How Do I Pray?

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Luke 11:1-13:

I remember sitting next to my mother one day during worship. I don’t remember how old I was, but I think I was pretty young, and everyone started saying the Lord’s Prayer and I asked her how she knew it, and she responded with something like “it’s just something you learn.” That memory stands out for me for a couple of reasons. One being that it taught me that there were things that happened in church and you just had to pick them up, through repetition I was guessing. And the second is that it is probably my earliest memory having anything to do with prayer, and in this case a prayer that everyone says together, which is not always what we think about when we talk about prayer. Of course, we do have communal prayers that we do in worship, and then there is the Lord’s Prayer, which we say together each week. But normally when we talk about prayer its about the personal kind, or of someone else saying a prayer that we are listening to. And in that, I’m sure that most of us have probably heard someone praying out loud, and we’ve said “I wish I could pray like that.”

And probably not surprisingly, Jesus was like that. In hearing him praying, which seems to indicate that he was praying out loud, not silently, the disciples come to ask Jesus to teach them to pray. That is, whatever Jesus is doing doesn’t match their own prayer lives, and so they hope to learn something in order to be better. And while we are told many times that Jesus is teaching people things, and he is even called teacher in numerous stories, this is the only time in the gospels in which Jesus is asked to give a specific teaching about how to do something, not just to answer a question. And so that seems to be one of the clues to us not only about the importance of prayer, but also that prayer can be taught, and perhaps that prayer should be taught. That while it may seem to come natural to some people, that if you are not good at praying, or don’t feel comfortable praying, that there is some good news for you, that help, through teaching is available. And because it’s a learned activity that means that you can try new things, question, experiment and even fail and all of that is okay. And so, as we continue in our series entitled How do I…? today that is the topic that we move on to, prayer.

How Do I Read the Bible

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 2 Timothy 3:14-17:

I want you to think about the first Bible you ever received, or that you can remember having. Who gave it to you? How old where you when receive it? What did it look like? Was it a children’s Bible or a regular Bible? Did it have a special place in your house or room where it was kept? Was it treated like any other book or was it treated special? Did your family have other copies of the Bible? How where they treated and where were they kept? Do you still own that Bible? If not, do you know what happened to it? I want you to think about that Bible, and then turn to someone near you and tell each other about that Bible…. I knew that my first Bible was special in some way, although I don’t remember anyone telling me it was special, it was just sort of conveyed. It was different than other books. I knew the stories where special, although I couldn’t tell you why. I mean if nothing else it’s pretty rare to have a book read in public any more and yet this book is read from every week in worship, and we don’t hear from other books in that way. But no one ever said that we read it differently or treat it differently than other books, but we did, and no one ever said this is how to read the Bible. And I’m willing to guess that’s true for most of you as well. And I’m not talking about Sunday school classes that dealt with stories, because they might have actually made approaching scripture even more troubling or confusing. And so today in our series we are going to be looking at how to read scripture, and please note that I can’t get to everything and so some of this will be a 30,000 foot view of reading scripture.

But let’s start with some basics. The Bible is widely considered the best selling book of all time, and large numbers of people own a copy, besides for being found in hotel rooms, and also report believing what it says to be true. But it might be like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. A book that everyone has, but few people actually read, and surveys show us this general sense of misinformation. So, for example, 10% of people say that Joan of Ark was Noah’s wife. Only 1/3 can identify that Jesus delivered the sermon on the mount, and more than that think that Billy Graham gave it. 40% believe that both the old and the new testament were written a few years after Jesus’ death, and a not insignificant percentage believe that it was all written in English. Or as a Texas woman was reported to have said, although it’s probably just apocryphal, “If English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me.” It was not written in English, not a word, but instead it’s in Hebrew for the Hebrew Bible, or the Old testament, and Greek for the New Testament.

How do I Worship?

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Matthew 14:22-33:

In 1940, philosopher and educator Mortimer J. Adler wrote a book entitled How to Read a Book. Now how we read books seems to be sort of self-explanatory. Other then the mechanics of learning to read, and sentence structure, and looking for main themes, and things like that, I’m willing to bet that few, if any of us, where ever taught how to read a book. And yet if you’ve ever read Adler’s book then you will probably came to realize that perhaps you didn’t actually know how to read a book after all. And the purpose of that is to say that there are some things that we do just because we’ve always done them, and we may never have been formally taught how to do them. And this definitely includes some things that we do in the church. And so, for the next four weeks, our worship series is going to be addressing some of these ideas and asking the questions that perhaps you may have asked, or maybe even never even thought to ask, of how do I do x, and we start with the question How do I Worship?

Now just like with learning how to read a book, you might think you don’t need to know the mechanics of worshipping, after all you’ve been doing this worship thing for a very long time. But I’m again willing to guess that no one ever set you down and taught you how to worship, or talked about the mechanics of worship, or how to prepare for worship, or what to do after worship. Now, I’m sure there were some things you were taught when you were a child, like to be quiet and not to squirm in your seat. And other things you picked up, like when to sit and when to stand, and how to pretend like you’re singing when you’re not, things like that. But even though worship is this extremely important thing we do, few were taught what it takes to worship, or what we should do to worship. So, what are we called to do in worship, and are there things to help us give more to worship and get more out of worship? And the answer is a most definitive yes.

Rogue One, May The Force Be With You

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was John 15:9-17  and the movie was Rogue One.

Sports fans in Philadelphia are known to be particularly passionate about their teams, and their passion sometimes leads to downright hostility, and this is not just directed at visiting players and fans, but even to their own players. These are fans who might be best known for throwing snowballs at and booing Santa Clause. I mean, who boos Santa? People who want coal in their stockings is who. Now this hostility sort of stands in direct contrast for being known as the city of brotherly love, which of course has nothing whatsoever to do with the people who live there, and no offense to anyone here from Philly, I love your sandwiches. But their nickname comes from the meaning of the word Philadelphia, which literally means brotherly love in Greek. And some may remember that there are actually four words in Greek for love. One is the word eros, which is a passionate, physical love, and it never appears in the New Testament. Another, much rarer, is storge, which is the feeling that people in families have for each other, or we might familial love. Then there is Philia, which is brotherly love, with brother here being a much broader category linking with people not related by blood, and we could also certainly include sisters in this. Love for BFFs. Then there is agape, which is much more common. Iit is the word used to describe God’s love for us, but this is, again, not a feeling, but a doing a way of being. It’s also a sacrificial giving love, which is why this word is sometimes used to describe a parents love for a child. It’s giving of yourself for someone else, and so as we conclude our series on The Gospel in Star Wars by looking at the film Rogue One, I want you to keep those understandings of philia and agape in mind because they become important.

Rogue One was released in 2016 and was the first of the live action stand-alone Star Wars movies, also sometimes referred to as the unnumbered films. Rogue One takes place immediately before the original Star Wars film, by a few weeks, and thus brings us full circle back to where we started. The main story line tells us about Jyn Erso, the daughter of Galen Erso, the man who is forced to design the Death Star. As a young girl, Jyn watches her father get taken by the empire and her mother killed, and then she is rescued by Saw Gerrera, a militant rebel leader. Rather than resisting the empire and being killed, her father Galen, designs a flaw into the Death Star so that with one shot it might be destroyed, which explains the end of Star Wars. Galen gets an imperial shuttle pilot to defect with a message for Jyn, which he takes the city of Jedha, the home of a former Jedi temple and a mine for Kyber crystals which not only power lightsabers but is also what powers the death star’s weapon. Captured by the rebels to help them get the plans, Jyn travels with the rebel Cassian, who is shown to do whatever he thinks is necessary for the rebel cause, and K2SO a reprogrammed imperial droid. While on Jedha, they encounter the blind seer Chirrut Imwe, the coolest force user we’ve met in a while, whose personal mantra and breath prayer is “I am one with the force and the force is with me.” We are told that Chirrut is a guardian of the whills, which is an ode to Lucas’ original story idea before he came up with the force, and he is accompanied by Baze who helps protect Chirrut. Although Jyn thinks of herself as being totally independent, of not being able to trust anyone and making it on her own, we get an early indication of who she is when she and Cassian are caught in a street fight between the empire and Saw Gerrera’s followers. (Video)