Sermon Echoes-Good News For Everyone

 

Good News for Everyone

Jesus is the telos or ultimate aim of the Law, and our cruciform connection to him allows his love, the greatest commandment, to be fulfilled in our own lives.
                                         

In the letter to the Philippians, Paul uses a Confession of Christ, which takes the form of a hymn known by all of the communities of faith he planted. To this community especially, to talk about having the mind of Christ.

5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
6 who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a servant

being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

Now the history of the Philippian community as a Roman army base, meant that the readers of this letter had certain expectations of their gods. 1 god didn’t die. 2 gods didn’t HUMBLE THEMSELVES. 3. gods didn’t expect worshipers to change how they did things. But this God DID DIE, HE DID HUMBLE HIMSELF and we are being asked to change our minds to be like Christ. For the Philippians community, it meant letting go of the social order the community had established and someone of high class having the same place in the community of faith as someone of low or no class. For us, perhaps it is letting go of our judgments of others, or giving our own opinions a rest for the sake of a relationship. To humble ourselves as an act of service to another is what Christ did.

The second verse of the hymn continues,

Therefore God also highly exalted JESUS
and gave him that name
that is above every name,
10 so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

Church this confession is our history, it is our present and our future. Our willingness to go beyond boundaries and to understand what God has made clean we can’t call unclean is all tied up in having the same mind as Christ. We have been given life by Christ offering for us, his humble act of service to all humanity. All of this makes it our honor and privilege therefore, to have open hearts, open minds, and open doors for the glory of God the Creator, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Sermon Echoes - The Great Commission

 

 The Great Commission

October 8th was such a full day of wonderful opportunities to be church. I am so blessed to serve the communities of Pilmoor Memorial UMC in Currituck and Mt. Hermon UMC outside Elizabeth City.  The morning began with a beautiful sunrise over the Currituck sound that always has this way of centering my spirit and reminding me how small I am in the scheme of things. God shows off every morning over here in Currituck and I love seeing the paintings in the sky and all of creation coming alive.

This week, I began a sermon series called "Everybody Tell Somebody" that will take us through the month and I am very excited to be sharing these messages, calls to discipleship, and weekly bible study. If you missed out on the message you can watch it here.

"What if we were to read the text this way, 'Go, therefore, and while you are going make disciples and baptize them into Trinity and the family of faith.' Doing so causes a shift in our understanding of evangelism from being a task we are commanded to complete, to instead, being asked to live our entire lives as a witness to the Gospel, meeting others and ourselves where we are along the way.”

There is a difference between “mission” and “evangelism” even though we often use them as interchangeable words and experiences.  So often in our churches, we do great mission work but struggle to find the opportunities for evangelism or to know the difference between mission and evangelism. 

Mission - apostolḗ  - ap-os-tol-ay'

sent or sending

Evangelism - euangelion - yoo-ang-ghel'-ee-on

to announce/tell good news 

As we journey through this series it is my fervent prayer that we will make a shift from "doing evangelism" to “being evangelism”.  That could look like (e.g., making conversation with a stranger in the checkout line or the server in the restaurant you frequent; listening when a stranger, friend, or neighbor is going through something; letting others go first in a line; helping a neighbor with a project; handing out food in a food pantry) allowing our lives become shaped by the call to "euangelion" (evangelize)

Step 1:acknowledging our doubts and fears about our ability to do or be evangelism does not prevent God from using us. God's perfection does not need ours, if we allow grace to work in us and through us God can and will use us for all sorts of good.

Step 2: take a relationship from stranger to neighbor, showing love and kindness to anyone we encounter. Showing them they matter enough for us to build a relationship with them.

Step 3: do not be afraid to say that the source of that light shining within you is Jesus.

What would it look like if we, as the body of Christ, were to see our call to evangelize not as one task among many but as an overall approach, structuring our days from morning to night? Imagine being that daily witness who baptizes others into a Christ-filled life.  Our evangelism or witness becomes an announcement, a telling, not just with words, but with our actions and behaviors too.

A culture shift like this for our church begins to generate the same kind of excitement as invitations to a big celebration, where it’s not just another thing we do. The Great Commission also becomes the Great Invitation - one that all of us can rally around and help share this amazing Good News. 

-May Trinity make it So-

REMEMBER! God Loves you and So do I!

Recording Worship Bloopers

We have all been there, right? Someone asks you to read a passage, you look over it and think, "Oh yeah, I got this", until it is time to read in front of everyone and your mind blanks on that random word in verse 8... 

Sharing this memory to keep me humble. And as a reminder to us all that when we read God's word with confidence, likely no one will question our mispronunciation!

Remember: God loves you and so do I!

-josh

Living In-Dependence

Shane and Shane is one of my favorite groups, and this is one of my favorite songs by them,"Liberty". I think one of the best moments in the song comes in the bridge with these lyrics,
"The storm rolled in, it was dark in the land
As the Son of Man was crucified
You don't take His life, He laid it down
And He paid the price, and shed His blood
It is done, the veil is torn
He has won and I am free"
As followers of Christ our freedom and liberty comes differently, We cannot be set free by our actions, we cannot win on our own. We fully depend on Christ. We offer him our lives and will and faith and depend on his goodness to set us free from our sin and redeem us into right relationship with God. By Christ's great mercy, and for our freedom, Christ's work on the cross has set us free from the burden of the law. Now our job is to re-member what he has done for us, and gather all of creation into his love by our love. The love demonstrated in his life as the love of God for all creation. Paul says in Galatians 5:14 Jesus summed up the whole law, everything we as his followers are supposed to do, with the words, "Love your neighbors as yourself."

He goes on to illustrate how we will know we are living as faithful disciples through the "fruit" those relationships bear, "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control."
 
It is not an easy thing to bear these fruits all the time, people are hard, life is hard, and circumstances arise that we don't always understand which makes living a life of faith hard. However, when we try our best to fully depend on God for all that we have and all that we are, our faith can be tried, but it will not be shaken because we will see the fruit in our lives and the fruit in creation around us that reminds us God is alive and working. That we are living in the reign of Christ right now and we are no longer separated from the holy because the veil was torn and God busted loose into all things to make God's way the way of freedom. 

So I wonder how we might celebrate dependence? We will celebrate tomorrow with fireworks and cookouts, ice cream and baseball, the liberation of our nation from another, but in what ways do we celebrate a liberation that looks so much different. This freedom in Christ means dependence on him for all, it means we listen to the Spirit for each step we take, it means we put our trust in a God we cannot see with our eyes.

For me, worship is the way I celebrate. It is the way I tell the way of the world it will not be my guide. It is the way I show God my love and passion and appreciation. It is the way I am filled to overflowing for ministry to my neighbors. As a Pastor, I am usually working while the congregation is attending worship, so I have to find ways to worship throughout the week. Listening to music or sermons, engaging in bible study, reading and talking with friends and family about where God is working in our midst becomes the worship that fills me. I pray, that each of you also find a way to celebrate your dependence on Christ. Tell us how you celebrate in the comments below or on my facebook page - @JATlifelessons.

Remember, God Loves you and So do I!

-j out

Preaching like Jack

Storytelling has been my connection to preaching almost my entire life. Growing up, the pastor of my home church, always preached with a story. He may have used an illustration from a book or an experience from his childhood or even from the week before. Every sermon began with him reading the scripture dynamically and then he would begin the story and switch back and forth between it and his exegesis of the text. Basically, a three-point sermon, but through stories.

When I became a youth, I went on cool retreats every winter and summer. You know the kind, a bunch of smelly teens crammed in a gymnasium or auditorium jumping around to high octane praise and worship music, live games on the stage and in the crowd, a drama to set the mood for preaching and then the preacher delivered the message. As a United Methodist youth in Western NC I grew up listening to the hilarious and poignant Conference Evangelist at almost all of these events. Andy had a style of preaching all his own. Switching between sermon and first person narrative with props and voices usually queuing that switch with a phrase like, “It may have gone something like this…”. The way he wondered through a sermon, asking questions of the text and offering laughter throughout always hit me as a great way to preach to teens. As an adult it still strikes me as funny, but I wonder if it would get old 52 weeks a year?

The greatest preacher I know, my mother, took a class at Pfeiffer University with Andy called “Preaching to the Pierced Tongue Generation”. It was right as we had begun a contemporary service at our home church and she was in the rotation to preach as the minister of Christian Education. Her final project was a first-person sermon on the story of Mary and Martha. She played the role of Martha and did it in the style of a Mary Tyler Moore sketch. She did so great! It was the first time I had ever seen a sermon in that style, she never broke character, hitting all her points and morals as Martha.

As a youth minister myself, I attended many retreats and heard many sermons, good and bad for better or worse in church and at those retreats too. I would take my confirmands to a retreat at Lake Junaluska every year, and hear the stories and folk sermons of a pastor named Ed. These sermons had a different technique, as they were complete stories, but they were told from the narrator’s perspective. What I enjoyed about this technique was how he modernized them, the woman at the well was a teenager at the soda fountain, Zacchaeus a back row of the Sanctuary blues singer.

These sermons inspired the way I spoke with my youth on a weekly basis, but I never thought I would be a preacher, much less be “graduating” (I put this in quotes because…corona) from Duke Divinity School in less than a month. But one of my favorite styles of preaching is through storytelling. While being in Div School I have explored my own style of preaching and most recently, in this class, did a sermon in the style of a Jack Tale.

Jack tales always center around an unbeatable foe, but by his wit and sneakiness, Jack wins the day. Many of the stories told about Jack center around his defeat of Giants. My great uncle, Ray Hicks told Jack Tales in the style of Appalachian folk stories. Jack is a trickster, always getting the best of the antagonist and coming out every time as the unlikely hero.

Great Uncle Ray was a renowned Appalachian storyteller, who lived his entire life on Beech Mountain, North Carolina. He was particularly known for the telling of Jack Tales. The Hicks family lived in conditions of extreme poverty in the relatively isolated mountains of North Carolina near Banner Elk. The family got by selling carpets handwoven by his mother and dulcimers crafted by his father as well as other work. In 1945, Ray’s father committed suicide. His mother died in 1975 leaving him the family homestead and child-raising duties.

In 1973 he went to the National Storytelling Festival and became a headliner for many years at the event. Ten years later he was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship with pictures and recordings of his stories put on display at The National Museum of American History in the Smithsonian Institute

Storytelling is not only something I was formed by in the sermons I heard growing up, it also runs in my blood. I’m not completely sure how to continue using these stories in sermons but I think there is something to this style of telling that applies to preaching. Especially in a Rural context. My worry doing it was that people may think I was talking down or making fun of this style, but it is honestly me paying respect to my family heritage and learning the phrases and motifs to tell the stories on my own. I have been telling my 3-year-old Jack and the Giant stories to teach her about telling the truth and being brave. She loves hearing them and is repeating them back to me. In retelling scripture in the form of Jack Tales, I think that there is a possibility to teach the stories in a way that sticks in the minds of young and old. I only hope that as I continue to hone my preaching style, I will feel confident to use all the methods we have explored in this class to bring scripture and themes to life for the congregation.

Remember, God loves you and so do I
-j out

Person County United Methodist Parishes 1/3/17 Devotion

Picture by Elizabeth Reiter 12/29/16

My Wife and I spent last week in Disney world, and I am always struck by the fact that people told Walt his dreams were impossible. His father thought being an animation artist was a waste of time, His brother thought they would run out of money before Snow White was finished, people around him thought it was crazy to build an amusement park and though it would never take off.  But he never lost sight of the dream he had when he drew that first picture of a little Mouse he called Mickey and is quoted saying “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”

I have done my share of impossible things in my time as a church worker, student, child and sibling. I have held on to and let go of my share of dreams. And it strikes me today that as we enter this new year together that many of our churches and congregation members have done the impossible and dreamed big dreams or perhaps had to let go of some dreams we once had. But in the back of my mind I hear Walt echoing the words of the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Philippians, where he is giving them a word of encouragement and before my pixie dust turns to glitter on the shelf I feel the need to share a word of encouragement here this evening.

Paul says in Chapter 4 verses 11-13, "Not that I am referring to being in need, for I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me." 

I can, We can, do all things through Christ who gives us strength. The Psalmist says to God "Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long." —Psalm 25:5 As long as we place our hope in the one who gives hope and grave, love joy and peace as freely offered gifts we are indeed able to do all things. So maybe it is time for us as pastors and parishioners to shack off those dreams deferred and put them back on our radar. God has big plans for the church today, just as God did when letters were being passed around and shared among the new disciples of Christ.  Each church represented here has gifts and ministries unique to that body and God uses those to build up the Kingdom of God. No it’s not a Magic Kingdom that all started with a Mouse, but it is a Kingdom started and founded on the Love of God that is manifest in each of us and intended to be shared with the world around us. 

So friends, shake off the ideas that our dreams our out of reach, because Nothing is impossible with Christ on our side and as Walt says It’s kind of Fun to do what the Worlds deems impossible, and when we do, when we achieve our dreams and goals, May God receive all the honor and Glory. 

"I am God your Savior. I guide you and teach you, so put your hope in Me all day long. I guide you according to My truth, and I teach you important lessons as you follow the path I’ve prepared for you. Because I am both your Savior and your God, I’m able to help you with the obstacles you will encounter. Your difficulties can even be blessings when they draw you into deeper dependence on Me." —Jesus Today by Sarah Young

Jesus I know you can...

Sitting here in my new office, at a new church, in a brand new position created for me in a way and I am completely beside myself with the reality that following Jesus has led me here right where I have wanted to be for so long. At First UMC, Asheboro I am the Community Life Minister, basically an Assistant Pastor, and will be the Worship Leader for our new Contemporary Worship service we will call "First".
 I can't help but think about the first time I asked God to help me grow into the minister God wanted me to be and feel a tug in my heart towards becoming a worship leader. WUMC made it possible for me to follow that dream by allowing us to begin "The Well" and for 2 years I struggled to be THIS and THAT and to devote time to my PASSION and my JOB and in the end I feel like I did an okay job. However, here I get to simply be what God has called me to be...to do what God has called me to do. It is amazing and, I must confess, completely overwhelming to realize that people saw my gifts and decided to trust God enough to allow me to use them to further the work of the Kingdom.

While we were packing up the house in Wvl, I was overcome by a serious moment of sadness, that was followed by complete disbelief that any of it was happening. As the tears began to roll down my cheeks and this grown man was reduced to a blubbering mess, in the background I heard the lyrics to my new favorite Third Day song, "I Know You Can". I listened to it repeatedly until I could sing the words without crying and then my heart started believing them. "If I'm to follow you it's only by your hand. Help me to make it through, Jesus I know you can..."
  The craziest thing about this life we have chosen to live is that God's timing is not always convenient, it's not always how we want it to look, but when we allow God to move everything will be okay.

"I Know You Can"

Give me the words to say
Bring me the strength to stand
Take all the doubt away
Jesus, I know You can
For if I’m to follow You
It’s only by Your hand
Help me to make it through
Jesus, I know You can

So close that I can taste it
I stand at the great unknown
Second chance and I don’t want to waste it
I gotta know, I gotta know
You speak and I will listen
You ask and I will go
Lord, will You be there with me
I gotta know, I gotta know

So the lesson we take from all this is that Jesus has us in the palm of his hand and will never leave or forsake us...and even in the great times of our lives, it is okay to grieve the loss of something great as you move to the next great thing. Lastly, it is right and good and joyful to make lifelong and lasting friends whom you share the pains and beauty of life with and for your heart to break as you move away and then spend days really missing them, because it means that God will cross your paths again and quite often. It means that a phone call or text message from them will mean even more, and the memories you make during the times you get to share will be stronger and truer because there is love wrapped in each moment with them. 

 Here we are standing at the "great unknown" with new and old friends and our family surrounding us and a God that will not let go of us...so I pray for strength, for wisdom, for your guidance, and your love. I ask you to be with my friends, love them in my absence and help me to feel their love with me. Give me your words, forgive me when I doubt, speak and I will listen, lead and I will follow...help me to make it through, Jesus I Know You Can.