For Freedom Christ Has Set Us Free, 5/7
Tonight we skipped ahead in our story, reading all of Exodus 16. "Freedom from Pharaoh's economy" was our theme. We made pillows. You'll see why.
For Freedom Christ Has Set Us Free, 4/7
We're making progress through the Exodus story, and landed here on Mount Horeb with Moses and that spontaneously combusting-but-not-consumed shrubbery. We read Exodus 3:1–4:5, then sang the strangest song I've ever had the pleasure of yelping along with in worship. Then a sermon about the ineffable Deity we like to call God.
Listen to the strange and perfect song here.
For Freedom Christ Has Set Us Free, 3/7
Continuing our reading of Exodus, we took a chunk from the latter half of chapter 2 (verses 11-25), a piece of the story not often told. Moses is a confused adult, driven to rage and exile by his identity crisis. Hebrew? Egyptian? Who is he?
And who are these people he leaves behind, the suffering slaves that are Moses' biological kin? They have been "Hebrews" up to now, ethnically kin but fragmented from each other. By the end of the chapter, they will be "Israelites," one people united in suffering, heirs to the promise of God to their ancestors. How do they change from one to the other?
God promises us freedom from isolation and fragmentation. Pinky swear.
For Freedom Christ Has Set Us Free, 2/7
And now, Exodus. The prequel for Moses, 1:8–2:10. Before anybody says, "Let my people go," five women have to say, "Let this baby live." Can they do it? You bet your buttons. Our service was about "freedom from helplessness."
For Freedom Christ Has Set Us Free, 1/7
Tonight we started a new worship series, "For Freedom Christ Has Set Us Free: Stories from the Exodus." But we weren't quite ready to read Exodus. We started with a condensed version of the Genesis-to-Exodus narrative from Psalm 105. We read the whole darn thing, and so should you before you listen.
Also, we had a worksheet. Fun times. (One of those Hs should be a Z. Bonus points if you find it.)
Riddle Me This: Jesus' Parables of God's Reign #5
Erin James-Brown has a way with words. But really, she has a way with life. We love the way she describes the with-God-way, with longing — and also with her teeth gritted, because, as she says, "doing what Jesus proposes here is stupid. Watch out." Yeah, we really should be able to admit that what we're doing, seeking this treasure with our whole lives on the line, is reckless and risky. Matthew 13:44-46 and following.
Confounding questions for our post-sermon conversation:
1. Have you ever found something for which you were willing to give up something valuable? Was it an easy decision, or difficult? Would you do it again?
2. What do you think about Jesus' scandalous relationship to money (i.e. asking people to sacrifice it all, requiring his disciples to depend on the hospitality of others)? How does his way of talking about money strike you? Does it challenge? inspire? leave you with more questions?
Riddle Me This: Jesus' Parables of God's Reign #4
Just two little short ones for this night: parables from the deli, Matthew 13:31-35, mustard and yeast. And Galileo Church's very first dedication of a baby to the reign of God, our very own mustard seed, CC Bates. Kinda scary. Kinda awesome!
Riddle Me This: Jesus' Parables of God's Reign #3
For today we read Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43. Can I just say, this church is bold for confronting texts in the Bible that don't square with our own ideas about how nice Jesus really ought to be? To disorient ourselves in preparation for a disorienting parable, we sat on quilts on the floor; during the sermon I moved from microphone to microphone around the perimeter of the room so that people had to pivot on their behinds to keep facing me. The message was something like, "Don't get too comfortable." And we did not.
After the sermon, we turned again to Confounding Questions for Conversation:
1. Katie quoted a friend quoting a Russian author (Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, brought to our attention again in Brian McLaren's Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha,and Mohammed Cross the Road?: "The line between good and evil runs through the center of my heart." Does that seem true to you? How do you know?
2. If someone were going to judge you -- wheat or weed -- what evidence would you like for them to consider?
Riddle Me This: Jesus' Parables of God's Reign #2
This Sunday we repeated the Parable of the Sower from Matthew 13:3-8, adding the explanation of the parable given a little later, Matthew 13:18-23. After the sermon we did lightning rounds of one-on-one conversation, switching partners for each question:
1. Imagine a Buzzfeed Quiz, "Which Soil Are You?" Which one do you think you would get -- path, rocky, thorny, good? Which one would you have gotten five years ago?
2. Do you think a person chooses to be one kind of "soil" or another? (i.e. Do you choose your disposition toward God's reign?) Or are you just born that way?
3. The church is commissioned by Jesus to share (or sow) the word (or seed) of God's reign. Based on this parable, how should we be doing that?
Riddle Me This: Jesus's Parables of God's Reign #1
We're reading parables from Matthew 13 for five weeks, starting now. And everything about our worship -- the seating, the music, the table, the reflection time -- is like a parable, definitely unexpected and kind of absurd. We're trying to get in the headspace and heartspace to hear Jesus's words about God-Who-Cannot-Be-Apprehended.
This recording includes instructions from Erin F. about how to get ourselves into conversation groups after the sermon. We had a lot to talk about. Three questions:
1. How do you feel about the mission Jesus and Isaiah shared, to confuse the issue of God for their hearers?
2. On a spectrum from clarity to confusion, where do you feel most comfortable? What parts of your life are in your comfort zone? What parts of your life are outside your comfort zone?
3. Katie suggested that God is playing a game of Sardines with us. Are there other games you can think of that God likes to play?
Help Wanted: Disciples (part four)
"Hold that brick," she said. "You think I'm going to talk about it, but I'm not. I'm just asking you to hold it for a while." And everybody did, for the duration of the sermon. We read Matthew 11:16-30, minus a few verses in the middle, and contemplated our eating-and-drinking messiah, the one who promises rest for our souls. Rest from what? Man, those bricks are heavy.
Help Wanted: Disciples (part three)
It's cruel luck that the recorder we use to capture sermon audio filled up about 11 minutes into worship on 6/29. The opening prayer was barely prayed; the first song barely sung; and there sat Rev. Nathan Russell, waiting to preach his heart out. How many people told me later how amazing it was? How many of the listeners lucky enough to be there remembered the power and presence Nathan brought to the room? All of them, that's how many.
So we who weren't there can't listen to him speak the words, but he's been gracious enough to lend us his manuscript. Just imagine Nathan shining with the light of God while he tells what he knows about being a faithful follower of our Lord and brother.
Help Wanted: Disciples (part two)
Cookies delivered to working people... the risk of embrace... the terror of hope... my son's friend on his bike, needing toast and a listening ear... our neighbors, as suspicious of us as we are of them. Everybody is a stranger to somebody. Disciples of Jesus are called to stretch our arms wide and take the risk of being rejected. Matthew 9:37–10:14.
Help Wanted: Disciples (part one)
We've begun a four-week worship-n-preaching series to think about our own job descriptions as followers of Living Jesus. (If he's still working, his followers also have stuff to do.) We read Matthew 9, almost the entire chapter, and sang songs about sickness and healing. We watched a video clip from "The Normal Heart" to start things off, which you can watch here if you can stand it.
They're Married! Again!
On Pentecost we were privileged to witness the vows of Ashley and Phillip, who wanted to have the wedding they didn't have when they got married the first time, twelve years and five kids ago. So how do you preach a wedding for a family of seven? Well, here's how I did it.
Acts 16:11-15
We set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days. On the sabbath day we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there.
A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul. When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.” And she prevailed upon us.
Homily
You probably noticed that this is not a very wedding-y text. The truth is, the Bible doesn’t actually say a lot about how to have a good 21st century marriage; it’s not the Bible’s job to be an advice manual. We learn from the Bible how to be the best humans we can, and how utterly dependent on God we are for every breath we take, and beyond that, God trusts us to work out a lot of the details on our own.
Plus, Phil and Ashley, y’all have been at this marriage thing for a long time. I’m not sure what I could tell you that would be better than your own experience of commitment through the ups and downs of everyday life. You have had babies together. You’ve lived through war together, literally, in ways that most of us have not. You’ve endured long separations; economic hardship; health issues; and spiritual desolation; and you’ve done it all together. I don’t think it seems reasonable that you need advice for how to stay happily married.
So we have read this ancient story about the spread of a very local message to a globalized distribution of the news that God is God of heaven and earth, not just local, not just for some people, but for all. Like all history, it’s in the past. But like all history, it has a couple of clues for us today, clues that I thought you might find interesting given where life finds you today.
Here’s our first clue: the women who gathered by the river with their leader Lydia were spiritual, but not religious. For one thing, they weren’t Jewish, so they didn’t come from a heritage of deep faith and religious practice. Their hearts were inclined toward God, but they gathered informally by the river, not in the synagogue, not in the temple, not in any of the designated holy places. Like flowers leaning toward the sun, they leaned toward the Divine, without a great deal of clarity about what they believed – only the sense that something or someone greater than themselves is the Director of the cosmic project.
So the apostle Paul, the church’s first theologian, impressed with their searching, fills in some of the details about God’s intense love for all of humanity, and they decide to take a chance and believe it. That’s how the early conversions to Christianity always were – somebody deciding to take a crazy chance that it just might be true, that the God of the Universe might just be reaching out to them. And then acting on that chance, they took the incredible risk of faith. It was not easy for them; it was never simple. And that might be a familiar feeling to you, that Christian faith feels something like jumping off an intellectual cliff in your mind. But the story of Lydia and others like her show us that that’s the way it’s always been, even for the very first believers. Don’t trust anybody who tells you that believing in God, and believing that God is for you, is easy, or a foregone conclusion. The believers who are notable enough to make it into our sacred book are the ones who believed it against all odds.
The second clue for your marriage that we find in this text is that Lydia’s decision to take that leap of faith affects her whole family. The text says, “She and her household were baptized into Christ.” This is a pattern in the New Testament – that when one member of the family puts their trust in God as God is made known to us in the person of Jesus, the whole family often comes along. There are numerous stories like this – Cornelius the Roman centurion, the unnamed Philippian jailer, Crispus the synagogue leader, and now Lydia the textile merchant, just to name a few.
Things are a little different today – we tend to be much more inclined to let every member of the family make their own, autonomous decision about what to believe and how to orient their lives around those beliefs. But the inescapable truth, even today, is that you two, Phil and Ashley, are householders, you are the chiefs of your own little tribe, and as such, you have a great deal of influence over these children you’re raising together. Brendan, Ella, Evelyn, Barrett, and Brock are already becoming the kind of people they can see that you are.
They are already prioritizing the things you prioritize.
They are already putting their trust in whatever you put your trust in.
They are someday going to work as hard as you work, and love as deeply as you love, and practice mercy insofar as you have been merciful.
They will give generously of their lives in direct proportion to how generously they witness you giving of yours.
Not to put too fine a point on it: your kids’ lifelong engagement with God our Father, the Maker of heaven and earth, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, is in your hands. And it won’t be enough for you to talk about it with them. They’ll have to see it in action. They’ll need to witness your own attachment to a community of disciples who are all trying as hard as we can to follow Jesus down this faithful path to the heart of God, our own hearts’ true home. I want to urge you to make that a commitment of your continued life together, for their sake, as well as for your own. Someday, when generations to come tell the story of the Hersman family, they’ll say how the Lord “opened the hearts of Phillip and Ashley,” and how all your household came to know the Lord, and how together you all lived happily ever after.
And listen: because you are here, you are off to a good re-start. Standing here in front of God and all your beloveds, you are declaring yourselves to be making a fresh start even as you continue the love you began well over a decade ago. We are so privileged to witness your new beginning, and to witness the vows you are ready to make to one another.
(And they did. They spoke very lovely vows to each other, and the gathered congregation vowed to help them.)
Pronouncement:
Phillip and Ashley, before God and in the presence of this congregation, you have made your solemn vows to each other.
You have joined hands with your children to symbolize the wholeness of your family.
Therefore, by the power vested in me as a minister of the gospel of Jesus the Christ, I now pronounce you husband and wife, father and mother, partners for a lifetime of love through whatever comes your way.
Those whom God has joined together, let no one separate!
I give you Philip and Ashley, Brendan, Ella, Evelyn, Barett, and Brock! The H-- Family!
Living Jesus: Pentecost!
On Pentecost Sunday, Galileo Church celebrated almost more than we could handle! A new baby born in the early hours of the morning... a rewedding for a family of 7... a Covenant of Co-Conspiracy and the commissioning of leaders... a concert by Paul Demer and his band... and a record-release party with enough BBQ to make you believe in the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes. To get a little taste, here's what you do:
1. Read Acts 2, most all of it, with all the excitement that story deserves. Which is a lot.
2. Listen to this five-minute sermon.
3. Have your own concert experience with Paul Demer's new release, "Canvas of Sky." You can stream it for free here.
Living Jesus: Gives Good Gifts
Take a look at 1 Corinthians 12:4-31, and try to imagine the situation into which the Apostle Paul is writing. Could those folks really be fussing about who is mo' better at this kingdom of God stuff? Yeah, they could. But there is something even harder than giving everybody their due respect. Yes, even harder.
The Reflection Station for Sunday asked people to reflect on the gifts they bring to our community -- specific ways they might be shared for the overall health of our "body". You can take a look at the list here, and send it along to Katie if you like.
Living Jesus: calls us to confession
Our worship on 5/25 went a direction I did not anticipate. I thought we would talk about how Jesus calls and sends disciples, commissioning us to share his life with the world. But when the creative team for this series read Matthew 28:16-20, they felt torn. Surely the "Great Commission" has caused a lot of trouble for a lot of people. How can we celebrate our commission without also confessing how wrong we've gone with it?
So, a challenge. How to plan a liturgy of confession where we tell the truth about the mistakes in our heritage and the mistakes in our present form of life together? We came up with a rhythm of scripture, song, homily, and prayer that helped us give voice to our corporate confession.
We can't publish the recording of the whole thing, so we'll provide an outline here so you can follow along. "Enjoy" isn't quite right. "Endure," perhaps; and "Engage."
1. Listen to "Song for My Family" by the Michael Gungor Band.
2. Read Matthew 28:16-20 and Matthew 12:15-21.
3. Read the first homily, "Compelle Intrare (Still?)":
Living Jesus’s last instructions to his disciples before he disappeared from their sight was that they should “Go, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them.” Though he himself had never left the tiny strip of land between Galilee and Jerusalem, he intended that his followers would become world travelers for his sake, carrying the gospel from Jerusalem to the surrounding towns of Judea, to the countryside of Galilee in the north, throughout the cities of the ancient near east and eventually into Europe.
Today, a couple of thousand years later, about one-third of the world’s population is Christian. And surely this is due in part to the wildly optimistic efforts of evangelistic missionaries who leave their homes for distant shores, so deeply invested in the good news of God’s kingdom that they are driven to share it with the furthest corners of the world. Indeed, the population center of Christianity has recently shifted away from the northern hemisphere in the west – Europe and North America – to the southern hemisphere in the west and the east – South America, Africa, and, increasingly, Asia. I recently met a man whose parents were missionaries to California from South Korea. The Living Jesus continues to call and send people to repeat his message of God’s just and merciful reign throughout the world.
But even as we appreciate the efforts of those who have traded comfort and ease for the difficult itinerant life of mission work in foreign lands, we must acknowledge that conversion of the foreigner has not always been such a merciful endeavor. The church through the ages has at times adopted the doctrine of compelle intrare – “compel them to enter” – as a way to justify forced conversion of those who have no inkling of the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
Constantine, 4th century emperor of the Roman Empire, in the earliest manifestation of compelle intrare, dreamt that his armies carried the cross of Christ into battle and soundly defeated his enemy. He had the crucifix painted on every soldier’s shield and cast his war as a holy one.
The following centuries saw the church cooperating with the ruling governmental powers so thoroughly that soldiers conducted baptisms by physical force and threat of death. In the Spanish Inquisition of the 14th century, for example, the church served the state by “converting” thousands upon thousands of Muslims and Jews, “making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” just like Jesus said. It was conventional wisdom that conquering powers would have more control if the conquered people shared the religion of their conquerors.
So when we hear the living Jesus instruct his first disciples and, by extension, us, to “go into all the world and make disciples,” we hear those words with a pang of dis-ease. We know that God’s reign is the best news we’ve ever heard. It is saving our lives every day, this hidden truth that God is in charge, that eventually God gets everything God wants, that what God wants is us, all of us, at home in God’s heart. But we also know how often, and for how long, this good news has been twisted into something ugly, something violent, a kind of cultural superiority, a means of political dominance. We are rightly hesitant to be counted among those who have done violence to the bodies or psyches of those we sought to “save.”
We hear Matthew earlier describe Jesus’ own way of announcing God’s reign. He was quiet about it, often asking people not to advertise what he had done for them. Matthew says he fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy in this way: he did not wrangle, which I take to mean he didn’t argue his case forcefully; he did not cry out, his voice was not heard. He was a gentle evangelist, always aware that some within his hearing were broken stalks, like tomato plants that get top-heavy, bending under the weight of their own life, and have to be gently staked, stalks tied tenderly to a lattice that will help them grow toward the sun. He knew that some among his listeners were dimly burning wicks, lanterns with little oil remaining, in danger of being extinguished by the slightest breeze. Jesus practiced a way of being that was compelling because it was attentive to exactly this quality in the people who came to him. With great care, with tender mercies, he probed their pain and offered relief.
So we, when we hear living Jesus commission us for the work of evangelism, must keep in mind that it is not for our glory or our growth that we would go to all nations, or even talk to a friend, about what we know to be true concerning God’s reign. It’s not about us, not about growing our church or being part of something big and powerful or even sustainable. It’s not about validating our own radical commitment to this radical way of life. It’s not about winning.
It’s about being attentive to the hungers all around us, the hunger for a little bit of good news, the thirst for something that relativizes and relieves the brutality of life out there. Do we have a word for those who suffer, whether from circumstances of their own making or from things that have been done to them? Do we have a gentle way of sharing the life-giving news that the living Jesus is with us, working still to scoop us up and bring us home to God’s heart?
We confess that the church in every age has confused the motives for evangelism. We confess that the church in this age has broken a lot of bruised reeds and quenched innumerable dimly burning wicks. We confess, and ask forgiveness from our God who is forgiving.
4. Listen to "Hands and Feet" by The Brilliance.
5. Read the second homily, "(Not Quite) Panta ta Ethné":
When living Jesus said, “Go make disciples of all nations,” what he actually said was “panta ta ethne,” all the nations, which means living Jesus was way ahead of us on the “all the things” meme. He really is amazing.
More importantly, when living Jesus said “all the nations,” “panta ta ethne,” ethne is the word almost always translated “Gentiles,” meaning, everybody who’s not Jewish. Meaning, everybody who was left out of the original plan of salvation. Meaning, us.
This would have hurt the ears of Matthew’s original readers, I guarantee it. They were Jewish believers who had accepted Jesus as the Jewish messiah, the one sent by God to redeem Israel, not the ethne, not the nations, not the Gentiles, not us. According to the gospels Jesus occasionally healed a Gentile, sometimes had a conversation with one, but he never ever sat down to eat a meal with a Gentile. The divide between Jewish believers and those Gentile outsiders who also hungered for the reign of God was the central conflict of the early church, the one that is addressed in every book and epistle in the New Testament.
But according to Matthew, Gentiles were among the toddler Jesus’s first admirers. The wise men from the East were decidedly not Jewish, and their weird baby gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh foreshadowed a time when, according to the prophets, the nations would stream to the sound of his voice and bow in reverence at his feet. Grown-up Jesus, then, sends his first disciples to all the nations, all the Gentiles, all the ethnic outsiders, to proclaim the good news that they are in.
If the gospel we preach, then, is inherently inclusive of all people; if the earliest conflict in the church had to do with ethnic pride and ethnic exclusion, the result of which is that we are here, we Gentiles, having been included, finally, as Jesus asked; why is it that 2,000 years later the most segregated hour of the week, as Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out, is still 11 a.m. on Sunday morning? Or, in our case, 5 p.m. on Sunday evening.
According to a Rice University sociologist in research conducted for Hartford Seminary, only about 2% of Protestant congregations in the United States are significantly multiracial, with no one ethnic group comprising more than 80% of the congregation. Knowing this to be true, one of the founding documents for Galileo Church explicitly named racial diversity as a goal for our new church, especially given that the metroplex is becoming increasingly racially diverse and Mansfield enjoys an extraordinary mix of ethnicities in its neighborhoods and Millennials are known to have multiracial friendship groups in numbers unprecedented in previous generations. But look around, y’all. We are really, really white. I’m sure that your workplaces and schools don’t look like this. My neighborhood doesn’t look like this. So what is up with the church?
I don’t have an answer for that. But it bugs. And it should. When God gets everything God wants, all the ethne, all the nations will sit down at table together. Aren’t we meant to be practicing for that now? Aren’t we trying to be formed into people who want what God wants? Well, God wants this hour, the hour we spend in communal contemplation of God’s beauty, to be desegregated. Living Jesus said so. Panta ta ethne, all the ethnicities. Everybody previously excluded is now in. And it’s our job to get that done.
We confess that the church in every age has excluded entire races of people from the celebration of God’s reign. We confess that the church in this age has settled for the uneasy peace of congregational segregation by race and ethnicity. We confess, and ask forgiveness from our God who is forgiving.
6. Listen to "Help Is Round the Corner" by Coldplay.
7. Read the third homily, "We Could Be the New Them":
A friend of mine asked his third grade class to draw pictures of the Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” in the King James, or “Treat others as you want to be treated,” in the vernacular of public school.
Children drew pictures of themselves sharing cookies from their lunch and taking turns on the playground. But one child, a mopey little boy who was always the victim of the bullying impulses of bigger kids, drew a beach, a long seashore by a beautiful blue ocean. On the beach were two figures, the larger one kicking sand into the face of the smaller one, who was crying. My friend the teacher said, “It’s lovely, friend, but how is this an illustration of the Golden Rule?” The little boy took his picture back and wrote a caption at the bottom: “Whatever you do, don’t do this.” Sometimes the negative example is the most helpful.
There’s almost no one here who never encountered a church before Galileo, who never took part in a community of people gathered for the stated purpose of worshiping the God who draws us together. And there’s almost no one here who doesn’t understand how wrong that can go, how dangerous it is for a church to decide that it knows how to do that. Churches have done a lot of awful things in the name of the God they worship, a lot of awful things in their declared discipleship of Jesus. They may have done awful things to you.
So it’s tempting, in light of our collective experience with the churches of our past, to draw that picture over and over again: the hard-hearted church kicking sand in the faces of the little ones, the ones who don’t fit in, the ones whose lives or beliefs or identities don't square with the mainstream. We could preach it every week: Here is the big, bullying church of our past. Whatever you do, don’t do this.
The only thing is, if we park our message there, in the negative example, it’s amazing how fast we become the heroes of our own stories. It’s amazing how argumentative we become, naming our own counter-cultural beliefs as the new orthodoxy to which all others must conform or be condemned – if not by God, at least by us, when we’re together and feeling safe and enjoying the miracle by which we have found each other.
Jesus’ own evangelistic way can sometimes be read that way – that he argued vigorously, presenting new and powerful interpretations of God’s work in the world, condemning those who didn’t see what he saw. They were blind to the beauty, he sometimes said. They were deaf to the truth. And as we discover the new ways that God is revealed in our lives, we often say the same – that the people who can’t see it are blind, that we have been given eyes to see, thanks be to God.
But here is the best reason for our liturgy of confession tonight: that we don’t want to do that, we don’t want to become another church that thinks it’s got it all figured out. We don’t want to wrangle – Jesus didn’t wrangle, Matthew said; and we don’t want to shout – Jesus didn’t shout, Matthew said. Even as we look for ways to share the gospel, the good news of God’s reign, as living Jesus called us to do, we remember how careful we must be with our own self-assessment in light of that gospel. We are not the center of the universe. We are not a perfect church. We are a broken community of broken people, drawn together for healing and celebration by the God who makes beautiful things out of dust.
We confess that the church in every age has pretended a monopoly on God. We confess that the tendency remains for the church in this age, even this church, to be smug and self-righteous in our proclamation of what we’re sure we’ve finally got right. We confess, and ask forgiveness from our God who is forgiving.
8. Listen to "Dirty Feet" by Dear Saint Isaac.
9. Pray the prayer Joel wrote, riffing on Psalm 103:
O God of forgiveness,
we rejoice in your making all things new,
which includes us, broken and undeserving as we are.
You make all things right.
You put victims of all kinds of evil back on their feet.
You make whole what was broken.
You are sheer mercy and grace.
You don’t fly into fits of rage at our every mistake,
but you’re enduringly patient, rich in love.
You don’t nag and scold us whenever we err,
and you don’t grudgingly hold our sins over our heads.
You don’t treat us for who we are,
broken, selfish people prone to sinful habits and oppressive systems
In spite of all we do, and say, and think, and feel,
You forgive us.
Though our hands are muddied and covered in blood,
You wash us clean.
Though we are injured and scarred,
You heal us.
Though we are broken,
You make us whole.
You have forgiven us;
as far as sunrise is from sunset,
so far have you separated us from our sins.
We are forgiven!
And so we rejoice in our forgiveness,
in the rich love that covers it,
and in the one who says to us, “You are forgiven.”
Amen.
Living Jesus: Coercion
So sometimes Living Jesus is comforting and gentle. And then sometimes Living Jesus knocks you to the ground, puts his resurrected foot on your neck, pokes you in both eyes, and tells you exactly what to do. Such is the story of Acts 9:1-31. If Living Jesus "chooses" you, congratulations. And watch out.
We enjoyed this movie clip at the top of the service to get us in the mood. And this song following the scripture reading.
Living Jesus: Advocate
Before you listen, please read at least a few chunks of John 14. We shared verses 1-7, 15-18, 25-26. John's Jesus is kinda' long-winded. And if you need musical accompaniment, try Gillian Welch's "Orphan Girl" or Carole King's (James Taylor's) "You've Got a Friend." They worked really well for us.
We had a little sound glitch right at the top of the sermon, which Malcolm fixed -- hence the interruption. Hang in there.