Sermon Echoes - A Baby Changes Everything

 

    

It may seem strange to be hearing about the Wisemen's arrival this past week. 

Christmas may seem so last year (😊)  

We are into a new year with new hopes and dreams  

But the message of Christmas –

    the message of HOPE,  PEACE, LOVE, and JOY is for all days  

As is the Good News of Salvation – 

     life abundant now and life eternal is the promise received by the incarnation of Christ.  

Pastor, Theologian, and Poet Howard Thurman says it best in his poem, The Work of Christmas  

 

THE WORK OF CHRISTMAS 

When the song of the angels is stilled,  

When the star in the sky is gone,  

When the kings and princes are home,  

When the shepherds are back with their flock,  

The work of Christmas begins: 

To find the lost, 

To heal the broken, 

To feed the hungry, 

To release the prisoner, 

To rebuild the nations, 

To bring peace among others, 

To make music in the heart. 

    The Visit of the Wisemen has significant theological meaning for all of us. The star invited visitors from far away to announce to the religious leaders and the royalty the Messiah had been born. Talk about epiphany right! The text says that Herod was terrified and all of Jerusalem with him. They had gotten used to their power, The Religious leaders used to their seat at the table, used to lining their pockets with a little of what Ceasar took. And this baby,  if word got out about this baby, a messiah being born to fulfill the scripture… this baby would change everything.

It is very True, a Baby changes everything. This baby came to bring that change. Jesus came to usher in the way of God. We have read about it as our liturgical year got underway in the declarations of the Prophets, In the Magnificant of Mary, the angel's song to the shepherds, in the way he came. 
Friends, Jesus brings the change that shows us the way of God. Jesus' teachings turned the establishment on its head and demonstrated a love that tore down barriers to allow us in, to allow all people in. Jesus first message would be a reading of Isaiah 

   The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,  because the Lord has anointed me. 

He has sent me to preach good news to the poor, 

    to proclaim release to the prisoners 

    and recovery of sight to the blind, 

    to liberate the oppressed, 

¹⁹    and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. 

Jesus closed up the scroll and announced he was the fulfillment of this passage.

Jesus came to bring about change  

Change through healing and wholeness  

Change through a rearrangement of how people were treated.  

This babe in the manger 

This child the Wisemen traveled over the continent to see  

This son of God – changed everything for the world.

"A Baby Changes Everything"     Faith Hill

A Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan Tradition

The Wesleyan Covenant Prayer was adapted by John Wesley, the co-founder of Methodism (along with his brother, Charles) for the renewal of the believer's covenant with God. Wesley wrote the prayer was first used in a covenant renewal service held on Monday, August 11, 1755, in London, with 1800 people present. Since then, the Wesleyan Covenant Prayer has often been used by the people called Methodists around the world in services throughout the year but especially at the start of a new year. 

I invite us to pray this and make this covenant together as an opportunity to re-commit to our work to bring about grace-filled, loving, and redeeming change to others this year.

(Contemporary Version)

I am no longer my own, but yours.

Put me to what you will, place me with whom you will.

Put me to doing, put me to suffering.

Let me be put to work for you or set aside for you,

Praised for you or criticized for you.

Let me be full, let me be empty.

Let me have all things, let me have nothing.

I freely and fully surrender all things to your glory and service.

And now, O wonderful and holy God,

Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer,

you are mine, and I am yours.

So be it.

And the covenant which I have made on earth,

Let it also be made in heaven. Amen.

You can print this prayer to keep with you throughout the year. by following the link here

Sermon Echoes: Meet People Where The Are

 

I am so thankful to my congregations for the love they have shared with me over this Pastor Appreciation month. I feel so blessed and seen by these folks. They have come to mean so much to me over our four months together and I LOVE being their pastor. 

"We Are His Offspring" Kimberly Cash

Yesterday in worship, I told a story about Tony Campolo and Agnes, It turns out the story was turned into a short film with names and places changed by rik swartzwelder films.

(synopsis) It's the same-old-same-old tonight at the local diner. Jim, the owner, hides in the kitchen while the regulars retread the old banter. But a new guy walks in and sits alone at the far end of the counter. Soon a new idea shatters the dull routine. Will it continue to be the same-old-same-old? Not tonight. Not ever again...

 I have linked it below. (PG)

"The Least of These" a rik swartzwelder film (Based on a true story by Tony Campolo)

In Acts 17, Paul shares the message that God is not a deity to whom we simply bow down and make offerings in the hopes that the odds will turn in our favor. Rather God lives within us, and we in God, and daily we have the joy and privilege of communing with God and being led by God. As we share our faith, we should be reminded that we, too, have growing and changing to do. This invites people to a community of disciples who are learning and growing together, rather than into a club where they are expected to ‘join and catch up with everyone else.’

When we think of not only ourselves but of everyone as being made in God’s image, we are invited into seeing the ways that others are trying and the way that God is active in their lives. Seeing the Imago Deo or the fingerprints of God, in someone means that we are willing to make space to hear about their experiences, to understand other contexts, to be in conversation, and growing relationships. There are so many ways that story Tony tells could have gone, But it makes me happy to think there are people who set aside all the things that could make us call a person unclean because we truly have come to understand that what God has called clean we cannot call unclean. And God has called creation good. Yes, we all sin and fall short of God’s glory, but when we set aside our personal piety to discover the created goodness in others we can see Christ emerge and can allow love to lead the way.

Disciples of Christ are called to be a witness for Christ in daily life, to surprise people around us with the good news of the gospel. We’ve acknowledged over these weeks that putting our commission into regular practice can be daunting.

Author Michael Frost, in his book, Surprise the World teaches clear and practical missional habits for being evangelism in your daily life. Frost’s BELLS Method offers five habits for disciples to practice each week:

·        Bless others

·        Eat together

·        Listen to the Spirit

·        Learn Christ

·        Understand yourself as Sent by God into others’ lives

We, as the church, have a responsibility not only to teach but also to listen. Every person who walks through our doors or who we meet out in the world will have a completely different lived experience. We can learn from Paul’s shift in approach and we can seek the example of Christ by not trying to get people to where we are, but to enter into where they are and begin the conversation there. Sometimes that bears fruit immediately, sometimes it’s just a seed planted for a long journey, sometimes it’s a cake that goes home before anyone takes a bite, sometimes we learn more about ourselves than anything, but whatever the circumstance we have the opportunity to be a positive connection to Christ by recognizing and honoring where someone is.

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