Forgive Us Our Debts As We Also Have Forgiven Our Debtors

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Colossians 3:12-17  and Matthew 6:5-15:

The Lord’s Prayer, which we have been looking at for the past four weeks, consists of a series of petitions. The first of those petitions are really about God, although about things we might be doing, like hallowing God’s name, which means making it holy, and then it turns to personal petitions, things we are asking God to do for us. And as a reminder that is the plural us, not the individual us. And so last week we began with the first of those personal petitions asking God to give us, and everyone, this day our daily bread. This image is from a freeze from the Roman Senate House which was originally constructed by Julius Caesar in 44 BCE. It was updated over time, and this carving represents the emperor Trajan who ruled from 98 to 117 CE. We actually know some really interesting things about the early Christian church because of a series correspondence that Trajan has with Pliny, who was the imperial governor of what is now modern day turkey. Although it’s hard to see now due to age and destruction, Trajan is sitting on his throne, with some of his advisors behind him, and standing in front of him is a woman who was originally holding a child, although the child has been broken off, and Trajan is extending out his hand and giving the woman and her child bread. This is to show his magnificence as through his generosity, and through the generosity of the kingdom of Rome, Trajan is making sure that this family does not starve to death.

Heart of Comfort

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10 and John 14:1-14.

Mother’s Day is always a difficult service to plan and prepare for, because there are so many pieces that have to be remembered and taken into account. Of course we celebrate our mothers, but there are those whose mothers are gone, and they mourn, and there are those who never had a mother, or lost their mother early, or those whose mothers were unable to be a mother or to love as we expect mothers to. And then there are those who desperately wanted to be mothers, but who were unable to, and others who feel judged and thought of as less than a woman because they didn’t have children, and there are the mothers who have known the pain of a child dying, or that have lost a child in other ways. Although worship attendance tends to be higher on Mother’s Day, because mom’s say “I want you to come to church with me today”, and the family does, I also know many women who choose not to come to church because it’s just easier not to try and be in church an deal with some or all of the emotions and feelings that come with just some of the situations I just named. And so wherever you are today, as we’ve been saying, whether you are experiencing joy and celebration on this day, or sadness and pain, or something in between, it’s okay, and it fits into our next issue of getting to the heart of the matter, and that is the heart of comfort.

Each Sunday, we’ve begun by holding our worry stones, or perhaps our pocket crosses, and rubbing them as a reminder of the steadfastness of God, and that God is with us always. We hear that is the Psalm that was read, in the Psalmist’s plea for deliverance from whatever it is that they are facing, that they are seeking refuge in God. Twice the Psalmist talks about God being their rock and fortress, first in asking for God to be that, and then in recognizing that God is their rock and their fortress. That God’s faithful and steadfast love will redeem them and protect them. In that imagery, in that call, and in that assurance and knowledge of God’s steadfast love, the Psalmist finds comfort. That God is rocksolid in God’s promises and in not going anywhere, and all the other things that the idea of God as rock means for us. And yet when we say that God is our rock, or even God is our fortress, we of course don’t literally mean that God is a rock. We understand that this is a metaphor that’s being used to give some attributed about what God is like. It’s to say that God is like this, but also to know that God is not like this. And there is certainly some comfort in understanding God to be our rock, solid, true, holding us and protecting us. But as we think of God’s comfort there are other metaphors that also need to come into play, especially as we celebrate our mothers and other significant women in our lives.

Resurrection: Adoption

Here is my sermon from Mother's Day. The texts were Galatians 3:25-4:7 and Exodus 1:22-2:10. If you would like to see the testimonies given, please view the video on our Youtube page.

This past week I was at a conference center located right on the shore of Lake Tahoe. The lake, which is beautiful, played a significant role in human populations from the time of native Americans coming to the area on to the present, which is not really surprising, because water is obviously important to us as humans for survival. So perhaps it’s not surprising that according to the national institute of health, that 50% of the population on the earth live within 3 kilometers of freshwater, and only 10% of the worlds population lives more than 10 kilometers away. That’s true even with the increasing urbanization of the population, because the majority of large cities are also close to water. That was just as true in Egypt, and the Nile River played a crucial role in the life and activities of the people. While water can bring destruction and death, as see in storms and flooding, water is seen as a giver and protector of life, and so the Pharaoh’s instruction at the beginning of the book of Exodus to have male Hebrew children thrown into the Nile to drown stands in strong contrast to how the Nile was seen. Rather than being a source of life, he wants to make it, to turn it into, a source of death, but his actions are thwarted by four women.

Now perhaps that is not surprising that it is women who choose to protect life, and to even keep the water as a symbol and source of life. Even more striking, or important, is that other than the instruction from the Pharaoh handed down that all Hebrew male children are to be killed, there are no adult males in this story of Moses, and the fact that women play such a prominent role is not because this is a birth story. In fact, the story of Moses’ birth is just half a verse, half a sentence. It’s the role the women play in saving a life, in direct contradiction to the edict laid down the by the pharaoh himself. They are counteracting the rule which would distort the purpose of the Nile, the meaning of the Nile, to bring about death, rather than life. And so, Moses’ mother, who is not named, although Moses is not actually named yet either, makes a basket that is covered in bitumen and pitch, so that it will be waterproof. The Hebrew word translated here as basket, is the same word used to refer to Noah’s ark, and so we are called to see that this is a new form of salvation taking place here. Then the mother takes the basket, the ark, and places it amongst the reeds in the Nile. Now later when Moses will lead the Egyptians out of slavery, contrary to popular opinion, and some translations, he leads them not across the Red Sea, but across the Reed Sea. Again, we are called to see the story of the Israelites, of salvation, of freedom, of life, being played out here in this initial story of Moses.

Spiritual Milk

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was 1 Peter 2:2-10:

According to futurists, the first person to ever live to be 1000 has already been born. That seems really hard to believe, but we really have no idea of what medicine will be able to do in 50 years, or how the things that are likely to kill us now will be fixable in the not too distant future, and so I have to at least give those who postulate these things some benefit of the doubt. Or at least admit that while they might not be born yet, they will be born in the near future. Just to give you a perspective, if you had an ancestor born a thousand years ago, and they were still alive, you would be roughly the 50^th generation, and when they were born, the emperor Charlemagne’s death would be as recent as Thomas Jefferson’s death is for us. They would have been alive when the Chinese perfected gun powder, Macbeth was becoming king of Scotland, and in 1066 they would be alive to hear about, or participate in, the Battle of Hastings, one of the most  important events in Western history. They would have celebrated their 500^th birthday at the time of the Protestant Reformation, and been 600 when Shakespeare actually wrote about Macbeth. That type of life span will radically change how we live, perhaps how we love, and definitely how we relate as family, or perhaps even how we have families.

Rabbi Harold Kushner has written about what might happen if we became immortal, and questioned whether people might stop having children, if for no other reason than a form of population control. But, he says, that means that not only would humanity stop having the joy of having children around, but that they would also stop having the joy of being a parent, and if that happened we would lose the concept of what it meant not only to have the love of a parent, but also of what it meant to dedicate your life, and be prepared to give your life for another person. We would also lose the understanding of the needs of infants, and of milk as life giving force, as we hear in the passage from 1 Peter.

Worry Not

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 6:25-34:

Today we conclude our series looking at the things that Jesus told us not to do.  We have looked at not fearing, not doubting; not sinning and not judging, and I would encourage you, if you missed any of those, to go watch them on our website or YouTube page.  But today we conclude by looking at Jesus’ injunction not to worry.  Now when I was putting this series together, my wife Linda, and the mother of our daughters, asked what I was going to be preaching on after Easter, and so I told her, and she said to me, “On Mother’s Day you’re going to preach on how we shouldn’t worry,” and I said “yes,” to which she said, “do you think that’s a good idea because worrying is what mothers do. It’s who we are.”  Well obviously I didn’t listen to that sound advice, and I have been worrying about it ever since, but I didn’t move it because I thought that if there is a group who is worrying all the time, then perhaps this is the message we need to hear, and if I’m wrong, please tell Linda that she was right which will be the best Mother’s Day present she will get today.

But, just like with the other “nots” we have covered, Jesus is not really telling us not to worry about things in this passage.  Indeed, there are troubles that can occur in our lives that it might be legitimate to worry about, but it’s a matter of what we consider worry worthy, and what we do with that worry, or really what that worry does with us, and this does tie into Mother’s Day.  The creation of today as a holiday came about from two movements, one of which comes from Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, who after the end of the Civil War called for the creation of a day for mothers to gather and be honored and call for peace and the end of war.  The other movement was from Anna Jarvis, who instituted the first Mother’s Day in her Methodist church, in honor of her mother who was a nurse during the Civil War, and later an advocate for peace and women’s health issues.  It is this anti-war piece that I think ties into this because there are good times to be worried, as every mother does, and one of those in when their children go off to war.  One mother at a church I served told me, after her son was sent to Afghanistan, that for the first time she truly understood Paul’s injunction to pray without ceasing, because that is what she had begun to do.  So, if you have worries, that are okay, but it’s what we are worried about and how we handle that worry that makes the difference.

Death, Life and Motherhood

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Ruth 1:1-17:

The first attempts to create a day for mothers was begun by Julia Ward Howe, best known for writing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.  It wasn’t a day to honor mothers the way we do today, but instead in the wake of the civil war, in which so many mothers had lost their children, it was a day for mothers to come together to call for peace and disarmament.  The first Mother’s Day as we know it was celebrated at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, the precursor to the United Methodist Church, in 1908.  Anna Jarvis wanted to create a day to honor her mother, who worked promoting female education, and through her to honor all mothers.  At the 1912 general Conference, which is the administrative body of the Methodist church, they called for Mother’s Day to be celebrated at all Methodist churches, and in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national celebration as a day to recognize all the women who had lost sons in war, which we should note is the same year world war 1 began.  Unfortunately for Jarvis, by the 1920’s she believed that the holiday had become so commercialized that she began to regret having created the holiday. 

I think that Mother’s Day is one of the hardest sermons to deliver every year.  While Mother’s Day tends to be a high attendace day as people come out to celebrate their mothers, I also know that there are people who consciously avoid church on Mother’s Day, or at least dread coming, because they don’t want to have to deal with the pain that mother’s day brings.  There are those women who wanted to have children but were unable to; there are women who chose not to have children, and who feel judged for that decision, especially in the church; there are who have lost children; there are those who have lost their mothers; and there are those who mothers were unwilling or unable to be a mother to be their children and somehow I have to bring those altogether and or at least recognize those realities, to mourn and to celebrate, to recognize pain and to honor, and I think to proclaim a message of hope, love and appreciation, and I think that Naomi and Ruth do all those things.

The Book of Ruth is one of only two books in our Bible named after a woman, does anyone remember the second?  (Esther)  The book begins with a key indicator of what the story is going to be about, but it is very subtle and so to catch it you would have to be very aware of Biblical storytelling, and that is that we are told that the family are Ephrathites.  It is said that Bethlehem, was founded by the descendants of Ephrath, who was the wife of Caleb, and so the family is identified not by a male clan name but by a female name indicating that this is a story about women and the descendants of those women.  There is also a sort of ironic meaning to this usage as well, as the word Ephrath comes from a root word which means fertile or productive, and at the moment neither the land nor the sons are matching that description, and so they have to leave Bethlehem, which means house of bread, although eventually there is not only fertility in the land but also fertility in the family as well as Ruth will give birth to a son.