Run The Race Before Us

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The texts were Hebrews 12:1-11 and 1 Corinthians 9:24-27:

Tonight many of the athletes will gather once again will gather for the closing ceremonies of the Olympic games, not including those who fled the country with the police on their heels.  At tonight’s ceremony, the head of the International Olympic Committee will declare that the Rio games are officially closed, and then the flag of Japan will be hoisted up in the stadium, as they will be the host nation of the next Olympic games, and the race to the next Olympics will be begun with stories of cost overruns, of the inability of the city to host the Olympics, of the worries of terrorism, and as we get closer the reality that many of the facilities are not yet completed, just like we hear every single time the Olympics come around.  We move from what has just happened, and we move forward to the next games. In some sense this is just one big relay race, one nation passing the baton on to the next, and on to the next, with everyone hoping the baton doesn’t get dropped, or perhaps with a little glee at the spectacle hoping the baton does get dropped.  But regardless, the athletes and Tokyo are now all working hard to prepare to be ready come back in four years to do it all over again, to run the race that is before them.  And so today we conclude this series looking at what we can learn from the games about our faith in how we run the race that is before us.

Last week when we looked at wrestling, I said that it was believed to be one of the oldest sports in the world and one that is found in every culture.  But, since walking is an Olympic sport we would have to go with walking as being the oldest sport, something we have been doing for some 4 million years, but running probably comes in as the second oldest sport in which we undertake. Although my guess is that the earliest races were not about being the fastest person, but instead only about not being the slowest person, because when you’re being chased by a wild animal intent on killing you, you don’t have to be the fastest one, you merely have to outrun the slowest person in order to survive.

Five Practices: Passionate Worship

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

Most of us are aware of the importance of words, and how one word can make a huge difference in our perspective or in the story we tell.  When I was growing up my brother loved madlibs, in which you add random words to a story to create something funny.  Many of you are probably familiar with the idea, but we are going to do one here today, and to warn you this is going to be a much more interactive sermon than normal, and interactive, so you are all aware, means that you are active in it along with me.

An Unforgettable Church Service

We arrived at the Church of the Holy _________ (noun). We were dressed in our __________ (day of week) best. Today was special because it was ___________ (holiday) and the kids looked forward to receiving _________ (noun) as part of the celebration.

Pastor John welcomed us and the service started with invigorating ___________ (action verb). It was so __________ (emotion), people were ___________ (verb ending in ing).

The sermon was based on _________ (Book of the Bible). The pastor talked about  ____________________ (biblical character)’s injunction to love God with all of our  ______________________ (body part) _________________ (body part) and   ________________ (human characteristic).   When he finished, I couldn’t believe he had only talked for _________________ (amount of time).  Then we sang a ___________________ (musical style) version of Amazing Grace. 

We wrote a check for $_________ (amount of money) and put it into the __________ (noun). This made us so ________ (emotion) we couldn't contain ourselves.

The _________ (kind of team) team played another song and we filed out to the ___________ (name of a room) to have _____________ (beverage). We stood there waiting to ________ (verb) to someone.

All in all it was a(n) ________ (adjective)  worship service.   _________ (exclamation) God!

Words matter, and descriptive words sometimes make all the difference.

Today we begin a new sermon series based on The Five Practices of Fruitful Living by Bishop Robert Schnase.  It’s been said that once someone becomes bishop that they believe that everything they think has to be written down and published, and Bishop Schnase certainly lives into that belief, but he also has something to say to us.  He says that the five habits are radical hospitality, passionate worship, intentional faith development, risk-taking mission and service and extravagant generosity.  But, while the activites in and of themselves are important, Schnase says it is the adjectives that really make all the difference, and you can move them around, you could have extravagant hospitality and passionate mission and service and risk-taking worship.  The adjectives make a difference because they are describing what it is that we are really doing.  There is a difference between worship and passionate worship.  The adjective matters.  Most of us have probably participated in boring worship or even mediocre worship, maybe even here.  Those are the times in which we don’t feel like we worshipped at all.  And then there are the times in which we have been truly moved, in which we knew that God was present for us in that moment, in which we may have been fundamentally changed.  That is what passionate worship feels like, and yet it is about so much more than that as well.

Here I Am To Worship

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Psalm 145:1-13, 21:

At the end of the book of Genesis we are told that after Joseph’s death, and Joseph of course looked amazingly just like Donny Osmond with his amazing Technicolor dream coat, after his death that the Pharaohs forgot about him and what he had done and as a result what did they do to the Israelites? They got made slaves, which then brings Moses onto the scene, who looks just like Charlton Heston. God then calls Moses and tells him that he is to go to Egypt and to petition the Pharaoh to set the people free. When Moses appears before Yul Brenner, as the Pharaoh, he asks a rather peculiar thing of him. Moses does not simply say, and is commonly thought, let my people go. Instead he asks Pharaoh to allow them to go out into the wilderness, to do a particular thing. What does Moses ask the Pharaoh to let them do? Worship. Let the people go into the wilderness so that they can worship. That is how the exodus story begins, and of course the Pharaoh refuses to allow them to go worship God. Why would the Pharaoh be so concerned about that? Of course there is the possibility that perhaps he thought that if he let them go out into the wilderness that they would never come back.

But I think an even better interpretation, and one presented by Lovett Weems, is that while they are in Egypt the people belong to him, but if they are to go out to worship God, they now belong to God, because that is who they are giving their allegiance to and who they will be listening to. For as it turns out we really belong to whatever it is that we worship. Last month we kept coming back to Jesus’ statement that you cannot serve both God and mammon because you will love one and hate the other, which is really to say that you will worship one and not the other, and you can only ultimately worship one thing, because everything else will subtract or interfere with that worship. The root meaning of the Hebrew word that we translate as worship means to bow down, or to prostrate oneself. When we worship something or someone we enter into a fundamentally different relationship, it’s about much more than just being a follower. In the story of Jesus’ temptation, the devil does not say come follow me and I will give you whatever you desire. Instead what does he say? “worship me.” Worship is important. Two of the Ten Commandments, that would be 20% for those not good at math, deal with worship issues.

Last week I quoted the Rev. Zan Holmes who said that churches are guilty of the sin of low expectations, mainly because we don’t have any expectations, and people will, I believe raise or lower themselves to what is expected. If expectations are high people will rise to meet them, and if there are low expectations people meet them as well. In studies of churches that are growing or are vibrant and healthy, there are lots of commonalities that are found, and one of those is that they have high expectations for their members. I have high expectations for this congregation, and hopefully you also have high expectations for me, and so that is what we are talking about for the month of November. As United Methodists we vow to support this congregation by what? Our prayers, presence, gifts, service and witness. Last week we began by talking about prayer, which is first on the list for the simple reason that prayer creates the foundation upon which we build our faith lives, and it is my expectation that we will be praying every day, and praying for this church and its members every day, and today we talk about the second, which is presence.