sign the online petiton for Equality for All in Christian Marriage here.
Download the Equality for All in Christian Marriage petition here.
Background: The trial of the Rev. Amy DeLong, a lesbian clergywoman in Wisconsin, took place June 21-23, 2011. DeLong, a clergy member of the Wisconsin Annual (regional) Conference for 14 years who currently serves as director of an advocacy group, initiated the case in 2009 when she agreed to officiate at the union of a lesbian couple. That same year, she registered with her partner of nearly 16 years under Wisconsin's Domestic Partnership Law. She reported both actions to the annual conference. The Book of Discipline, the denomination's law book, states that "the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching."
In this sermon Pastor Michael shared the outcome of that trial and it's bearing upon our understanding of liberty, in the life of the church and in the nation.
Scars and Stripes : Liberty and the Trial of Rev. Amy DeLong
The Rev. Michael Love
July 3, 2011
The First United Methodist Church of Palo Alto
Galatians 6:1-10
June 5, 2011 - Start More Fires - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's June 5, 2011 sermon.
This was the sixth sermon in the Catch Fire in 50 Days series.
The reading was John 17:1-11.
May/June 2011 Sermon Series
“Catch Fire in 50 Days.” Download the study guide here.
May 29, 2011 - Spread Wildly - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's May 29, 2011 sermon.
This was the fifth sermon in the Catch Fire in 50 Days series.
The reading was John 14:15-21.
May 2011 Sermon Series
“Catch Fire in 50 Days.” Download the study guide here.
May 22, 2011 - Fan the Flame - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio/Video)
The May 22, 2011 sermon was a combination audio/video parable.
This was the fourth sermon in the Catch Fire in 50 Days series.
The reading was John 14:1-14.
to the audio and watch the video below.
May 2011 Sermon Series
“Catch Fire in 50 Days.” Download the study guide here.
May 15, 2011 - Shine Brightly - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's May 15, 2011 sermon.
This was the third sermon in the Catch Fire in 50 Days series.
The reading was John 10:1-10.
In the sermon Pastor Michael mentioned the Gifts and Talents survey. We invite you to fill out the survey here.
May 2011 Sermon Series
“Catch Fire in 50 Days.” Download the study guide here.
May 1, 2011 - Catch Fire - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's May 1, 2011 sermon.
This was the first sermon in the Catch Fire in 50 Days series.
The reading was John 20:19-31.
May 2011 Sermon Series
“Catch Fire in 50 Days.” Download the study guide here.
Easter Sunday 2011 Sermon - Revs. Michael Love & Laurie McHugh (Audio)
Listen to the Easter Sunday sermon preached by Revs. Michael Love and Laurie McHugh.
This was the sixth sermon in their "Thrive! New Life in the Risen Lord" series. It was preached on April 24, 2011.
At the end of the sermon, we held our traditional community sing of the Hallelujah Chorus on the chancel steps.
The reading was Matthew 28:1-10.
Pastor Michael showed the following video during the sermon.
Palm Sunday 2011 Sermon - The Rev. Michael Love (Video & Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's Palm Sunday sermon.
This was the fifth sermon in the Thrive! series and was preached on April 17, 2011.
The reading was Matthew 2:1-11.
April 3, 2011 Sermon - The Rev Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's April 3, 2011 sermon.
This was the third sermon in the Thrive! series.
The reading was Ephesians 5:8-14.
March 6 2011 - The Devil Didn't Make Me Do It - Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's March 6, 2011 sermon.
The reading was 1st Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-2.
February 20, 2011 - In Our Own Best Interest? - Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's February 20, 2011 sermon.
The reading was 1st Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-2.
February 13, 2011 - Everybody's Gonna Be Okay - Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's February 13, 2011 sermon.
The reading was 1st Corinthians 3:1-9.
February 6, 2011 - It Gets Better - Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's February 6, 2011 sermon.
The reading was 1st Corinthians 2:1-16.
During the sermon Pastor Michael mentioned videos from the It Gets Better Project.
January 30, 2011 - Get a Job - Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael's January 30, 2011 sermon.
The reading was Matthew 5:1-12.
During the sermon Pastor Michael showed the following video:
January 9, 2011 - Get a Clue - Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastor Michael's January 9, 2011 sermon.
The reading was Matthew 3:13-17.
January 2, 2011 - Get a Friend - Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastor Michael's January 2, 2011 sermon.
The reading was Matthew 2:1-12.
December 26, 2010 - The Voice of Fulfillment - Revs. Michael Love and Laurie McHugh (Audio)
Listen to Pastors Michael and Laurie's December 26, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Matthew 2:13-23.
During the sermon Pastor Michael showed the following video.
11:00pm Christmas Eve 2010 Sermon - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastor Michael's Christmas Eve 2010 sermon from the 11:00pm Candlelight Service.
The title of the sermon was We Welcome the Holy Guest.
The reading was Luke 2:1-20.
The Voice of Joy - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to and read Pastor Michael's December 12, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Luke 1:46b-55.
The sermon begins with a dramatic monologue by one of our members.
At the end of the sermon Pastor Michael showed a video of a "flash mob" in a mall food court who unexpectedly start singing the Hallelujah Chorus. As the video is playing members of our choir, who are scattered among the pews, one by one get up and start singing along. Soon their voices drown out the video and they gather together on the chancel to finish the Hallelujah Chorus.
Watch the original Food Court Flash Mob Hallelujah Chorus video below.
Giving and Receiving Thanks - The Rev. Michael Love (Text)
Listen to and read Pastor Michael's November 21, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Luke 23:33-43.
Download a copy of this sermon.
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What's In A Name? - The Rev. Michael Love (Text)
Read Pastor Michael's October 31, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Luke 19:1-10.
Download a copy of this sermon.
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You Might Be A Methodist - Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Listen to and read Pastor Michael's October 24, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Matthew 25:31-40.
Download a copy of this sermon.
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Preaching Our Way to Jerusalem - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Read Pastor Michael's October 17, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Luke 18:1-8.
The books Pastor Michael mentions in the sermon are Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations and Five Practices of Fruitful Living, by Bishop Robert Schnase.
Download a copy of this sermon.
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Even "Them"? Even Me? Even Now? - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastor Michael's September 19, 2010 sermon.
The reading was 1 Timothy 2:1-7.
This was the first sermon in the Intentional Faith Development sermon series.
Life-Long Learning - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastor Michael's September 5, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Psalm 139: 1-6, 13-18.
This was the first sermon in the Intentional Faith Development sermon series.
The book Pastor Michael mentions in the sermon is Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations by Bishop Robert Schnase.
Life-Long Learning - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastor Michael's September 5, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Psalm 139: 1-6, 13-18.
This was the first sermon in the Intentional Faith Development sermon series.
The book Pastor Michael mentions in the sermon is Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations by Bishop Robert Schnase.
Amen Means "Yes" - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastor Michael's August 29, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Psalm 84.
This was the last sermon in the Passionate Worship sermon series.
The book Pastor Michael mentions in the sermon is Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations by Bishop Robert Schnase.
Finding a Feast in the Wilderness - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastor Michael's August 22, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Psalm 84.
This was the third sermon in the Passionate Worship sermon series.
The book Pastor Michael mentions in the sermon is Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations by Bishop Robert Schnase.
Finding a Well in the Desert - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastor Michael's August 15, 2010 sermon.
The reading was John 4:1-15.
This was the third sermon in the Passionate Worship sermon series.
The book Pastor Michael mentions in the sermon is Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations by Bishop Robert Schnase.
Radical Hospitality - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastor Michael's July 11, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Romans 15:1-7.
This was the first sermon in the Radical Hospitality sermon series.
The books Pastor Michael mentions in the sermon are Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations and Five Practices of Fruitful Living, by Bishop Robert Schnase.
Freedom from What? - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastor Michael's July 4, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Romans 8:18-30.
Does God Have a Facebook Page? - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Listen to and read Pastor Michael's May 2, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Romans 10:11-17.
Download a copy of this sermon.
Does God Have a Facebook Page?
May 2, 2010
Romans 10:11-17
The Rev. Michael Love
I was so happy to see that God has a Fb Page! First I had to get over my shock that God only allowed certain information to be shared unless you are a friend. “God only shares some of their [a little trinitarian reference there] profile information with everyone. If you know God, send them a message or add them as a friend.”
Okay, so I naively thought I'd send a friend request. I was a little uneasy to find that I would have to wait until God decided if we could be friends. But that's what it said, “God will have to confirm that you are friends.”
Well, I didn't have to wait long... Imagine my sad surprise to find out that God has too many friends! “Too many friends” “Sorry, this user already has too many friends.”
If I can't be a friend to God on Facebook, what can I do? I'll just have to look for other options.
I make light of this discovery that someone has posted a Facebook page for God. And, I knew it was silly the minute I saw it. You can't fool me when I saw that God's hometown is listed as Chicago, Illinois. But this points to a real and pressing question: How do I get to know and experience the God professed by the Christian church? This was a question in the life of the early church as well. Paul had some ideas about how we achieve connection to and knowledge of God. That's kind of Paul's reason for ministry. Removing the obstacles in between the people he met and the God he had come to know. And to Paul, this was no little work. It was a matter of death and re-birth. A matter of a radical make-over of the root understandings of God and God's people. It wasn't easy for Paul to go down this road. But once he started upon it, he saw it as a moral obligation to share with everyone, so that all would know the life-giving grace of God.
So, let me start there. Let me ask you, what is our moral obligation to share news that is life-saving?
Let me ask it this way. If you were riding on this jetliner and sitting in this seat and this was your view...What obligation would have to tell someone what you see? Without a doubt, we would jump up and grab someone in the cabin crew and mention it! Anyone of us would become an instant and visible witness to the urgency of the situation.
Paul saw the power of the spirit of God in the Risen Christ as an equally urgent situation. He grasped that although the history of people of faith was rich with expectation, it was a treasure from the past. And in some important ways, no one was looking out the window to see how things were going. Paul saw a need of a herald in that present time to re-interpret and re-invigorate God's purpose of creation-transforming. Our needs have not changed so much over the course of 2 millennia.
That's easy for us to do, grasping our need of God, perhaps, individually. Who can't get behind all the good stuff of “Christian Faith”, individually. It's a personal choice, and we can grab onto faith without much real risk, if we keep it to our selves and lay low on Sunday morning.
The moment we extend the concern even to our family and friends, we move into the really exciting place of faith. Frankly, mostly we are challenged to know how to proceed.
Equally difficult: sharing faith with those with whom we would say we identify; co-workers, club members, classmates.
With all of these though (family, friends, classmates, church family) we might express our restless urgency that they know of the Gospel of God. This, as we know, is not the end of the list to which we are called.
Paul's message went out to complete strangers and he modeled a posture of hospitality and outreach into which we still try to live today.
This has always been the most un-easy of the places we travel as witnesses to the Gospel. Some are concerned that they can't do street corner preaching, but there are other ways to share the Gospel. Some are very good at street corner preaching but struggle to internalize and experience the good news themselves. I realize the difficulties, I have faced both myself.
In history, we have had that un-ease leak out into our programs for sharing the gospel. Our tactics have been sometimes coercive when we dealt with peoples we saw (in those days) as “less developed”. We have, in other times and places, swung to the other extreme of non-committed passivity, afraid to suggest anything to anyone about belief in the God who nourishes, saves and comforts. (Afraid, as it were, to mention that defective jet engine, that broken way of life when we plainly see it.) And so we have, in fits and turns, sponsored a God who swung between vindictive/judgemental and absent/uncaring/ineffectual. Both of those historical responses to the difficulty of faith sharing have been flawed and certainly don't reflect Paul's advice to us on the matter.
A good way forward for people of faith is pointed to in Bishop Robert Schnase's book, Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations
Bishop Schnase describes what he calls an attitude of Radical Hospitality; prioritizing the visitor and stranger in our midst. Being restless for the well-being of others in the landscape of our daily lives. And sharing life-saving news as a response to that restlessness. This is the exciting first step in his guide to the reacquisition of a relevant, centered faith in the middle of a vibrant congregational identity.
This restlessness assumes something. It assumes that the spirit of God is moving in every heart, preparing that heart and creating a yearning for God and the abundance of love and grace all may anticipate from God. It further assumes that the church is joyfully moving beyond institutional maintenance and on to dynamic, relevant ministry.
Lest we think that this Radical Hospitality is some kind of novelty injected into the faith by the Bishop or by Paul, I make this remark. Paul was living in the tradition-stream of his heritage. Indeed today's scripture lesson is built upon an armature of insight and inspiration from the prophetic texts of Isaiah, written over 500 years before Paul lived. Paul restates those promises and asks some inconvenient questions. For a people who have waited for deliverance, there is indeed a restlessness. If there is a good word to be shared, they want to hear it. If we, in Paul's context, are present to God, we are responsible to that same restlessness; in our case, to share the good word of assurance to all who hunger.
Listen again : “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” [this is from Isaiah 28:16] For there is no distinction between the Jew and the Greek, for the same Lord is Lord of all, who richly blesses all who call on him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. [Up to here, Paul is simply reciting venerated Old Testament tradition. Now, he comments upon the current reality, that even with that assurance, people have become detached from God. So Paul continues, seeking to lead us to know a way out from that detachment.] “How are they to call on one they have not believed in?” he wonders. “And how are they to believe in one they have not heard of? And how are they to hear without someone preaching to them? And how are they to preach unless they are sent?” Jumping to the end, Paul, without naming you or me, identifies the missing element that will complete the promise. “Consequently,” he says, “faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the preached word of Christ.” (excerpts from Romans 10:11-17)
The telling conclusion of Paul? “Faith comes from what is heard” that is, the communication of the living example of God's love for all people in Jesus Christ. People get to God, through a declaration of some sort, by us, of the gospel.
And so this morning I want to celebrate the ingenuity of God's people for finding many ways to tell the old, old story. I want to encourage you in any way that you can find to express the Radical Hospitality that reaches out so that people may come to faith by hearing, in your deeds, the word of God in Jesus.
See, it turns out that God doesn't have a Facebook page, per se. But I do. And some of you do. And our church does. And Pastor Laurie's even shown us that Facebook can be a place of discourse, prayer and a new way of community. Visit her and find out, at the Facebook Community Church. So, maybe God does have a Facebook presence after all. And, certainly God has a presence in everything else that we do. How we focus that presence toward others, that's the witness part of hospitality.
Is any of this tricky? Yes, the tricky part is this. Getting clear on what we mean when we say “hospitality.” Hospitality is friendliness, and more. The center of Radical Hospitality has a lot to do with a Christian understanding of love.
I heard a young pastor working out a theology of hospitality, you might say. The question on the table was “what is love.” The response: Well, love is a feeling. I think that's how many of us would struggle with that question. But I have to ask, is love, as we are called to express it between us in Christian fellowship, is it really a feeling? Or an emotion? That's a pretty subjective description. The Christian understanding of Agape Love is different enough to need comment. Love is not a feeling. Love is a strategic decision. An attitude. A hunger for the well-being of others. This is an important distinction lest we only offer hospitality to those toward whom we have positive feelings or emotions. This is not the same love as we have with a lover or even with a brother or sister. This love that fuels Radical Hospitality is a love springing from the spirit of self-sacrifice. It is one of the emblems of love that comes to us from the cross of Jesus.
And so, in the end, Christian hospitality, radical hospitality comes from a sense of gratitude for what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. That gratitude stirs us to restlessness for one who has not yet known what God has to offer them.
Because, unlike that fictional Facebook page for God, the living God who I proclaim to you, never runs out of room for more friends. Indeed, the God who seeks you has already loved you, before you were born, before you were wondering if there was a God. That God, already was and is and will always your friend. I feel a strong sense of urgency that you know that above all else. And I pray that by sharing with you a word about God's abundant, unregulated, overflowing, constant love, you may come to feel restless, too.
May your restlessness grow into a concern for those who wander and struggle without God to turn to. And may that concern grow into hospitality. And may that hospitality grow into words and deeds. And if this can be so, God will surely redeem the whole world. Amen.
Living Easter in the Real World - Week 3 - Do You Know the Way to Sim City? - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastor Michael's April 25, 2010 sermon.
The reading was John 10:22-30.
This is the third sermon in the Living Easter in the Real World post-Easter sermon series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
Sermon Series - Living Easter in the Real World
Revs. Michael Love, Laurie McHugh preached the post-Easter sermon series, Living Easter in the Real World, over three Sundays beginning on April 11, 2010.
Read and listen to the three sermons in the series:
April 11, 2010 - Friended by God - The Rev. Laurie McHugh
April 18, 2010 - There's An App for That - The Rev. Laurie McHugh
April 25, 2010 - Do You Know the Way to Sim City? - The Rev. Michael Love
Let Us Fix Our Eyes on Jesus: Rebirth - Week 5 - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Read Pastor Michael's March 21, 2010 sermon.
The reading was John 12:1-8.
This is the fifth sermon in the Let Us Fix Our Eyes on Jesus Lenten sermon series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
Download a copy of this sermon.
Let Us Fix Our Eyes on Jesus - Rebirth
March 21, 2010
John 12:1-8
The Rev. Michael Love
Our Lenten Theme is from Hebrews 12:2 on our theme banner (Fix our eyes on Jesus). Here are verses 1b to 3 "...let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us. We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith. Because of the joys awaiting him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame. Now he is seated in the place of honor beside God's throne. Think of all the hostility he endured from sinful people; then you won't become weary and give up.
That's an invitation (in the most colorful language) to the rebirth that is the hallmark of the Easter story. Birth is hard, so I'm told. We call it labor, after all. Why, then would we imagine re-birth to be any easier?
I look today beyond the ordinary brooding that we might relate to this season, beyond to the excitement of the possibility that re-birth, though difficult, is not impossible. It takes a certain environment, to be sure. Just as our first birth is best accomplished in a place of safety and care. And just as birth requires facilitation of a mid-wife or a doctor or maybe a knowledgeable firefighter, re-birth also requires facilitation.
That's what I'm seeing in the text for today, oddly enough. We have to look beyond the author of John for the back story on Mary, the one who is extravagant with the costly perfume. We have to jump over to Luke (10:38-42) to get the character sketch of Mary and her busy sister Martha. From Luke's point of view, Mary is a paragon of discipleship. To be greatly admired in comparison to Martha. Jesus himself contrasts her with her fussy sister stuck on the chores of the household while she, Mary, is present to their guest, listening to what he said. Mary has, in Jesus words, chosen what is needful. Martha, not so much.
Jesus will get a chance to shelter her again, in our lesson today, when he deflects Judas' critique.
What is amazing to me is that this is the story of Mary's re-birth, her growth into a full-fledged disciple. And it takes place in a church, or at least in a place that churches could well afford to copy. Here's the scene. A dinner is set. A widely differing group of souls is present. And Mary acts in a way, that even in that wild band of individuals, catches their eye. Something is out of line here, Judas complains. This doesn't look like the tone of the evening, this isn't the outcome he was looking for when he fell in with Jesus. And Jesus teaches into that moment. The magic of this, in my eyes, is that nobody bolts. Nobody decides to fracture off and start the "first church of no more perfume pouring" or whatever you'd call the sect that would break off. Everyone hangs tough and in the re-birth that Mary is going through, everyone gets a little taste, a little bit, of rebirth themselves.
What a wild ride those disciples had. And they stand in as a preview to us. For, indeed, what a wild ride faith and re-birth turns out to be.
Maybe this is a good time to ask, How is it with your faith? How is it with that re-birth that Jesus wrestled after for you? Does it feel like a ride down a Black Diamond Ski Slope? A straight drop, with treacherous curves and steep chasms waiting to gobble you up? Most of us can describe what this part of faith feels like, and we don't have to rely on illustrations from Scripture. The hard realities of most of our lives will connect any one of us to the lifestream, faithstream experiences of any other of us. One way these scriptures function is when they seem to be pulled from our own lives. A lot of people say they read the bible to find the answers or a model for themselves. That only works because we keep finding ourselves in the stories. It's not the other way around, the way we're afraid that somehow these text will reach out and sweep us away if we give them too much attention. No, what really happens, in my view, is that while plummeting down the Black Diamond trail, trying to figure out where God can possibly be in the ride, I encounter a glimpse of someone else plummeting as well. Look at Judas in this story, he is plummeting. Mary, she's been plummeting but is starting to get into the flow and rhythm of the slide. And so it's the recognition of my life setting in the story that is like inspirational glue, bonding that story to me, because it has become, once again, my story. And your story.
So, here's the thing, if you can, in the words of John Wesley, “O, just begin.” And if you can stick with it. In the long run, it ends up being more like the HOV, a safe path through tough traffic
Can you imagine that? Back to the life of John Wesley as a bit of an example. He was on the Black Diamond Trail for 13 years before he hit the HOV lanes. He was an ordained clergyman for 13 years when he had his Aldersgate Experience, the specific experience of May 28 that he records occurring at a small study group when he finally got it, really got it, that God loved even him. (as he put it) That is to say, he finally received a profound sense of assurance that God's love was boundless and meant for the individual experience of a spiritual traveler such as he.
So, can you imagine that? What would it be like to be in a kind of spiritual HOV Lane? Not a spiritual smarty-pants lane, that's not what I said, nor mean. But to enter into a place of spiritual process and assurance that would equip you for the steep trails as well as make you fit to transform the world into the sustainable Kingdom that Jesus described?
Wow! How do you ever get started on something like that! I've been talking to some people about what that kind of community must look like and in fact, what it has looked like in the life of the Methodist church. The fact is, this is kind of a big question right now for the Church in general. But when I run into this conversation with people about what that kind of life of faith would look like or how that re-birth might be lived out, we always seem to end up at pretty much the same question...How do you ever get started on something like that!?
To say anything about that I have to say something about ironing shirts. Actually about how I learned how to iron a shirt.
Well, in these days, you can actually look this up online. At a site called eHow.com I found it. The difficulty rating was, I was assured, Moderately Easy. It will talk you right through it. How to iron a man's cotton shirt.
Except that's not how I learned. I learned because someone else taught me. I always get this part wrong. I remember it being my mom. It was probably Dolly. But we're all going to Disneyland together in a few weeks, so I'm reconfiguring my memory to say that one day my mom and Dolly got together to teach me how to iron a shirt, I figure I'm safe that way. Well, here's what I learned.
I remember being taught to “Just begin with the sleeves.” Then you can move onto the collar, the back, etc. Well it works, the instructions are great. I have to say eHow.com even agrees with this time-tested advice of “Just begin with the sleeves.”
But I puzzled over those instructions and I came to realize however that the real advice was not "Just begin with the sleeves." The real advice I was receiving was in fact, "Just begin." Get started. Step up to the iron. Engage the task and move along.
More recently Nike shoes stole this ironing instruction and it became, “Just do it.”
So, is that how to begin this re-birth that Mary is experiencing? Is that how to begin to live into the transformation that each of the disciples is going through in their own way; to enter into the drama of faith that resonates so much with our own lives?
Well, let's look again to John Wesley, maybe he is more instructive. Let's see, in his letter to a Mr. John Trembath (Works, Volume 12, pg 254) who is asking the same question, he say, with an alarming bluntness, “O begin!” Wait, it gets better.
“Fix some part of every day for private exercises. You may acquire the taste which you have not; What is tedious at first, will afterwards be pleasant. Whether you like it or not, read and pray daily. If is for you life; there is no other way...Do justice to your soul; give it time and means to grow. Do not starve yourself any longer.”
Harsh words these. Words we might reserve for our children perhaps, but did Mr. Wesley really mean us to apply them to...ourselves? Well, one may as well I suppose ask if Jesus meant the re-birth to be merely for the characters in the bible stories that we encounter at a safe distance.
You see the scandal of the Gospel is that this can happen to people of every walk of life and indeed the scandal of the early Methodist movement was that John Wesley only took that lesson seriously and said, “this can happen to you.”
And out of that simple premise, grew the Methodist movement. And what a movement it was! Not a church movement per se, more a movement within a church. The way into the process of re-birth was in small groups some of you may have heard about. They were called class meetings. And at such a class meeting, you would gather weekly for one hour with others under the guidance of a class-leader, a kind of facilitator. And during this time, hymns were sung, and the class inquired of one another, “how is it with your soul.” An abrupt and overly vulnerable sounding question in our day, I'm certain. But let's just say that the effect was as if someone asked you, “How are you?” And then actually remained present to here how you really are. And in that meeting, if someone acted “differently”, as Mary did, the class was a place where that was held safely. And a growing together of the group was possible that exceeded what can happen in a time of mass worship or even mass fellowship. It quickly became an instrumental mechanism for recreating faithful community as Jesus, Lazarus, Mary, Judas, Martha, and the rest might have experienced it.
So nourishing is this model of group interaction that most successful Christian denominations adopted some form of the Wesleyan Class Meeting by the 19th century. Churches of every size and stripe continue today to employ this way of being together and credit John Wesley with the innovation. For as long as this way of initiating the experience of spiritual re-birth has been used in the Methodist church, congregational care has been strong, the invitational reach to new members has been open and welcoming, the deployment of missional workers has been robust and stewardship has been a natural ministry of the laity.
Up until 1908, every person who came into membership in the church, entered through the nurturing care of a class that continued to walk with them in their Christian journey. Up until 1908, the church grew and grew and grew. In 1908, an act of the General Conference removed the requirement of attendance in the class meeting for membership and eventually the presence of the meetings themselves evaporated from the Discipline of the church and from the churches themselves. By about 1930, the class meeting was gone. The Diamond Lane HOV faith journey of the Methodist Church began to look more like the Black Diamond Ski Slope plummet.
I tell you this little bit of Methodist history, because in it I find the beginning of the answer to “How do we get started experiencing the re-birth that this season promises us?” I think it's one of those back to the future moments for the Methodist Church. Indeed the re-surgence of the small group, the discipleship group, the class meeting, all tell me that there are others out there in accord with my conclusion. That is this: the single most important thing a church can be doing in these times would be to refocus on the mission of the church (which is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world) and to make disciples, there is no better time-tested vehicle than the class meeting. The class meeting trusts the caring instincts of the laity. It multiplies their talents and gives them access and responsibility for the health and vitality of the congregation. The class meetings extend the effectiveness of the Pastoral Ministers and create multiple “safe-places” for people to work out their faith journeys. The message today in John, like much scripture, is a telescoped, foreshortened vignette of the life of early disciples. And so much of what they did is locked in time; wouldn't translate into our time and culture. But there is one part that is universal.
An early pagan opponent of Christianity, a secular observer had this to say about the early church and that universal distinctive, when he wrote, “Look how they love one another.”
I have been doing some homework on this one. And we have actually gotten a few folks together for a test run on a Wesleyan Class meeting. We learned what works and what doesn't, but the return on the de-briefing questions has been “Let's just do it.”
So, as an extended invitation to whatever Lenten practice you may been involved in currently, I call on you to consider whether or not you would like to know more about a class meeting near you that you might become a part of sometime after Easter. If you are just curious or if you are positive this is for you, please visit the welcome desk in the narthex after worship and sign an interest sheet.
Jesus is moving us closer to the cross. We are keeping our eyes on him. And I keep hearing him say, “O just begin.”
Let Us Fix Our Eyes on Jesus: Reconciliation - Week 4 - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Listen to and read Pastor Michael's March 14, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Luke 15:1-3, 11-32.
This is the fourth sermon in the Let Us Fix Our Eyes on Jesus Lenten sermon series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
Download a copy of this sermon.
Let Us Fix Our Eyes on Jesus - Week 4
March 14, 2010
Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
The Rev. Michael Love
I got to Trinity Learning Center, TLC as it's known, to pick our son up from pre-school. I arrived to discover that he had lost something and we needed to find it before we could go home. By the look on his face, I was worried to think that it was his favorite Thomas the Tank Engine hat that he'd worn that morning. I was relieved to find out that it wasn't the hat, it was a railway pin that had fallen off the hat.
It was a part of a growing collection of railway pins. And it definitely was clipped on his Thomas hat at the beginning of the day, but by the end of his stay at TLC it had come loose and fallen off. So, I arrived to pick him up and found he and his teachers and one or two of the other kids looking around on the ground for this pin. It was small, and the play yard and activity structure and paved tricycle area combined to make a big, big search area. Sam was desperate to find this pin. We looked and looked and looked some more. After several minutes I said what I thought were brilliant words of encouragement. “Don't worry, big guy, we'll have to find you another pin.” The look of alarm and disappointment converged on his face and I knew we would be continuing the search. We searched for about 30 minutes. And, sadly, we did not find the pin. But here's what I learned : I had fallen prey to a very ordinary and contemporary frame of mind when I said, “Don't worry, big guy, we'll find you another pin.”
Luke 15, verse 3 says, “Which of us, having a hundred sheep and losing one, does not leave the 99 and go after the one?”
Well, the answer for most of us is, not many of us would leave the 99 and go after the one, in this day and age. The loss of one? It's a cost of doing business. Loss. Spoilage. Shrinkage. To be expected in a market economy. There is a way to make that balance, to reconcile the loss...but that's not the kind of reconciliation Jesus speaks of, is it? When he sends us out to find the one, as we sit comfortably with the 99. The reunion that Jesus envisions has more of the intensity of my son's search for that single lost railway pin.
Maybe this seems like an obvious thing. I don't know. However, this was evidently a hard lesson to transmit. Jesus tells it in 3 different ways and forms in this little sequence in Luke. There are 2 warm-up parables to this one; the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. Elsewhere Jesus has spoken of lost and found pearls, lost and found life, lost and found yeast, lost and found lamps. For Jesus, losing and finding is the parabolic image of reconciliation. It is the emblematic description of the call of a disciple. So let me ask, you, How important is reconciliation to Jesus? How important is finding the lost, elemental thing? How significant is the safety of one confused soul? Well, counting how much teaching time he spent on it, I would say it was a top level concern.
And it is a concern for 2 reasons. One : It was the theme and purpose of Jesus' ministry. It was the work he came to do. And Two : he needed to do some myth-busting around the old, old thought that says finding stuff; sheep, coins, people is a lot harder than losing stuff.
So today : The central theme of Jesus' work is reconciliation. And, finding stuff is easier than we think it is.
So, let's get started. Everything in our upbringing lures us to the acceptable losses position. The myth that the lost stays lost. That once divided from faith, or God, or family....once divided, forever gone.
Not for Jesus.
Jesus knew that division among peoples and families and nations grows slowly until the chasm seems uncrossable. And so we call it an acceptable loss, a state of affairs that can not be repaired. Not acceptable to Jesus.
RECONCILIATION : JOB ONE
So he tells this little story. And it is all about the slow growth of division and the alarming chasm that results.
Here's a son, a family member, a young son, a boy who makes a rash request. “Father,” he says, “Give me the share of the property that will belong to me.” He leaves the rest of the sentence unspoken, you notice. Because the whole sentence is “Give me the share of the property that will belong to me when you're gone .”
This kid is not a good egg. He's rotten. He can't even wait until his father is dead to get his hands on his inheritance. History has named him, “The Prodigal Son.”
Prodigal : A great way to describe the SON because it means recklessly wasteful. But as it turn out, it's a great way to describe the Father, because it is a word that is also employed to describe lavishly pouring on gifts. This contrasting meaning of the word will tie the story together, The Prodigal Son, recklessly wasteful or extravagant. The Prodigal Father providing a counterpoint of abundant love and quick spent memory of the offenses.
This is the set-up, let's be clear, Jesus is setting up his hearers to NOT LIKE THIS GUY, this son. There is no pity for him as he moves toward his own ruination.
Now, he doesn't just grab the money and run does he? He gets his prize, driven by some fidgety anxiety in his soul. He just had to have that inheritance NOW. Just was fascinated perhaps to stack up the treasure and count it and observe it. But he doesn't run off, because you see, he doesn't have a plan. He just sits on it. Until, “A few days later.” You see, it has to work on him. His greed had to work on him, eat at him, grow into the next thing it was to become. So I imagine that he got that money and the first thing he did was hide it. He would have begun to imagine the same lowness of motive in those around him, that he was really just confronting in himself. And his greed would have begun the division. So, his prize, his precious, calls to him from its hiding place, “You don't need these people.” “You are rich now, you should move on.” “You have to leave.” As his first merely selfish idea grew into solid evidence of his privilege and finally into an absolute conviction to free himself from the family that is holding him back.
And now he bolts. Still without plan. In company only of himself. All decisions only made by him. He is now totally independent. Totally free. Or is he?
We are already implicated in this story. No, the finger doesn't point in an accusatory manner. But the complexity of what it means to be a free individual living responsibly as a member of an interdependent community...that starts to sink in for all of Jesus' listeners. Including those of his listeners sitting hear this morning. We may not be the Prodigal, but we know the prodigal parts with which we struggle.
And so the son. His spiral downward increases velocity at this point in the story. He is truly prodigal, spending without vision or plan. Consuming, consuming pleasure and experience. And finally, in an amazing allegory, the very land becomes depleted at the same time as his pocket-book. “And a severe famine took place throughout the country.” As if the country itself was appalled by his outrageousness.
How very much this is like the story of Jacob and Esau and their fraternal rivalry. (see Gen. 25:19 - 26:1) That old, old story was used as an Ur-text to explain the great chasm between peoples in the ancient near east. Jesus' listeners ears would have itched with the parallels. The duplicity of the younger son, the famine that drives the story along. Division and the daunting prospects of reconciliation, you see, are old, old themes.
This poor son, has begun with the smallest of infractions. Youthful short-sightedness is all that it amounts to. It was a small divide between son and family then. Who could imagine that it would expand into a gulf like this. He had to be at the edge of death by starvation until he “came to himself”. Until he arrived in the full presence of all that his acts had brought him. Until he saw himself clearly in the mirror. Only then did he draw a deep gasp understanding how far the gap had opened. How can I ever make it back! This was a cliff-hanger when Jesus told, I imagine. Worthy of a great 1950's film noir suspense, to bring it to our recent times.
It is a cliff-hanger because the son would have begun his road home believing what we secretly all fear; that the gap, once opened, can never be recrossed. We fear, I think, that if division grows slowly and steadily, then reconciliation must surely be a long and similarly tedious process, except with much more unsure outcomes.
How can I ever make it back?
How great then is the joy of this story that in the instant that his father saw evidence of his lost son on the horizon he was ecstatic. Before he could be near enough to discern if his son's scowling attitude had gone, or if he was just back for more money. Before the father could know anything that would indicate worthiness, before that, he rejoiced!
And it probably turned out that in that house reconciliation would take a season; the part of the older son is to bring this reality into the picture. But in the instant of the father's joy is the seed of the whole re-gathering. As in the instant of the son's folly, the whole family began to unravel, so also was the father able to exert healing force and reconciliation, in an instant.
The son was prodigal : wasteful and short-sighted
The father is prodigal : lavish in love and quick to forgive (a kind of short-sightedness)
The gulf between us and God, between us and a neighbor, sometimes even between us and a family member, can seem vast. How often do we take the route of “acceptable losses?”
Because we have asked in fear, “How can I get back?”
When will we “come to ourselves” and see that reconciliation begins in an instant? Maybe if we imagine what it is like to experience reconciliation from the other end of it, we can begin to see this. Imagine that you have never been welcomed home.
That may be hard to fathom, for we are all here, welcomed, safe, acceptable to one another. But in Jesus' time, and ours as well, there are many for whom we are called to a restlessness of concern. There are those who may think of us as critics of lifestyle, or smug, or exclusive. Others may have tried to reach God, but just can't navigate the path without a friend, a guide. At the current rate of church involvement, there are literally close to one out of two of your friends who do not have a place to turn when they are in need. I see only one obstacle to our ability to reach these; a mis-perception that the gulf is too wide. But I tell you that first steps to reconciliation are an instant away. And so I'm going to call this the opportunity of a life-time for this church, in this season.
It is our opportunity to see in the life of Jesus a life lived for reconnection. That we would learn it as a preferred lifestyle choice : to reach out in reconciliation. To act. To turn reconciliation into a verb. Because the reunion that Jesus calls us to is of a much higher intensity than business as usual. We are called to the riskiest sheep search we have ever known.
We are like those who dare to dream again, that we might know restoration. This project is so important that Jesus did what he did to get our attention and point us to the work.
When people tease out the meaning of this Prodigal Son story, they often ask, which of the brothers resonates with you? Do you find in the younger son a bond of identity? Or are you in the older brother's camp? These are both valuable spiritual reflections. But this Lenten season I want you to consider a different option. I invite you to see how Jesus might have been casting the model of the Prodigal Parent as one for us to contemplate. It would be by acting the part of the Prodigal Parent that we would know our role as those who are anxiously, restlessly, looking for the lost ones and welcoming them in with hope and acceptance. As you fix your eyes on Jesus, see in him an example for your life. Ponder how he is calling you to a life that is lavish in love and quick to forgive. If you can, I am convinced, you will glimpse the kingdom of Heaven. Amen.
Let Us Fix Our Eyes on Jesus: Repentence - Week 2 - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastor Michael's February 28, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Luke 13:31-35.
This is the second sermon in the Let Us Fix Our Eyes on Jesus Lenten sermon series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
Sermon Series - Let Us Fix Our Eyes on Jesus
Revs. Michael Love, Laurie McHugh and Robert Hamerton-Kelly preached the Lenten sermon series, Let Us Fix Our Eyes on Jesus, over six Sundays beginning on February 21, 2010.
Read and listen to the six sermons in the series:
February 21, 2010 - Turning the Corner - The Rev. Michael Love
February 28, 2010 - Repentence - The Rev. Michael Love
March 7, 2010 - Forgiveness - The Rev. Dr. Robert Hamerton-Kelly
March 14, 2010 - Reconciliation - The Rev. Michael Love
March 21, 2010 - Rebirth - The Rev. Michael Love
March 28, 2010 - Triumph - The Rev. Laurie McHugh
Christmas: The Sequel - Week 2 - How Is the Christmas Story "True"? - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Listen to and read Pastor Michael's January 10, 2010 sermon.
The reading was Matthew 1:18-25.
This is the second sermon in the Christmas: The Sequel series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
Download a copy of this sermon.
Christmas: The Sequel
January 10, 2010
Matthew 1: 18-25
The Rev. Michael Love
We've had a few days, 9 to be exact, to contemplate what changes we might hope for in the New Year. I wonder about resolutions. I wonder how honest we are with ourselves about these things. Do we resolve with boldness? Or do we resolve to do what we prefer to do anyway? To move ahead into a vision that we cast on our own? Or maybe just to just work harder? Doesn't sound like a resolution to me, if I might be so bold, it just sounds like business as usual. When we're at our best, I think, the resolutions are really about things we know will be a reach. Stuff that will actually be an improvement. Or that represent growth. As a Christian and a Methodist, that means my resolutions are centered around trying to discern and remember God's purpose for me. And that means aiming a little higher than I sometimes find myself aiming. We have some pretty good, although traditional, language to get this idea across. When we say that people hear a call from God, we're thinking about a higher call. When we talk about taking up a cross, we're talking about the condition of servant-hood and sacrifice the disciple's life calls for. When we describe a spiritual practice of self-denial, we're picturing a state of behaving in which we work to take ourselves out of center-stage and ask what God would have us do. In the New Year, if there could be a one size fits all resolution for followers of Jesus, the resolution that fits most any circumstance, it might go something like this : I resolve to be honest with myself about my resolutions. Am I preference driven in my choices or am I learning to be more and more purpose-centered in the life that God is luring me to inhabit?
Well, if we're looking for some New Year's honesty, we could start by saying that we're honestly not sure what we just celebrated. Before we get into Christmas : The Sequel, should we ask, what did we just celebrate? Was Jesus born on December 25? Possible dates of the Nativity were only retroactively guessed at long afterward, the earliest mention of a named birthdate being around 200 A.D. Was he born in Bethlehem as Matthew and Luke tell it? We can't get corroboration from John and Mark, they begin the story with Jesus' adult ministry. Did 3 Wise Men visit the Nativity? Or 2 or 4 or 6? The scripture makes no mention of how many there were.
It's especially hard to know what this all meant in those day because the celebration of birth dates was considered a pagan observance. The first and most significant calendar date for the Jesus people was Easter. This was the date of highest importance for the early church. In fact, the guess at a date of birth somewhere between December 25 and January 6 was achieved by back-counting from the date of Jesus' crucifixion, a date which had been fixed with some clarity.
But this doesn't make our cause hopeless, as we will see. We can still get a look at the importance of the birth of Jesus in the context of his time and place. This is the first part of Christmas : The Sequel. Today we'll ask, “How is the Christmas Story True?”
What's the tallest tale you have ever heard? For me it was the pool that was supposed to be on top of the auditorium at the elementary school I attended. How about you? And, what's the tallest tale you've ever told?
The story told in Matthew's first chapter is far from a tall tale, but it is a story with a long lineage. And Matthew is very plain about that; the gospel of Matthew opens with a family tree of some 42 generations. From Abraham to David. And from David to Jeconiah (don't worry, I can't always remember who he was either). And from Jeconiah to Jesus. It is the list that immediately precedes the lesson we just heard. That history will continue into the birth story of Jesus and contains an element of key importance to Matthew and those who lived by this message.
The message that Joseph receives from the angel of the Lord was meant to give him a specific way forward in that moment. Now, in order that Joseph didn't just say, “Yeah right, tell me another one,” the angel told him something that would be deeply meaningful to Joseph. He assured Joseph that this would all work out, because the child to be born would be Emmanuel, God with Us. That's pretty amazing in and of itself, but as they say on tv, there's more!
This message, it turns out was delivered once before. When heard the first time, back in the Old Testament, it was spoken by Isaiah, to King Ahaz, a son of David. You can check me in the genealogy of Jesus, conveniently near-by in Matthew 1:9! It was re-broadcast by the angel of the Lord to Joseph, also of the line of David. The message, you see, is a family story! It's a story of God's promise to the house of David. And so, Joseph would know this story already. I think it's safe to say that the angel had Joseph's undivided attention at this point. And so, as we try to find a foot hold in the story, what we have here is not a tall tale, but the reminder of a promise deferred, and something more. It was an announcement that a promise deferred is not a promise that will go unfulfilled, when it comes from God.
That is the first and most significant message of Christ's birth to the people who immediately inhabited the story. They for the most part did not have the option to life a preference driven life. For those living in the darkness of the time, the birth of Jesus was truly a great light. Waiting for the light was a trial that had literally gone on for generations. But with the advent of Jesus came the redeeming experience the gospels recount as purposeful and saving. Even Joseph is impacted by the birth of Jesus. In this part of the story that we shared today, Joseph moves from being driven by his preferences to centering himself in God's larger purpose.
That's a little hard for us to connect with, but it shouldn't be. Living into Christmas : The Sequel is all about this. It's about resisting the urge to pack up Christmas. It's all too easy to do a kind of seasonal tip of the hat to the Nativity Scene. That is our preference. Get out the check list. Observe the holidays, check. Now's the New Year, time to get the next check list out and move on. Centering in God's purpose takes a little longer look at the events we just celebrated. It takes a risk to further unpack the gift of Christmas. Because, this story continues to call us, in individual ways, to call us into a true and deep conversation with God's higher purpose.
The trustworthiness of the story of Christmas is that you can believe it will change your life when you drag your feet a little to wonder What DID Jesus have in mind when he made himself known to you, and me?
I discovered one more gift under the tree this year. (Unwrapping gift) I wondered, what was it that I didn't get, that I really wanted? Is this that gift, miraculously arrived? Did Dolly find a wish list of mine that I had forgotten and tucked into a shirt pocket?
God did not give the gift of Jesus so that I would get what I want. Joseph sure wasn't getting what he wanted. God gave the gift of Jesus so that I would be able to get centered in God's purpose for my life. That means the gift is always showing up in surprising forms. Catching me unawares, like a surprise angel announcement when Fear Not is definitely what I need to hear.
And God will almost never give me what I want when I want it. But God most certainly will pick a time when what God has for you is indispensable in that moment.
Just as the gift of Christmas takes a bit more unwrapping than we thought. We don't want to stop at a layer that is pretty, but still just surface. I invite you to keep unwrapping Christmas and to keep unpacking the purpose that God has for you in this New Year.
Christmas: The Sequel - Week 1 - The Rev. Michael Love (Text)
Read Pastor Michael's December 27, 2009 sermon.
The reading was Luke 2:41-52.
This is the first sermon in his Christmas: The Sequel series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
Download a copy of this sermon.
Christmas: The Sequel
December 24, 2009
Luke 2: 41-52
The Rev. Michael Love
What if Christmas had a sequel? What would it look like?
We have entered into the post-Christmas week of games and puzzles and books. And photos from people we haven't seen in a year and news from others we haven't heard from in at least a year. What can the other side of Christmas look like, if it's not merely the wind-up to New Years?
I would like to take you through a new series called Christmas : The Sequel. I guess it's my way of drawing out the story a little bit longer and so that we might explore the impact of the gift of Christmas in our lives. Just as the games will get old and the treats will all be eaten, sometimes the power of Christmas fades and gets packed away with the ornaments and the garlands.
So, while the notion is fresh, I want to leave it unpacked for awhile. Next week, Jan 3, we'll get a real-life look at Christmas faith in action as Rev. Ken Bosworth shares his testimony about the Volunteers in Mission Philippines Medical Project. You can read more about Rev. Bostworth in the bulletin. Then on Jan 10 I will return to wonder with you “How Is the Christmas Story “True?” What questions of life did the Jesus narrative answer “in those days.” We'll follow that with “Why is the Christmas Story “True?”, asking What questions of life does Jesus answer in these days?
We'll keep asking questions, like “What's so radical about Jesus?” And, “What Ever Happened to the Christmas Story?” And, “Why isn't the Church all that it could be?” I'll bring this series to a conclusion with a sermon called “The Christmas Story.Now” Exploring how the people of Jesus can be true to the story of Jesus, and in the process dare to redeem and renew ourselves, the church and the world itself.
For today, we begin as the implications of the Nativity sink in. As the shepherds depart and the wise men go home and the story moves along to the early childhood of Jesus. But before we go, there's a hymn that reveals in the Christmas season an awareness that there's something bigger going on than a cute baby Jesus in a manger scene, surrounded by gentle donkeys, lowing cattle, and humble shepherds. I invite you to turn in your hymnals to page 219 and we will sing verse one and two. As we sing, listen closely to the words especially in verse two.
What Child Is This : UMH 219 “Why lies he in such mean estate (lowly location) Good Christians fear, for sinners here, the silent Word is pleading.”
Jesus came pleading a case for us, but he did from a place of identification with us. I mean that he understands our circumstances are rough also. He started his life in a hidden, out of the way place. And he lived among people who knew the uncertainty of life. Now you may not identify with the shepherd's life or the culture of the subsistence peasants of 2st century Palestine, but we live in uncertain times. Just look at the current events of the day. What a different Christmas we almost just had. The attempted sabotage of a passenger jet over Detroit on Christmas day remind me that we still inhabit a fallen and struggling world.
Jesus did not come into a world of tranquility and gentleness. He came into a world as complicated and challenging as the one we inhabit even now. The idyllic imagery of the Nativity points to a hope, not a reality. It paints a scene of tranquility that the world longed for, not one it was basking in at that moment.
So also for us. The silent Word, the infant Jesus, who conveys a Word of safety and redemption to you and to me; that Jesus pleads for us. That work extended far beyond the cradle for him. In other words, Christmas was meant to have a sequel.
In Matthew, Jesus is born, the wise men visit, the family flees to Egypt, they return and then John the B gets to work. In Luke, Jesus is born, the family heads to the 8th day ritual of dedication at the Temple, then the Temple for Passover and then John the B. In LUKE, Jesus as a 12 year old, has a significant Passover experience. Luke has a flair for literary devices and so maybe he means this to be a mirror of a later Passover, when Jesus and his practice of debate and conversation with the elders would lead to conflict instead of amazement. At any rate, the story shows us a 12 year old boy engaged in the community of his day and culture.
Ever get lost in the department store? Or at the mall? Who was more alarmed? You or your parents? Maybe they masked their alarm with a little anger and indignation? As Mary and Joseph did when they discover Jesus at the Temple. Listen to verse 48 again, ”And when his parents saw him, they were astonished. And his mother said to him, Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress.” (vs, 48 ESV) Eugene Petersen's translation, The Message, gets it better. “But his parents were not impressed; they were upset and hurt. His mother said, “Young man, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been half out of our minds looking for you.”
His parents are probably close to hysterical by the time they find him. Mary and Joseph traveled a day with the caravan back toward Nazareth before they saw he was gone. They traveled the one day’s journey back to Jerusalem to search for him. And once in Jerusalem, they searched for three days before finding him in his Father’s house, the Temple. It's an amazement that they found him not taken in by thieves and hustlers, but safe and sound in the Temple. How is it, they might have wondered, that they found him alive at all? It is the center of this story that he was safe because he knew where to find safety in the real world.
We have a fake Christmas tree. It's very lovely. And I think that one result of a fake Christmas tree is we miss one of the lessons a Christmas tree can remind us of. Because with a real tree, as we used to do it, when the tinsel is off the tree and the ornaments go back into the boxes, we are left with a drying out, branch dropping, needle dropping tree. It's a not too subtle reminder that there is after all a real tree under there. And that real tree entered life, grew and was harvested for us and will now dry out and die off. The reality of the cycle of life is right there. And the image of Jesus' promise of eternal life stands in striking contradiction to that claim of time upon us. So, without shirking the reality of living, the Christmas Sequel says, stay tuned, Jesus has a way forward in the midst of this reality. And so the journey of the Christmas story as it moves from Nativity to SEQUEL again looks like it must be rooted in the reality of life. There is the potential for danger. But there is also the promise of renewal.
If you'll turn to page 273 in the hymnal, I would like to share another hymn. This one is called Jesus Hands Were Gentle Hands. It only has 2 verses and they focus on the answer Jesus gave to us, by the actions of his life. It was an answer rooted in an understanding of human need and informed by his compassion.
The Sequel of Christmas now begins to have a suggested way forward. “Let me watch you Jesus, till I'm gentle too.” The story as it moves away from the Bethlehem manger is about to catch up with us. To engage our hopes and fears. To redeem and save us. And in the process, give us a charge to carry out in the world.
One of the more notable parts of the Nativity Story is that it leads immediately to action and engagement. We learn that the shepherds GO and tell the people what they have seen. The little family, Mary, Joseph and Jesus GO to the Temple for an infant dedication. Jesus GOES to the Temple again, to converse with the elders. Mary and Joseph GO to, return to Jerusalem to search for him.
Indeed in the stories of all 4 Gospels, action and engagement will be big themes. The people will GO seeking Jesus. The disciples will travel throughout the Mediterranean world, essentially the known Western world, in a frenetic and energized engagement of the people.
The over-arching theme of the Christmas Sequel is that we who hear these stories are “called out,” invited into a journey. Christmas isn't over. The adventure is just getting under way. This is Luke's thesis. Jesus' ministry quidkly engages and encompasses the larger community. The Christmas Sequel is a journey of engagement. We are invited into the story right away as well.
This next hymn I want to share with you is an oldie. Please will you turn to hymn 398. The verses are short, so let's sing all 5 and then I'll make some closing remarks.
Jesus Calls Us UMH 398
The invitation was given to us on Christmas Eve at the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. We were never meant to be observers or spectators. The story is one of risk-taking engagement and radical living in the face of God's outrageous and abundant love. In the weeks ahead, we'll look at the power and significance of this Gospel Story. In the process I hope you'll find a renewed interest in the story that is convincing and connecting. Convincing of God's love for you in Christ Jesus and connecting you to a depth of faith and witness in the world so that real and positive change can happen in your life. If you can be renewed, so can the world. If you can find the eternal living that is the promise of the Nativity, then the world can be redeemed and healed.
Sermon Series - Christmas: The Sequel - Revs. Michael Love and Laurie McHugh
The Rev. Michael Love and the Rev. Laurie McHugh preached the sermon series, Christmas: The Sequel, over the seven Sundays beginning on December 27, 2009.
Read and listen to the six sermons in the series:
December 27, 2009 - Christmas : The Sequel - The Rev. Michael Love
January 10, 2010 - How Is the Christmas Story "True - The Rev. Michael Love
January 17, 2010 - Why is the Christmas Story "True"?? - The Rev. Michael Love
January 24, 2010 - Who is the Christmas Story About? - The Rev. Laurie McHugh
January 31, 2010 - What Ever Happened to the Christmas Story? - The Rev. Michael Love
February 7, 2010 - The Christmas Story Now - The Rev. Michael Love
Jesus is the Gift: Christmas Eve, 2009 - The Rev. Michael Love (Text)
Read Pastor Michael's Christmas Eve 2009 sermon.
Download a copy of this sermon.
Jesus is the Gift : Christmas Eve, 2009
The Rev. Michael Love
December 24, 2009
We are gathered tonight in anticipation of the gifts of tomorrow morning's festivities. Some of you have gone to great length to pick just the right gift for a loved one. Or maybe are hoping and waiting for a gift that you dropped numerous hints about over the past couple of weeks...or months. I tell you that before you have opened one gift from under the tree, you will receive most astounding gift human kind has received. The gift of Jesus is the gift that pre-figures all the other gifts. They are fitting reminders to us of his Gift.
And that gift befuddles us. It's not a simple gift like a sweater or a necktie. The gift of Jesus, you see, raises just as many questions as it can answer. For example: Is the story of his birth a true story? And if true, what significance can it have in my life? And how does a birth so long ago have such lasting influence that we are drawn, lured to candlelight services and children's pageants and nights of carols and lessons? Who knew a birth could carry such weight?
There are three birth stories that carry a special significance to Christians. We take great care to preserve them and pass them on. One is the story of a birth at Bethlehem, the birth of the Prince of Peace, Jesus. The second is a re-birth story really - it is the story of the empty tomb, after Jesus is crucified and buried. It is the Resurrection story. The third is also a re-birth story - it's the one many have experienced at personal times and places on the occasion that they have been swept up in the fullness of God's love. The re-birth happens when they respond by saying, “Okay, God, I'll try it your way.” We have seen people undergo this change. The Apostle Paul called it the experience of a new creation. Jesus, in the lessons of John, says that it is like being born all over again. It is the birth we mark when we turn over the reins of our life to Christ.
Three stories of birth. All, cornerstones of our tradition. Birth is a very important image in our faith narrative.
So I want to ask, When you hear these words that we have just shared, the words from the second chapter of the Gospel according to Luke, can you hear in them something more that a narrative that happened a long time ago, in a far away place? Or does it seem to have little to do with us here in our lives? I worry that it might seem that way; distant and remote. Not out of ignorance or disrespect, but because we have heard the story so often, or maybe not enough. Maybe we've never really been able to enter into the story in a deep and personal way. Maybe we're like those shepherds, taking it easy in the fields, watching our flocks leisurely by night. Perhaps we, too, could use a clanging of bells and a flurry of angels and the air full of light and the Glory of God to shake us awake.
Ever take a ride a roller coaster? If you have and it's frightening for you, then you're like me. I like riding them, but they scare the dickens out of me. But, I have to admit, that when I get off a ride that scares me like that, a ride that maybe makes me think a bit about my own mortality, I'm kind of giddy. How about you? In that moment of post-panic, do you feel ultra clear and totally aware and really alive? So maybe it takes a little holy angel banging and clanging to jolt us into a bit of clarity so that we can see the wondrous thing that has occurred.
We already have a notion of what is about to occur, because after all, here we are. It is Christmas eve, it is in the dark of this night that he is born. And here we are, waiting. So maybe, even though the story is threadbare and worn, we still have an inkling of it, maybe more than an inkling, and we have assembled here this evening to witness it, together.
I think we come here tonight to wait, together, because we simply can’t stand to wait separately any longer. In less than 1 hour, we will be able to say with joy and confidence, “Christ the Lord is born!” And that's exciting!
“But Pastor,” you could be thinking, “Do the math, Jesus was born 2000 years ago! He’s not going to be born tonight! That story in Luke, that’s ancient history!”
Well. . . . if you were to say that, you’d be half-right.
It’s true, our Savior WAS born 2000 years ago in Bethlehem of Ephratha, a suburb of Jerusalem. But I am here to tell you that he will be born again, tonight, as he has been every Christmas season since that census was taken during the reign of the Emperor Augustus.
I think there is something in the anticipation of the evening that points to this. We have a sense, God-given, I believe, that this night above all others, is filled with possibility. And so we gather, because we must. Because we long to see if this year, maybe this year, we'll glimpse the change that comes over the world when its Savior is born. We came because some part of us remembers that something amazing and wondrous can occur this night. So we must come to this place and witness it as a gathering of God's beloved children.
To sum up my claim then, I believe that the Nativity will be re-enacted this very night! I know where he will be born. And I know that this time there will be no problem finding room at the inn. This time he will be born in a kind of “hotel”, if you will, a very modern place. It’s a different setting I know for the birth of the Infant Jesus, and I hear that this hotel - well really not quite a hotel - has all the current conveniences. In fact it’s quite a rather large and successful chain, perhaps you’ve heard of it - it’s called the Inn of the Heart. On top of that, all of you are owners in this chain. Each of us, in fact, owns and operates one location, one hotel in this international conglomerate. Imagine yourself as the innkeeper of your own heart. Imagine yourself as the one who watches over the guests as they come and go.
Now, in this hotel, if you'll entertain my image a little bit further, you employ a staff of hard working folks who keep the hotel running smoothly while you pay attention to the rest of your busy life. Sometimes we forget what important work goes on in this establishment. Here in the Inn of the Heart you care for others and remember good old times you’ve had together. Here is where you feel a sadness at the passing of a friend. Here is where you remember to send a card to cheer up a sick relative. Here is the place that where you fret over the state of the world and decide to get involved in making a difference. The Inn of the Heart is a busy place. And while you are running around doing all that life demands, the staff of that hotel, the Inn of the Heart, keeps things going as smoothly as possible.
A nice metaphor, you might be thinking. Maybe. I invite you to join me in a little bit of imagining what the responsibilities and work of such an establishment might be like on this Christmas Eve.
You are the owner and it's Christmas Eve. Imagine with me that you are very nice employers. In fact you are so generous that you each gave your night managers Christmas Eve off. Fair enough? Wasn’t that nice of you? And since all the other employees have long since headed off to their holiday celebrations, that leaves you filling in on this special evening as the Late-Night Desk Clerk for the Inn of the Heart. All the details of hospitality and administration are up to you tonight. (I hope we can remember how to do everything that the desk clerk has to do!)
The evening has started out quietly enough, but just wait, for in a little while, on this evening, as on every Christmas Eve from time gone by, you are going to be asked a very simple question by a rough faced traveler named Joseph. He is going to ask you for a room for himself and his traveling companion. Her name is Mary and she looks a little on the young side. Neither of them wears wedding rings and Joseph admits that they are not yet married, although Mary is clearly with child. Now, tonight, it's going to be up to you to decide if there's a place for them, so that this miracle can happen. No one can tell you what to do, you gave the night manager the evening off, you have to decide what the company policy is going to be tonight at the Inn of the Heart. No one else can tell you whether to turn them out into the night, or invite them in.
It’s late and the lobby is empty except for you and them. Some Christmas lights are twinkling in the window in time with the pulse of the Vacancy sign. Garlands and red and green ornaments are draped in the lobby area near the travel brochures and the free coffee and the ice machine. Johnny Mathis is singing in the background, urging you to “have yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” But, really, it’s late and if you turn them away, no one will know the better . . . just you. The sign over the desk proclaims the company motto “This Heart is big enough for all.” And there you stand deciding whether or not you can live into that motto.
And all over town, all over the world, there we all stand. At our own check-in desks in this moment, looking into the eyes of the Holy Family, making that same decision.
So you see, Jesus will be born again tonight. Because every year we get a chance to say “yes” to that little family of travelers from Nazareth, who have come to be counted. And who have come to count so very much in our lives.
The question is not so much whether the Holy Family will find room in the inn, there are plenty of inns now-a-days. And for as many Inns of the Heart as are out there, that is how many Josephs and Marys will ring the bell at the night-clerk’s desk looking for a room. The real question is, will they find room in the Inn of your Heart. You see, Jesus will be born tonight. As surely as God promised it, it will happen. And really Advent has been about getting the room ready, putting out new glasses on the sink, fluffing the pillows, making sure the Gideon Bible is in the drawer. . . getting our Inn ready for the arrival of these special guests. This is the night you have been getting ready for! That’s the excitement of Advent which culminates on Christmas Eve!
You see I knew that Jesus would be born again tonight because I already knew that his family has come knocking each year, brand new, in the Inn of your Heart. And so it really isn’t much of a guess to believe that the Holy Family would be welcomed again this year.
And you know something else? I do believe that this very evening, in this very place, some new locations will be opened in this great chain of hotels. Because Joseph and Mary also call at Inns that don’t know they are open for business yet. They call on people who may not even think themselves capable of housing the Christ child in their heart. And that is another one of the wonderful and amazing gifts of Christmas - we all receive from God the special ability to cover the night shift at the Inn of the Heart. You can make a difference in your own life tonight by inviting the Christ child in for yet another nativity.
Now, there's a little more work ahead for us as Innkeepers. For, having registered the Holy Family and given them the key to their room, which is the key to our hearts and lives, we will turn and see the morning light. We will welcome Christmas Morning. Our shift will be over for this year and once again we are like the shepherds because we will be sent out into the Christmas morning glorifying and praising God for all we have seen and heard. We have received a true gift, the new life and fresh start offered by God in Jesus Christ. May each of you enter the new day that God is even now making for us, filled with a spirit of joy.
Sisters and brothers, I give you the true gift of Christmas. I proclaim that Jesus Christ is born this day, not only in Bethlehem, but in each of you. And by that Nativity may each of you are renewed and reborn. I pray that Nativity will live and thrive in your Inn of the Heart so that the world may be re-born as a place of sustainability, justice and peace. Thanks be to God. And Merry Christmas to you all. Amen.
I want to make sure to invite you to continue the journey of Christmas, as I begin a new sermon series next Sunday, entitled, “Christmas : The Sequel.”
Blessings,
Rev. Michael Love
God's Christmas Gift to You: Love - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Pastor Michael's December 13, 2009 sermon.
This is the third sermon in their Jesus is the Gift series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
Sermon Series - Jesus is the Gift - Revs. Michael Love and Laurie McHugh
The Rev. Michael Love and the Rev. Laurie McHugh preached the sermon series, Jesus Is The Gift, over the four Sundays of Advent beginning on November 29, 2009.
Read and listen to the four sermons in the series:
November 29, 2009 - God's Christmas Gift to You: Hope - The Rev. Laurie McHugh
December 6, 2009 - God's Christmas Gift to You: Peace - The Rev. Michael Love
December 13, 2009 - God's Christmas Gift to You: Love - The Rev. Michael Love
December 20, 2009 - God's Christmas Gift to You: Joy - The Rev. Laurie McHugh
We Are Called to Thanksgiving - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Listen to and read Pastor Michael's November 22, 2009 sermon.
The reading was John 18:33-37.
Download a copy of this sermon.
We Are Called to Thanksgiving
The Rev. Michael Love
November 22, 2009
John 18:33-37
When the GPS went haywire
It was on the way down the mountain from the Clergy retreat last week, that the GPS lost it's bearings. I expected to be on route 50 for almost 100 miles before anything significant happened to my course back to home. But the GPS kept getting lost. I'd glance over at it after an odd and unexpected suggestion to turn left or right and see that it had me tracking in the woods paralleling the highway about 200 yards over.
So did I turn it off? Well. I waited for it to regain it's senses. I was doing fine, even knew where I was going. After the fellowship of the retreat and the wisdom of the bishop and a visiting guest speaker who really gave us some tools for ministry. Where I was going, on a lot of levels, I felt. But I couldn't turn off that GPS when it was clearly not providing the best way forward.
We picked, Dolly Sam and I, we picked C3PO for our GPS voice. It's kind of funny, we can pretend that our car really has the highly advanced android-butler from Star Wars as our guide and helper. When you get to you intended location, C3PO very formally announces, “You have reached your destination, master.” But, as I drove the winding road down the mountain, C3PO advising me to drive through the woods or into the river to regain my course, got a little, creepy.
So, did I turn it off? And trust the direction that I had received both by having driven the way up (reverse course is pretty easy) and by virtue of the experience of the retreat. Did I turn off the voice giving me odd and actually dangerous advice? Did I go with what I knew and give thanks for the freedom?
Why I give thanks for Jesus
Jesus met with Pilate and had a discussion, oddly as equals it seems to me. Or so it looks by the boldness of Jesus' replies and his own questions he points at Pilate. And all along, you could say that Pilate kept giving Jesus bad advice. Advice that gave Jesus an out, like the “advice” from the devil to Jesus when he was being tested in the wilderness at the start of his ministry. Advice that originated in a world of “no thanks” and “that's mine.” Jesus had a word about where his Thanksgiving came from. “My kingdom is not FROM this world.' He said. (NRSV) Or: My kingdom, said Jesus, doesn't consist of what you see around you. (MSG)
And Jesus is about to give us cause for Thanksgiving because a whole trajectory of history, a momentum of violence and corruption is about to meet its match. Jesus is the catalyst, the change agent, the savior in a hinge moment that will change the arc of history. The actions of Jesus life, ministry, his death and resurrection are the new reality declared in the face of power that the age of Evil is at an end. He turns from the to each of us and beckons that we might activate that reality. We might find cause in that possibility to give thanks and get to work on the Kingdom. For clearly, we have not lived into the reality that Jesus died for. But we can, thanks to Jesus. We can conceive of a peaceable and sustainable kingdom where before the prevailing advice had us driving in the woods. Think it's bad to be at war? (yes) Good. That's a step forward from a human condition that accepted war as necessary, heroic and inevitable. Give thanks to the King who never took to the throne who made that possible. Give thanks to the King who abdicated power and achieved glory.
The bishop said an interesting thing at the retreat this week.
He said many things. One thing that spoke to me was about how we are tempted to pretend everything is okay. And I believe he nailed it, it's a snare and a trap laid for us. The work to pretend everything is just alright is tiring, draining labor that keeps us from our real calling, whatever that may be. And I began to see how it pointed to the times I stop giving thanks. I don't give thanks when things go wrong. Then I can sort of skip over it. I don't have to acknowledge it. It's not in my prayer life, maybe it's not there at all, I tell myself. That's a confession. Because I want to give thanks for everything. This may sound odd, but if I give thanks for everything a bunch of stuff happens that's really helpful. One thing is that I have to face the stuff I don't want to face and stop the exhausting work of pretending everything's okay.
The bishop was applying this to the life of the church and our need to see our situation with clarity and realism. But I guess you can see how it might apply to the walk of faith each of us takes daily.
So, I am using that line of thought to encourage us to give thanks for everything.
This notion comes from the scriptures.
It reminded the bishop and he reminded the clergy and I'm reminding myself and you to give thanks for everything, not just the good stuff.
More specifically it comes from Jesus. Jesus did not say, stand back, everything is going to be alright....this wasn't a Superman moment, or even an Underdog moment. He says, to Pilate, Are you speaking/thinking on your own...or just saying what you saw on Foxnews and CNN? You know what's coming. You can see the signs. Will you own the truth of the situation? Pilate does the first cowardly thing of the story, he cops out. “Well, what is truth?” he asks. Even Pilate knew big stuff was ahead. Even Pilate couldn't pretend everything was going to be alright. Thanks be to God, everything was about to change.
The Christian Strategy
“Its tempting to pretend that everything is alright". And I think it is tempting to think, after we get over this little bump, after things settle down...it's going to be alright. We need that, I need that, to keep balance in my life. But Jesus life reminds us that discipleship is a vocation, an effort is required. That in fact a key part of discipleship is an honest look at the plain facts of life. You know they say that everyone is either just coming out of a tough patch in life, in the middle of a tough patch, or just about to enter into a tough patch. That's not pessimism, that's just remembering what life is really like. Everything is about to change. Christian Discipleship is the most realistic life-style choice for acknowledging and navigating that reality. The thanksgiving I give for the new life I find in Jesus Christ is that I have been given (not a fantasy, pie in the sky vision) but a solid core, authentic view of the world and my place in it. That probably sounds pretty funny to some, given the sugarplum and lemondrops make believe that passes for the religious life in these consumption driven times. So I declare to you that you will never find a more realistic life-style choice than Christian Discipleship. That's cause for thanksgiving.
When your GPS breaks down
We all have this internal GPS that we inherited. Some of it comes from our families, some from our schooling, some from our position in the class system of American life. Our internal GPS is programmed by a number of factors and influences. Some of them are useful and accurate. But every once in awhile the GPS breaks down. And when that happens, give thanks. In those moments, listen to Jesus, he doesn't get enough air-time on those gadgets. Enter into conversation with the King who showed us a way when all our navigational stuff seems broken. Meet the sovereign who re-claimed the language of peace and justice and community. Do it quick before the old directionals come back on line and have you driving through the woods.
Give Thanks.
The Bottom Line
We are called to Thanksgiving. Few of us come to it naturally or find it on our own. We have to be summoned, cajoled, encouraged. I did finally turn off the GPS. I was finally able to settle into the great Thanksgiving of knowing that I knew where I was going. And I knew that after a reset or update or something, C3PO would be back giving road directions. What I had been resisting on route 50 coming down from 7000 feet through 6000 to 5000 and onto the Sacramento Valley and then home, was my call to Thanksgiving. I think we have to be cajoled by the spirit of God's own self, to release and give thanks and then watch some really astonishing and amazing scenery go by. God is calling you, each of you, to thanksgiving. You maybe also find it not your usual posture. You may find, like I did, that Thanksgiving is most poignant when I don't think I have much to give thanks for at the moment.
It's in the giving of thanks, that Jesus steps in to aim me in the direction of my intended thanks. And I come away knowing that indeed each of us has much for which to thank God. It's a kind of practice really. If you give thanks, you find things for which to be grateful. Funny about that.
And, as our now working GPS with C3PO voice always reminds me, then You have reached your destination. Amen.
Other Campfires - Part 2 - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Listen to and read Pastor Michael's November 15, 2009 sermon.
Read and listen to part 1 of Other Campfires. Pastor Michael preached this on his first Sunday at First Church, July 5, 2009.
Download a copy of this sermon.
Other Campfires – Part 2
The Rev. Michael Love
November 15, 2009
Acts 17:16-33
I arrived in Palo Alto on July 1 and preached about Other Campfires. That sermon was generally about what I believe to be a pre-eminent opportunity for the church today. That opportunity I called “Other Campfires.” It was to encourage a renewed sense of adventure in the Christian enterprise of building new ministries. I cast the idea that our work as disciples of Jesus includes reaching out in a variety of ways. I contend that in response to God's abundant love, we are given a sense of safety and security that equips us to wander from the comfort of our sanctuary. I like the image of the campfire as our sanctuary, a place of coziness as well as mystery, a place that nurtures and keeps us spiritually warmed. A place where we can prepare meals to sustain and meal to share. I also want to notice that it is the success of our campfire that emboldens us to wander off to help others start new campfires. This image I use to think about new missions, new worship venues, and new models for being church itself.
This morning, I will take up the topic of Other Campfires again. This time through the lens of Paul's address to the Athenians which you have just heard, from Acts 17:16-33. I see in Paul's manner and speech a template of instruction for how we might best go about building "other campfires" in Jesus' name.
Today, I am going to focus the metaphor of Other Campfires. Let's say this morning that Other Campfires are all the potential ministries that God is calling us to plant. I presume something here and so in the fairness of disclosure will name it explicitly. I presume that God makes churches primarily to build other ministries and other churches. I presume that God is not finished with us once we've settled into a particular address on a particular block in a particular section of town or city. I presume, as our good friends in the United Church of Christ share in their media, that “God is still speaking.”
So, with all that in mind, I want to observe that in Paul's experience in Athens, preaching the Good News of God's unconditional love, we glean some advice on building new campfires. To put it another way, we might see in Paul's experience the basis for a Frequently Asked Questions list about building new ministries. I have 3 questions on that list.
Question 1 : Can you build another campfire if you're happy with the one at which you sit?
Answer 1 : Yes. It's good to be satisfied with the campfire at which you sit. It means that you're pretty good at building campfires. It means that you have enjoyed success at building campfires. Don't settle down yet, however. Because, if you are going to build other campfires, you have to be dissatisfied in some way. Look at Paul. Right away, he's dissatisfied. As he wanders Athens, he is distressed to see the abundant evidence from the culture that God has many competitors in Athens. And he sees an opportunity for another campfire. We can mimic Paul when we love our community enough that we would want to add further ministry choices to it. So, the first step is avoid the satisfaction of what is, instead of always leaning forward into the opportunity of what could be.
Question 2 : If you want to start another campfire, do you have to leave the campsite?
Answer 2 : Yes. If you want to launch viable, sustainable ministries that will make an impact for God's peaceable kingdom, you have to "wander the townsquare." Again, look at Paul. He explored and saw with new eyes. We, too, can explore our community and see it with new eyes. If we don't learn everything we can about the place in which we plan to start a new campfire, good luck. Not only will we have failed to keep faith with the ones we are given to serve, but we will fail to discern the many rich opportunities for ministry in our own backyard. Adam Hamilton in his book about church life entitled Selling Swim Suits In the Arctic notices this for us. When you have swim suits to sell and your customers live in a non-swimsuit environment, you have to engage the needs that they DO have.
When you do wander the townsquare, you have to take what you find seriously. If you dismiss what you see around you in the culture, you will not be able to engage in meaningful conversation. And remember, the longer it's been since we've visited the world beyond this campfire, the more likely it is that what we find will seem weird to us.
Question 3 : Will we have to give up our identity to serve others beyond this place?
Answer 3 : Here's where we really live. “What will I have to give up?” The answer is No, and Yes. No, having taken what you see seriously, you have to retain your own self-definition. This is crucial to successful campfire building. Your strength comes from a willingness to hear others into being while remaining rooted and centered in your own identity. This isn't a matter of “while in Rome, do as the Romans do.” This is not about going native. This is about being a good visitor ourselves while in the middle of the culture that surrounds us.
And Yes, you will have to give up something. We in the church will be set free from our isolation. We will no longer be the only ones in the conversation. Observation and analysis of the mission field alone build no campfires. Campfires are extraordinarily relational. Paul really went out on a limb to connect relationally to the Athenians. Some smirked. Some will. Others were touched and followed on to become involved in the Way that Paul was declaring. Some will do that also in this day and place. And in the addition of new folks to the Body of Christ, the Body was transformed. New vitality and new visions were added. Our invitation to new members needs to always include this message : “Come and be among us and in the process, transform this congregation.”
Building new campfires, starting new ministries will always change the “us” we understand ourselves to be.
Those are my 3 FAQs. And remember, the goal is not to get compliments for the design of your campfire. Building new ministries is not an exact science. The campfires you start to build will not look like the one we're used to. But that's okay, the goal is not to replicate one model of the Body of Christ over and over. The goal is to model a process of that equips others to build campfires, whatever the shape or style. The goal is deployment of qualified campfire builders who also understand that they are now enlisted in the work of teaching others.
You have heard me say, some of you, that the church is a group of leaders making leaders who make leaders. You could also say it's a group of teachers making teachers who make teachers. Or a group of healers making healers who make healers. That's my not so subtle way of saying that we have a job to do, and it's not optional. The health of a church is directly mirrored by its attentiveness to growing other ministries or even other churches.
Jesus did a lot of walking around, so did Paul. It was an essential ingredient in the core structure of the church that we sometimes have overlooked. For our metaphor, that means that building a new campfire means walking around. Going to the other campsite, and working with the campers at that site to help them build a fire...at their site. I think you can see that this has some serious implications for us.
Often this is taken as a kind of tampering with the institutional needs of the existing church. I want to address that and allay those fears.
Let me say that we build other campfires as a celebration of our our successful ignition of this campfire. It is because we are specially blessed and strong enough to help others that we have been called into this ministry. It is because God has graced us with the successful ministry in this place that we are so bold as to imagine more ministry, more opportunity to serve, more ways to worship and be in mission together.
The biggest hurdle that we face is that we have to act in faith. Starting new campfires is a work of multiplication not a work of division. We are call by God to risk success. When we hedge against division, it is a way of not engaging the real question. The real risk is risking success.
Our Greatest Fear
by Marianne Williamson, founder of the Peace Alliance, which sponsors a movement to form a United States Department of Peace.
It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other
people won't feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of
God that is within us.
It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.
Today I want to leave you with a practice of starting a new campfire. This is a little exercise that we can build on later. This is a walking around exercise.
The ushers are distributing something I call a Boomerang Postcard. You can take it home, put a stamp on it, give one to a friend. They mail it. For every one of these I rec'v back, a $5 contribution from the Pastor's discretionary fund will go to the FUMC Children's Fund which makes grants to the Ravenswood School district mostly for school for supplies and educational field trips. This is a practical exercise in walking around the “town-square.” It is the beginning of getting our legs under us in a renewed way to reach as far as God is calling us to reach.
And may the spark you ignite become the basis for a new campfire that we have not yet even imagines. Amen.
The Ways We Care - Part 3 - Service - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Read and listen to Pastor Michael's October 25, 2009 sermon.
This is the third sermon in their The Ways We Care series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
Download a copy of this sermon.
The Ways We Care –Week 3 – Service
The Rev. Michael Love
October 25, 2009
Acts 9:1-6
Saul was doing everything he'd been trained for. He was at the top of his game. He was protecting the faith from interlopers. This was good work, let's be clear... Except for one thing, Saul wasn't paying attention to the one who had called him into service in the first place. He was just going along, acting out of habit and training, and had stopped reflecting on what his job was. Saul, devout as he was, was not alert to God's call to service in those moments when he was dragging Jesus followers from their homes and hauling them off to the authorities.
Had he remained alert to God, that startling Damascus Road experience, that desert highway flash of light and thunderstruck blinding wouldn't have been so startling.
We know when we're out of line with God. And yet God still has ways to startle us when we drift. Ever been startled by God in this way? I have. I've been startled when, even though I was doing everything I'd trained for, I was struck to the ground by Jesus' alarming question:
“Michael. Michael. Why do you persecute me?”
When you hear THAT question, you can be sure that a Mid-Course Correction in your life has begun. Like Saul, when we lose focus on God, when we elevate other concerns and projects above God, then we have worked against the best interest of the Body of Christ.
Service is one of the gifts of membership that we promise. It is one of the harder promises of membership that we keep. I can pray, daily, work to give my tithe, commit to being present in the congregation; but fulfilling my service and being a witness to my faith...those two require that I act beyond my own interest. Those two require an added blessing of God's grace for the strength to commit and follow-through.
But when we are enabled by God to serve, there is no other experience of religious life quite like it. We have heard time and time again of the ones who serve in the world and comes back reporting all that THEY have gained. When we step out in faith as servant ministers, as volunteers, as healers; so often we return as the ones healed ourselves.
It's that we are completed when we serve. We are not whole when we serve only our interest or are ourselves served by others. Only in service do we become whole. That is a statement of our faith.
And so this morning we examine the third of our membership promises : Service. We acknowledge God's generosity to us and respond in faith. Service is one of the ways we are given to respond.
I need to add a supplemental reading today, from the prophet Isaiah, who knew something about being called into service by the Lord. In the beginning of the book of Isaiah, we hear 5 chapters of bad news, tough times, hard living and low expectations. It is a sobering introduction to Isaiah's call from God. It's as if the writer wants to make sure that we know in what social environment Isaiah is being called. And so then in Isaiah 6:8, he finally tells us, “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, [into service and witness in these extraordinary times] and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here I am; send me!”
Now, I have to hand to Isaiah. He answered more quickly than I could have. But then again, Isaiah knew that God doesn't suggest we serve. The tradition of faith understands service as an essential part of our relationship with God. Not optional. Indeed, the bible is filled with episodes of the prophets speaking on God's behalf, warning against empty observances, vacant service, listless attention, distant allegiance. The radical message of Jesus Christ follows in the same tradition. If you seek to follow me (Jesus say) then you will be last in line, dragging a cross, speaking out for justice and probably drawing heat for doing so.
That's enough to knock you off your horse. To come up to a full stop against that assertion of risk-taking service (to borrow a phrase from one of our UM bishops, Robert Schanese) is for most of us, like having God suddenly change our job description. We might be understood if we said, “Gee, this isn't what I thought I signed up for!”
What would you do if God changed your job description? How would you react. Because under all that dramatic language of “Saul, still breathing murderous threats.” Is the story of a mid-course correction. A job-description change. A mid-life crisis. That's what happened to Saul. That's happened to me. Has it ever happened to you?
Doing one thing with zeal and certainty, over-certainty really, and all the while being off-course? God can and does enter into our lives in moments of opportunity, maybe when our defenses are down, because life is handing us some challenges, or maybe when our defenses are down, because we think we've got it all under control. God is opportunistic, because God knows us well enough to understand that it often takes a blinding light and a voice like thunder from the sky to get our attention back to what's important.
This text is set in the drama of the life of the early church, when one of the challenges had a name, Saul. This text is the story of how God's grace can even overtake a cruel and fanatical mind and aim it in a new direction of service.
Are you open to God changing the work plan of your life? Are you open to God changing your job description? If you've ever changed jobs, switched majors in college, transferred to another post, moved, got laid off or went back to school to learn a new career, you've been through this already. You know what I'm asking of you. You know the gravity of this question.
This morning maybe you were thinking as you glanced over the bulletin and saw the title of the sermon, maybe you were thinking that I would be celebrating service. And I am. But you may not be as ready for me to speak about why a call to service is a call to some kind of change initiated by God. Why not just serve, Pastor? Why do I have to go through a job description change?
Let me answer that by asking another question. Is there anyone here who has not had to make a course correction at some point in their journey? Is this actually new to anyone? I suspect it's not. As for me, I wouldn't choose it. But you know, I've just had too much experience of God doing just that in my life. And I've had too much experience of seeing God doing just that in other's lives.
When God calls us to service there's usually some kind of change ahead for us as the ones who serve.
So, are we open to God changing the “job description” of our lives? If you can say, even hesitantly, “yes” then you have made the gift of service. Because when you say yes to service, you had said, “here I am Lord”. And God puts us to the field of work then that God has chosen.
I'd much rather pick my favorite service or helping-area and have God bless and equip me for that. That's mostly how we go about this service thing. And that's okay, but it's not quite the service we pledge to in our membership vows. The kind of service we pledge to, results in chances to serve that sometimes come as a surprise or an unexpected opportunity in an area that we could not ourselves imagine.
Ever have an odd job?
I found some odd jobs the other day. Listen to this.
How about being a Hair Simulation Supervisor?
Believe it or not, digital artists proficient in the art of creating 3-D hair are hot commodities in the world of animation. Just ask Mark Thomas Henne, the man responsible for every follicle flip in Pixar's CGI blockbuster, 'The Incredibles.' According to Nathan Pieratt, Director of the Online Animation Program at Westwood College, the industry has shifted from 2-D design to 3-D digital media, giving rise to highly specific jobs. So you could be a Hair Simulation Specialist.
Need something odder? How about being a Banana Gasser? - Less flatulent than it sounds, banana gassers finish off what Mother Nature started. To make sure the bottom of your banana split is tasty, bananas are shipped while they're still green to prevent bruising. Gassers for the JFC Fruit Company are in charge of moving new shipments into hermetically sealed chambers where the fruit is sprayed with an ethylene gas to catalyze ripening.
And my favorite: A Fire Scientist. That sounds cool before you even know what it is. A fire scientist specializes in experiments involving flame. They do everything from checking gas pipe leaks to blowing things up. Grads from the University of Maryland's University College online fire science program not only learn the science behind smithereens, but are also trained in emergency management and arson investigation. 1
There are many odd jobs out there. God calls us to odd jobs, too, sometimes.
I once found myself called to teach Sunday School in a downtown church in Los Angeles where Spanish was the first language of the congregation. I was in my first year of high school Spanish as I remember and it definitely was not enough Spanish to teach Sunday School. For some reason, I said, “Here I am.” And it was an amazing experience as the class took care of me and I worked diligently to tell la vida de Jesus en espanol.
Bottom Line:
God changed Saul's Job Description....God will change yours when your bring your life to the altar of service. It is not only that we are asked to submit to God's draft call, it's more than that. I believe that when we do something that God has called us to, rather than something that I have picked, that our own lives are also transformed.
There are 4 hymns in our hymnal that reflect Isaiah's anwser to God's call, “Here I am, send me.” One of them is hymn number 436, “The Voice of God is Calling.” The third verse makes this pledge:
“We heed, O Lord your summons, and answer: “Here are we! Send us upon YOUR errand, let us YOUR servant be.”
As we consider God's call to us in service, may these words be our own response as well.
1 from http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2009/08/16/odd-jobs-and-crazy-careers/
The Ways We Care - Part 2 - Presence - The Rev. Michael Love (Text and Audio)
Listen to and read Pastor Michael's October 18, 2009 sermon.
This is the second sermon in Pastor Michael and Pastor Laurie's The Ways We Care series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
Download a copy of this sermon.
The Ways We Care –Week 2 – Presence
The Rev. Michael Love
October 18, 2009
Acts 2:1-13
Video : Jesse's Back (from “Step Into Liquid”, a film by Dana Brown)
The gravity of presence. You know that Jesse could have just gone home after his accident and not come back. But he showed up. His true love of the sport and his friendships drew him back. Jesse came back to the surf out of love. Now, you could argue that he can't surf anymore, just kind of scoots along on the knee-high breaks. But what's amazing is the effect he has had on his circle of friends. How he has inspired and lifted them up, even though they're the ones doing all the lifting. Jesse's presence sits large in the lives of those who know him.
Reminds me of the story of the 4 friends who lowered their paralyzed friend through the roof of the house where Jesus was teaching. Lowered him down on a bed so that Jesus could take a look and see what could be done. Jesus took one look at the man, and at his friends, and at the length to which they had gone to get in. Jesus said, You've shown your faith. Well done. Your friends “showed up”, you “showed up.” You've achieved a healing.
Presence matters : Ever wonder if your presence matters? If people would notice if you were there or not? I want to assure you that your presence is highly significant, I'd even say it is a gift from God.
It was Woody Allen who said that "90% of life is just showing up."
You can't tell the parents of Falcon Heene, the 6 year old boy from Ft. Collins, Colorado, that presence doesn't matter. You can bet that whether Falcon was, or was not, present in that helium balloon accidentally loosed over Colorado, was very important to his parents and friends. You are important, don't forget to "show up."
“90% of life is just showing up.” Putting the effort to be present. It matters. Being present changes everything. For example: This sanctuary : empty = beautiful, colorful, resonant, inspiring. This sanctuary : filled = wow!
Your presence matters. When we are here, songs are full and fellowship is a work spread among many caring hands. We gather to build one another up in Christ. To hear one another as carefully as we can and to pray together for direction, strength and even healing.
Presence matters.
Our presence is a response to the Generosity of God that we have experienced. We show up to say thanks and to pray we might be in some small portion a reflection of that Generosity ourselves. There's a lot at stake, when you decide to “show up.”
Let me ask this then : What's it take to “be the church”? I believe presence is a key ingredient to thriving in the church and in the rest of our daily living.
Let's see how the church did it in the Acts of the Apostles. They didn't have the option to pick and choose who would put the thing together. Otherwise they might have assembled a highly skilled and qualified team of experts. As it was they went with who showed up.
Matthew : Tax collector (ordinary guy)
Mary, Martha, Salome, Mary Magdalene (bold, outspoken, boundary breakers)
John and James (the sons of thuner Jesus called them because they were always at each others' neck)
Peter (the loudmouth)
Stephen and Phillip (who let the Greeks in?)
Not exactly a likely bunch of candidates for the top-flight Team Jesus.
However, they did one thing, relentlessly. They showed up. The Lord had told them to gather in his name and share a meal, “in remembrance of me.” And that they did every first day of the week. And the Lord told them to wait, and that they did also, for 50 days. Think of it, who in this day would show up here, right here, for the next 50 days, not knowing if the wait would be 50 or 100 or 150 days, or more? And not knowing exactly what had been promised?
They showed up. And they didn't worry over Jesus' absence, they went about the work of being present to one another. Of remembering Jesus in song and prayer and the breaking of the bread.
Not exactly the most compelling business plan., I'll admit. Not exactly the most exciting way they could have spent their time, either. But they did it. And because of that relentless waiting, the Lord fulfilled a promise of Holy Spirit proportion.
There is no doubt in my mind that this is a template of what happened again and again and again around the Mediterranean Sea spreading the gospel and the church in an unprecedented manner. And there is no doubt in my mind that this template has continued to be the most significant cause of the growth and sustenance of the church for 2000 years.
Presence matters. Showing up makes a difference. Can you imagine what would have happened if every other person or even every third person had woke up on the morning of August 28, 1963 and said, I'm not going down to the mall at the Washington monument in Washington, DC to hear what that guy Martin Luther King had to say. Think I'll go shopping, instead. Presence matters in our tradition because we profess the astonishing claim that where ever 2 or more followers of Jesus are gathered in his name, Jesus himself is there among us. Do not fail to gather together Hebrews 10:25 tells us. (Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.)
Now....We live in times when gathering is not an innate instinct. We don't seem to “clump together” naturally into groups. Sometimes that feels like a development of this age, but I think it is nothing new. There have always been reasons and causes keeping humankind separated into small batches. The gathering is a counter-intuitive choice we make. We gather in places like this. We gather at school events. We even gather now in communities of on-line connected groups. That seems to some to be more separateness, but to a new generation that has grown up with the tools of cyberspace, it is a gathering none the less.
It's an act of faith when we can choose to gather. To be present to one another. And, I believe that it is a gift of God when we choose to do so.
This sounds tough, doesn't it? But I want to re-share something that Pastor Laurie mentioned last week that helped me see the project as more do-able. “Breathe,” she said. “Don't push. Just breathe.” This came from her parable of child-birth. What a great insight for living! It acknowledges that we have raised the bar anytime we are speaking of being people of faith AND it also lays claim that we have the resource to accomplish and succeed.
The life of a disciple IS a life of heightened expectations. Remember the story : they were told to wait, and had done so, for 50 days, when this amazing episode of the Holy Spirit occurred. I can imagine that they had to do some sitting and breathing to get through that time together. I'm sure that some of the disciples had a better idea. That some got antsy and wanted to re-organize the whole thing. So I believe they had to breathe in and breathe out. And trust God and one another. And look what happened! The church was born.
See what can happen when you just show up!?
It is the generosity of God, a promise delivered on, modeled for us, so that we might have an idea of what generosity looks like. That's why it is one of our touchstones of membership—the gift of your presence—because how you show up matters. Here and in the rest of your living. God invites each of us to a heightened awareness of the impact we make in the world by the fact of our being. I invite you to pray about and celebrate the ways that we may be more intentional about our participation in the life of this church and in all the other parts that make up our total experience of living.
I invite you to remember that in the eyes of God, you are important. You are a significant fact in the world. You have an impact, how you choose to use that impact is up to you. Don't forget to "show up."
Sermon Series - The Ways We Care - Revs. Michael Love and Laurie McHugh
The Rev. Michael Love and the Rev. Laurie McHugh preached the sermon series, The One Anothers, over five Sundays beginning on October 17, 2009.
Read and listen to the four sermons in the series:
October 11, 2009 - Witness - The Rev. Laurie McHugh
October 18, 2009 - Presence - The Rev. Michael Love
October 25, 2009 - Service - The Rev. Michael Love
November 8, 2009 - Gifts - The Rev. Laurie McHugh
Jesus and Good Health - Part 1 - Personal Responsibility - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Listen to Michael's September 20, 2009 sermon.
The reading was Luke 9:18-27.
Before the sermon we heard a video of First Church members answering the question "Who do you say Jesus is?". During the sermon Pastor Michael showed us a clip from the movie Wall-E.
Download a .pdf of Pastor Michael's preaching notes for this sermon.
This is the first sermon in his Jesus and Good Health series. Listen to the other sermon in this series.
Sermon Series - Jesus and Good Health - The Rev. Michael Love
The Revs. Michael Love and Laurie McHugh preached the sermon series, Jesus and Good Health, over two Sundays beginning on September 20, 2009.
Read and listen to the two sermons in the series:
September 20, 2009 - Personal Responsibility - The Rev. Michael Love
September 27, 2009 - Resolving Conflict - The Rev. Michael Love
The One Anothers - Part 4 - Live in Harmony - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Listen to and read the Rev. Michael Love's September 6, 2009 sermon.
The reading was Romans 12:9-18.
The book mentioned in the sermon is The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible 
This is the fourth and last sermon in Pastor Michael's The One Anothers series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
Download a copy of this sermon.
The One Anothers –Week 4 – Live in Harmony
The Rev. Michael Love
September 6, 2009
Romans 12:9-18
Here we are in week 4 of the One Anothers, a series of sermons meant more to get you thinking than to answer any questions. And the topic is : the way in which the Body of Christ, the church, is supposed to behave toward and treat one another. Those are the higher goals of Christian community, but first we have get past the rushing free-fall of everything else. How can we find the deeper life, the connected community life, when we're so busy trying not to plummet to our destruction?
I'll bet the disciples felt that way and pretty often.
When worship ends and the rest of your week gets under way, then what? When Jesus steps away and raw life rushes in, what happens? What's that like when we lose sight of the Lord? For the disciples it was always a little dicey.
When Jesus stepped away, they forgot how to pray. They couldn't do healings right. They confused the kingdom of God (a place of equity) with the Roman Legion (a place of rank and power). They got hungry and couldn't find the bread of life. They were even frightened by the weather. And the thing is, Jesus continually came back. Throughout the narratives of the Gospel, Jesus returns to rescue, to bless, to teach and nurture them. Paul, seeing the same struggle in the infant churches, responds, in part, with today's text. He responds by numbering 24 positive marks of the congregations. Paul wants to give them a blessing of confidence, not a spirit of fear. And that is what we are aiming at today.
As we consider the instruction to Live in Harmony with One Another, let's look at this through the lens of the Get Smart film clip we just saw. Did you notice the 3 very strong statements in that short interaction?
“I'll be right back”(God's promise)
“Where could you possibly be going” (What happens when God steps away)
AND “Never do that again” (What we learn when God returns, as God always does)
“I'LL BE RIGHT BACK”
In this slice of scripture, Paul notes 24 positive qualities of Christian community. I don't think we celebrate those enough. We get lured into fixating on all the times we don't make it. We all too often live in that split second of fear when God says, you can do this, I'll be right back, keep moving forward. And so sometimes we spend a lot of time living in regret, instead of in celebration. In the story of the Gospel and in the larger narrative of our faith, Jesus returns again and again to equip us for something more than that. I'll bet you've often heard the phrase, “Jesus saves.” And that is certainly true for me. But I believe with the same intensity that it is also deeply true that “Jesus Equips.” When the disciples can't pray, Jesus teaches the Lord's Prayer and models a methodical practiced life of spirituality. When the disciples get confused about power and rank, he shares parables of God's justice describing equity and acceptance that is not based on social status. When the disciples buckle to the pressures of a fear-filled world of materialistic competition, Jesus points to qualities of living that are eternal and un-limited. Jesus returns throughout the story to model and equip. And Jesus works in us to this day for the same purpose, commissioning us to model Christian community and equip one another.
WELCOME PROJECT
Now, our response when God says, “I'll be right back” is usually “WHERE COULD YOU POSSIBLY BE GOING!”
In spite of ourselves, we seek to be in charge of God. And because this is an absurd project, we do the next best thing, we worry. Instead of carrying on in the ways we have been taught, we wander about and even invent new ways to follow God. We construct some pretty silly ways to follow God as a kind of spiritual filler.
The journalist A. J. Jacobs makes light fun of this impulse. In his book, “The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
This is important to mention as we try to internalize and understand the scriptural lessons I've called the One Anothers. The One Anothers aren't about the work of filling a vacuum where God should be standing. They aren't a naďve attempt to live like Jesus & his disciples did. We're not trying to find a way to walk everywhere instead of using bicycles or buses or cars. We're not trying to learn how to avoid refrigeration by eating only salted and dried foods. The behaviors we seek to modify are the ones related to our interpersonal relations. We don't seek the appearance of religiosity, we seek the substance of justice and equity, charity and friendship between us.
We have spent a time at the One Anothers. A short time. I have only lightly touched on them. And we have looked at them in a context, the times in which we live. We are situated in a time beset by the fear that if we took all this to heart, if we acted upon the One Anothers, we would be weird. If we lived in a structured and sacred way, that we might veer off into crazy fanaticism. Indeed the American landscape, our very culture, encourages that caution. For the religious life in general competes with parts of life in the American landscape. Despite arguments to the contrary, this is hardly a Christian nation and hardly a faithful nation on many accounts. The American landscape is a challenge that excels in goading us away from any other belief system besides some occasional and changeable false gods of consumerism. Satisfaction through shopping and immortality through medicine are 2 such false gods that come to mind. There are other false gods that you might recognize and can name as you them pass by each day.
So, it's frankly risky and adventurous business to think we can live in harmony. It's risky business when make a declaration of care for One Another in a congregation. We risk sounding insular and exclusionary. And it's good to approach this with introspection and prayer.
I believe however, that we can find our balance there, in spite of the shrill critiques of a cynical society. A bigger obstacle, perhaps, is the quaintness of the One Anothers. Sure they are tender, but are they believable? And if believable, then how does one negotiate them? How does one lose one's life to gain the kingdom and remain authentic, not merely another cartoon character of religious belief on the landscape? How does one matter, how does one remain authentic and relevant?
I think a part of the answer comes in the form of celebration. Just as Paul sought to sow the seeds of celebration in his only partial list of 24 qualities of church life, we might celebrate what is happening right and where we are connecting. Sometimes the only thing needed to banish darkness is one small light.
At the the recent Multifaith event at the Cubberly Community Center on August 31 I learned something about this. This was an important event for many reasons. It was a community-wide interfaith conversation about ways that we can gather together in support of our kids who daily negotiate some of these same questions of caring and acting in faith. A highlight for me were the thoughtful remarks of Rabbi Janet Marder of Congregation Beth Am, Los Altos Hills. She spoke of Psalm 23 as a psalm we mostly hear at funerals. She thought that was too bad that Psalm 23 had fallen into that box. She reminded us that, although it is clearly a Psalm of comfort, it is also Psalm of life. It is a Psalm that promises God's ever-presence. It is a Psalm that reminds us of feasting in the very midst of strife. It assures and calls on the power of life in the face of death itself. To mourn loss is important human work and it is best done in a community that can also celebrate life with depth and passion. We need to be reminded from time to time that God is around. Especially when the harmony of life is rattled.
Still when we've been convinced of God's return, don't we always want to say to God: “DON'T EVER DO THAT AGAIN!”
As if we can't still believe that God always returns from an absence, a time away. And as if we've forgotten the ways that we have made it, while God stood not at all as far away as we thought, and while we walked on our own for a little, trying out the steps that God taught.
A commentator (Kean Salzer) made this kind of counter-intuitive observation, that spiritual maturity requires that we go it alone sometimes. To make his point, he shares a story about how eaglets learn to fly. The adult eagles, the parents do an astounding thing...when it's time to learn to fly, they carry the eaglets up high...and drop them. It is the way, he says, “to move from Nestling, crying for someone to come and feed you, to an Active Flyer.”
To learn to live in harmony, to live into the One Anothers, requires that we are Active Flyers. This is the way that that we become, in Slazer's words, “the ones who ride the wind and can feed ourselves and others, preserving the future of eagles.”
Bottom Line : Is God Trustworthy?
We have been lofted high by our hopes and needs in faith. That is how God calls to our souls to get the whole thing started. An inner call, an inner longing, an inner need. It's a risky place to be, to say, out loud to yourself, “I'm going to try God. I'm going to honestly engage Jesus. I'll be vulnerable to the Holy Spirit. And then I'll see what happens.” We want to know the outcome first. We all start as Nestlings, getting fed, not too much risk. Can we let go and cast ourselves on those 24 promises of safety in the Body of Christ that Paul lists? Or to ask it more bluntly : Is God trustworthy?
Psalm 9 says this, “You Lord have never foresaken those who seek you.” Psalm 18 says, “Everyone who runs toward God, makes it.”
The ability to live into the One Anothers is not an ability based upon logic or will-power, it is the ability to lean on the trustworthiness of God. And we can expect to fulfill God's call in our lives to observe the covenant, the promise to live together under these behavioral rules, only by that grace and strength. It is the work of the church, always has been.
“I'll be right back” - This is the promise of God. You are never that far away from God's care. “Where Could You Possibly Be Going!” & “Never Do That Again.” Are just about the most dramatic admissions of our need as anything else we could say. We are bonded in Christian community because we are bonded to God. And it is this bond that makes us fit to engage our world in healing ways.
We conclude this examination of the One Anothers with another significant admission. It is one made in some way or another by everyone who is a follower of Jesus. It is our individual understanding of the identity of Jesus Christ. The question comes from the NT : Who do you say that Jesus is? The answer to that is foundational. Does Jesus have credibility to instruct us in the ways we live together in this community and thus in the larger world we inhabit? I invite you to continue to study and pray about the instructions to the church found in the One Anothers. And may the grace of God give us insight and daring so that we might continue to live into the Welcome Project as our way to focus this in our local experience.
As I prepare to share worship next Saturday at our District Quarterly Conference, this topic is very much on my mind. The question in fact I am charged to share is : Who do you say that Jesus is? I want to invite you to help me answer that question. On the plaza during our time of fellowship, I will be standing by with a video camera recording brief answers to that question as you might feel called to share them. They will be an important part of encouraging others at the conference to enter into dialog about the identity of the one who says to us, Love one another. Others will know that you are my disciples if you love one another.
The One Anothers - Part 3 - Peace vs. Truce - The Rev. Michael Love (Audio)
Listen to Michael's August 30, 2009 sermon.
The reading was Mark 9:42-50.
This is the third sermon in his The One Anothers series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
Download an outline/study guide to this sermon.
In the sermon Pastor Michael mentions The One Anothers list. Download a .pdf of this list.
Study Outline
The One Anothers –Week 3 – Truce vs. Peace
The Rev. Michael Love
August 30, 2009
Mark 9:42-50
Today's Reading is by Rev. Laurie McHugh
The Video Clip is from the animated feature “9” with the tag line, “We're going to need a map.” Clip used by permission of WingClips
INTRO & VIDEO TRANSITION
The thing about being the Body of Christ is, we're going to need a map. The thing about these One Anothers is, they are the map. You may be asking yourself, “Come on, how hard can it be?” Seriously, we need a map to be friends?? To be peaceful??
How hard can it be to be friends?
A trail of crumbs leads to this instruction by Jesus to “have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another.” (v 50)
Three texts :
After returning from retreat with John, James and Peter
Mark 9:16 “What are you arguing about?” (Healing techniques, which weren't working)
Stopping for a break on the road
Mark 9:33 “What were you arguing about?” (Out there on the road) (Which one's the greatest)
Mark 9:43-47 This is the teaching that Jesus gives after seeing the disciples arguing at every turn. It's a story, a parable, about an argument WITHIN (if you hand, or foot, or eye cause you to stumble)
This is an argument, an unrest within the Body.
The story reminds us that it's hard to really be friends...that we argue with one another when we are taught to be at peace with one another.
HOW IMPORTANT THEN IS IT TO BE FRIENDS?
TRANSTITION TO TEXT : How important is it to stop quibbling, to be friends? Jesus describes as casting obstacles in the way of faith. Sounds important.
TEXT : “It's better to enter life [maimed] than to be whole and be tossed into hell, where their worm never dies and the fire is never quenched.” (V 47-48)
Quaint little verse. Only vaguely scary to us now. As it might have been to those hearing it, IF that's what Jesus said. Too bad that we have translated it so poorly.
What Jesus said, as recorded in the Greek, is “better to be maimed than to be tossed into Gehenna.” Gehenna is the Greek form of the Hebrew ge himmon, or Ben-hin nom, or the Valley of Hinnom.
And the Valley of Hinnom was a real place. You could see it yourself in those days, if you just looked over the southern wall of Jerusalem.
In OT times, it was where human sacrifice to the pagan god Molech happened. King Josiah, (ruled ca. from 640 to 610 BCE) of whom it was said, “Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; nor did any like him arise after him. (2 Kings 23:25. So Josiah, a reformer, put an end to the practice of human sacrifice. (2 Kings 23:10)
The One Anothers - Part 2 - Forgive One Another - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Listen to and read Michael's August 23, 2009 sermon.
This is the second sermon in his The One Anothers series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
Download a .pdf of this sermon.
The book mentioned in the sermon is Getting Rid of the Gorilla: Confessions on the Struggle to Forgive
The One Anothers - Forgive One Another
The Rev. Michael Love
August 23, 2009
There is a certain something that we do as a church community, a kind of holy atmosphere we try to create and preserve. Sometimes we fall short of the goal, because we are not in fact experts. And that's not the best outcome, but we need to acknowledge that it happens. And I believe we need to begin by letting ourselves off the hook, just a little. We don't know it all. We aren't perfect. And we don't always do the right thing. In fact, “the certain something” we do as the community of the church, when we are doing it even a bit right should feel like a work in progress, an intentional something to which we have to actually apply ourselves.
You might say being church feels like spiritual calisthenics, a kind of 24 hour fitness club for the soul. And I know how that works; I was a member of a gym for 2 years. I didn't get full value out of that membership. I know, you see, how easy it is at the beginning to go regularly and do the circuit and work with a trainer. And I also know that it gets to be more and more of a matter of making a real lifestyle change so that the gym doesn't just fit into schedule, but is a part of my life.
The spiritual workout of forgiveness is no different. It takes practice. We do not come to it naturally. What we come to naturally is righteous indignation and resentment and even vengeance. When Paul says to the Ephesians, “you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds,” this is what he is speaking about. Paul is admitting that sometimes life brings us to anger more readily than to joy. And that sometimes it brings us to thoughts of getting even more often than getting it right.
Embedded in the verses today, Paul introduces one of his corner-stones of faith. An astonishing conclusion based on his grasp of the Gospel message. In a little verse near the middle he says, “We are members of one another.” And Paul means united, welded together in faith, no part more distinguished than any other. In Paul's eyes, we can not conceive of withholding forgiveness from one another any more than we could say to our knee, you won't get the nourishment from this meal I am taking. In the Body of Christ, if one is nourished, all are nourished. And if one is wounded, all are wounded, in the economy of Jesus Christ. When the Body of Christ can not exercise forgiveness within itself, it's like a man walking down the street hitting himself on the foot with a hammer, because he doesn't like the way his shoes fit.
As are each of the One Anothers we've received from Jesus and Paul, the admonition to forgive one another is an imperative. For in the life of the church, we are in close spiritual proximity. Although we would like to think that in the church we won't ever step on any toes, in practical experience, we will. We do step on each others toes from time to time. It's what we do next that is distinctive of a community of Jesus followers. The work of forgiveness is a highly visible mark of the church.
Media and Music break : Rev. Laurie McHugh, The Welcome Project
Here's how it's done. Every member of the body of Christ must exercise, spiritually exercise a soul muscle that may be present or not. May be strong or atrophied. But this muscle of forgiveness must be exercised. It is a matter of our personal survival. And that may sound odd, because often we think of the forgiveness as a kind of gift we bestow on someone else. But the point Jesus and Paul make is that forgiveness is fundamentally an antidote to rage and sin which we give to ourselves. It may begin as a response to an insult against you, but it ends as a way to release yourself from the long-term damage and power of the insult. We forgive, not so the other feels good about themselves, but so that we may diffuse the toxicity of resentment. Restitution and reconciliation are all parts of a whole and healing repair to the damage, but forgiveness is pre-eminently the power that lets go of power, the glue that holds the whole thing together.
Brian Jones in his book “Getting Rid of the Gorilla: Confessions on the Struggle to Forgive
In the office the other day, the conversation was grandchildren. And one us spoke of being met at the door by a grandchild who excitedly knocked on the door to grandmas house. When grandma came to the door, he blurted out , “Hi grandma! I am so happy. Today is a great day!” And after a beat, “Grandma, are you happy too?” This is a grandkid who knows he is loved and that knowledge just pours from his heart and he loves everything and everybody.
And we reflected, Don't we all pray we could be like that!? Knowing we are loved and because of that ability to totally let loose and give love back.
As adults, life is a bit more complex and the ability to be free to love is all wrapped up in the ability to forgive.
This ebb and flow of positive regard, of grace and of love is instrumental to our understanding of today's bit of the One Anothers; the call on each of us to forgiveness. There is a reciprocity, a give and take, a mutuality in all that Jesus and Paul had to say about this.
Jesus saw forgiveness as so key to clearing up the pathways to love that he constructed teaching cycles around this relationship. In Matthew, Jesus taught his disciples the Lord's Prayer including the part about “forgive us our trespasses as we have also forgiven those who trespass against us.” Right after that he reinforces the linkage saying, “If you forgive others their trespasses, the Lord will forgive you.” To seal the lesson he states the opposite, “If you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven.”
In an age of resentment over the many trespasses experienced by his audiences, this was a major challenge. What do you mean, if someone strikes me on the cheek, I'm to turn the other?!!!
Paul, speaking to the Ephesians, who are going through this also, says, “I insist” this stuff can be done. Don't live in futility. Don't idolize your weaknesses, put them away in faith and clothe yourselves in the new creation that you have become in Christ Jesus. That other stuff is the old practice, we have been called to develop a new practice, a new habit, that is founded on God's love, not on the futility of our human condition.
Last century, my favorite amateur theologian-team of Lennon and McCartney said, “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” And I think they had it half right. Because I believe that, in the end, we all need to receive unconditional love first in order to make us strong enough, secure enough to love freely ourselves. I believe this because it rings truer to the gospel message upon which I was raised, that the Love of God flows first freely to us in Jesus Christ and that critical relationship frees us and empowers us to give love. And so, in the end, seeing the source of the love as God rather than myself, is a critical difference between Paul of Tarsus and Paul of Liverpool.
You see it all depends on where we start, on where our first principles lie. It's a lot easier to speak of forgiveness and love when we begin with the candid observation that we gather in our need of God's love to get the whole thing started.
So, please remember, you don't need to be an expert, but you are given abilities and strengths by a God who loves you so that you can do something. Henry David Thoreau said, “One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something."
And remember the something you do depends an awful lot on how you are equipped. If you are equipped in fear and doubt, that's going to determine some outcomes, so be equipped by the abundance of God's love instead.
Next week we will speak a bit about the difference between Truce and authentic Peace within the Body of Christ.
The One Anothers - Part 1 - Sing to One Another - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Listen to and read Michael's August 16, 2009 sermon.
This is the first sermon in his The One Anothers series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
Download a pdf of this sermon.
In the sermon Pastor Michael mentions The One Anothers list. Download a .pdf of this list.
The One Anothers - Sing to One Another
The Rev. Michael Love
August 16, 2009
Were it only so easy...that we could just “order up” a faith to suit us at the drive through window of our local church franchise. But we know better than that. We expect more of faith, that it be deeper and more compelling and therefore require more of us. Still, we might cringe a little when we see those two young faith seekers in the drive-through lane of a make believe “have it your way” church. Maybe because we ourselves struggle from time to time to know what exactly constitutes a living faith that is solid, and relevant, and authentic.
Today we begin a new series I'm calling the One Anothers. And while looking at the lessons that I have come to know as those which illustrate the living practices of the church, I acknowledging that struggle. I acknowledge that God's strength and grace is always needed to accomplish what I am going to be suggesting over the next 4 weeks.
A part of what I will be suggesting is that there is a big challenge in the perennial disconnect between what we say we believe and how we act in the church. Isn't that always a challenge in the life of the church? Can we admit this safely here this morning? That the high hopes, the good intentions often do in fact pave the way to a kind of confusion and suffering, because we don't always know how to live those hopes out with consistency, with integrity and in love.
Lucky for us that we 21st century followers of Jesus are not the first to have this dilemma before us. It seems that from the start, the church has needed advice on this tough topic. Also lucky for us, Jesus and Paul both are recorded sharing a fair amount of specific advice related to this very thing.
Those two lads in the convertible didn't really need a laundry list of beliefs as much as they needed a to-do list, a list of faithful behaviors that would craft their lives as followers of Jesus. They needed an agreement between themselves and God on how they were going to live and behave.
One reason it's not so easy to outline faith as a laundry list is that faith, contrary to popular rumors, is not so much a stack of beliefs as we might think it is. Oh, we hold some bedrock and uniting beliefs, but I am convinced they grew up around a church that was living, acting out a relational covenant with God and one another. The bible say “believe in” only a few times and mostly in the NT that is said this way, “Believe in Jesus.” Now, how we believe in Jesus is described in a wonderful diversity of ways. What's much more common, however, and much more specific, in descriptions of faith are lists of preferable behaviors. Behaviors like “Take care of the widows and orphans.” “Welcome the stranger.” “Feed my sheep.” “Teach the nations,” and so forth.
Belief as it is biblically illustrated is essentially a bunch of behaviors. Even the Ten Commandments are action oriented. Not “what to believe,” but “how to behave.” Keep no other gods, make no idols, do not misuse the name of God, rest on the Sabbath, honor your parents, do not kill, remain faithful to your partner, don't steal, don't bear false witness against your neighbor, don't lust after the possessions of others. All of these are actions.
In the course of this series, we will look at some of the behaviors, the actions that Jesus and Paul put forth as markers of the church. You want to know what a church looks like? What they believe? Look to their actions. Tertullian, an early Christian author and theologian noted in his 2nd century defense of Christians how Christian behavior attracted pagan notice: "What marks us,” he said, “in the eyes of our enemies is our loving kindness. 'Only look,' they say, 'look how they love one another'" (Apology 39).
[Welcome : Song and visuals by Pastor Laurie]
You have before you an incomplete list of “The One Anothers.” The One Anothers, is a list I owe to the insights of my pastoral coach, Rev. Dr. Bill Tenney-Brittain. This list is itself a partial index of the coaching advice that Jesus and then Paul gave to the early churches spread throughout the ancient near east as they grew and encountered successes and stumbling blocks. As I note on the top of that list you have before you, there are many lists of behaviors of the ways that we are called to treat the world in general. This is not that list. This is a list that in every occasion is the response to some event in the life of a local body of Christ, from the days of bands of followers during Jesus' life and ministry, to the spirit empowered church that rose after Jesus resurrection.
The list you have before you is how WE have been instructed to treat one another. And I am inviting us to be in a journey that reflects upon this list in a soul-searching fashion. It will require great prayer to see ourselves through the lens of the One Anothers. For it is easy to see how others may need to focus on them, harder to see ourselves that way. Anne Lamott, author of “Grace (Eventually),” notices rightly I think that “God can't clean the house with you in it.” We need to pray for the ability to get just enough outside of ourselves to see ourselves in a new light. Prayer and study of these “One Anothers” that you have in your hand, will be instrumental to the journey I will endeavor to guide us on.
You must know that I see this not as optional but essential. This work is essential so that we may be the very best church we can be, the church that God is calling us to be. An ongoing self-reflectivity is critical and healthy in this work. The church can well afford to escape some of the abiding myths about life in the church. When I was a kid, the myth, a joke really, made about the UMC was that we believed that all you needed to get into heaven is a covered dish. Some of the myths aren't as light-hearted as that. Some of the myths about the church are based in a bit of truth (as most myths are) and don't always shine a good light on us. Last week I suggested an example in the area of theology : that the core image of Eternal Living had become calcified into a stale and strange myth. And that we are receiving in this time an opportunity to re-own and re-live that core concept in a viable and relevant way. It is, I intend, a slippery slope between that willingness to re-investigate our faith and a willingness to re-investigate in safety and community, our behaviors as Christians. We owe this to ourselves and to our God. We owe this to the world we seek to reach which looks to us for a more excellent way of living; a way that is welcoming and healing and has integrity.
Only the church can re-examine the myths of Christian behavior, many of which we have come to believe ourselves. They are often comprised of messaging that we've received or carried in from a wounded world. The world is puzzled by this, because the world doesn't want us to be dysfuncational like the world. Indeed the world desperately needs us to own our traditional role as the antidote to the poisons people take on while struggling in the world. The last thing the world wants is for us to emulate the soul sickness of the world.
And for that reason, to promote a healing and refreshing image of the church to the world, for that reason I begin this series with a healing image. Today I cast the image that may be the most refreshing immediate behavior that we share in common with the early church. The most striking to me as a specific behavior that Jesus and Paul commission us to : the practice of worshiping together in spirit, truth and joy, corporately celebrating and declaring our faith in action. The lesson in Ephesians shares that image as one in which we sing to one another as an act of faith. We are told elsewhere in scripture that the disciples gathered on the first day of the week, broke bread with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day, the Lord added to their numbers those who were being saved. (Acts 2)
As we move through this sermon series and build a congregational expression of what the One Anothers look like in this place, I invite you to enter into a time of guided self-reflection. Can the words of the letter to the Ephesians guide your behavior? “Be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts.”
Next week, August 23, we will see if we can answer the question: What is the covenantal community? In a sermon entitled : Forgive One Another. On August 30, we will look at the difference be Peace and merely Truce and what that means about Authentic Community. Then on Sept 6, we will explore specific and practical Steps a church may take to Becoming a Covenantal Community, as we conclude the series in a sermon entitled : Live in Harmony.
I hope that you will follow along and give your prayers to this topic in the days and weeks ahead.
Sermon Series: The One Anothers - The Rev. Michael Love
The Rev. Michael Love preached the sermon series, The One Anothers, over four Sundays beginning on August 16, 2009.
Read and listen to the four sermons in the series:
August 16, 2009 - Sing to One Another - The Rev. Michael Love
August 23, 2009 - Forgive One Another - The Rev. Michael Love
August 30, 2009 - Peace vs. Truce - The Rev. Michael Love
September 6, 2009 - Live in Harmony - The Rev. Michael Love
In this series Pastor Michael mentions The One Anothers list. Download a .pdf of this list.
The Purposes of Jesus - Purpose 5 -That All Shall Make It - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Listen to and read Michael's August 9, 2009 sermon.
Todays reading: Mark 10:17-31.
This is the last sermon in his The Purposes of Jesus series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
Download a .pdf of this sermon.
The Purposes of Jesus - That All Shall Make It
The Rev. Michael Love
August 9, 2009
Today is the final morning in our 5 part series on the Purposes of Jesus, although I hope that it isn't the last time you ponder the idea that Jesus was driven in ministry by very specific goals and visions. That he had a purpose and that it is all wrapped up in our lives. That the purposes of Jesus have something vital to offer us.
Today we'll speak about: The Purpose of Jesus : That All Shall Make It. It's going to be a summing up, really, because all of the purposes of Jesus, in the vernacular of the biblical texts, are united in an overarching purpose, pointed to in the scripture today. That overarching purpose is that All Should Make It. That all should find God. And, in the language of the lesson from Mark, that all shall come to know eternal life. That everyone makes it to the goal of eternal life.
Now this is a very problematic goal because frankly the very idea of eternal life gets a bad rap these days. Eternal Life is usually associated with a line of religious thinking that fewer and fewer people can grasp. And so, we make the mistake of throwing out what Jesus said about eternal life before we take the time to explore it faithfully and deeply.
So I have to start there. What is eternal life? The bible gives plenty of imagery. Eternal life is life spent constantly in God's presence. Eternal life is spent in a community of care and growth. Eternal life is signaled by the experience of the Lion laying down with the lamb, in other words, the meek and the strong living in fairness, safety, and peace. Eternal living is an experience of God's economy of justice presiding over us in grace and love. These are the marks of eternal living and mostly we think of them as quaint biblical pictures of primitive theologies by primitive people. We almost dare not image them as sophisticated and viable world views that reconcile our sinful nature to a better way of living. As God inspired and excellent ideas that confront us with our human struggle with war and greed and vice and hunger.... But the ace in the hole for me is that Eternal Live involves, most importantly of all, something that you can do and experience now. The challenge to the rich young man was, in my estimation, that Jesus gave him something immediate and presently possible to do. Eternal life under those terms was then and there and active. Eternal life is not an endless world cruise with God Almighty after you've consummated a righteous life here below. Eternal living is a lifestyle that Jesus described which begins in any moment we surrender to God and then reaches out beyond time.
With that maybe different picture in mind, I believe the idea, the concept, the theology of eternal life is a key element of understanding the Purposes of Jesus in our lives today.
No wonder the rich young man was so stunned. This is a bigger deal than he may have imaged. Coming in with an opinion that eternal life might be something that he could “inherit” (his words) like a family title or office, he was stunned by the answer. Jesus did what Jesus always does, offers the blessing in a way that challenges and changes and renews us to our very soul. What Jesus had to offer was more than a t-shirt and a poster from some kind of “Salvation Lolapalooza.”
And so, I hope that you may have detected in the sermon series a kind of stealth sub-text. Every purpose of Jesus includes within it a significant challenge and opportunity for altering the way that we live. A chance for renewal. A challenge to change our behaviors in ways that significantly align us with God's purpose for our lives.
For example, in week one I said that the gift of God's total and unconditional acceptance is also an equipping tool. A tool that you and I are sent to use in the world offering that same kind of radical hospitality. And I said that the two are inexorably tied together. Identical twins in the life of a disciple of Jesus. The work we do receiving and reconciling and healing the diversity of the world..that work I declare as impossible until we have experienced the complete and radical love of God ourselves. In short, we can't offer what we don't first experience. eg. Tell me about a chocolate cake, if you haven't tasted one.
In week two I cast a picture of God's transforming power in our lives, but then asked you to see that it's not something done to us, without our consent, it's a change that we may embrace or hold off. The whole idea of the transforming power of God is often seen as an external machine in the world. But the idea of my involvement, my surrender to God's motion in my life, THAT is compelling and immediate, and yes, another opportunity for renewal.
Week three had us visiting the promise of being fed. And once again, a challenge, because we are called to stay present in the world as we find it, leaning on the miracle of God's supply and also, ALSO, being ministers of that supply ourselves as we collect the abundant overflow of God's grace in our baskets and go once again out into the world.
Last week, it was Pastor Laurie's turn to challenge and well she did, asking us how we would be actively and consciously tending gardens of compassion, service, prayer and faithfulness. She gave us gifts, seeds really, and observed about little and big gifts alike, that we are given a gift by God and what we choose to do with it is our decision. The opportunity she testified to was a self-reflective question for each of us: What has God given me, and you, to grow? Where have we been called out to plant a new garden, to build a new campfire, to be a new creation in Christ as a witness to God's healing power in the world?
And so to today, The Purpose of Jesus : That All Shall Make It. And I have already painted the picture of the goal, for if all shall make it, you have the right to ask the question, Where are we making it to? We are making it to eternal living. And I have to be honest enough to say that for me and I'm betting for you, every day doesn't feel like eternal living. Some days feel more like negotiating a very big pit, with unknown stuff at the bottom...
What chance have we of seeing beyond this moment by moment existence in which we live? Limited by our perceptions to the ever-present now and sometimes bullied by our memories of the quickly fading past. How do we look forward to eternal dimensions, limitless futures, with faith, not foolishness? I believe it is very difficult, Jesus even says in the 27th verse of the lesson, that it is impossible for mortals, without God's assistance. The Life of Jesus is a promise with a purpose, to supply assurance along the way through questions like these. Sometimes we tell ourselves that if we release from our plan, and our r expertise and our knowledge, that we will plunge into a pit of chaos, endless depth. The promise of Jesus that emerges from these purposes is that he will not let you fall very far, only far enough to shock you awake to the work he has for us to do.
You see the ultimate purpose of eternal living is so that you may be an active agent of change in the transformation of the world. We hold a sacred trust to this image of the peaceable kingdom, a place that Jesus clearly showed us how to construct. We only mess it up when we forget that Jesus also told us, we can't do it on our own. But as the hands and feet of God's grace, we cannot fail.
Maybe the biggest challenge for us as 21st century followers of Jesus is recapturing the imagry and language of our faith and re-exploring it, re-owning it and re-living it. I invite you to a bold and exciting adventure of re-acquistion of the ideas of Jesus, ideas that we have set aside sometimes because they are unfamiliar or strange to us : key ideas like salvation, reconciliation, covenant, holiness, eternal living, and transformation.
I invite you to continue exploring the scriptures with an eye to discovering more purposes of Jesus, more teachings of Jesus, more challenges to life-change. I pray that they can all be activated in your life.
Next week we will look at what a Christian Community looks like, when it takes the purposes of Jesus to heart. We begin a new series entitled, the One Anothers. And in it I will briefly introduce the ways that Jesus and Paul instructed the early church on the manner in which they (and we) are to take care of one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.
The Purposes of Jesus - Purpose 3 - That All Shall Be Fed - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Listen to and read Michael's July 26, 2009 sermon.
The sermon audio begins with Pastor Laurie reading today's Gospel lesson, John 6:1-21.
This is the third sermon in his The Purposes of Jesus series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
Download a .pdf of this sermon.
The Purposes of Jesus - That All Shall Be Fed
The Rev. Michael Love
July 26, 2009
A story was told of a priest in a small rural church. He was restarting the local Sunday school. He recruited the new Sunday School teachers, got the curriculum, announced in worship that Sunday School was commencing. It was in the Social Hall of the small church. There was only the sanctuary and the social hall, so Sunday School was in the social hall. One Sunday, a church stalwart came into the social hall early to get the coffee made. He saw the one teacher and 2 students sitting at a table in the corner of the room, learning about Jesus. The priest was passing through on the way to the sanctuary to get ready for morning worship. The church officer said to the priest, “Gee, it's too bad, only 2 kids. Looks like Sunday School is a failure.” The Priest, preferring to see the work of God in the room, said, “Well, tell me how many children did we have in Sunday School last month?” “None,” said the stalwart. “Well then,” replied the priest, “Look at it this way, you've witnessed 200% growth in your Sunday School in just one month!” Which started to look more like a miracle than a failure and that church officer became the biggest champion of the newly re-launched Sunday School. Asked to feed the children, that priest said, “Here are 2 you may feed.” The church said, “Only two?” Just as the disciples said, “Only a few loaves and a couple fish?” And look what happened. So today I want to speak with you about the very real need and the very real possibility that ALL SHALL BE FED. And more so, why that will require a different look at the whole idea we have of being fed.
Even as I see this as a purpose of Jesus, I wrestle with the mixed message Jesus sent us about the matter. The Jesus who said : Feed 'em. All of 'em (John 20 eg) that Jesus also says “The poor you will always have with you.” Matthew 26:11...not an innovation by the way...Jesus is reminding everyone of us what the tradition had held since Deuteronomy 15:11 “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I [Moses] therefore command you, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.”
Well there can be no doubt, the people who populate the Jesus story are often these, the poor and the needy. They followed Jesus around the countryside because they needed him to survive, to live, to receive wisdom, to be healed in an oppressive time, to receive the bread of life in a season of dry spirits and desperation. We have an instant recognition of the powerful images of spiritual and physical hunger. The human want of the soul can be seen from quite a ways off. If you've watched any of the Holy Blockbusters by Cecille B. Demille or the more recent Jesus movies, one thing is common to all. The anguish and dire need of those who clung to Jesus' every word and every step. They came to Jesus to be fed.
In this case, in the reading from John, what they may have noticed most is that he makes them to lie down in green pastures and feeds all to restore their souls.1 There is also plenty left over for the next time. If five loaves and two fish were enough for the over 5,000, then 12 baskets would make a good starter batch for the next congregation.
Let me be clear about what this is. I approach this as a miracle story, a wonder-working story. If we apologize for it and dismiss it, we throw out the power of this story to startle and save. The central image is that All Needed to Be Fed and All WERE Fed. AND, and, that proceeding from that day it was apparent that this was a repeatable event. They had the props, 12 baskets of provisions for the next time of need.
The dilemma for us and for the church is that the One who says feed them all, also says, the need will never go away, those 12 baskets are going to come in handy. The miracle of human kindness worked out on that hillside, will not alone accomplish the deed. Hunger will not cease, the miracle will need to occur again and again and again. The greater dilemma is for us to see ourselves as among the hungry AND among those who share bread with others.
Boy does this drive us us crazy. One kind of Faith says God could do it. God could replicate that event, could eradicate hunger. Why doesn't God just do it? Probably missing the point with that question, eh? Doubt responds (also, missing the point I believe) that, Well the answer is plain enough, it never happened and therefore could never happen again, let alone on a global scale. And we are left in the middle of what is not a philosophical or even a logistical problem, but rather a spiritual catastrophe. Dire need and no workable way to apply our faith and hope and love.
The Good News today is that we will always be called to lean on the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 because there will always be the un-miraculous reality of hunger and strife. And we profess that God in Jesus Christ is our way out of that seemingly un-winnable end-game.
What's here for us in this story is an outline of our faith declaration wrapped around a purpose of Jesus. That ALL need sustenance, that Jesus stands by ready to sustain us, and this keeps us alive and kicking for a purpose: that we might carry those 12 baskets on to the next hunger event we encounter. I tell you that I believe that the redemption of the the world is tied critically to these steps. The improvement of your personal life, your family, your community and the world, is wrapped in this.
And so here now we are finally ready to say something about hunger, being fed and the other thing...the unspoken thing. The matter of growth. We say we come to God because we are hungry and need to be fed. Most often I hear it in relation to Worship Experiences. I hear it all the time. I say it myself. “I go to church to be fed.” I'm pretty sure you've heard it, too. I believe this is coded language, a short-cut way of saying something more.
We all use short-cut language. If you text-message, you use REALLY short-cut language. If you've ever text-messaged anyone, you know what LOL means. (laugh out loud) And you know that IMHO means __________ (in my humble opinion). And that BTW means ______________ (by the way.) These are all ways of saying something in a compact space. I believe that saying “I Go To Church To Be Fed,” is also such a phrase. What would that be?.... IGTCTBF.
I think we are pointing to a more complex need when we say that. I know a pastor who can really incite angry conversation when he says, “Those who come to worship to be fed, leave hungry.”2 My expanded version of that thought, is that I believe we come to worship because we are hungry and we need to Grow. Being Fed is a step, a middle moment. It is the instrument of growth, not the destination.
This requires an acknowledgement that is counter-intuitive. Eagerness and mild, not chronic, mild anxiety goads us to growth. We are in the self-esteem era and mistake good feelings about self as the end goal. It has been known for awhile that it is not satisfaction with the present state of affairs that moves anyone or anything forward. It is hunger, a mild form of pain, to be frank, that pushes us on. A hunger for knowledge drives our kids through school. A hunger for wisdom takes that knowledge and applies it to the human condition. A hunger for justice puts people in the mission field and out in public service. A hunger for God urges each of us to be here and in many houses of worship across the world. Growth and strength come from a mild dis-comfort with what is and a yearning for what can be. The mild dis-comfort is a signal of need.
We hunger as a triggering mechanism that alerts us to a need for food so that we can grow. Spiritually, we hunger and that driving force gets us in the neighborhood of God so that we can grow and be fit for a life of servant ministry. Now that may seem like a trivial difference, but I am convinced that it is a world of difference. All are fed, not to be satisfied, not to be pacified, but to be energized, and made eager and ready to grow. We are fed by God in Jesus Christ, so that we will grow.
The story in John had that implicit “Go and Do Likewise” Clause, that we find in all the Jesus stories. Here, Jesus would be saying, take these 12 baskets and go find others who need healing, teaching, justice, reconciliation, and salvation. The push to FEED ALL, is once again our calling. And it is a call to mobilize for transformation and improvement. That All Shall Be Fed says to me that All Shall be made ready to run the race, not to sit around and be satisfied too long after the banquet has ended.
This 3rd purpose of Jesus is aimed at each of us in differing ways. But each of us is called to be fed and then take up the basket of resource that is produced from that encounter. And to move out into the world, because the resource you carry is also a miracle that will multiply as you share it.
Next week I will be in Chicago at our national School of Congregational Development event, and Rev. Laurie McHugh will journey with you through the 4th Purpose of Jesus : That All Shall Tend Gardens.
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1 Green, Joel B. & Willimon, William H., General Editors, Wesley Study Bible, commentary notes at John 6:10, Abingdon, 2009
2 Bill Tenney-Brittain
The Purposes of Jesus - Purpose 2 - That All Shall Be Changed - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Listen to and read That All Shall Be Accepted, the Rev. Michael Love's July 19, 2009 sermon.
This is the second sermon in The Purposes of Jesus series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
The reading was Mark 6:30-34, 53-56.
Download a .pdf of this sermon.
The Purposes of Jesus - That All Shall Be Changed
The Rev. Michael Love
July 19, 2009
We're in week 2 of a series on the Purposes of Jesus, asking not What Would Jesus Do, but What DID Jesus Do. Last week I suggested that Jesus accepts us all and then turns that gift into the foundational basis of our calling; that we are then to take up the challenge to, ourselves, be accepting of all. Today I'm going to spend some time on the second Purpose of Jesus: That All Shall Be Changed. It's a purpose that I see flowing out of radical acceptance. I more than hinted that Purpose #1 would likely initiate changed hearts and minds in us.
Now this purpose #2 (That All Shall Be Changed) is one that I wrestle with myself. I'm not particularly interested in being changed, when I am honest about it. I suspect that many of us would agree with my District Superintendent of some ten years ago who said, “I don't mind change, I just don't want to be there when it happens.” Aversion to change is a human characteristic. It is especially true when we speak of matters of faith. Matters of faith, deeply held and thoughtfully gathered and nurtured, have a big influence in all parts of our lives. So, a change there is potentially a sweeping life-style change. In the illustration in Mark, being changed by Jesus leads to the lifestyle that we read about constantly in the New Testament, a lifestyle that includes much “running around from place to place.” If changed by the power of God's grace in Jesus Christ, I might be reduced to one who “runs this way and that,” attending to the teachings and the ministries of Jesus. It's not like I don't have enough to do already without getting caught up in the work that Jesus has for us....let's face it first, Jesus keeps you busy. “constant coming and going.” “running.” “people ran this way and that.” That's how the lesson in Mark describes the scene. And it is not much different elsewhere in the New Testament.
So, If I'm to have any credibility with you this morning, I've got to start with some myth-busting. The myth is that there is no room in your life for God. (The Rice and the Walnut?)
The foundational assumption must be then, there is room in your life for God. That it's not only okay to risk being changed by God, but that it is in fact a realistic expectation of anyone. There is no “Out Clause.” A relationship with God in Jesus Christ works for others, it can work for you. Your life is not so extraordinarily constructed as to make you uniquely immune to God's reconciliation or the practices of a deepened and thriving faith life.
I reflect on my own calling to ministry, which began when I was about 17, as an illustration. When God called me to a life of ministry, I did not heed that call at first. In fact, shortly after hearing that call, I left off from church attendance altogether. Like many high-school graduates, thinking about college or university trumped thinking about church. I thought of myself as faithful, but church didn't seem to have much to offer way back then. I entered a period of life, with zeal and intensity, that formed me by God's invisible and constant Grace, for although I had left off from God, God was not through with me. I had convinced myself that there just wasn't room in my life for God—that I could do all the right things without God. Hey, that's economical and efficient, what could go wrong???
When I utterly failed to purge God by way of my lifestyle choices, I came to myself, and understood that God meant to work in and through me. That God's un-fatiguing Love could heal and use my weaknesses and would increase my strengths. I came to understand that I had been changed before I even knew of it. That I was reconciled by a presence that had not abandoned me in a single moment.
You see, I thought I was an original, that I had presented a New Argument in practical application for how one might merely be “good” and “moral” and “just” without the messiness of church community or acknowledged faith identity. But is was with shocking clarity that God pointed out how every one of “my” nobler values, came from the heart of God. I am happy to report my failure in the endeavor to take all the credit and originality for what God has so plainly crafted. And I stand before you today as the nearly finished product of a process over which I have had very little real control. Mostly I have cooperated with God in these things. And it this backdrop that informs what I now want to share with you about Being Changed By Jesus Christ.
An important “first thing” those people who were running around the country-side had, was a certainty that they needed change. They were able, perhaps because of the rigor and directness of their lives, to be perfectly honest about themselves. When Jesus asked one of them what they wanted, they spoke up. No one said, “Oh nothing, I just came to listen and meditate upon your teaching.” Oh, no. They said, “I'm blind,” or “My son is sick” or “My life is confused” or “I'm afraid of death.” We might bring these same answers were that question asked of us. What do you want from Jesus? There is an old saying that every one here this morning is either just finished with a major life challenge, in the middle of a major life challenge, or about to begin a major life challenge. Where can God be in that work with you? What do you want from Jesus as you journey in life? These who followed him all over the country-side acknowledged that they were needful of change. And that's the first lesson for us. Although God is working in you right now to initiate significant empowering change in your life, we can halt the change that God wants for us. We can, “None for me please, I'm just here to listen and meditate upon your words.” We are the primary blockage. Paul calls it our innate sinful nature, that we think we can do it all on our own. And boy oh boy doesn't the culture ever want you to believe it. The culture, not some external machinery, the culture is us, the culture whispers in our ears that we can be powerful and successful and lead lives of abundance and bliss, if we cooperate with the culture. There's always the cost however. Bono, lead singer of U2 reminds us in Vertigo, of the words of the tempter who has promised cultural power to Jesus. Bono almost murmurs in the husky, luring voice of fame, “All of this can be yours. All of this can be yours. Hypnotically. And then he adds those devilish words....Just give me what I want, and no one gets hurt.”1 The culture always extracts a price.
God's work to change you comes from a fundamentally different place. It comes from a loving and nurturing core of Good AND, AND you can resist it. My prayer for you is that you don't, but I know that we do. We bring in excuses and reasons to explain why a much lower touch relationship with God is just okay for our unique situations. And that's understandable, too. It's out of uncertainty, fear and a lack of information that we do this.
Ever ask someone out on a date? Think about that decision to ask for a phone number, or to drop by where they were working, or whatever it took to initiate that first wonderful, terrible question: Will you go out with me? There is that moment before it's possible to imagine living through the question/answer experience? (Will he/she say yes? Will they say Yes oh Yes, I've been waiting for you to ask...or will they laugh?) There's that moment before and the moment of relief after, having asked and heard an answer. Why is that so hard? It's hard because it is much more than just a question isn't it? It's an admission of tenderness and affection. It's a moment of extreme and wonderful vulnerability. It's a request for change in a relationship.
Well, acknowledgement that I need God to be changing me, perfecting me, daily, is at the start an admission of that magnitude. Wondering what God will say in response. And I want you to know that I understand that. But, once that nervousness can be admitted, the daily practice of calling on God to strengthen and change me, becomes a familiar part of living. It does take practice. That's key.
I want to encourage you, whether you have been a disciple of Jesus Christ since you were 7 years old or you're just getting to know about this Teacher today, that you hold the key to the first step. God has loved you always and waits to hear from you. Today can be that day for you.
This is all about moving from spiritual novices and beginners to spiritually mature and fit disciples. As spiritual beginners we get to know the lingo and the history, some verses in the bibles and often just enough church structure to get ourselves in some trouble. But, more importantly, as spiritual beginners we don't always ask the big question : “What is really driving the engine of our lives?” (Holeman, Martyn, 2008)2. In other words, are we knowledgeable of the Good News or are we knowledgeable AND transformed by that Good News?
Why is any of this important? 2 reasons : you and the world. Anyone here feeling like the world is in such great shape that we can all take a vacation from our cares and woes and that everything will just be okay? Any fans of the church of Akoona Matata, don't worry be happy? Each of us faces the concern of how in the world can I make a difference in the world. My answer, may surprise you, but I suspect it wouldn't surprise John Wesley. The answer begins with you. As Mahatma Gandhi said, the project really is for you to be the change that you wish to see in the world. He got that from John Wesley, I believe. And I would add that for the world to change, you need to be spiritually fit. And the tradition that I am equipped to tell you about is the Jesus Christ, Son of God, Fitness Program. I tell you that if you are not changed by God's spirit, you will die. Not out of condemnation, but out of sheer battle fatigue. I believe that is the eternal life that Jesus was telling us about. It was a here and now strategy for getting in tight with God so we can do the work and live through the work that God is calling us to do to reform the world. Think of this any way that suits you. Think of God in Jesus Christ as your life vest, your oxygen mask, your haz-mat suit, your EMT Kit, your armor (Paul used that one). Think of it any way that you can, but think on it. And pray on it. And call out to a God who wants to change you today. Know that a loving God is anxious to prepare so that you may do more than survive life, you may thrive in it. And that you may be a disciple, and a maker of disciples for the transformation and reconciliation of the world.
Next week we will talk about how this strength is essential that the world might be healed.
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1 U2, Vertigo, on the album How to Dismantle An Atom Bomb, Universal-Island Records Ltd., 2004
2 Holeman, Virginia Todd and Martyn, Stephen L., Inside the Leader's Head : Unraveling Personal Obstacles to Ministry, Abingdon, Nashville, 2008
The Purposes of Jesus - Purpose 1 - That All Shall Be Accepted - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Listen to and read That All Shall Be Accepted, the Rev. Michael Love's July 12, 2009 sermon.
This is the first sermon in his The Purposes of Jesus series. Read and listen to the other sermons in this series.
The reading was Mark 6: 14-29.
Download a .pdf of this sermon.
The Purposes of Jesus - That All Shall Be Accepted
The Rev. Michael Love
July 12, 2009
Stephen Covey : the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is known as the originator of the saying : 'The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.' I confess that during these last 2 weeks, many things have competed for my attention, all claiming to be "the main thing." I'm betting that the same's true for you as well. Anyone here today, having a landslide of "Main Things" on their calendar? So, I have to apologize in advance because I'm about to add to the problem. The lesson from Mark, about John the Baptist losing his head, is not the main thing. It probably felt like the main thing to John the Baptist, but it is not, the main thing for us this morning. It is important to what I have to say, but as a backdrop, as a context, as a setting. Not as the main thing.
The function of this reading, for me, is to set the stage. It paints a picture of the exceptionally bad times into which Jesus walked. And, how Herod was happy to sweep Jesus up into the same frame as John the Baptist. The account that follows is kind of the back-story. As if to say, “In case you didn't know how bad Herod was, get a load of this.»
At the end of the day, I guess you could say that Herod is an extreme example of someone who just could not accept difference. Herod, like much of the world around him, couldn't see human interaction in any other light than power dynamics, political gain, and the balance of risk against threat. John the Baptist intrigued Herod, and yet he alarmed the puppet king. If Jesus is the Gospel story's emblem of the rightful hero, the anointed king, the one who is coming in to save the day, then Herod is definitely the anti- to all that. While Jesus is ushering in God's grace and full acceptance of everyone, Herod was checking credentials at the door for his own little kingdom affairs. It is against this striking backdrop of contrast that we are introduced to Jesus, the one who in Mark's next episode in the story will show Jesus presiding over a free lunch in the park for over 5000 folks without credentials. Over 5000 people that Jesus simply reached, received and accepted.
Today we are beginning a sermon series on the Purposes of Jesus. In it we will examine the central figure of our faith from a rather practical point of view. We will be asking not What Would Jesus Do, but rather, What DID Jesus Do. What was his purpose, his mission, as he moved among us, and continues to move among us as the Risen Lord. So, let's start with the idea that a main purpose of Jesus, his life, his death and his resurrection is THAT ALL SHALL BE ACCEPTED.
We will follow up with 4 other purposes in the weeks ahead: July 19 That All Shall Be Changed. July 26 That All Shall Be Fed. August 2nd Rev. Laurie McHugh will preach That All Shall Tend Gardens. Finally, on August 9 That All Shall Make It.
These are all things that Jesus makes possible, that he facilitates, that are his mission and purpose. I hope that you'll be able to journey through these Purposes with me. The list is not exhaustive, you may likely have some others of your own. But these are 5 that resonate with me and make a firm foundation for faith. I look forward to sharing them with you.
There we are, in a time typified by Herod (he was not some unique bad-guy, just a good poster-kid of the times)...in a time typified by Herod, Jesus arrived on the scene and couldn't be more opposite. In my mind, Jesus couldn't have been clearer that through him all shall be accepted. That all might reconcile their differences with God and with one another. The Second letter to the church in Corinth said it like this... All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ.” (2nd Corinthians 5:18-19 NIV)
This morning I'm going to be using Acceptance and Reconciliation as synonyms. You'll see why in a while.
Did you ever find yourself in a spot where you needed to take something back that you said? Or did? Or that you needed to repair a breach between yourself and a neighbor, or a friend, or a family member, or even (Saints preserve us) repair a breach between yourself and another member of the church? If you have, you have known the need for reconciliation. And if you have succeeded, you know the joy of reconciliation achieved. We were talking the other day about what might be the motivation for church folk to press so hard at the work of being disciples. 'Cause it is hard work. While studying and praying for this sermon today, it occurred to me that one reason we do it is because Reconciliation, once achieved is one of the highest joy-bringers we know.
What a great day it is when peace is restored between friends, between groups of peoples, between nations. We all yearn for restoration and reconciliation and full acceptance. And Jesus was purposed to fulfill that need, to pave a way forward through our struggle to the successful achievement of reconciliation.
One of the places in the Gospel story where this joy of restoration is celebrated is one of the more familiar parables of Jesus; the parable of the Prodigal Son. This is a story of a wayward son who leaves home, squanders his inheritance, parties away his respectability, and comes to the edge of starvation. And I want to remind us of how surprising the ending is. It's hard to achieve that surprise factor if you are already familiar with the outcome. Oh yeah, Prodigal Son, all-forgiving Father, big feast, blah blah blah. No, no, this is a truly astounding outcome! That the son comes to his senses, returns home and is received unconditionally by his loving father (no time outs, no earning back favor, no restitution, just forgiveness and love) This is wild and crazy and extravagant....And wonderful. And against the cultural backdrop of the violence of Herod, surprising and astonishing.
How wonderful is it? Well, the Assurance flowed from this improbable tale to its hearers (how are remember living UNDER Herod), that through Jesus any of us, all of us, when we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and head home, can know with certainty that a loving Parent God waits to throw a humongous party at our return.
Now, it's always easier to see this assurance as made for someone else. It's always easier to see how the other guy has to get right with God, or their family, or with me. It's easy to see this story of a returning son as an object lesson for the wayward; harder to see it as a lesson for us. Doubly hard to see it as a lesson for the church, the Body of Christ.
We can see in this purpose of Jesus some imbedded work for us, the Church of Jesus Christ. So this purpose—that all shall be accepted, that all shall be reconciled—has implications for us. Because if the purpose of Jesus is that all shall be received home for the feast, then we are called firstly into an atmosphere of joyous thanksgiving and secondly into a behavior shift to radical hospitality. This is a big adventure, much beyond the mere assertion of doctrine, precepts or political stance. Isn't it always that way with Jesus. The Gospel of Jesus always involves taking a thing received (your salvation by God's grace) and turning it into a thing given. From the passive intellectual understanding of God's grace into the pro-active dispensing of that same Grace.
Jesus calls me to move from raising my hand to show support for an Idea (All are worthy of God's grace, I can vote yes for that) to Extending my hand in care to act on that value. That is the full and completed arc of faithful action in the Methodist tradition. I complete that action in response to the Love of God given me without reservation. Without reservation, then I am called to both assert my faith and act on it. Raise my hand and extend my hand. For us, the 2 are inseperable.
The implications of this run deep in the life of the church. Not only are people of difference acceptable to that imaginary “us” that we believe we constitute, but we are called into the scarier of being acceptable in this place to one another. That's not so abstract now, is it? And when we are convicted to our core of that truth, that All Are Acceptable in the Eyes of a Relentlessly Loving God, a lot of things are called to change.
Here's the challenge for us. There is only one way that I know for ALL TO BE ACCEPTED and that's if ALL ARE REACHED. In case that sounds like a «bait and switch» in my sermon topic, let's test the question you might be having right now. Really, ALL CAN BE ACCEPTED if ALL ARE REACHED? Well, In my mind If all REALLY are accepted (as we rightly declare, along with our sisters and brothers in many other faith tribes); if all REALLY are accepted, it sounds to me like we will get the blessing of being in relationship with all? To put it another way, What if we are successful in getting out the word that we find all people acceptable and accepted AND they actually show up? You see, from the standpoint of a disciple of Christ, there is nothing theoretical about this. At some point, early on, it becomes relational and experiential and tangible. We know this. What will it mean to be in relation with our whole community? What does it mean to be in reconciling relation with those who are here in this place now?
In our minds, we know that it is absurd to accept others theoretically or in principal only. Our Spirits tell us that's not acceptance and reconciliation, that's toleration (maybe even and gritting my teeth till you go away). And so to say that all shall be accepted means that must all be reached out to and all shall be cared for. Oherwise this is an empty sentiment, an impractical ideal that we hold without covenant or the integrity to deliver upon.
Jesus modeled full acceptance to us that we might turn around and go and do likewise. I tell you this morning that ALL CAN BE ACCEPTED, all the prodigal sons and daughters will find their way home, if ALL ARE REACHED. I tell you this morning that the two are entwined. To accept all means to reach out and care for all.
In this first purpose of Jesus are our marching orders, so to speak. This is the main thing from which all the other things are derived. The words given to us at the end of Matthew, describing Jesus' commission to his disciples are underwritten by this generous hope that we will accept all as we have been accepted.
I can imagine no other way that Jesus could have said, “Go, make disciples of all people, baptize them, teach them my commandments” without this underpinning of extreme reconciliation. And he wouldn't do it without enlisting us in the same mind-set and heart-set. The context is Herod and pain and fear and resentment and addiction and violence. The response is the one Jesus modeled. The response is full acceptance and radical love.
Let me ask you a funny question? Where is the door to the church? Are those doors out there the doors to the church?
Are those the safe passages to reconciliation? They are of course critical to the process, but I am wondering if the door to the church isn't really right here. Your heart is the pathway to God's full acceptance and reconciliation. Jesus works that out through you. We are called to open our hearts so that the doors of the church, the pathways to safety, will be open for everyone.
I got to thinking about this. One thing led to another and I got curious about doors. Do you know how many doors there are in this church? A lot. I did a very fast count, so this is very approximate, but the point will be telling. There are about 75 doors in this church (and I didn't even count multiple doors into the same rooms.) About 75 portals. Here's the thing. Only about 23 of them are doors from the outside. In the main, about 52 doors are doors that are interior. I like that. I like that the portals are inner. Not cut off from the outside, but safe and sacred. And I believe that the Good News of Jesus Christ is that we are those inner pathways.
This is a new season in the life of the church, and Jesus is tugging on the hearts of some of you that we would follow the commandments to make a church for ALL that ALL shall be accepted in the sustainable Kingdom.
So, here's a little practice related to this work. Kind of a prayer exercise to get in the frame. So get comfortable, settled, quiet... I want you to think of someone. Someone not in this church. Maybe a friend. Maybe a neighbor. Someone you know but who you would like to get to know better. Think of what you do know about them that draws you together. Dwell on the good stuff, the endearing stuff. There may be very little that you share, maybe all you share is that you put your recycle bins out at the same time each week and say, “hello.” Just find that image of beginning friendship. Get a picture of that person and fix them in your mind's eye. Hold them there as I pray... God we would like to focus for a moment on these persons who we hold in our minds and hearts. First we pray that you care for them and bless them in all they do. Also, we bring to you this prayer; that we would like to get to know them better and for them to know you better. God, you have taught us that when we're on the road back home, you are there waiting to welcome all home. You have also taught us that our lives describe the pathway to acceptance, the road to safety. So, we're counting on you to make opportunities for increased friendship to happen. We're also praying that you will give us insight and boldness to notice when those opportunities arise. Give us the clarity to reach out for the sole purpose of getting to know our neighbors better; for the joy that this will add to their lives and ours. We pray to reach across that gap that separates us from our neighbors, that we might be witnesses to your amazing love that reaches out to all, that receives all and cares for all. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
Sermon Series: The Purposes of Jesus - The Revs. Michael Love and Laurie McHugh
The Revs. Michael Love and Laurie McHugh preached the sermon series, The Purposes of Jesus, over five Sundays beginning on July 12, 2009.
Listen to Pastor Michael's introduction to this sermon series.
Read and listen to the five sermons in the series:
July 12, 2009 - That All Shall Be Accepted - The Rev. Michael Love
July 19, 2009 - That All Shall Be Changed - The Rev. Michael Love
July 26, 2009 - That All Shall Be Fed - The Rev. Michael Love
August 2, 2009 - That All Shall Tend Gardens - The Rev. Laurie McHugh
August 9, 2009 - That All Shall Make It - The Rev. Michael Love
Other Campfires - The Rev. Michael Love (Text & Audio)
Listen to and read Michael's July 5, 2009 sermon. This was his first sermon as Senior Pastor of the First United Methodist Church of Palo Alto.
The reading was Mark 6:1-13.
Download a .pdf of this sermon.
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Good morning. I was raised camping. And that single fact may have as much to do with who I am as any other bit of God's working in my life. Any campers? If you've never camped, let me say that it's more than sleeping in the dirt. At dusk and amazing begins to happen. At dusk, campfires start up around the campground and at other camp-sites. Woodsmoke and flickering lights. Finally as dark comes on, blazing fires with smiling faces silhouetted in the nighttime. It's a magical time, it's a God moment. There is something primal and sacred about being in a circle around a warming fire.
It's also a picture of generations. This is something you have to see to understand, I guess. Campfires are also about passing on a really basic human capacity. So there's also a lot of teaching that goes on around the campfire ritual. There's always time to teach the kids, the first-timers, the rookies about tinder and kindling and split-wood versus whole logs. And there's always at least one or two impatient ones. The ones who think the shortcut to a bonfire is a good dose of camp stove fuel on the wood before lighting. Don't know if their eyebrows ever grow back...
But I have to tell you what I like most about campfires, is that everyone of every age and every station in life, is drawn to them. Everyone is fed by the warmth and the changed environment that a campfire lends. And I see in the lesson from Mark, the directive to be about the work of campfire building. Let me explain:
The lesson in Mark is like this super-condensed outline of a disciple's life. A disciple's life is promised by Jesus to be one of teaching/sharing our faith. Seems to me there's a lot of “go and do likewise” in Jesus' message to us. So we are to be about the teaching and sharing of our faith.
In this reading, a disciple's life is promised by Jesus to be one of risk. When you are a disciple you always run the risk of sounding like a “smarty pants.” The next promise follows after that. A disciple's life means continuing in the face of the opposition and criticism you receive. The disciples life is promised to be one of moving around from place to place. And of sending others to do the same. We can only work this block for so long and then as the author of Mark puts it, we have to hit the circuit. (A little Methodist language there in verse 6.
The disciple's life is one that requires we travel light and that where we land we are fully present and focused. Also noted is that we are to move on when we must. Lastly and certainly of primary importance in the life and teaching of Jesus: the disciple's life is an assignment to anoint (that is to bless) and heal.
A snap-shop view in my mind of the life of a disciple as modeled, promised and commissioned by Jesus. It's an outward bound life, isn't it? That's the itchy part. There is this constant movement in the descriptions of discipleship that is outward. It begins with those who know the Gospel, then moves outward to those around “on the circuit” (v. 6, NKJV).
It's not easy work we disciples enter into. It's a mighty good thing that we don't go alone. That we travel those roads to heal and teach and witness for justice, we travel those roads in the company of the Living Lord, Jesus of Nazareth whom I confess to you as the Christ. For it's not easy work we enter into, but it is the best work you can ever get.
Our work, to put it as simply as possible, is to share the very good news of Jesus Christ with everyone within the sound of our collective voices. And when I say voices, I also mean the voice of our actions in the world. Or, to use the image of the campfire, our job, the work given us by God is to begin as many campfires as we possibly can to warm as many people as we possibly can in as many places as we possibly can.
Jesus says in John 10:16 “I have other sheep which are not of this flock. I must also bring them so there will be one flock.” Remember I mentioned that Jesus was in the “go and do likewise business”? This is a case in point. If Jesus modeled his concern for others beyond the recognizable flock, it is my faith declaration that we are called to go and do likewise.
The flock then is always growing. There's always room for another. Or maybe we could say, that there's always need of another campfire to be built and that probably we're going to be called on to make sure that the next one doesn't burn his or her eyebrows off because they are new at it. But you know that there's a stray who's almost lost hope of finding a place where they'd fit in. Maybe one who was hurt or misunderstood, and is looking for a safe haven. Jesus would gaze out upon us this morning, with love and compassion that knows no bounds, and then would reflect, “You know, somebody's missing.” One of my favorite images of God, I'm sorry I can't tell where I stole it from, can't remember the one much wiser than I who first said it, goes like this. God is like a Mom who steps away from preparing our dinner to stand on the porch watching the horizon, waiting patiently, maybe a little anxiously, for those who haven't come home yet for the supper. We who are at the table are also called to the porch to watch and welcome, even to leave the porch and go searching for those who hunger.
Let me start wrapping up by reflecting on the things that you can learn from campfires. Firstly, you can't start one fast : remember the guy with the Coleman fuel. It takes time, just like discipleship takes time, building and keeping a fire that will warm the camp, takes time. Go slow, be diligent. Secondly, you can't start one with only tinder, or only kindling or only branches or only logs. Gotta have a lot of different kinds of fuel to make a fire.
Thirdly, you don't need a big fire for a big group, you need a multitude of fires. Oh sure, you might remember that big ol' bonfire at camp. We had that too. Looked great, a backdrop to the night's story-teller, songleader, worship leader. But usually then we were in the ampitheater, too far away to be warm. A bonfire may look good but they're usually too hot, if you're up close. If you're up close, you get singed. If you're a couple of rows back, or up in the ampitheater, you're chilly. We don't need a single fire to bring the warmth of the Spirit of God to a multitude of people, we need a multitude of campfires.
Now these last 2 are the most important. Somebody on the campground is not able light a fire. You can see them standing in a cloud smoke, kindling all gone, some big old log smoldering away. They're eyes sting and they don't know what to do. They can't light that fire until and unless you take a bit of your fire over to help them get started. Think of it as your campfire having new life in the neighbor's campsite. It's a lot like ministry, I think. We have a treasure of mission and ministry that is the product of God's spirit moving in this place for many years. And we have the opportunity and responsibility to cast that treasure forward as a legacy of the Good News of Jesus Christ for all who come after us. We are called to light new campfires. Not extinguish ours. Ours is the source from which the new fires are made. We are responsible for keeping our fire well-fed so that it continues to cast the warmth of God's reconciling spirit. And, we are called to light new campfires.
And here's the last thing, the fire we start, at the next campsite over? I guarantee you , that fire in the next campsite over is going to look different. Real different. But it is a campfire none the less, rooted in the spark that begins in the original campfire. I dare someone started the campfire we're sitting around right now, with a spark or a bit of kindling that was passed on to us. We didn't originate the fire. God's holy spirit did that little bit of scout-craft a long time back. We are keepers for a season.
The church has never been a place of one fire. The church has always been a place of multiple campfires. Our communities are the same. Our families certainly are: everyone in your house like “fruit loops” for breakfast? I doubt it. I'm a child of the 50's and we had these televised fantasies called advertisements that showed a happy family bounding into the kitchen for breakfast and EVERYONE wanted a bowl of Corn Flakes, or Raisen Bran or Malto Meal.......what planet is that from? If our home experience is that diverse (if we have multiple campfires going in our own homes), I think it's safe to suppose that we will encounter other campfires in the workplace and in school or in church.
Here's the thing. Jesus calls us to be alert beyond the warming flames of our campfire. To look through the flames to the other campers out there. Some are not at a campfire yet, Jesus calls us to help them get started. Now don't pick up and go crowd them out of their campfire, get 'em started and leave 'em alone. There'll be times for all the campfires to get together for some kind of mass thing....in the UMC we call them potlucks and bible study and soft ball games and service missions.
Jesus modeled for us this Other Campfire image, not as a charitable act, but as normative and healing for our lives and the world.
Remember that book, “I'm OK, You're Okay”? Written in 1969 by Dr. Thomas Harris, it was a book of the times. It created spin-out and goof titles to this day. For example, you can find “I'm Okay, You're Not,” “I'm OK, You're a Brat,” and even a music offering entitled “I'm Okay, You're Undead.” But original was kind of novel, a bit of open-ness and inclusivity in an era where that was kind of new stuff. It was a self-help book and the title kind of says everything there is to say about the premise and the content. It was great in the accepting everyone department. Think of the untold hurt that could be be avoided if we practiced the I'm OK, You're Ok mantra. I think the demise of I'm OK, You're OK came from the reality that life doesn't always feel like I'm OK. A truer place to start, when we're being honest with one another, might go like this..... I'm not Ok, in fact I'm broken, and I'm guessing you are too. Sometimes we forget that and get to the business of campfire building and management that's simply joyless. How much more quickly could we be able to gather around the warmth of the campfire of God's grace if we could start there. We all need God's warmth. We all have a stake in building campfires. And we are all called in our own way to build other campfires. Amen.
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