The Kindness Challenge: Carrying Out Kindness

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 25:31-46:

After last week’s message on practicing praise, I had a lot of people coming up to me to give me thanks, and so then I had to decide whether it was just everyone working on practicing praise, especially the injunction not to let people assume you are appreciated, but to tell them, or if there were lots of people who decided to practice the kindness challenge on me. But, since one of the things we are working on is assuming the best of intentions for others, rather than the worst, I am going to go with the first answer. Today we conclude in our series on the Kindness Challenge, which is based off a book by the same name by Shaunti Feldhahn, and so a quick recap of the three rules of the kindness challenge. The first rule is to nix the negativity, that is we are not to say anything negative to the person we are doing the kindness challenge for, not to say anything negative about them to someone else. The second rule is practice praise, that is as we start to stop focusing on the negative we instead look for positives and to give one piece of praise or affirmation about someone else every day, and tell someone else what you praised them for. If you missed either of those messages, I would encourage you to go back and listen to them, which then leads us into the final rule, which we cover today, and that is to carry out kindness, or to do a small act of kindness or generosity for the person you are doing the kindness challenge for every day, and to do all three of these steps for 30 days, although you don’t have to stop there.

Additionally, as we are doing the kindness challenge for one person, if that’s what we choose to do, we will also find that we can do these steps for everyone so that we are seeking to bring kindness into all our interactions. But, one thing to keep in mind as we think of ways to be more kind is that except for this third rule, you can do the first two rules for anyone, even if you never come into contact with them. So, you can be more kind to that certain politician you can’t stand, by removing negativity and practicing praise, and remember first is that you don’t have to like someone in order to be kind, and everyone is deserving of kindness even if they are not being kind to others. You can do it for someone who has died, and you need to bring some healing to that relationship, or to someone you have cut out of your life because of something that they did to you. Kindness, and practicing acts of kindness, can be the first steps to bringing about healing and forgiveness, and remembering that forgiveness is not about condoning, enabling or forgetting a hurt, or even saying that it didn’t hurt, but about freeing ourselves from carrying that burden any more so that the perpetrator no longer has control over our lives. Nor is forgiveness about denying that we have the right to be resentful, but for us to say that we are going to put aside that right in order to practice kindness, compassion and forgiveness, with the big caveat that Jesus never said that we only had to forgive people up to a certain point, but that if they crosses our line in the sand, that we didn’t have to forgive. Instead he tells us not to forgive 7 times, but 70x7 times and that unless we learn to forgive then we will not be forgiven. And kindness, acting in kindness can play a significant role in that, because kindness is not just about what we think, but it is about what we say and what we do.

The Kindness Challenge: Practice Praise

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 17:11-19:

There are lots of stories of Jesus healing people in the gospels, of which the healing of the 10 lepers which we heard from Luke this morning seems to be one of them, except, this story is not really about a healing. Yes, a healing does take place, but all we are told about it is that after Jesus tells them to go show themselves to the priest that “as they went, they were made clean.” That is they left Jesus before they were healed of their leprosy, which was a default term used to describe lots of skin diseases, not just the one we typically refer to today as leprosy, or Hansen’s Disease, which still infects some 200,000 people a year around the world, and most of the cases in the US are believed to come from exposure to armadillos. But, that’s just of interest, at least to me, this story is not about the healing, but about the thanksgiving and how it takes place. At the beginning of the story, Jesus is traveling, and these ten men call out in unison to Jesus, to have mercy on them. There is a subtle distinction in the major translations here that I think is significant to point out. In the NRSV, which is what we heard this morning, and the translation I prefer for several reasons, the are simply referred to as ten lepers, but the NIV refers to them as ten men who had leprosy. The difference is subtle, but important, because the NIV simple makes their disease an aspect of something they have, rather than who they are. They have leprosy, rather than they are lepers. It gives them dignity and humanity that is lacking, or can be lacking, when we refer to them by whatever characteristic we choose to say that they are, which I think is important as we think about gratitude and praise and how we see and respond to others.

But Jesus hears their request, which may simply be a request for alms, or money, not a request for healing, as the story is not clear, as it is in other healing stories, that that is what they are asking for. And Jesus listens to them, and sees them, another important point, and offers them healing or cleansing, as leprosy is about ritual impurity, and then they go on their way and then are healed. As one person I read this week said, “a portion of Jesus’ ministry is his willingness to be interrupted by the intrusion of human need.” That is, he sees these people in need of his help and he takes the time to help them, regardless of what is going on, or how busy or exhausted he is, and by implication calls for us to do the same. But how often are we irritated by the intrusions we have in our life, the things that we don’t think are important, or, again, that we might attribute the worst of intentions towards the person who is coming to us for something. But what we see in this story is that just we never know who we may encounter that needs healing, even if they are not seeking it, so too we never know who will be a vehicle for God’s grace to us, as it is here. Because of the ten-people healed, only one returns to thank Jesus, to give him praise. It’s not that the others have their healing go away, they simply go on with their lives. But one returns, and he is a Samaritan at that, one of “those people”, someone not liked by Jews, and he praises God with a loud voice, and then bows down at Jesus’ feet, an act of worship, and thanks him. He sees Jesus’ act of grace towards him and responds with praise and thanksgiving. His life becomes an act of worship towards God.

The Kindness Challenge: Nix the Negative

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 5:21-24:

In Jewish tradition, every sin is ultimately atoneable, or forgivable in this life, except one, and that is the sin of desecrating or profaning God’s name, which can only be atoned after death. When we think of profaning God’s name, it’s usually something about taking God’s name in vain, or cursing, but according the Rabbi Rav, the core desecration occurs when those who are most closely associated with God act in ways that would be perfectly legitimate for other people, but that are not for those who proclaim faith. That is, when representatives of God appear to act in ways that do not adhere to the highest moral standards, their behavior reflects poorly not just on the faith, but more importantly their behavior reflects poorly on God, and consequently God’s name is desecrated. In the daily baptismal prayer we have talked about, and have available, we pray that everything we do that day would honor God, but what if we thought about that not only honoring God but also not dishonoring God to others, because what we do matters.

As we continue in our series on the kindness challenge, I had a number of people come to me to tell me that the person they were going to do the challenge for, the person they were going to work on practicing kindness towards, were not believers, which means it’s even more important that our actions match what we proclaim to believe, because it’s not just that we are setting a bad example and picture of Christians, and there are plenty of people who do that already, as we see on an all too regular basis, especially in trying to use scripture to justify bad, or even illegal, behavior, but within this understanding we are also desecrating God’s name, just to add a little more pressure for us all.

The Kindness Challenge: Breaking Bread

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 22:14-23:

A little more than two week’s ago, former presidents Bush and Obama made speeches about the current political atmosphere in the country. Obama said “Why are we deliberately trying to misunderstand each other and be cruel to each other and put each other down? That’s not who we are!” while Bush the younger said “We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty…. Bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone, provides permission for cruelty and bigotry, and compromises the moral education of children. The only way to pass along civic values is to first live up to them.” Now, this decline in civility has been building up for a long time, and is clearly found in more than just politics. Just turn on the television and we see people screaming at each other on cooking shows. I’ve spent some time in kitchens, and every kitchen I’ve been in that type of behavior would not be tolerated, but it makes for good television. There is a reason why we don’t have a show called the sweetest housewives of Beverly Hills, because that’s not exciting, and people don’t want to watch two political commentators agree with each other. Instead we’d rather watch people be oppositional, except we’ve moved passed just disagreeing to being disagreeable. And as much as we say that we don’t like it and we want it to be better, the truth is our behavior says exactly the opposite because people are watching these shows.

Reformation and Re-Formation

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 22:34-40:

When European Christians began building their great cathedrals, and then began to paint the ceilings, they encountered a unique problem, that is it’s hard to project true geometry onto vaults and domes. Because the space starts large at the beginning, but then pulls into a point at the top, the sense of perspective gets totally off. If you were, for example, to be painting the image of a saint in the dome, the saint’s feet would be really large, but then the body would have to get consistently narrower until they ended up with a really small head. So, artists had to create a new way of showing perspective, but even then, sometimes it would be a little off depending on where you stood, that is in some churches there is an ideal viewing location. When he was painting a soaring trompe l’oeil dome, that is a fake dome, on the ceiling of the church of Saint Ignatius of Loyola in Rome, the artist Andrea Pozzo had an even more unique problem. Because not only did the perspective need to be done correctly, but because the entire thing was fake, and there was no true vanishing point in the center, he inserted a marble disk in the pavement of the church to indicate where people should stand to be able to witness his masterpiece. There is only one place to stand to have proper perspective on the painting, and the farther you get from that, then it stops being effective.

When I read of that a few months ago in a book on the trial of Galileo by the Inquisition, I thought it was the perfect metaphor for what’s going on in the world today. That for a long time, most people were standing on the marble disk and so the world looked okay, it looked like they expected it to look, and certainly how they wanted it to look, and how others said it was supposed to look. But now, we have moved off of the marble disk and everything seems weird, the image to some people is now distorted and they are searching desperately for the marble disk, so they can go back and stand on it and the world will make sense again. Except that we can’t go back to the marble disk for the very reason that the disk isn’t even there anymore and the image itself is changing anyways, so even if we could find the spot where it used to be the image still wouldn’t be the same. As much as this strikes anxiety and outright fear into some people, and celebration into others, this I not all that unusual in the history of humanity and its true in the church as much as it is in politics.

Give All You Can

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 21:15-22 and Mark 12:41-44:

Last week after worship someone came up to me, and they will remain nameless, and asked if I was now done preaching on money. I told them that we had one more week left, and they were grateful that that was it, although they would have been just as happy if we were done last week, and perhaps that’s you as well. If it is, know that you just have to make it through today, and then we will make our way onto other things. But those things might not necessarily be more important things, because money is a spiritual issue. We don’t normally think of it that way, but the Protestant reformer Martin Luther said that there were three steps to conversion. First was the conversion of the heart, second was the conversion of the mind and finally was the conversion of the wallet. But, he said, they didn’t always happen at the same time, and he argued that the wallet was the last to come around. Now, as James Harnish says, “salvation is about a lot more than money, but it is never about anything less than money, particularly in a culture that is compulsively driven by the power of money.” That is, ideas of salvation end up being partly about money because money plays such an important role in our culture and in our lives.

This is nothing new, Jesus was dealing with the same issue which is why he talks about money and possessions so much, and he tells us directly that we cannot have two masters, that we cannot serve both God and money, or God and possessions. That we have to choose our allegiance. Now he doesn’t say that money in and of itself is bad, but what we decide to do with it, how we are going to treat it and relate to it that makes all the difference. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism emphasized exactly the same things when he talked about money, and in establishing what have become Wesley’s rules on money which are to first make as much as we can, with some very clear stipulations about what that means, the second was to save all that we can, and the third, and I know this is the message you have all been waiting for, and you’re sitting on the edges of you seats now in anticipation, give all you can.

Save All You Can

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 12:13-21:

A clergy friend of mine told me about a member of his church who was very wealthy, or at least everyone thought he was very wealthy. That was the rumor, although no one was really sure if it was true, and there was much speculation as to his true worth. Well, one day he died, and as the ladies of the church were gathering to prepare a reception at his funeral, one of them said, sort of casually, “I wonder how much he left behind.” There was sort of an awkward pause, and then one of the other women responded, “all of it. He left all of it behind.” Although you don’t see it much anymore, there was a time, and many of you remember it, when you were prone to see the bumper sticker that said, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” What they won was never really clear, and I think part of the reason you don’t see that anymore is because people came to realize that you didn’t really win anything, because, in fact, you did leave it all behind. That you can’t take it with you, and so while it might help here in this life, and we might argue about the true merits of that, it doesn’t matter in the next life. And so perhaps the other bumper sticker that says, “we are spending our children’s inheritance” might be a better way to think about it, and yet we are also called to be good stewards of the resources with which we have been entrusted, and what we hear in Proverbs is that the good leave an inheritance for their children’s children. But simultaneously, Jesus tells us not to save earthly treasurers were moth and rust can eat them, and don’t worry about tomorrow, so which are we to do?

With those questions in mind, we continue in our series on the money rules of John Wesley, which are to earn all you can, which we covered last week, to give all you can, which we will cover next week, and today we discuss his rule to save all you can. As I’ve been saying for the past few weeks, when the Methodist movement began, John Wesley laid down some rules, three of them, that people had to agree to abide by if they were going to become a Methodist. They were to first do no harm, second was to do good and the third was to attend upon all the ordinances of God, which Bishop Job changed to stay in love with God. Among the things that it meant to do no harm, which was not just to others, but also to yourself, was not to buy spiritous liquors, love that phrasing, or to drink them, which sort of closes the loophole of someone else buying it for you. Not buying things on interest, that is not buying anything you can’t afford to pay cash for, and not wearing gold or expensive clothing. What Wesley, and those in the church found, was that when people started doing these things, especially not wasting money on alcohol, which is still an enormous amount of money, that people then had more disposable income which could then be used for other things, like education, which then allowed people to get better jobs, which paid better, and thus more income, and so that was the reason why Wesley then established his rules

Earn All You Can

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 25:14-30:

Last week Samantha asked me if I would rather have too much or too little? Would you rather have too much or too little? I had to think about it for a moment, and then I said too much, and there are some things we would rather have too much of it, but then it occurred to me that I wouldn’t really like to have too much pain, or sorrow, or illness. On the flip side, we might like to have less of those things, or something else, but we wouldn’t want to have less happiness or joy or laughter. I think sometimes we think the same thing about money. We want to have more money rather than less, right, but at the same time we also know that have too much can bring problems, and there is also a sort of guilt that comes with having too much money, although perhaps we all think we’d like to be a little more guilty than we are. But, it’s that idea that leads us into today’s message continuing in our series looking at Wesley’s rules on Money. As I said last week, as people began to follow some of the expectations that Wesley had set down on how to live your life if you were going to be part of the Methodist movement, people found themselves doing better economically, which we’ll hear about more next week, and so Wesley felt he needed to respond to new economic issues and he laid down three rules, the first was to gain all you can, or as James Harnish said, to earn all you can, the second was to save all you can, and the third rule was to give all you can.

Now today we start with the first rule, and for most people it is the rule that is most surprising and that is being told to make as much money as you can. That’s shocking because of some of the comments that Jesus makes that would seem to contradict such an instruction, like that it’s easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than it is for someone who is rich to get into the kingdom of God. That would seem to say that being rich is a problem, and Wesley would actually agree with that, but it’s dependent upon why we are seeking money and more importantly what are we doing with that money. Wesley says that “the right use of money” is “an excellent branch of Christian wisdom… inculcated by our Lord on all his followers.” And then says of Christians, who don’t normally talk about such things, that they “generally do not consider… the use of this excellent talent. Neither do they understand how to employ it to the greatest advantage; the introduction of which into the world is one admirable instance of the wise and gracious providence of God.”

2017 Reading Challenge

This list was a "challenge" that was going around Facebook at the beginning of the year, so thought I would add it to my list as I am selecting books to read this year. I will update the list with what book qualifies as we go through the year.

1. A book you read in school
     1984 by George Orwell
2. A book from your childhood
     The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
3. A book published over 100 years ago.
     Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic
4. A book published this year
     Irresistable: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter
5. A non-fiction book.
     Lost at Sea: An American Tragedy by Patrick Dillon
6. A book written by a male author.
     The World America Made by Robert Kagan
7. A book written by a female author.
     A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren
8. A book by someone who isn't a writer.
      This is a hard one because if they wrote it aren't they a writer? But going with Raising the Floor by Andy Stern and Lee Kravitz (Lee Kravitz is a named ghost writer, or assistant writer)
9. A book that became a film.
     The Hunger Games series
10. A book published in the 20th century.
     Mere Christianity by CS Lewis
11. A book set in your hometown/region.
      Christmas Every Day by Lisa Tawn Bergren set in Taos, which is the region, but the main character is also an alum of St. John's College in Santa Fe, as am I, and will be joining the faculty there by the end of the story.
12. A book with someone's name in the title
      The Second Death of George Mallory by Reinhold Messner
13. A book with a number in the title.
      23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joong Chang
14. A book with a character with your first name.
     John Birch: A Life by Terry Lautz
15. A book someone else recommended to you.
      The End of White Christian America by Robert P. Jones
16. A book with over 500 pages.
     One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson
17. A book you can finish in a day.
     How English Became English: A Short History of a Global Language by Simon Horobin
18. A previously banned book.
     Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling
19. A book with a one-word title.
     Thrawn by Timothy Zahn
20. A book translated from another language.
     Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman, translated by Elizabeth Manton
21. A book that will improve a specific area of your life.
     The Kindness Challenge: 30 Days to Improve Any Relationship by Shaunti Feldhahn
22. A memoir or journal.
     Three Weeks with My Brother: A Memoir by Nicholas Sparks
23. A book written by someone younger than you.
      Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
24. A book set somewhere you will be visiting this year.
     Engineered for Murder by Aileen Schumacher (takes place in Las Cruces, NM)
25. An award-winning book.
     In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick (National     
     Book Award Winner)
26. A self-published book.
     All that Glitters by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

Know The Cost

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 14:25, 27-33:

Today we begin a new sermon series looking at John Wesley’s rules about money.  Wesley, who is the co-founder of the Methodist movement, put down some strong rules and expectations for those who chose to join the movement, including about simple economics, which we will hear more about over the course of the next four weeks. As people then began to live out those rules, they began to advance in economic possibilities and opportunities, moving out of the lower economic classes, and then Wesley faced an unexpected situation with members wanting to buy nice clothing and bigger houses and, heaven forbid, they even wanted to finance fancier churches. And so, Wesley responded in several ways, but one of them was in writing a sermon entitled “On the Use of Money”, of which we will also cover more, but in that sermon Wesley expounded on three rules when it comes to money which was first to gain all you can, which James Harnish, who wrote a book on this, changed to earn all you can, second was to save all you can, and then finally was to give all you can.

Now I know some of you are saying, O pastor John is talking about money, it must be stewardship time again, and the good news is that it is. But, this sermon series is not about how much you should give, as important as that is, but instead this is about your personal finances and making them better, or at least helping you understand them better, especially from a biblical perspective. Because the truth is, I could tell you that you need to be giving ten percent, or even 50 percent of your money, to the church and other causes, but if you don’t have even 1 percent to give because of other issues in your home economics, then it doesn’t matter what I say to you about what you should give because you can’t do it. But, if I can teach you some new skills, or maybe some new ways to think about our resources and how best to be a good steward of those resources then we enter a space where I can actually give you guidance about giving and how to invest your money for God’s Kingdom.