Core Values: Christ-Centered

Here is my message from Sunday. We began a new series on our core values, and the passage was on Acts 19:1-7 and Mark 1:4-11:

In what is the crescendo in the call to discipleship in the gospels, Jesus asks the disciples “who do people say that I am?”  They say that some say that he is Elijah, remembering back to our message on Jesus being the prophet as to why that answer is important, and some say perhaps John the Baptist has returned, or maybe one of the other prophets. But then Jesus asks the crucial question: Who do you say that I am? And Simon says “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” and it is then that Jesus changes his name to Peter, the rock, and says that it is upon this rock that I will build my church. Now there is some debate about whether that rock is Peter himself, or whether the rock is Peter’s confession of faith. That the church’s foundation and solid rock on which it stands is the proclamation that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the Living God. Because it turns out that we have to answer that same question about who Jesus is for ourselves. No one can answer that question for us. We have to have our own answer. And really we see that throughout scripture. If you remember in our Genesis series, for a while, Jacob only talks about the God of his father Isaac. It’s not his God, but his father’s God. It’s only later in his life that we hear about the God of Jacob, that Jacob has accepted God as his own. Or later after Joshua has taken the people into the promised land, he says to them, after recounting all that God has done for them, he says “You must choose this day whom you are going to serve” and then he responds “as for me and my household, we will serve all Lord.”

Now I say all this for several reasons. One of them being that when I lead confirmation classes for youth, one of the first questions I ask is what does it mean to be a Christian? They will talk about things we might believe, or things we are supposed to do, or about going to church, sort of generic things. But, what they never say, until I get more direct, is that being a Christian means following Christ, or worshipping Christ, or proclaiming Christ as the Messiah, the son of the living God. We might think that’s sort of basic, of what it means to be a Christian and yet it doesn’t seem to be for many people. That when they answer the question about Christianity, following Christ is not the first answer given.

Creating Christmas: Joy

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 and Luke 1:39-56:

Towards the end of his life, Henri Nouwen, a Roman Catholic priest, was still looking for some meaning or purpose to his life. Even though he was a world famous author and theologian and had taught at Notre Dame and Yale and Harvard, he still felt there was something missing. And so he left the academy behind and moved to a L’Arche community in Toronto to live with people with intellectual disabilities, some of them severe that require nearly 24 hour care. It was there that Nouwen was matched with Adam, to be his companion and care taker, of whom he said “"It is I, not Adam, who gets the main benefit from our friendship.” 

Nouwen would take members of the community with him whenever he traveled to speak around the world, and what he also found in this community was joy. He says that there were people there who radiated joy, not because their lives were easy, because they most certainly weren’t, but because they habitually recognized God’s presence in the midst of all human suffering, their own as well as others. And that is at the heart of joy, which we’ll get into, and so, Nouwen says, “The great challenge of faith is to be surprised by joy.” Let me say that again so you can let it sink in and begin to percolate in your mind, “The great challenge of faith is to be surprised by joy.”

Jesus as Prophet

Here is my message from Sunday. The scripture was Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12  and Luke 4:14-24:

In his first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul says that he didn’t come to them using lofty words or wisdom, but instead to make known amongst them only Christ and him crucified. And yet, that term Christ had a lot of meaning that eventually would have to be unpacked. Because Christ is a specific term. Even though we talk all the time about Jesus Christ, Christ is not his last name, and H is not his middle initial. Christ is a title, coming from the Greek word Christos which is the Greek word used for the Hebrew word Messiah, which means the anointed one. And so in proclaiming Jesus as Christ, Jesus as messiah, Jesus as the anointed one, there was a lot of understanding that went along with that. Or we might say that there was a lot of explanation that the early church had to do to come to understand who Jesus was that encapsulated his life, his death and most especially his resurrection. Jesus did not match the role that people expected of the Messiah, and so a new interpretation had to be given about Jesus, and one of the first titles was that of Christ. But when people asked “who is Christ”, or when the disciples and apostles set out to explain who Christ was, they didn’t seek to talk about his nature, but instead about his function. What does Christ do? Why is he important? How do we find salvation in his acts? How do we understand him as the Messiah?

And so the church spent years and years trying to answer some of those questions. And one of the ways that explanation was done was through assigning certain offices, or positions to Jesus, namely that of prophet, priest and king. And we have these titles and ideas appearing early on in the church. In the mid-first century, Justin Martyr was writing about these three offices, and just as an aside, like Jesus, Martyr was not Justin’s last name, that was given to him after he was martyred, otherwise that would be a rather unfortunate circumstance and heavy burden to carry. Later, Eusebius, the father of church history, would do the same. In the middle ages, Thomas Aquinas took up the topic, as did John Calvin in the Protestant Reformation, and John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement encouraged the preaching of Christ in all three of his offices.

Making the Way

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Mark 1:1-8:

Last week we heard scripture from the gospel of Luke announcing the birth of John the Baptist to his father Zechariah. But, because he and his wife are getting on in years, Zechariah does not believe the angel Gabriel’s announcement, and for that reason he is struck mute for the length of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, which had to be a long wait. And yet, they had already been waiting a lifetime for this momentous occasion to come. They had been praying to God for a miracle to take place, for them to have a child, thinking and probably believing that it was never going to happen. And so, as we look through their eyes at the miraculous birth of their son, who we are told will make the way for the coming of Jesus, we see their waiting and the waiting that John the Baptist will also have to do, although we don’t have to do that same waiting because last week when the scripture passage ended Elizabeth was 5 months pregnant with John and today we encounter him, and he is around 30 years old, man does time fly.

John is a special character in scripture, because he is the only person who is continually referred to by what he does, that is he is John the Baptist. So, we have to note that John is not a Baptist, it’s not like saying John the Methodist, but he is known for being the one who baptizes, which we will dig into a little more in the new year when we come back to Mark’s account of Jesus baptism by John. As part of the proclamation to Zechariah, he is told that John “must never drink wine or strong drink; even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” What this statement means is that John was a Nazarite, which again has nothing to do with a specific denomination like the Nazarenes, but instead this was a very special group of people, men, in Judaism who took special vows. Two of the most famous Nazarites were Samson and Samuel, who both also happened to be the result of births of formerly barren women, and they entered into their vows because of pledges their mothers had given to God about what they would do with their child, if they were able to have a child. Of course, in this case, it’s not the pledge of the mother, or at least not that we know of, although Elizabeth was praying hard for a child, but instead the pledge that God is making on behalf of who John is and who he will be.