Leader: The Christmas season is coming to a close.
People: Now what?
L: The magi have finally reached their destination.
P: Now what?
L: We’ve come to the end of a journey.
P: Now what?
L: God who gave the magi a star - give us light to follow.
P: May we continue to follow Jesus, our light.
All: Let us worship the Light that has come. Amen!
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
Call to Worship based on Luke 2:41-52
Leader: Lord, we come to you today as children:
People: In wonder & amazement, still reeling from the joy of Christmas.
Leader: Lord, we come to you today as children:
People: Full of questions and curiosity, a desire to learn and to know.
Leader: Lord, we come to you today as children:
People: Safe and secure in Your love.
Leader: Lord, we come to you today as children:
People: Knowing that we will grow in holiness and love.
Leader: As children of God,
All: Let us worship our God, our Divine Parent. Amen.
People: In wonder & amazement, still reeling from the joy of Christmas.
Leader: Lord, we come to you today as children:
People: Full of questions and curiosity, a desire to learn and to know.
Leader: Lord, we come to you today as children:
People: Safe and secure in Your love.
Leader: Lord, we come to you today as children:
People: Knowing that we will grow in holiness and love.
Leader: As children of God,
All: Let us worship our God, our Divine Parent. Amen.
Call to Worship based on Hymn "Lord, Listen to Your Children Praying"
L: Lord, listen to your children praying.
P: Send us love!
L: Lord, listen to your children praying.
P: Send us power!
L: Lord, listen to your children praying.
P: Send us grace!
All: Lord, send your Spirit into this place. Amen!
P: Send us love!
L: Lord, listen to your children praying.
P: Send us power!
L: Lord, listen to your children praying.
P: Send us grace!
All: Lord, send your Spirit into this place. Amen!
Monday, July 29, 2024
“Bread, Breadth, and Breathtaking” a sermon on John 6:1-21 & Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:1-21
Ephesians 3:14-21
“Bread, Breadth, and Breathtaking”
Preached Sunday, July 28, 2024
Have you ever had an experience that took you days, weeks, months, or even years to process? To fully understand what had happened, what you experienced, to make sense of it and find the words to describe it?
Unfortunately, traumatic events can often fall under this category: the dissolution of a relationship, abuse, an accident, major or emergency surgery, the death of a loved one…
There are also positive or life-changing or altering events that can fit into this category: falling in love, birthing a child, moving, making a career or life stage change, a significant trip to a new or meaningful destination...
And then, there are those events that may not be life-altering or major events in our lives but they were so experiential, so bodily, that it takes times for our minds and our words to catch up with what we experience in our bodies: that first bite of the most delicious pastry of your life, sky-diving, seeing your favorite music artist live, running your first marathon, looking out at the most gorgeous sunset you’ve ever seen, the view from the mountaintop…
For the people in our Gospel lesson today, for the crowd of 5000 plus - this is one of those experiences for them. This large crowd followed Jesus because they saw the signs he was doing for the sick… Were they curious? Full of hope? In it for the entertainment, the novelty of it all? Perhaps. I would also venture to say that they were hungry.
Now, to be clear, I don’t mean that they were hungry for food - although I am sure they were physically hungry as well. I don’t think they followed Jesus with any expectation that Jesus would feed them dinner - surely with no expectations that he would feed them with the miraculous multiplication of bread and fish…and yet, that’s what happened.
And as they were seated on the ground and bread and fish were passed around and they all ate and had their fill - they experienced something - something life-altering. Something that they couldn’t wrap their minds and thoughts around, even as the taste of the bread and fish was on their tongues and they felt the comfortable fullness in their bellies. They had an experience that changed everything for them. And although they left physically sated - they were now more hungry than ever.
This week’s Gospel Lesson kicks off what we call the 5-week Bread of Life Discourse in the lectionary. The next 50 verses in the 6th Chapter of John all show the people trying to make sense of this experience they just had where they were miraculously fed. The Revised Common Lectionary, that’s the ecumenical assigned readings for each Sunday, spends the next four weeks - five including this one - working through this chapter, walking us through trying to make sense of the experience that the crowd of 5,000 is trying to make sense of, talking about bread. As a disclaimer, while I will be spending a couple weeks talking about the Bread of Life, I won’t be spending all 5 weeks on it in my sermons - cause even for someone who loves carbs, that can get stale real fast… (See what I did there?)
But in essence - the crowd that day experienced something - something beyond the taste of bread and fish, something beyond satisfying their physical hunger, something that they experienced in their bodies and their lives but they needed their minds and souls to catch up. It was life altering but they couldn’t quite find the words right away.
Now let’s put a pin in this story of the feeding of the 5,000 because it’s not the only well-known Jesus story we are offered in this week’s reading from John. We also have Jesus walking on the water toward his disciples in the boat.
For the crowd he just fed, they didn’t know what they had experienced but they knew they experienced SOMETHING. And so their immediate reaction was to overwhelm him and make him king. A king who could feed us all until our bellies are full? Sounds like a good king to me - and it must have to the crowd too - but that's not why Jesus fed them. So Jesus and the disciples retreat and go up to the mountain to pray. The disciples then go down to sea but Jesus hasn’t joined them yet and a strong wind picked up. It was then that the disciples saw a ghost. Or they thought they did - they were terrified to see a figure walking to them on the water. The Sea of Galilee was traditionally thought of in the time of Jesus as reaching all the way down to the underworld - it is no wonder that their imaginations were running wild and they were afraid. This was not something they experienced every day after all.
Jesus met them in their physical fear - as he met the crowd of 5,000 in their physical hunger - and he said to the disciples, “It is I; do not be afraid.” And their boat automatically reached the shore to which they were going.
Again, for the disciples in that boat…this would have been another EXPERIENCE for them to process and make sense of. These kinds of events keep on piling up and happening around Jesus.
Both of these experiences - the feeding of the 5,000 and Jesus comforting the disciples' fears after walking to them on the water - both of these experiences are physical. But they also point to something beyond the physical.
Jesus met the crowd that day in their physical hunger.
Jesus met the disciples that night in their physical fear.
Jesus offered the crowd physical bread.
Jesus offered the disciples physical reassurance, “Do not be afraid.”
Jesus meets us in our physical hunger.
Jesus meets us in our physical fear.
He offers us physical bread.
He offers us physical reassurance “Do not be afraid.”
But he also offers something else, something more, something alongside the physical - to the crowds, to the disciples, and to us.
Christ, through meeting the crowds and disciples' physical needs, has also filled their innermost beings - or they’re starting to realize their innermost beings need to be filled with love. God’s love. For those familiar with the idea of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this makes sense. We have physical needs for food and safety and often our spiritual needs, our emotional needs, our innermost needs struggle to get the attention and realization they deserve until those other needs are met.
But for the crowd and the disciples - those deeper spiritual needs, the need for God’s love - it was there all along. It’s why they followed Jesus in the first place - they were hungry, hungry for something more. Hungry for a reason why. Hungry for hope. Hungry for love.
Which brings us to our reading from Ephesians, one of my favorite excerpts in all of Scripture:
“I pray that…Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
Jesus wasn’t just offering bread and reassurance that day - he was offering the breathtaking breadth of God’s love.
And love is a lot harder to understand - to digest - than bread. It’s why Jesus spends the next 50 versus and the lectionary the next 4 weeks talking about Jesus as the Bread of Life. Yes, carb lovers. You are finally justified by the way - If Jesus is God and God is Love and Jesus is the Bread of life, ergo bread is love. Not really, but kind of. I’m off topic.
That day that the crowds were fed, a spiritual hunger was ignited. One that could only be satisfied by Jesus, by God’s love. And it’s not something we can always describe with words.
What has your spiritual journey looked like? What has it meant for you, to become rooted in God’s love? To know the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s love? It’s probably an amalgamation of different life experiences and events - some we have words for, some we don’t have words for yet, and some we may never have words for.
For me, I can think about being taken to church as a kid and loving it for the doughnuts - a physical experience. And then staying for the community and love I felt there. I think about summers at Camp Asbury - especially the summer we talked about trees. Did you know that sometimes, the roots of trees go down double the depth and double the length into the ground as the branches do? When it comes to our faith I think about the branches as those spiritual experiences we have words for - and the roots, so much below the surface, as the love God has given us that we’re still trying to wrap our minds and hearts around. I think of the daily humbling experiences of pastoring and mothering and everything in between. All the ways, big and small, that God reaches out to me - to us - in love. My words fail, and yet God’s love remains. And every day, God offers to take my breath away with the ways God wants to root me in God’s love.
So today let’s recognize that we are hungry. And if we’re hungry because our stomachs are empty or we live in fear - know that God meets you in those physical needs. And let us, the church, your community know, so that we can be Jesus to you and meet you in those needs.
And let’s also recognize that we are hungry for something more - to be satiated with love. The love of God which is breathtaking and always offered to us in abundance - as Jesus offers bread and fish to the crowds in abundance that day. God wants to blow us away with the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s love for us. So just admit to God that you are hungry, and you will see how the God who is the Bread of Life, satisfies our souls.
Amen.
Ephesians 3:14-21
“Bread, Breadth, and Breathtaking”
Preached Sunday, July 28, 2024
Have you ever had an experience that took you days, weeks, months, or even years to process? To fully understand what had happened, what you experienced, to make sense of it and find the words to describe it?
Unfortunately, traumatic events can often fall under this category: the dissolution of a relationship, abuse, an accident, major or emergency surgery, the death of a loved one…
There are also positive or life-changing or altering events that can fit into this category: falling in love, birthing a child, moving, making a career or life stage change, a significant trip to a new or meaningful destination...
And then, there are those events that may not be life-altering or major events in our lives but they were so experiential, so bodily, that it takes times for our minds and our words to catch up with what we experience in our bodies: that first bite of the most delicious pastry of your life, sky-diving, seeing your favorite music artist live, running your first marathon, looking out at the most gorgeous sunset you’ve ever seen, the view from the mountaintop…
For the people in our Gospel lesson today, for the crowd of 5000 plus - this is one of those experiences for them. This large crowd followed Jesus because they saw the signs he was doing for the sick… Were they curious? Full of hope? In it for the entertainment, the novelty of it all? Perhaps. I would also venture to say that they were hungry.
Now, to be clear, I don’t mean that they were hungry for food - although I am sure they were physically hungry as well. I don’t think they followed Jesus with any expectation that Jesus would feed them dinner - surely with no expectations that he would feed them with the miraculous multiplication of bread and fish…and yet, that’s what happened.
And as they were seated on the ground and bread and fish were passed around and they all ate and had their fill - they experienced something - something life-altering. Something that they couldn’t wrap their minds and thoughts around, even as the taste of the bread and fish was on their tongues and they felt the comfortable fullness in their bellies. They had an experience that changed everything for them. And although they left physically sated - they were now more hungry than ever.
This week’s Gospel Lesson kicks off what we call the 5-week Bread of Life Discourse in the lectionary. The next 50 verses in the 6th Chapter of John all show the people trying to make sense of this experience they just had where they were miraculously fed. The Revised Common Lectionary, that’s the ecumenical assigned readings for each Sunday, spends the next four weeks - five including this one - working through this chapter, walking us through trying to make sense of the experience that the crowd of 5,000 is trying to make sense of, talking about bread. As a disclaimer, while I will be spending a couple weeks talking about the Bread of Life, I won’t be spending all 5 weeks on it in my sermons - cause even for someone who loves carbs, that can get stale real fast… (See what I did there?)
But in essence - the crowd that day experienced something - something beyond the taste of bread and fish, something beyond satisfying their physical hunger, something that they experienced in their bodies and their lives but they needed their minds and souls to catch up. It was life altering but they couldn’t quite find the words right away.
Now let’s put a pin in this story of the feeding of the 5,000 because it’s not the only well-known Jesus story we are offered in this week’s reading from John. We also have Jesus walking on the water toward his disciples in the boat.
For the crowd he just fed, they didn’t know what they had experienced but they knew they experienced SOMETHING. And so their immediate reaction was to overwhelm him and make him king. A king who could feed us all until our bellies are full? Sounds like a good king to me - and it must have to the crowd too - but that's not why Jesus fed them. So Jesus and the disciples retreat and go up to the mountain to pray. The disciples then go down to sea but Jesus hasn’t joined them yet and a strong wind picked up. It was then that the disciples saw a ghost. Or they thought they did - they were terrified to see a figure walking to them on the water. The Sea of Galilee was traditionally thought of in the time of Jesus as reaching all the way down to the underworld - it is no wonder that their imaginations were running wild and they were afraid. This was not something they experienced every day after all.
Jesus met them in their physical fear - as he met the crowd of 5,000 in their physical hunger - and he said to the disciples, “It is I; do not be afraid.” And their boat automatically reached the shore to which they were going.
Again, for the disciples in that boat…this would have been another EXPERIENCE for them to process and make sense of. These kinds of events keep on piling up and happening around Jesus.
Both of these experiences - the feeding of the 5,000 and Jesus comforting the disciples' fears after walking to them on the water - both of these experiences are physical. But they also point to something beyond the physical.
Jesus met the crowd that day in their physical hunger.
Jesus met the disciples that night in their physical fear.
Jesus offered the crowd physical bread.
Jesus offered the disciples physical reassurance, “Do not be afraid.”
Jesus meets us in our physical hunger.
Jesus meets us in our physical fear.
He offers us physical bread.
He offers us physical reassurance “Do not be afraid.”
But he also offers something else, something more, something alongside the physical - to the crowds, to the disciples, and to us.
Christ, through meeting the crowds and disciples' physical needs, has also filled their innermost beings - or they’re starting to realize their innermost beings need to be filled with love. God’s love. For those familiar with the idea of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this makes sense. We have physical needs for food and safety and often our spiritual needs, our emotional needs, our innermost needs struggle to get the attention and realization they deserve until those other needs are met.
But for the crowd and the disciples - those deeper spiritual needs, the need for God’s love - it was there all along. It’s why they followed Jesus in the first place - they were hungry, hungry for something more. Hungry for a reason why. Hungry for hope. Hungry for love.
Which brings us to our reading from Ephesians, one of my favorite excerpts in all of Scripture:
“I pray that…Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
Jesus wasn’t just offering bread and reassurance that day - he was offering the breathtaking breadth of God’s love.
And love is a lot harder to understand - to digest - than bread. It’s why Jesus spends the next 50 versus and the lectionary the next 4 weeks talking about Jesus as the Bread of Life. Yes, carb lovers. You are finally justified by the way - If Jesus is God and God is Love and Jesus is the Bread of life, ergo bread is love. Not really, but kind of. I’m off topic.
That day that the crowds were fed, a spiritual hunger was ignited. One that could only be satisfied by Jesus, by God’s love. And it’s not something we can always describe with words.
What has your spiritual journey looked like? What has it meant for you, to become rooted in God’s love? To know the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s love? It’s probably an amalgamation of different life experiences and events - some we have words for, some we don’t have words for yet, and some we may never have words for.
For me, I can think about being taken to church as a kid and loving it for the doughnuts - a physical experience. And then staying for the community and love I felt there. I think about summers at Camp Asbury - especially the summer we talked about trees. Did you know that sometimes, the roots of trees go down double the depth and double the length into the ground as the branches do? When it comes to our faith I think about the branches as those spiritual experiences we have words for - and the roots, so much below the surface, as the love God has given us that we’re still trying to wrap our minds and hearts around. I think of the daily humbling experiences of pastoring and mothering and everything in between. All the ways, big and small, that God reaches out to me - to us - in love. My words fail, and yet God’s love remains. And every day, God offers to take my breath away with the ways God wants to root me in God’s love.
So today let’s recognize that we are hungry. And if we’re hungry because our stomachs are empty or we live in fear - know that God meets you in those physical needs. And let us, the church, your community know, so that we can be Jesus to you and meet you in those needs.
And let’s also recognize that we are hungry for something more - to be satiated with love. The love of God which is breathtaking and always offered to us in abundance - as Jesus offers bread and fish to the crowds in abundance that day. God wants to blow us away with the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s love for us. So just admit to God that you are hungry, and you will see how the God who is the Bread of Life, satisfies our souls.
Amen.
Thursday, July 25, 2024
"What Are You Taking Home With You?" A camp sermon
2 Corinthians 4:18
“What Are You Taking Home With You?”
Preached Thursday, July 25, 2024 at Camp Asbury
“because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”
What are you taking home with camp from you this week?
“What Are You Taking Home With You?”
Preached Thursday, July 25, 2024 at Camp Asbury
“because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”
What are you taking home with camp from you this week?
(Get answers)
Hopefully you are leaving with everything you came with. I think your parents or caregivers would appreciate that. Maybe you’re leaving with some crafts, some artwork, a four leaf clover…
I have some things here with me that I’ve taken home from camp when I was a camper and counselor here…Let me show you:
(Go through props - art, four leaf clovers, letters, tshirts, etc)
But…are any of you taking something home that you can’t hold? These things, our luggage, our camp tshirts, crafts we made…these are all what we call tangible. We can see them and we can touch them and hold them and physically carry them home.
What are you carrying out mentally? What has this week at camp taught you? Has anyone learned a new skill?
(Let campers list skills they’ve learned)
While I was at camp I learned how to make a fire and cook over it. I learned how to be a complete boss at the ropes course. I learned the words to a bunch of camp songs. I even learned interesting facts about nature/God’s creation.
What about friendships? Have any of you formed new friendships this week? Or this summer? Why don’t we just raise our hands for this one?
Yeah - I made new friends while I was a camper. One year I met a girl named Hilary and we wrote letters and emails to each other the whole school year. And for the next couple summers we planned on coming back to camp the same week and getting to share camp together again. I also have lifelong friends who were my co-counselors at camp. I’ve met people at camp who I’ve carried into my life beyond camp.
What about in Bible study - what have you learned this week?
(Let campers share about Bible study)
This week you’ve heard about the Ethiopian Eunuch getting baptized and how God’s love is for ALL people - ages, nations, races, genders. You heard about The Last Supper and how God calls all Christians, even those with different worship practices, to be one together. You heard about The Lord’s Prayer and how God wants to hear us pray and how God wants us to care and pray for each other too. Today you heard or maybe you will hear around your campfire’s about Jesus teaching on hospitality, and again about how God wants to include ALL people and asks us to do the same. Tomorrow you’ll hear about The Good Samaritan and again about how God wants us to love and care for all people and show them God’s love.
Now my question is - are these things you’ve learned about - are they tangible - something you can see and touch and smell and taste or are they intangible? Something you can’t touch but you can feel it in your heart? What do you think?
(Let them answer)
Right - they are intangible. We can’t carry these things home in our luggage. But we do carry them with us - we carry them in our hearts.
We carry them in the experiences we’ve had here at camp. We might not have touched them with our hands but we have experienced something and we know what we’ve experienced just as much as we know the crafts we made this week. And we can take those things with us. We can take the friendships we’ve made - and if we can carry those friendships throughout the school year or longer - that’s awesome. And even if we can’t stay in touch after camp - we know those friendships are still things that, even if for just a week or for a summer, have changed us - hopefully for the better. And we can take those things we talked about in Bible study - and they can remain head knowledge or we can carry them with us in our hearts. And let the words our counselors shared with us this week, let them change how we see God and others. Let them change how we practice living out our faith. Let them change how our faith becomes alive because of the way we treat and welcome and care and pray for other people.
And in this way - although these things are intangible - they can be tangible. You can’t touch the idea of loving others like God loves them - but when you live it out, you can. You can touch your neighbor’s hands or hug them as you offer them care and friendship. You can give them food or a meal. You can live out love. God’s love for them. Through you - God’s intangible love - can become tangible. You can see and experience the ways you show care and support for one another and how you were acting as God, as Jesus, for that person.
So tonight we will take Holy Communion - have bread and juice together - and this is something that is both tangible and intangible.
It’s tangible because you can touch the bread. You can taste it. You can taste the sweetness of the juice on your tongue. You can see bread crumbs on the ground. This is something we experience with our bodies. And Jesus wanted to give us that tangible experience of a way to remember something intangible. That is - Jesus wanted to give us something that we can see and smell and taste - to remember something that we can’t see and smell and taste but we can feel it in our hearts - and that’s how much God loves us.
And we can remember how much God loves us every time we come to the Communion table. And maybe we come from different traditions and maybe in our non-camp life, we don’t normally take communion - and the beautiful thing about that is, we can connect this table to every table we eat at. Every time we eat bread. Everytime we have juice. Every time we eat with people and it's an experience of love and joy. Every time we do that - we can also remember this meal - this meal that means God’s love for us. And in that way, the intangible - God’s love for us - becomes the tangible - the taste and smell of food and the love shared between people who eat together.
So tomorrow as you pack up your bags and stop by lower Asbury on your way out to gather anything you made this week - and you think about what you’re bringing home with you this week…
Think about the things that you’re bringing home with you that you can't touch:
The friendships you made.
The skills you learned.
How you’ve experienced God while here.
How you’ve learned about how God loves us and wants us to love others.
How this meal reminds us of God’s love.
You can’t touch these things - but you’ve experienced them this week and they have been just as real to you as the luggage that you are bringing home. And in some ways, they are even more real - eventually you may outgrow the camp tshirts. The four leaf clovers pressed between the pages of your Bible may disintegrate into nothing. Crafts may fall apart, be lost, or thrown away. But God’s love isn’t going anywhere. God’s love for you isn’t going anywhere. God will always be reaching out to you - through Scripture, through bread and juice, through friendships, and through the beauty of nature - always reaching out to share love with you and encourage you to share God’s love with each other.
And that’s a beautiful thing - whether you can touch it or not. So I pray and hope and know that you will be leaving camp this week with God’s love because it is always with you.
Amen.
Hopefully you are leaving with everything you came with. I think your parents or caregivers would appreciate that. Maybe you’re leaving with some crafts, some artwork, a four leaf clover…
I have some things here with me that I’ve taken home from camp when I was a camper and counselor here…Let me show you:
(Go through props - art, four leaf clovers, letters, tshirts, etc)
But…are any of you taking something home that you can’t hold? These things, our luggage, our camp tshirts, crafts we made…these are all what we call tangible. We can see them and we can touch them and hold them and physically carry them home.
What are you carrying out mentally? What has this week at camp taught you? Has anyone learned a new skill?
(Let campers list skills they’ve learned)
While I was at camp I learned how to make a fire and cook over it. I learned how to be a complete boss at the ropes course. I learned the words to a bunch of camp songs. I even learned interesting facts about nature/God’s creation.
What about friendships? Have any of you formed new friendships this week? Or this summer? Why don’t we just raise our hands for this one?
Yeah - I made new friends while I was a camper. One year I met a girl named Hilary and we wrote letters and emails to each other the whole school year. And for the next couple summers we planned on coming back to camp the same week and getting to share camp together again. I also have lifelong friends who were my co-counselors at camp. I’ve met people at camp who I’ve carried into my life beyond camp.
What about in Bible study - what have you learned this week?
(Let campers share about Bible study)
This week you’ve heard about the Ethiopian Eunuch getting baptized and how God’s love is for ALL people - ages, nations, races, genders. You heard about The Last Supper and how God calls all Christians, even those with different worship practices, to be one together. You heard about The Lord’s Prayer and how God wants to hear us pray and how God wants us to care and pray for each other too. Today you heard or maybe you will hear around your campfire’s about Jesus teaching on hospitality, and again about how God wants to include ALL people and asks us to do the same. Tomorrow you’ll hear about The Good Samaritan and again about how God wants us to love and care for all people and show them God’s love.
Now my question is - are these things you’ve learned about - are they tangible - something you can see and touch and smell and taste or are they intangible? Something you can’t touch but you can feel it in your heart? What do you think?
(Let them answer)
Right - they are intangible. We can’t carry these things home in our luggage. But we do carry them with us - we carry them in our hearts.
We carry them in the experiences we’ve had here at camp. We might not have touched them with our hands but we have experienced something and we know what we’ve experienced just as much as we know the crafts we made this week. And we can take those things with us. We can take the friendships we’ve made - and if we can carry those friendships throughout the school year or longer - that’s awesome. And even if we can’t stay in touch after camp - we know those friendships are still things that, even if for just a week or for a summer, have changed us - hopefully for the better. And we can take those things we talked about in Bible study - and they can remain head knowledge or we can carry them with us in our hearts. And let the words our counselors shared with us this week, let them change how we see God and others. Let them change how we practice living out our faith. Let them change how our faith becomes alive because of the way we treat and welcome and care and pray for other people.
And in this way - although these things are intangible - they can be tangible. You can’t touch the idea of loving others like God loves them - but when you live it out, you can. You can touch your neighbor’s hands or hug them as you offer them care and friendship. You can give them food or a meal. You can live out love. God’s love for them. Through you - God’s intangible love - can become tangible. You can see and experience the ways you show care and support for one another and how you were acting as God, as Jesus, for that person.
So tonight we will take Holy Communion - have bread and juice together - and this is something that is both tangible and intangible.
It’s tangible because you can touch the bread. You can taste it. You can taste the sweetness of the juice on your tongue. You can see bread crumbs on the ground. This is something we experience with our bodies. And Jesus wanted to give us that tangible experience of a way to remember something intangible. That is - Jesus wanted to give us something that we can see and smell and taste - to remember something that we can’t see and smell and taste but we can feel it in our hearts - and that’s how much God loves us.
And we can remember how much God loves us every time we come to the Communion table. And maybe we come from different traditions and maybe in our non-camp life, we don’t normally take communion - and the beautiful thing about that is, we can connect this table to every table we eat at. Every time we eat bread. Everytime we have juice. Every time we eat with people and it's an experience of love and joy. Every time we do that - we can also remember this meal - this meal that means God’s love for us. And in that way, the intangible - God’s love for us - becomes the tangible - the taste and smell of food and the love shared between people who eat together.
So tomorrow as you pack up your bags and stop by lower Asbury on your way out to gather anything you made this week - and you think about what you’re bringing home with you this week…
Think about the things that you’re bringing home with you that you can't touch:
The friendships you made.
The skills you learned.
How you’ve experienced God while here.
How you’ve learned about how God loves us and wants us to love others.
How this meal reminds us of God’s love.
You can’t touch these things - but you’ve experienced them this week and they have been just as real to you as the luggage that you are bringing home. And in some ways, they are even more real - eventually you may outgrow the camp tshirts. The four leaf clovers pressed between the pages of your Bible may disintegrate into nothing. Crafts may fall apart, be lost, or thrown away. But God’s love isn’t going anywhere. God’s love for you isn’t going anywhere. God will always be reaching out to you - through Scripture, through bread and juice, through friendships, and through the beauty of nature - always reaching out to share love with you and encourage you to share God’s love with each other.
And that’s a beautiful thing - whether you can touch it or not. So I pray and hope and know that you will be leaving camp this week with God’s love because it is always with you.
Amen.
Monday, July 22, 2024
"Can't A Guy Get a Break?" a sermon on Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
“Can’t A Guy Get a Break?”
Preached Sunday, July 21, 2024
Before I start, I want to say that I truly make an effort to prioritize Sabbath rest in my life. And we’ll talk about that in the sermon today. But when life gets in the way of Sabbath - I try to have a sense of humor about it. For example, whenever I find myself putting on my clergy collar or getting ready for work on what is supposed to be my day off, I listen to or sing the 2008 song, “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” by Cage the Elephant. I am not sure with the age demographic in the room if you’ll have heard it but it goes:
“There ain't no rest for the wicked
Money don't grow on trees
I got bills to pay
I got mouths to feed
There ain't nothing in this world for free
I know I can't slow down
I can't hold back
Though you know, I wish I could
Oh no there ain't no rest for the wicked
Until we close our eyes for good"
I chuckle at the irony of singing “there ain’t no rest for the wicked” while getting ready to do church ministry, and if I am working on my Sabbath, it is often because of my other priorities of care and compassion for others - funerals are a common example of Sabbath exceptions.
And, the fact of the matter is, rest is holy. I wouldn’t like to go as far as to say a life without rest is wicked because a life without rest can be forced upon someone, but there is a kernel of truth in that. Sabbath rest is holy. And a life that revolves around Sabbath rest is a holy one, one that pleases God. Robbing ourselves and others of Sabbath rest is, indeed, a wicked thing.
Sometimes we think of “Sabbath” in Christian circles as something just for clergy but it isn’t just for ministers. We all need rest and we all are commanded to observe the Sabbath. Observing the Sabbath and keeping it holy is one of the ten commandments. And, yet, I often hear it is the commandment that we treat as optional, a suggestion, rather than an edict.
The odds are that you - we - most of us if not all of us in this room - struggle with the concept and observation of Sabbath. And you may therefore find some modicum of comfort in today’s Gospel reading where we see Jesus’s plans for rest waylaid. We see throughout the Gospels that Jesus prioritizes rest - even when it doesn’t exactly work out, like in today’s reading. Sabbath rest and renewing time with God was a pillar in his life. For him Sabbath was not a strict observance but something that enhances our lives, our relationship with God, and our relationships with one another. As he says to the religious leaders: “The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath, so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” Sabbath is a gift that God wants for our lives - why don’t we accept it?
“Can’t A Guy Get a Break?”
Preached Sunday, July 21, 2024
Before I start, I want to say that I truly make an effort to prioritize Sabbath rest in my life. And we’ll talk about that in the sermon today. But when life gets in the way of Sabbath - I try to have a sense of humor about it. For example, whenever I find myself putting on my clergy collar or getting ready for work on what is supposed to be my day off, I listen to or sing the 2008 song, “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” by Cage the Elephant. I am not sure with the age demographic in the room if you’ll have heard it but it goes:
“There ain't no rest for the wicked
Money don't grow on trees
I got bills to pay
I got mouths to feed
There ain't nothing in this world for free
I know I can't slow down
I can't hold back
Though you know, I wish I could
Oh no there ain't no rest for the wicked
Until we close our eyes for good"
I chuckle at the irony of singing “there ain’t no rest for the wicked” while getting ready to do church ministry, and if I am working on my Sabbath, it is often because of my other priorities of care and compassion for others - funerals are a common example of Sabbath exceptions.
And, the fact of the matter is, rest is holy. I wouldn’t like to go as far as to say a life without rest is wicked because a life without rest can be forced upon someone, but there is a kernel of truth in that. Sabbath rest is holy. And a life that revolves around Sabbath rest is a holy one, one that pleases God. Robbing ourselves and others of Sabbath rest is, indeed, a wicked thing.
Sometimes we think of “Sabbath” in Christian circles as something just for clergy but it isn’t just for ministers. We all need rest and we all are commanded to observe the Sabbath. Observing the Sabbath and keeping it holy is one of the ten commandments. And, yet, I often hear it is the commandment that we treat as optional, a suggestion, rather than an edict.
The odds are that you - we - most of us if not all of us in this room - struggle with the concept and observation of Sabbath. And you may therefore find some modicum of comfort in today’s Gospel reading where we see Jesus’s plans for rest waylaid. We see throughout the Gospels that Jesus prioritizes rest - even when it doesn’t exactly work out, like in today’s reading. Sabbath rest and renewing time with God was a pillar in his life. For him Sabbath was not a strict observance but something that enhances our lives, our relationship with God, and our relationships with one another. As he says to the religious leaders: “The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath, so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” Sabbath is a gift that God wants for our lives - why don’t we accept it?
Indeed how we observe the Sabbath has changed from the Mosaic Laws found in the Hebrew Bible and that some sects of our Jewish siblings still follow this day - rules about cooking and opening doors and such. Our Christian understanding of Sabbath has diverged from this concept - including the day - our Jewish siblings practice Sabbath rest on Saturday - the seventh day of the week, the day in the Creation story when God rested from the work of Creation. Christians, generally, think of Sabbath as Sunday - the day Jesus was resurrected from the dead.
For Christians who take the commandment of Sabbath seriously, the details of how it is followed isn’t as important as the priority of it being observed at all. That Sabbath is a priority for and in our lives. That we come to the one whose yoke is easy and his burden is light and find rest. That we set the example of what it looks like to rest in God and in doing so, participate in re-wiring the system of our world and culture so that all may find rest in Christ.
In his book, “Sabbath as Resistance,” Christian theologian Walter Brueggemann writes about the commandment of observing Sabbath. The whole premise of this book is that the commandment to observe Sabbath, which comes fourth in the ten commandments, is a bridge commandment. He opens his book with this thesis statement:
“…the fourth commandment on the Sabbath is the ‘crucial bridge’ that connects the Ten Commandments together. The fourth commandment looks back to the first three commandments and the God who rests. At the same time, the Sabbath commandment looks forward to the last six commandments that concern the neighbor; they provide for rest alongside the neighbor. God, self, and all members of the household share in common rest on the seventh day; that social reality provides a commonality and a coherence not only to the community of covenant but to the commands of Sinai as well.”
In order to understand the importance of the commandment of Sabbath as a bridge commandment, we have to understand the context of the book of Exodus that is alluded to in the preamble to the commandments and the first commandment: “And God spoke all these words: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.”
The book of Exodus has followed the slavery and oppression of the Israelites in Egypt, in the land of Pharaoh. And then God, through Moses, guided them out of slavery, out of Pharaoh's grasp, through the Red Sea, and delivered into the hands of God. It is then that Moses goes up the Mount and receives the Torah, the Law, from God.
Right from the start, God defines God’s self as the God who led them out of Egypt and then says they are to have no other gods before God’s self. We don’t think of Pharaoh in this way today - but to the ancient Egyptians and to the Israelites - Pharaoh was a god. He was seen as divine and had immense power and control over the Israelites - he forced them into slavery at the whims of the Pharaoh, pushing them to produce for the wealth and gain of Pharaoh and of Egypt, and gave them no allowance for rest.
Right off the bat the God of the Israelites, our God, is telling God’s people - I am not like the god of Egypt. I am not like Pharaoh. I am above Pharaoh. My ways are different from Pharaoh's. We then are given the second and third commandments about idols and misusing God’s name. The first three commandments are then primarily about our relationship with God. In the Gospels, Jesus sums up and the commandments, law, and prophets as “Love God and love neighbor as self.” So the first three commandments can be seen as primarily being about loving God. Then we come to the bridge commandment, the Sabbath commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” In this commandment we see a shift, a pivot, a bridge being built. For the next 6 commandments are all about how we treat, how we love, our neighbors, our fellow human beings. Sabbath, however, is about both love of God and love of neighbor. It connects the first three commandments to the last six and is absolutely vital for this connecting work.
When we observe Sabbath, in light of it being the bridging commandment, we are recognizing that God is our God and not Pharaoh. We are recognizing that the world we live in is God’s, not Pharaoh's, and we will follow God’s way which includes Sabbath rest. Pharaoh's way is the way of slavery. It is the way of using humans as tools and things rather than beloved children of God. Pharaoh’s way is the way of a system built on production and wealth and the anxiety and pressure to produce wealth. It is the way of mammon - the word used for wealth when Jesus says, “No one can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” While we no longer have a literal Pharaoh that we view as divine in our world, the kingdom of Pharaoh and all that Pharaoh represented is still going strong in our world. That is the constant desire to produce enough. To make enough. To have enough. At any and all cost.
Brueggemann says, “Rest as did the creator God! And while you rest - be sure that your neighbors rest alongside you. Indeed, sponsor a system of rest that contradicts the system of anxiety of Pharaoh, because you are no longer subject to Pharaoh's anxiety system.”
Now here’s the hard question: How come we still live like we are slaves in Egypt under the system of Pharaoh? At least when it comes to the systems of anxiety, production, and lack of rest that drives our lives? Why do we live under this system for ourselves and allow our neighbors to live under it as well?
Which brings to me a sin that we don’t often name for what it is, a sin, and contrary to God’s desires for us: The Protestant Work Ethic. The term was coined in 1904 by an economist, Max Weber, as he talked about the correlation between Calvinism and Capitalism. The Protestant Work Ethic has largely defined our American capitalistic culture for at least the last 100 years if not much more. The basic premise is that how hard you work is a reflection of how much you are worth, how good you are, if you are “saved.”
The Protestant Work Ethic tells us our value comes from what we produce. And not produce as in Fruit of the Spirit but produce in terms of economical gain, of blood, sweat, and tears poured into the cog of the economy, how much we grind, how much and how well we run the rat race. This can be applicable in any profession and stage of life. How many hours we work, how many meetings we have, how much we earn, how far we advance, what our supervisors or evaluations say about us… And that also all translates to the house we live in, the cars we drive, how many children we have and how they behave, how many and how luxurious of vacations we can take, whether we can afford the fancy lattes, etc., etc.. It can even relate to our lives in the church: is the church producing attendance and offering numbers that are up to par?
The Protestant Work Ethic though is just another term for the culture or system of Pharaoh that God commands us to not follow. It is a system that robs us of God as our God with no other Gods before God. We cannot serve both God and Pharaoh. We cannot serve both God and the endless drive to produce without rest.
And so allow me to ask: what would it look like for you, for you specifically, to make Sabbath rest a priority in your life? What would it look like to center yourself in our God who desires to make us lie down in green pastures besides still water? What would it look like to center yourself in Jesus whose burden is easy and whose yoke is light? Practically - what could taking the commandment for Sabbath seriously look like for you?
For me, I try and frame Sabbath rest as having one day off every week that honors God. AND, one day off a week to be human. My God honoring time can look like worshiping, praying, napping, gardening, spending time in loving community…and when I’m at my best, putting down my phone and its relentless stream of notifications and information. My day to be human is about errands and appointments and all that is required of me to function as a basic human and member of society.
Christian author Rob Bell framed Sabbath like this:
“Sabbath is taking a day a week to remind myself that I did not make the world and that it will continue to exist without my efforts.
Sabbath is a day when my work is done, even if it isn’t.
Sabbath is a day when my job is to enjoy. Period.
Sabbath is a day when I am fully available to myself and those I love most.
Sabbath is a day when I remember that when God made the world, he saw that it was good.
Sabbath is a day when I produce nothing.
Sabbath is a day when at the end I say, ‘I didn’t do anything today,’ and I don’t add, ‘And I feel so guilty.’
Sabbath is a day when my phone is turned off, I don’t check my email, and you can’t get a hold of me.”
I’ve heard it phrased this way as well - Sabbath is a day where you ask yourself - what would I enjoy doing or not doing today? And what could I do - or not do - that would center me in God who is Lord of the Sabbath? Where does our enjoyment and centering God meet? That is a day of Sabbath rest.
Now here’s my disclaimer or warning to you - when we first start practicing Sabbath…it does not feel good. We often think, “Oh I’m so tired, I’m so overworked, I’m so busy” that we must think OF COURSE a day of rest will feel good, like a tantalizing treat for our overworked selves. But the reality is, it feels good to be needed. It feels good to do and to produce. We get endorphins when we check items off of our to-do lists. When those phone notifications go off, our brains are flooded with hormones - someone needs me. Someone wants me. I can help.
We are so embedded in the culture of Pharaoh, in the culture of Productivity, that we need to detox from it. And detoxing doesn’t feel good at first. We may feel restless and listless as we have to force ourselves to rest, centering ourselves in God - and rest centered in God is different from the vegetative state we can enter when binge watching a favorite show. We have to actively engage our minds and our souls to turn toward God rather than turn toward productivity.
And if we stick with it, eventually we will find enjoyment in Sabbath rest. We will realize that rest and Sabbath is not a reward for the hard work well done, Sabbath is rest for the work we have ahead of us. It’s a small mental shift but a meaningful one. If we only rest when we feel we deserve it, when we feel the work is done, then we will never truly rest. But if we rest because we know we need rest and we know we need to be centered in God for the compassionate, caring, loving work God calls us to do… that’s different.
We rest so that we can love God and love neighbor more fully. We rest so that we can have compassion.
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus’s plans for rest don’t go exactly as planned - something that I can certainly relate to and assures me that Jesus was human and the world he lived in, while different in some ways, is still the same world we experience here today… Even though Jesus’s plans for rest don’t go exactly as planned - Jesus still had compassion for the crowds who needed him. He was able to love his neighbor. For as much as he was human, Jesus was also Lord of the Sabbath. And as the bridging commandment, Sabbath is just as much about love of God as it is about love of neighbor. Jesus prioritized rest and renewal, spread throughout his whole ministry, so that he could serve with compassion and love. I trust that even if Jesus didn’t catch a break in this passage, he continued to make rest a priority. He continued to pray and center himself in love. Sabbath was just part of the rhythm of his life.
My invitation to all of us today is for us to center Sabbath as a priority in our lives, to make it a part of the rhythms of our lives, to view it as the highly important bridging commandment it is. Let us hear the voice of God inviting us to lie down in green pastures and besides still waters, let us heed that voice and through Sabbath rest, find better love of God and love of neighbor.
May it be so. Amen.
For Christians who take the commandment of Sabbath seriously, the details of how it is followed isn’t as important as the priority of it being observed at all. That Sabbath is a priority for and in our lives. That we come to the one whose yoke is easy and his burden is light and find rest. That we set the example of what it looks like to rest in God and in doing so, participate in re-wiring the system of our world and culture so that all may find rest in Christ.
In his book, “Sabbath as Resistance,” Christian theologian Walter Brueggemann writes about the commandment of observing Sabbath. The whole premise of this book is that the commandment to observe Sabbath, which comes fourth in the ten commandments, is a bridge commandment. He opens his book with this thesis statement:
“…the fourth commandment on the Sabbath is the ‘crucial bridge’ that connects the Ten Commandments together. The fourth commandment looks back to the first three commandments and the God who rests. At the same time, the Sabbath commandment looks forward to the last six commandments that concern the neighbor; they provide for rest alongside the neighbor. God, self, and all members of the household share in common rest on the seventh day; that social reality provides a commonality and a coherence not only to the community of covenant but to the commands of Sinai as well.”
In order to understand the importance of the commandment of Sabbath as a bridge commandment, we have to understand the context of the book of Exodus that is alluded to in the preamble to the commandments and the first commandment: “And God spoke all these words: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.”
The book of Exodus has followed the slavery and oppression of the Israelites in Egypt, in the land of Pharaoh. And then God, through Moses, guided them out of slavery, out of Pharaoh's grasp, through the Red Sea, and delivered into the hands of God. It is then that Moses goes up the Mount and receives the Torah, the Law, from God.
Right from the start, God defines God’s self as the God who led them out of Egypt and then says they are to have no other gods before God’s self. We don’t think of Pharaoh in this way today - but to the ancient Egyptians and to the Israelites - Pharaoh was a god. He was seen as divine and had immense power and control over the Israelites - he forced them into slavery at the whims of the Pharaoh, pushing them to produce for the wealth and gain of Pharaoh and of Egypt, and gave them no allowance for rest.
Right off the bat the God of the Israelites, our God, is telling God’s people - I am not like the god of Egypt. I am not like Pharaoh. I am above Pharaoh. My ways are different from Pharaoh's. We then are given the second and third commandments about idols and misusing God’s name. The first three commandments are then primarily about our relationship with God. In the Gospels, Jesus sums up and the commandments, law, and prophets as “Love God and love neighbor as self.” So the first three commandments can be seen as primarily being about loving God. Then we come to the bridge commandment, the Sabbath commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” In this commandment we see a shift, a pivot, a bridge being built. For the next 6 commandments are all about how we treat, how we love, our neighbors, our fellow human beings. Sabbath, however, is about both love of God and love of neighbor. It connects the first three commandments to the last six and is absolutely vital for this connecting work.
When we observe Sabbath, in light of it being the bridging commandment, we are recognizing that God is our God and not Pharaoh. We are recognizing that the world we live in is God’s, not Pharaoh's, and we will follow God’s way which includes Sabbath rest. Pharaoh's way is the way of slavery. It is the way of using humans as tools and things rather than beloved children of God. Pharaoh’s way is the way of a system built on production and wealth and the anxiety and pressure to produce wealth. It is the way of mammon - the word used for wealth when Jesus says, “No one can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” While we no longer have a literal Pharaoh that we view as divine in our world, the kingdom of Pharaoh and all that Pharaoh represented is still going strong in our world. That is the constant desire to produce enough. To make enough. To have enough. At any and all cost.
Brueggemann says, “Rest as did the creator God! And while you rest - be sure that your neighbors rest alongside you. Indeed, sponsor a system of rest that contradicts the system of anxiety of Pharaoh, because you are no longer subject to Pharaoh's anxiety system.”
Now here’s the hard question: How come we still live like we are slaves in Egypt under the system of Pharaoh? At least when it comes to the systems of anxiety, production, and lack of rest that drives our lives? Why do we live under this system for ourselves and allow our neighbors to live under it as well?
Which brings to me a sin that we don’t often name for what it is, a sin, and contrary to God’s desires for us: The Protestant Work Ethic. The term was coined in 1904 by an economist, Max Weber, as he talked about the correlation between Calvinism and Capitalism. The Protestant Work Ethic has largely defined our American capitalistic culture for at least the last 100 years if not much more. The basic premise is that how hard you work is a reflection of how much you are worth, how good you are, if you are “saved.”
The Protestant Work Ethic tells us our value comes from what we produce. And not produce as in Fruit of the Spirit but produce in terms of economical gain, of blood, sweat, and tears poured into the cog of the economy, how much we grind, how much and how well we run the rat race. This can be applicable in any profession and stage of life. How many hours we work, how many meetings we have, how much we earn, how far we advance, what our supervisors or evaluations say about us… And that also all translates to the house we live in, the cars we drive, how many children we have and how they behave, how many and how luxurious of vacations we can take, whether we can afford the fancy lattes, etc., etc.. It can even relate to our lives in the church: is the church producing attendance and offering numbers that are up to par?
The Protestant Work Ethic though is just another term for the culture or system of Pharaoh that God commands us to not follow. It is a system that robs us of God as our God with no other Gods before God. We cannot serve both God and Pharaoh. We cannot serve both God and the endless drive to produce without rest.
And so allow me to ask: what would it look like for you, for you specifically, to make Sabbath rest a priority in your life? What would it look like to center yourself in our God who desires to make us lie down in green pastures besides still water? What would it look like to center yourself in Jesus whose burden is easy and whose yoke is light? Practically - what could taking the commandment for Sabbath seriously look like for you?
For me, I try and frame Sabbath rest as having one day off every week that honors God. AND, one day off a week to be human. My God honoring time can look like worshiping, praying, napping, gardening, spending time in loving community…and when I’m at my best, putting down my phone and its relentless stream of notifications and information. My day to be human is about errands and appointments and all that is required of me to function as a basic human and member of society.
Christian author Rob Bell framed Sabbath like this:
“Sabbath is taking a day a week to remind myself that I did not make the world and that it will continue to exist without my efforts.
Sabbath is a day when my work is done, even if it isn’t.
Sabbath is a day when my job is to enjoy. Period.
Sabbath is a day when I am fully available to myself and those I love most.
Sabbath is a day when I remember that when God made the world, he saw that it was good.
Sabbath is a day when I produce nothing.
Sabbath is a day when at the end I say, ‘I didn’t do anything today,’ and I don’t add, ‘And I feel so guilty.’
Sabbath is a day when my phone is turned off, I don’t check my email, and you can’t get a hold of me.”
I’ve heard it phrased this way as well - Sabbath is a day where you ask yourself - what would I enjoy doing or not doing today? And what could I do - or not do - that would center me in God who is Lord of the Sabbath? Where does our enjoyment and centering God meet? That is a day of Sabbath rest.
Now here’s my disclaimer or warning to you - when we first start practicing Sabbath…it does not feel good. We often think, “Oh I’m so tired, I’m so overworked, I’m so busy” that we must think OF COURSE a day of rest will feel good, like a tantalizing treat for our overworked selves. But the reality is, it feels good to be needed. It feels good to do and to produce. We get endorphins when we check items off of our to-do lists. When those phone notifications go off, our brains are flooded with hormones - someone needs me. Someone wants me. I can help.
We are so embedded in the culture of Pharaoh, in the culture of Productivity, that we need to detox from it. And detoxing doesn’t feel good at first. We may feel restless and listless as we have to force ourselves to rest, centering ourselves in God - and rest centered in God is different from the vegetative state we can enter when binge watching a favorite show. We have to actively engage our minds and our souls to turn toward God rather than turn toward productivity.
And if we stick with it, eventually we will find enjoyment in Sabbath rest. We will realize that rest and Sabbath is not a reward for the hard work well done, Sabbath is rest for the work we have ahead of us. It’s a small mental shift but a meaningful one. If we only rest when we feel we deserve it, when we feel the work is done, then we will never truly rest. But if we rest because we know we need rest and we know we need to be centered in God for the compassionate, caring, loving work God calls us to do… that’s different.
We rest so that we can love God and love neighbor more fully. We rest so that we can have compassion.
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus’s plans for rest don’t go exactly as planned - something that I can certainly relate to and assures me that Jesus was human and the world he lived in, while different in some ways, is still the same world we experience here today… Even though Jesus’s plans for rest don’t go exactly as planned - Jesus still had compassion for the crowds who needed him. He was able to love his neighbor. For as much as he was human, Jesus was also Lord of the Sabbath. And as the bridging commandment, Sabbath is just as much about love of God as it is about love of neighbor. Jesus prioritized rest and renewal, spread throughout his whole ministry, so that he could serve with compassion and love. I trust that even if Jesus didn’t catch a break in this passage, he continued to make rest a priority. He continued to pray and center himself in love. Sabbath was just part of the rhythm of his life.
My invitation to all of us today is for us to center Sabbath as a priority in our lives, to make it a part of the rhythms of our lives, to view it as the highly important bridging commandment it is. Let us hear the voice of God inviting us to lie down in green pastures and besides still waters, let us heed that voice and through Sabbath rest, find better love of God and love of neighbor.
May it be so. Amen.
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
"An Invitation to Wonder & Praise" a sermon based on Ephesians 1:3-14
Ephesians 1:3-14
“An Invitation to Wonder & Praise”
Preached Sunday, July 14, 2024
What is the best gift you have ever received?
I asked this question online as I worked on this week’s sermon and got an array of responses: surprise trips, a gaming console, a complete collector’s edition of a book series, custom made gifts, homemade crafts from children, a clock-making kit, family Bibles and heirlooms, gifts that were the “last” gifts from a loved one before they died… People shared gifts of thoughtful affirmations and hand-written notes they have received, one person received a video gift of friends and family from all over the country.
“An Invitation to Wonder & Praise”
Preached Sunday, July 14, 2024
What is the best gift you have ever received?
I asked this question online as I worked on this week’s sermon and got an array of responses: surprise trips, a gaming console, a complete collector’s edition of a book series, custom made gifts, homemade crafts from children, a clock-making kit, family Bibles and heirlooms, gifts that were the “last” gifts from a loved one before they died… People shared gifts of thoughtful affirmations and hand-written notes they have received, one person received a video gift of friends and family from all over the country.
There were also the less tangible gifts: time with family, the gift of children, of love.
When I considered people’s answers to this question and my own experience I seemed to notice two common things. People’s best gifts they’ve ever received are one or both of these things:
1. Lavish and generous - a gift that just floors you for how the giver went above and beyond in giving it to you. And
2. A gift that is personal and it’s less about the gift and more about how much the giver knows you, “gets” you, loves and appreciates you.
Think now of a gift or gifts you have received that have been among the best. That floored you with the generosity and love behind them. When you have been given a gift that just amazes you at the generosity, thoughtfulness, kindness, love and appreciation behind it…
The writer of Ephesians, is GUSHING about a gift that he - and we all - have received: the gift of God’s love, the adoption of us as God’s children, redemption, forgiveness, salvation, an inheritance through Christ… Actually, you can tell he is just gushing, that he’s floored, amazed at these gifts by the writing. In the Greek today’s 11 verses are all basically one convoluted run-on sentence. The translators of most English versions, including what we read today in worship, normally make it more palatable and understandable by breaking it down into sentences but in the original Greek it reads as one long gushing sentence. I can relate to him here, when I’m excited over something, REALLY excited about something, I tend to talk faster, my voice gets higher, and I can go on and on and on… And that’s basically our reading from Ephesians today.
This week’s Scripture is an invitation to wonder and praise. It is an invitation for us to marvel at the lavish love, the generous gifts, that God has given us - as it lists in today’s Scripture: the gift of God’s love, the adoption of us as God’s children, redemption, forgiveness, salvation, an inheritance through Christ.
The sacrament of Baptism is a way we recognize, celebrate, wonder, and give thanks for God’s lavish gifts that we have received from our Maker. Today we celebrate the lavish gifts and love that God has bestowed upon the child we baptized - and we remembered and recognized that same love was and is given to all of us. I’ve had the joy of sharing in multiple baptisms with you and getting to preach on it several times so what I am going to say to you today, many of you will have heard it before, but it never hurts to be reminded.
One of my favorite ways to frame baptism is a signing of the adoption papers. Before we are baptized, we are all already loved by God. We are all already God’s children in God’s eyes. Yet through the sacrament of baptism we are saying, “Okay, God - I know you love me as your child. I love you as my parent. I know you love me and I will respond to that love with more love - and let my life be shaped by you, the God of Love.” When a child is baptized, their parents bring that child forth as a recognition that this child belongs to God, even more than this child belongs to those who formed them in this world. It is a recognition that they will raise this child as God’s child, loving them, surrounding them in a loving Christian community, and teaching them about God’s love.
The sacrament of Baptism, this holy, mysterious, and wonderful ritual is part of how we participate in God’s divine plans of God’s love for us and for all. Through baptism we wonder at God’s love, we praise God’s goodness, and recognize the lavish and generous gifts God gives us. Being baptized, bringing a child forth to be baptized, remembering our baptism - it was a way we acknowledge, we recognize before God and before one another, that we know we are loved by God.
Part of the reading from Ephesians today is not only to marvel and wonder at God’s love, but the writer’s intent is to assure Gentile readers in the church of Ephesus that God always had a plan for them. That their acceptance into God’s covenant, their adoption as children of God - these things are not afterthoughts. That like their Jewish siblings, God always planned to gather them up in love and offer them an inheritance through Christ. The Scriptures say: “He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will.” It says that before the foundation of the world, this was all part of God’s plans, we were always part of God’s plan - God has always, since before Creation, planned to adopt us, to love us.
This again is another invitation to marvel and wonder and praise God - you were never an afterthought to God. Before creation, God already knew that you would be divinely loved, a child of God.
And, the Scripture goes on to give us even more reasons to just be floored at the lavish generosity of God’s gift of love. It reads, “he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” That is, God’s divine plan, God’s BIG big picture plan, is to draw all things to God’s self in love. As the first verse of our Psalm today declares: “The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.”
We started worship this morning by singing “He’s got the whole world in his hands'' - a children’s song which sums up so succinctly these points our Scripture readings make: The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it…God’s got it in God’s hands! We know this truth as children when we sing this song but the hardships and motions of everyday life can make us forget this fundamental and awe inspiring truth - we are all God’s. We are all loved by God. God’s got us all in the Divine’s loving hands. This song is another invitation to marvel and praise God for the lavish and generous extent of God’s gift of love for us - for them - for all - for the whole world.
This morning I wanted to extend to you an invitation to wonder and marvel at God’s gifts of Love for us, for the baby we baptized today…AND to marvel and wonder at God’s divine, mysterious, generous, lavish plan for the redemption of all God’s creation. If we truly believe that none of us are an afterthought, that God holds all of us, that God’s end game is to draw us all into God’s hands, cradle us all in the loving hands of God… wow! What a reason to give God praise!
So our takeaway, our “go out into the world and do” from worship today is simply this: go and lose yourselves in the wonder of God’s gifts towards us and all creation. Think about how much a mindset of marveling at God’s love for all - how much it will change how we all interact with the world, the people we meet, our day to day lives, etc. Think about how much living a life filled with praise for God’s generous and lavish gifts of love - think about how much that will color every interaction we have. How our knowledge of God’s love for us - for them - for all - how our knowledge of God’s plan to redeem all creation, to hold us all in God’s hands…how it will change…everything.
May we be absolutely floored at these gifts of Love that God has given us. May we offer God praise and thanksgiving. And may they change everything for us, as beloved children of God held in God’s hands.
Amen.
When I considered people’s answers to this question and my own experience I seemed to notice two common things. People’s best gifts they’ve ever received are one or both of these things:
1. Lavish and generous - a gift that just floors you for how the giver went above and beyond in giving it to you. And
2. A gift that is personal and it’s less about the gift and more about how much the giver knows you, “gets” you, loves and appreciates you.
Think now of a gift or gifts you have received that have been among the best. That floored you with the generosity and love behind them. When you have been given a gift that just amazes you at the generosity, thoughtfulness, kindness, love and appreciation behind it…
The writer of Ephesians, is GUSHING about a gift that he - and we all - have received: the gift of God’s love, the adoption of us as God’s children, redemption, forgiveness, salvation, an inheritance through Christ… Actually, you can tell he is just gushing, that he’s floored, amazed at these gifts by the writing. In the Greek today’s 11 verses are all basically one convoluted run-on sentence. The translators of most English versions, including what we read today in worship, normally make it more palatable and understandable by breaking it down into sentences but in the original Greek it reads as one long gushing sentence. I can relate to him here, when I’m excited over something, REALLY excited about something, I tend to talk faster, my voice gets higher, and I can go on and on and on… And that’s basically our reading from Ephesians today.
This week’s Scripture is an invitation to wonder and praise. It is an invitation for us to marvel at the lavish love, the generous gifts, that God has given us - as it lists in today’s Scripture: the gift of God’s love, the adoption of us as God’s children, redemption, forgiveness, salvation, an inheritance through Christ.
The sacrament of Baptism is a way we recognize, celebrate, wonder, and give thanks for God’s lavish gifts that we have received from our Maker. Today we celebrate the lavish gifts and love that God has bestowed upon the child we baptized - and we remembered and recognized that same love was and is given to all of us. I’ve had the joy of sharing in multiple baptisms with you and getting to preach on it several times so what I am going to say to you today, many of you will have heard it before, but it never hurts to be reminded.
One of my favorite ways to frame baptism is a signing of the adoption papers. Before we are baptized, we are all already loved by God. We are all already God’s children in God’s eyes. Yet through the sacrament of baptism we are saying, “Okay, God - I know you love me as your child. I love you as my parent. I know you love me and I will respond to that love with more love - and let my life be shaped by you, the God of Love.” When a child is baptized, their parents bring that child forth as a recognition that this child belongs to God, even more than this child belongs to those who formed them in this world. It is a recognition that they will raise this child as God’s child, loving them, surrounding them in a loving Christian community, and teaching them about God’s love.
The sacrament of Baptism, this holy, mysterious, and wonderful ritual is part of how we participate in God’s divine plans of God’s love for us and for all. Through baptism we wonder at God’s love, we praise God’s goodness, and recognize the lavish and generous gifts God gives us. Being baptized, bringing a child forth to be baptized, remembering our baptism - it was a way we acknowledge, we recognize before God and before one another, that we know we are loved by God.
Part of the reading from Ephesians today is not only to marvel and wonder at God’s love, but the writer’s intent is to assure Gentile readers in the church of Ephesus that God always had a plan for them. That their acceptance into God’s covenant, their adoption as children of God - these things are not afterthoughts. That like their Jewish siblings, God always planned to gather them up in love and offer them an inheritance through Christ. The Scriptures say: “He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will.” It says that before the foundation of the world, this was all part of God’s plans, we were always part of God’s plan - God has always, since before Creation, planned to adopt us, to love us.
This again is another invitation to marvel and wonder and praise God - you were never an afterthought to God. Before creation, God already knew that you would be divinely loved, a child of God.
And, the Scripture goes on to give us even more reasons to just be floored at the lavish generosity of God’s gift of love. It reads, “he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” That is, God’s divine plan, God’s BIG big picture plan, is to draw all things to God’s self in love. As the first verse of our Psalm today declares: “The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.”
We started worship this morning by singing “He’s got the whole world in his hands'' - a children’s song which sums up so succinctly these points our Scripture readings make: The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it…God’s got it in God’s hands! We know this truth as children when we sing this song but the hardships and motions of everyday life can make us forget this fundamental and awe inspiring truth - we are all God’s. We are all loved by God. God’s got us all in the Divine’s loving hands. This song is another invitation to marvel and praise God for the lavish and generous extent of God’s gift of love for us - for them - for all - for the whole world.
This morning I wanted to extend to you an invitation to wonder and marvel at God’s gifts of Love for us, for the baby we baptized today…AND to marvel and wonder at God’s divine, mysterious, generous, lavish plan for the redemption of all God’s creation. If we truly believe that none of us are an afterthought, that God holds all of us, that God’s end game is to draw us all into God’s hands, cradle us all in the loving hands of God… wow! What a reason to give God praise!
So our takeaway, our “go out into the world and do” from worship today is simply this: go and lose yourselves in the wonder of God’s gifts towards us and all creation. Think about how much a mindset of marveling at God’s love for all - how much it will change how we all interact with the world, the people we meet, our day to day lives, etc. Think about how much living a life filled with praise for God’s generous and lavish gifts of love - think about how much that will color every interaction we have. How our knowledge of God’s love for us - for them - for all - how our knowledge of God’s plan to redeem all creation, to hold us all in God’s hands…how it will change…everything.
May we be absolutely floored at these gifts of Love that God has given us. May we offer God praise and thanksgiving. And may they change everything for us, as beloved children of God held in God’s hands.
Amen.
Monday, July 8, 2024
"Shake It Off" a sermon based on Mark 6:1-13
Mark 6:1-13
“Shake It Off”
Preached July 7, 2024
One of the best pieces of advice that was ever given to me - was to talk to yourself like you would talk to a good friend or, in my case, a parishioner, a church member. If a friend or one of you came to me and you were absolutely beating yourself up over something, being hard on yourself, lamenting a “failure” - we would talk about that. We would talk about where you could give yourself grace and forgiveness. We would talk about how you could see this as a learning opportunity and a fresh start. Sure, maybe you didn’t have the outcome you wanted but that doesn’t mean that YOU as a person are a failure…
But, if I’m being totally honest with you, I struggle with this myself. I think most of us struggle with the F-word…we don’t even like saying it…You know the word I mean: Failure. (Yeah, I really debated using that joke in my sermon - hopefully my joke didn’t fail…Haaa). Anyway, I don’t always talk to myself the way I would talk to one of you or a good friend.
I am the type of person who has goals and benchmarks and a certain idea of what it means to succeed. And so when things don’t turn out the way I planned or the way I wanted…I struggle with this. I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think a lot of us struggle with failure because our culture puts a high emphasis on success and what it looks like to succeed. To succeed in our careers, to succeed in our popularity and social standing, and even to succeed at what our families look like… we are constantly comparing ourselves to a societal expectation of what it looks like to succeed and we don’t often realize how much power our cultural definition of success has over us.
All of us could probably benefit from recognizing this, naming this, and taking a step back away from it and instead looking at how Jesus approached failure and how our definitions of success change in light of that.
After traveling around the Israel-Palestine countryside, teaching, preaching, healing. After going head to head with authorities over religious law. After casting out demons. After quieting the waves and the wind. After healing a chronically ill woman and raising a little girl from the dead, Jesus returns to Nazareth, he returns to his own home town. And he is rejected there. Those who knew Jesus best. Those who raised him, those who held him as a baby, those who were his playmates as a child - they were not impressed with Jesus. In the Gospel of Mark it just tells us that those in his hometown “took offense at him.” In the Gospel of Luke, they ran him out of town and tried to throw him off a cliff! As a sports metaphor, that would have been like LeBron James returning to Cleveland after winning a championship in Miami and no one wanting him, being so unimpressed with him that we ran him out of town. Or, perhaps, it would have been like me returning to the Mahoning Valley a year ago to serve as pastor at Boardman UMC and both Canfield and Boardman UMCs teaming up to drive me out of town - thanks for not doing that, by the way!
Anyway… to take his hometown’s response seriously, it would mean Jesus failed. His own kin rejected him, spurned him, and his mission and goals there were stymied. And how did Jesus respond?
He sent his disciples out, two by two, to teach and to heal. He shook the dust of his failure off of himself and told his disciples to do the same if they should ever meet rejection. “If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” That is, literally, shake it off! Do not let the dust of failure cling to you.
Or, as Taylor Swift so eloquently puts it for our modern age:
“'Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off. Woaaaaah.”
Because failure can cling to you like dust. Settle on you. Make you feel burdened, or less than you are, less than God created you to be. And that’s not what God wants for us, or how God wants us to respond to failure. So like the dust from the disciples’ sandals, and like Taylor Swift, we are to shake the dust of our failures off, and we keep on going, like Jesus who moves on from Nazareth to Capernaum and he continues his message and his ministry.
But this isn’t the last time that Jesus will fail. In fact, to many, and to the world’s standards, Jesus’s whole ministry was a failure.
Jesus wasn’t only rejected by his own hometown, he was rejected by those he came to save. The Messiah was supposed to come and overthrow the empire, free the oppressed, and save the Judeans. During his life and teaching, many would have considered him a failure too. The most numerous complaints against Jesus were that he was a drunkard, hanging out the lowest of the low, with tax collectors and sex workers, with sinners, with the least of these. And he was arrested for treason, received the death penalty, and was executed by the State for his crimes. His followers all deserted him, denying they ever knew him, locking themselves up in rooms, hiding from the government.
Yes, Jesus rose from the grave, conquering death, we as Christians believe this. This is the scandal of the cross. That we took what the world would perceive as a total failure, the life and death of Jesus, and we view it as a victory.
And Jesus asks us to be like him. To pick up our crosses - the sign of Jesus’s largest failure, his execution - and to follow him.
What does this look like? It looks a lot like taking what this world considers a success, and turning it on itself.
It looks like failure.
It looks like being a peacemaker and turning the other cheek in a world that is obsessed with war.
It looks like hanging out with sinners, with the lowly, in a world that prioritizes the “right” kind of people.
It looks like loving our neighbors AND our enemies as ourselves in a world that separates “us” versus “them.”
It looks like meekness in a world that values strength.
It looks like humility in a world that values flaunting power.
“Shake It Off”
Preached July 7, 2024
One of the best pieces of advice that was ever given to me - was to talk to yourself like you would talk to a good friend or, in my case, a parishioner, a church member. If a friend or one of you came to me and you were absolutely beating yourself up over something, being hard on yourself, lamenting a “failure” - we would talk about that. We would talk about where you could give yourself grace and forgiveness. We would talk about how you could see this as a learning opportunity and a fresh start. Sure, maybe you didn’t have the outcome you wanted but that doesn’t mean that YOU as a person are a failure…
But, if I’m being totally honest with you, I struggle with this myself. I think most of us struggle with the F-word…we don’t even like saying it…You know the word I mean: Failure. (Yeah, I really debated using that joke in my sermon - hopefully my joke didn’t fail…Haaa). Anyway, I don’t always talk to myself the way I would talk to one of you or a good friend.
I am the type of person who has goals and benchmarks and a certain idea of what it means to succeed. And so when things don’t turn out the way I planned or the way I wanted…I struggle with this. I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think a lot of us struggle with failure because our culture puts a high emphasis on success and what it looks like to succeed. To succeed in our careers, to succeed in our popularity and social standing, and even to succeed at what our families look like… we are constantly comparing ourselves to a societal expectation of what it looks like to succeed and we don’t often realize how much power our cultural definition of success has over us.
All of us could probably benefit from recognizing this, naming this, and taking a step back away from it and instead looking at how Jesus approached failure and how our definitions of success change in light of that.
After traveling around the Israel-Palestine countryside, teaching, preaching, healing. After going head to head with authorities over religious law. After casting out demons. After quieting the waves and the wind. After healing a chronically ill woman and raising a little girl from the dead, Jesus returns to Nazareth, he returns to his own home town. And he is rejected there. Those who knew Jesus best. Those who raised him, those who held him as a baby, those who were his playmates as a child - they were not impressed with Jesus. In the Gospel of Mark it just tells us that those in his hometown “took offense at him.” In the Gospel of Luke, they ran him out of town and tried to throw him off a cliff! As a sports metaphor, that would have been like LeBron James returning to Cleveland after winning a championship in Miami and no one wanting him, being so unimpressed with him that we ran him out of town. Or, perhaps, it would have been like me returning to the Mahoning Valley a year ago to serve as pastor at Boardman UMC and both Canfield and Boardman UMCs teaming up to drive me out of town - thanks for not doing that, by the way!
Anyway… to take his hometown’s response seriously, it would mean Jesus failed. His own kin rejected him, spurned him, and his mission and goals there were stymied. And how did Jesus respond?
He sent his disciples out, two by two, to teach and to heal. He shook the dust of his failure off of himself and told his disciples to do the same if they should ever meet rejection. “If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” That is, literally, shake it off! Do not let the dust of failure cling to you.
Or, as Taylor Swift so eloquently puts it for our modern age:
“'Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off. Woaaaaah.”
Because failure can cling to you like dust. Settle on you. Make you feel burdened, or less than you are, less than God created you to be. And that’s not what God wants for us, or how God wants us to respond to failure. So like the dust from the disciples’ sandals, and like Taylor Swift, we are to shake the dust of our failures off, and we keep on going, like Jesus who moves on from Nazareth to Capernaum and he continues his message and his ministry.
But this isn’t the last time that Jesus will fail. In fact, to many, and to the world’s standards, Jesus’s whole ministry was a failure.
Jesus wasn’t only rejected by his own hometown, he was rejected by those he came to save. The Messiah was supposed to come and overthrow the empire, free the oppressed, and save the Judeans. During his life and teaching, many would have considered him a failure too. The most numerous complaints against Jesus were that he was a drunkard, hanging out the lowest of the low, with tax collectors and sex workers, with sinners, with the least of these. And he was arrested for treason, received the death penalty, and was executed by the State for his crimes. His followers all deserted him, denying they ever knew him, locking themselves up in rooms, hiding from the government.
Yes, Jesus rose from the grave, conquering death, we as Christians believe this. This is the scandal of the cross. That we took what the world would perceive as a total failure, the life and death of Jesus, and we view it as a victory.
And Jesus asks us to be like him. To pick up our crosses - the sign of Jesus’s largest failure, his execution - and to follow him.
What does this look like? It looks a lot like taking what this world considers a success, and turning it on itself.
It looks like failure.
It looks like being a peacemaker and turning the other cheek in a world that is obsessed with war.
It looks like hanging out with sinners, with the lowly, in a world that prioritizes the “right” kind of people.
It looks like loving our neighbors AND our enemies as ourselves in a world that separates “us” versus “them.”
It looks like meekness in a world that values strength.
It looks like humility in a world that values flaunting power.
It looks like kindness, mercy, and forgiveness in a world that tells us to get even.
It looks like us, living like Jesus lived - and when the world deems US a failure for not playing the rat race, for giving away more than we should, for loving others too much, for caring about those beyond our circles, beyond our own families, for loving those who don’t look this us, for working tirelessly for freedom from oppression for ALL, for mercy, for forgiveness, for grace in a graceless world! When the world deems us as failures for living as disciples of Jesus Christ...
We shake off the dust of failure that the world is trying to put on us. Shake the dust off your sandals, shake it off, shake it off, woooaah...and then boast in Christ. For Paul says, “So I will boast more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”
Yes - by the world’s standards, Christ failed.
By the world’s standards, the peacemakers and the lowly and the meek and the kind… are failures!
By many standards, worshiping a God who could be killed, especially in a public and humiliating way…is a failure.
But not to us. For in Christ we will BOAST of our weaknesses! What the world sees as weakness: love, forgiveness, turning the other cheek, helping others, fighting for humanity and dignity for all, even being part of a church community like ours - what the world may see as a weakness, in Christ Jesus, it is our strength.
Hear this, friends, Our failure is our strength when our failure is in and for Jesus Christ.
So continue to be a follower of Christ. Continue to be God’s hands and feet in the world: loving, serving others, working toward peace, putting others first, being generous to and with the least of these. Continue loving God and serving your neighbors as self. And whenever you get rejected, insulted, discouraged by others for following Christ Jesus, well...shake it off. And continue God’s work.
May we do so - turning what the world views as failures, into success for Jesus and the Kingdom of God.
It looks like us, living like Jesus lived - and when the world deems US a failure for not playing the rat race, for giving away more than we should, for loving others too much, for caring about those beyond our circles, beyond our own families, for loving those who don’t look this us, for working tirelessly for freedom from oppression for ALL, for mercy, for forgiveness, for grace in a graceless world! When the world deems us as failures for living as disciples of Jesus Christ...
We shake off the dust of failure that the world is trying to put on us. Shake the dust off your sandals, shake it off, shake it off, woooaah...and then boast in Christ. For Paul says, “So I will boast more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”
Yes - by the world’s standards, Christ failed.
By the world’s standards, the peacemakers and the lowly and the meek and the kind… are failures!
By many standards, worshiping a God who could be killed, especially in a public and humiliating way…is a failure.
But not to us. For in Christ we will BOAST of our weaknesses! What the world sees as weakness: love, forgiveness, turning the other cheek, helping others, fighting for humanity and dignity for all, even being part of a church community like ours - what the world may see as a weakness, in Christ Jesus, it is our strength.
Hear this, friends, Our failure is our strength when our failure is in and for Jesus Christ.
So continue to be a follower of Christ. Continue to be God’s hands and feet in the world: loving, serving others, working toward peace, putting others first, being generous to and with the least of these. Continue loving God and serving your neighbors as self. And whenever you get rejected, insulted, discouraged by others for following Christ Jesus, well...shake it off. And continue God’s work.
May we do so - turning what the world views as failures, into success for Jesus and the Kingdom of God.
Amen.
Wednesday, July 3, 2024
Call to Worship inspired by Ephesians 6:10-20
L: What does it mean to serve God?
P: To live in truth and righteousness.
L: What should we proclaim?
P: The Gospel of Peace.
L: What should we hold on to?
P: Faith and the Word of God.
L: And at all times, what should we do?
P: Persevere in prayer.
L: May we do so today in worship today and every day.
All: Amen.
P: To live in truth and righteousness.
L: What should we proclaim?
P: The Gospel of Peace.
L: What should we hold on to?
P: Faith and the Word of God.
L: And at all times, what should we do?
P: Persevere in prayer.
L: May we do so today in worship today and every day.
All: Amen.
Call to Worship inspired by John 6:51-58
L: We cry out to the Lord:
P: Lord, we want to live!
L: Eat this bread.
P: Lord, we want to live!
L: Take this cup.
P: Lord, we want to live!
L: Follow me.
P: We will follow the Living God.
All: Amen.
P: Lord, we want to live!
L: Eat this bread.
P: Lord, we want to live!
L: Take this cup.
P: Lord, we want to live!
L: Follow me.
P: We will follow the Living God.
All: Amen.
Call to Worship based on "Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah"
L: Bread of Heaven,
P: Feed me till I want no more.
L: Strong Deliverer,
P: Be thou still my strength and shield.
L: Songs of praises,
P: I will ever give to thee.
L: Let us worship our God, the Bread of Heaven, our Strong Deliverer, and the One worthy of our praise.
All: Let us worship! Amen!
P: Feed me till I want no more.
L: Strong Deliverer,
P: Be thou still my strength and shield.
L: Songs of praises,
P: I will ever give to thee.
L: Let us worship our God, the Bread of Heaven, our Strong Deliverer, and the One worthy of our praise.
All: Let us worship! Amen!
Call to Worship based on John 6:1-21 & Ephesians 3:14-21
L: We come to worship today hungry.
P: Hungry not just for food - but for the Gospel.
L: We come to worship today longing for more.
P: More Love, more Hope, more Truth.
L: We come to worship today in need of spiritual nourishment.
P: Fill us, Lord! May we know the breadth and length and height and depth of your Love.
All: We come to worship today to worship the One who is the Bread of Life. Amen.
P: Hungry not just for food - but for the Gospel.
L: We come to worship today longing for more.
P: More Love, more Hope, more Truth.
L: We come to worship today in need of spiritual nourishment.
P: Fill us, Lord! May we know the breadth and length and height and depth of your Love.
All: We come to worship today to worship the One who is the Bread of Life. Amen.
Monday, July 1, 2024
"Say My Name, Say My Name" a sermon on Mark 5:21-43
Mark 5:21-43
“Say My Name, Say My Name”
Preached Sunday, June 30, 2024
Calling someone by the name they wish to be called, by their name, is important. It shows them respect, consideration, kindness, and affords them basic human dignity.
When I was on staff at Camp Asbury, every year, on one of the first days of staff training, they would have the staff sit in a circle and share the story and meaning behind their name - and how they would like to be called.
If I was doing this today I would share:
Allison - named loosely after my grandmother’s: Alice Ann and Dolores Ann.
And I kept my maiden name as part of my middle name because it will always be a part of my identity and important to me.
And LeBrun - the name shows my love and marriage with my husband, a name I chose to take for me and my family.
I would then ask for you to call me Pastor Allison - a title and name which recognizes my calling, education, and ministry. The Rev. LeBrun for official documents. Do NOT call me Mrs. Zachariah LeBrun - that used to be the norm but most in my generation have come to hate this distinction as my name and identity are my own, not lost in my husband’s. If we’re friends or in an informal setting, you can call me Allison. Allie for family and for those friends who have known me since I was a child. Don’t call me Allie without permission.
Because how you refer to someone also conveys intimacy as well as respect and kindness, right? Only my family calls me Allie. Only my husband can call me a term of endearment - and even then, just a couple of them.
Each of you has stories behind your names and reasons you like to be called what you are called. Maybe you go by a middle name, maybe a nickname, maybe you hate your nickname - “No, it’s John not Johnny, thanks.” Or maybe “Only my mom can call me that!” Anyone have one of those?
Simply calling someone by their name is a way to say “I see you. I respect you. You are a fellow human who deserves kindness.” Who knew that simply calling someone by their name could convey all that?
Think of how much being called the wrong name can hurt - that is, being insulted, or bullied, name-calling. When someone repeatedly calls you that nickname you’ve asked them not to call you. Or how much you are not seen as an individual person when someone goes “Hey lady!” Or even worse - when someone calls me the B-word - and that has happened to every woman ever basically. And then think of how much it means when a loved one calls you by a name that only you two share together. How it feels or felt for a parent to call you in a loving way...Whatever the context is, I am a big fan of loving my neighbor as myself - and that means respecting the names people wish to be called. For an act that costs me nothing, looking someone in the eye and calling them by their name, conveys shared humanity, kindness, and even the love of Christ.
Now, let’s pivot for a moment - do you know what the most common female name is in the Bible? ...Trick question, it’s “the Unnamed woman” - and we have one of those unnamed women in today’s Gospel reading.
In today’s reading we actually have two stories sandwiched together - a literary tool Mark often uses in his Gospel so that the two stories help interpret and shine light on the other. When put this way, two stories that are rich in meaning become even more nuanced, more complex, more layered - there are many ways these stories speak to each other. And today, what I want to narrow in on, is how Jesus speaks to the two women - well, one woman and one female child, that he heals.
So first, back to that unnamed woman: A woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for 12 years. The Greek seems to imply that it is a bleeding or menstrual issue. An illness that not only would have been painful. An illness that not only took all her money to try and fix and just made it worse. But also an illness that would have made her ritually unclean - unfit for society - unable to touch others. An illness that would have affected her mentally and emotionally as well as physically - as anyone who has had a long-term illness knows. It’s never just the body - it’s all of you.
And yet, after all this time, after trying and trying again, after enduring setback after setback, after living with the pain and anguished nights...once again, there was hope at the end of the tunnel: a man named Jesus. The text says “She had heard about Jesus.” What had she heard? This is the 5th chapter of Mark - had she heard that John the Baptist baptized him and that heaven spoke and called him “my son”? Had she heard how he cured a man with an unclean spirit in the temple? Had she heard how he had cured Simon’s mother-in-law and cured many there at that house? Had she heard about his preaching and him casting out demons, about his curing lepers, about healing the paralytic? Had she heard that he went toe to toe with the religious authorities, verbally sparring with them, proclaiming something new? Had she heard about how he had healed a man of his withered hand? Had she heard that unclean spirits shouted at him, calling him the Son of God? Had she heard how he calmed the winds and the waves - creation stilling at the sound of his voice? What had she heard? She had heard about Jesus. She had heard enough to know that Jesus was more than a man. She had heard enough to know - to know that if she just...touched him - not even him, just his clothes...she could be healed. I believe that she had heard enough to know that he, Jesus, this man was God-divine.
She had heard about Jesus - but she didn’t presume she was worthy of his healing. She was not even permitted to touch him. She would make him unclean. She had spent the last twelve years of her life being estranged from others, being an outcast - in pain and made to feel less than. And still - she had faith, that if she could just...touch his clothes - Oh God, if that would be enough - it WOULD be enough - she would be healed…
And so in the crowd, people pushing against each other every which way, a massive throng - she reached out...and touched Jesus - or really just his clothes. And instantly, knew she was healed.
And Jesus, Jesus knows that somehow, without him acting at all, he has healed someone - he felt the power leave him. And so he says “Who touched my clothes?” Which - given the crowd size was a little ridiculous - think the packed aisles at the Canfield fair - everyone was jostling everyone - how can you say who touched my clothes? Who HASN’T touched your clothes? But still, Jesus persists - WHO touched me?
And the text says that “But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him and told him the whole truth.”
Now, I used to read this text and assume that - since it says she came in fear and trembling - that there was anger in Jesus’s voice when he asked who touched him. Was he angry that someone touched him without permission? It’s definitely not my favorite thing - please don’t do that. Was he angry that power had left him? But I’ve come to realize that 1 - I suspect there was no anger in his voice when he asked who touched him - maybe more incredulity, wonder, earnestness - after all - she didn’t hide, she didn’t run away...she could have. No one would have ever known it was her. But she came in fear and trembling...not fear and trembling as in I’m so afraid that this man is angry at me. But fear and trembling as in...I am about to stand before one who is Divine. I am about to meet the one who healed me. I am about to enter into a personal relationship with God. Fear and trembling as in the Advent-Christmas hymn “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence”: “Let all mortal flesh keep silence and with fear and trembling stand, ponder nothing earthly minded, for with blessing in his hand, Christ our God to earth descended, our full homage to demand.”
She comes before Jesus with fear and trembling. For she had faith in who and what he was before she was healed - and now that she has been healed - she knows with every fiber of her being, her body knows who and what Jesus is: God incarnate, Divine healer.
And as she comes before Jesus, God, healer - she tells him everything. And he looks at her, and calls her Daughter. This is not something that an unrelated man would call a grown woman. There is immense intimacy being shown here. As in, I know you. I know who you are. I know your name.
Now, there is obviously dialogue and conversation that happens that is not given to us in the Biblical text. I can imagine that Jesus, as she lay before him, prostrating at his feet, got down to her level and said, “Tell me daughter, what is your name?” We may not know her name today, 2,000 some years later. But I know that God knows her name - and I feel in my heart, that on that day, Jesus knew it too.
For he could have let her go - could have let her slip among the crowd. But he wanted to look into the face of the one who had such faith in him. He wanted to know her - to call her by her name. To recognize her humanity. To show her kindness. To bless her on the journey moving forward. Calling her daughter is an intimate act - one that says “You are part of my family now - part of the family of God. Go in peace, be healed.”
In her touching Jesus’s clothes, she was healed. In Jesus looking at her, in the eye, asking her name, calling her daughter - in that act, her humanity was recognized by God: You are worthy of love. You are worthy of wellness. Now that you have met God, may you be blessed.
And so, having recognized her humanity, shown her kindness, blessed her on her way...Jesus continues on his way to the house where a 12 year old girl is dead. And he enters her room, even with her parents, something a stranger would not do. It is a private, intimate moment - just like the moment with the woman before, even if that was on the street. There is intimacy here - there is deep knowledge that goes beyond our human knowledge - “I know you like only God could know you.”
And once, again, there is dialogue and conversation that we do not have in the text given to us. Did Jarius tell Jesus her name while he was begging to heal her? Did Jesus ask her name as he was bending over her body, the stench of sickness still in the air. “What is her name?” As Jesus was told, did he shed a tear at the sight of her, at the knowledge of her name?
What he does call her, as he takes her by the hand - is Little girl, little child, loved child of God - daughter of God, just as the woman with the bleeding disease for 12 years was a child of God, my child, get up, live.
And she does.
What a powerful, intimate moment. This little girl, opening her eyes, seeing Jesus, knowing that she was dead and now she lives - and this man, this man above her who knows her name and is telling her parents to give her something to eat - this man...no, not man...God...Christ, is the one who did it.
God in Jesus calls the bleeding woman daughter.
The one who is a daughter, the 12 year old girl, there is divine intimacy in the moment he takes her by the hand, and bids the little girl to rise from the dead.
These are healing stories.
“Say My Name, Say My Name”
Preached Sunday, June 30, 2024
Calling someone by the name they wish to be called, by their name, is important. It shows them respect, consideration, kindness, and affords them basic human dignity.
When I was on staff at Camp Asbury, every year, on one of the first days of staff training, they would have the staff sit in a circle and share the story and meaning behind their name - and how they would like to be called.
If I was doing this today I would share:
Allison - named loosely after my grandmother’s: Alice Ann and Dolores Ann.
And I kept my maiden name as part of my middle name because it will always be a part of my identity and important to me.
And LeBrun - the name shows my love and marriage with my husband, a name I chose to take for me and my family.
I would then ask for you to call me Pastor Allison - a title and name which recognizes my calling, education, and ministry. The Rev. LeBrun for official documents. Do NOT call me Mrs. Zachariah LeBrun - that used to be the norm but most in my generation have come to hate this distinction as my name and identity are my own, not lost in my husband’s. If we’re friends or in an informal setting, you can call me Allison. Allie for family and for those friends who have known me since I was a child. Don’t call me Allie without permission.
Because how you refer to someone also conveys intimacy as well as respect and kindness, right? Only my family calls me Allie. Only my husband can call me a term of endearment - and even then, just a couple of them.
Each of you has stories behind your names and reasons you like to be called what you are called. Maybe you go by a middle name, maybe a nickname, maybe you hate your nickname - “No, it’s John not Johnny, thanks.” Or maybe “Only my mom can call me that!” Anyone have one of those?
Simply calling someone by their name is a way to say “I see you. I respect you. You are a fellow human who deserves kindness.” Who knew that simply calling someone by their name could convey all that?
Think of how much being called the wrong name can hurt - that is, being insulted, or bullied, name-calling. When someone repeatedly calls you that nickname you’ve asked them not to call you. Or how much you are not seen as an individual person when someone goes “Hey lady!” Or even worse - when someone calls me the B-word - and that has happened to every woman ever basically. And then think of how much it means when a loved one calls you by a name that only you two share together. How it feels or felt for a parent to call you in a loving way...Whatever the context is, I am a big fan of loving my neighbor as myself - and that means respecting the names people wish to be called. For an act that costs me nothing, looking someone in the eye and calling them by their name, conveys shared humanity, kindness, and even the love of Christ.
Now, let’s pivot for a moment - do you know what the most common female name is in the Bible? ...Trick question, it’s “the Unnamed woman” - and we have one of those unnamed women in today’s Gospel reading.
In today’s reading we actually have two stories sandwiched together - a literary tool Mark often uses in his Gospel so that the two stories help interpret and shine light on the other. When put this way, two stories that are rich in meaning become even more nuanced, more complex, more layered - there are many ways these stories speak to each other. And today, what I want to narrow in on, is how Jesus speaks to the two women - well, one woman and one female child, that he heals.
So first, back to that unnamed woman: A woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for 12 years. The Greek seems to imply that it is a bleeding or menstrual issue. An illness that not only would have been painful. An illness that not only took all her money to try and fix and just made it worse. But also an illness that would have made her ritually unclean - unfit for society - unable to touch others. An illness that would have affected her mentally and emotionally as well as physically - as anyone who has had a long-term illness knows. It’s never just the body - it’s all of you.
And yet, after all this time, after trying and trying again, after enduring setback after setback, after living with the pain and anguished nights...once again, there was hope at the end of the tunnel: a man named Jesus. The text says “She had heard about Jesus.” What had she heard? This is the 5th chapter of Mark - had she heard that John the Baptist baptized him and that heaven spoke and called him “my son”? Had she heard how he cured a man with an unclean spirit in the temple? Had she heard how he had cured Simon’s mother-in-law and cured many there at that house? Had she heard about his preaching and him casting out demons, about his curing lepers, about healing the paralytic? Had she heard that he went toe to toe with the religious authorities, verbally sparring with them, proclaiming something new? Had she heard about how he had healed a man of his withered hand? Had she heard that unclean spirits shouted at him, calling him the Son of God? Had she heard how he calmed the winds and the waves - creation stilling at the sound of his voice? What had she heard? She had heard about Jesus. She had heard enough to know that Jesus was more than a man. She had heard enough to know - to know that if she just...touched him - not even him, just his clothes...she could be healed. I believe that she had heard enough to know that he, Jesus, this man was God-divine.
She had heard about Jesus - but she didn’t presume she was worthy of his healing. She was not even permitted to touch him. She would make him unclean. She had spent the last twelve years of her life being estranged from others, being an outcast - in pain and made to feel less than. And still - she had faith, that if she could just...touch his clothes - Oh God, if that would be enough - it WOULD be enough - she would be healed…
And so in the crowd, people pushing against each other every which way, a massive throng - she reached out...and touched Jesus - or really just his clothes. And instantly, knew she was healed.
And Jesus, Jesus knows that somehow, without him acting at all, he has healed someone - he felt the power leave him. And so he says “Who touched my clothes?” Which - given the crowd size was a little ridiculous - think the packed aisles at the Canfield fair - everyone was jostling everyone - how can you say who touched my clothes? Who HASN’T touched your clothes? But still, Jesus persists - WHO touched me?
And the text says that “But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him and told him the whole truth.”
Now, I used to read this text and assume that - since it says she came in fear and trembling - that there was anger in Jesus’s voice when he asked who touched him. Was he angry that someone touched him without permission? It’s definitely not my favorite thing - please don’t do that. Was he angry that power had left him? But I’ve come to realize that 1 - I suspect there was no anger in his voice when he asked who touched him - maybe more incredulity, wonder, earnestness - after all - she didn’t hide, she didn’t run away...she could have. No one would have ever known it was her. But she came in fear and trembling...not fear and trembling as in I’m so afraid that this man is angry at me. But fear and trembling as in...I am about to stand before one who is Divine. I am about to meet the one who healed me. I am about to enter into a personal relationship with God. Fear and trembling as in the Advent-Christmas hymn “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence”: “Let all mortal flesh keep silence and with fear and trembling stand, ponder nothing earthly minded, for with blessing in his hand, Christ our God to earth descended, our full homage to demand.”
She comes before Jesus with fear and trembling. For she had faith in who and what he was before she was healed - and now that she has been healed - she knows with every fiber of her being, her body knows who and what Jesus is: God incarnate, Divine healer.
And as she comes before Jesus, God, healer - she tells him everything. And he looks at her, and calls her Daughter. This is not something that an unrelated man would call a grown woman. There is immense intimacy being shown here. As in, I know you. I know who you are. I know your name.
Now, there is obviously dialogue and conversation that happens that is not given to us in the Biblical text. I can imagine that Jesus, as she lay before him, prostrating at his feet, got down to her level and said, “Tell me daughter, what is your name?” We may not know her name today, 2,000 some years later. But I know that God knows her name - and I feel in my heart, that on that day, Jesus knew it too.
For he could have let her go - could have let her slip among the crowd. But he wanted to look into the face of the one who had such faith in him. He wanted to know her - to call her by her name. To recognize her humanity. To show her kindness. To bless her on the journey moving forward. Calling her daughter is an intimate act - one that says “You are part of my family now - part of the family of God. Go in peace, be healed.”
In her touching Jesus’s clothes, she was healed. In Jesus looking at her, in the eye, asking her name, calling her daughter - in that act, her humanity was recognized by God: You are worthy of love. You are worthy of wellness. Now that you have met God, may you be blessed.
And so, having recognized her humanity, shown her kindness, blessed her on her way...Jesus continues on his way to the house where a 12 year old girl is dead. And he enters her room, even with her parents, something a stranger would not do. It is a private, intimate moment - just like the moment with the woman before, even if that was on the street. There is intimacy here - there is deep knowledge that goes beyond our human knowledge - “I know you like only God could know you.”
And once, again, there is dialogue and conversation that we do not have in the text given to us. Did Jarius tell Jesus her name while he was begging to heal her? Did Jesus ask her name as he was bending over her body, the stench of sickness still in the air. “What is her name?” As Jesus was told, did he shed a tear at the sight of her, at the knowledge of her name?
What he does call her, as he takes her by the hand - is Little girl, little child, loved child of God - daughter of God, just as the woman with the bleeding disease for 12 years was a child of God, my child, get up, live.
And she does.
What a powerful, intimate moment. This little girl, opening her eyes, seeing Jesus, knowing that she was dead and now she lives - and this man, this man above her who knows her name and is telling her parents to give her something to eat - this man...no, not man...God...Christ, is the one who did it.
God in Jesus calls the bleeding woman daughter.
The one who is a daughter, the 12 year old girl, there is divine intimacy in the moment he takes her by the hand, and bids the little girl to rise from the dead.
These are healing stories.
Now, I know today, many in our congregation and in our world, are in the midst of grief over death. Anger in the healing that didn’t come in the way they prayed for. Or perhaps living in hope - praying for a healing as they or a loved one fights against illness.
For these people, for you if you are one of them, I know these healing stories may be hard to hear today. And what I want you to hear is this: There is healing in what we think of as the traditional miracle sense. And there is also healing, healing for our souls, knowing that the God who is Love, God the Almighty, intimately loves us, knows our names, and calls us our names out of love. In this life and the next, there is healing for our souls - by simply letting ourselves be loved and held by God.
So yes, these are healing stories.
They are also stories about who God is in Jesus - that he has power over life and death as well as the wind and sea.
AND, these are stories about the power of divine relationship with God. That God loves us all, hears and knows our pain, wants life and wholeness for us, journeys with us when that’s not our lot, looks us in the eyes….and calls us children of God.
So listen.
Can you hear Jesus calling your name?
Can you hear him saying Daughter, Son, Child… I know you by name. Know me. Go in peace.
Can you hear that? God knows your name and claims you as a child of God.
Amen.
For these people, for you if you are one of them, I know these healing stories may be hard to hear today. And what I want you to hear is this: There is healing in what we think of as the traditional miracle sense. And there is also healing, healing for our souls, knowing that the God who is Love, God the Almighty, intimately loves us, knows our names, and calls us our names out of love. In this life and the next, there is healing for our souls - by simply letting ourselves be loved and held by God.
So yes, these are healing stories.
They are also stories about who God is in Jesus - that he has power over life and death as well as the wind and sea.
AND, these are stories about the power of divine relationship with God. That God loves us all, hears and knows our pain, wants life and wholeness for us, journeys with us when that’s not our lot, looks us in the eyes….and calls us children of God.
So listen.
Can you hear Jesus calling your name?
Can you hear him saying Daughter, Son, Child… I know you by name. Know me. Go in peace.
Can you hear that? God knows your name and claims you as a child of God.
Amen.
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