Liturgy for July 26th

Call to Worship	One: From a strong root of love, anything is possible. Because of love, Jesus taught and preached, healed and fed, lived and died. ALL: From a strong root of love, anything is possible. One: Out of love, churches have been born, Faith has grown, and God's word has spread. ALL: From a strong root of love, anything is possible. One: Because of love, we are connected to others, we create families and friendships, we find community. ALL: From a strong root of love, anything is possible. One: Out of love, we grow as disciples, we grow in mercy and grace, we grow with love as the foundation and center of our lives. ALL: From a strong root of love, anything is possible. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymn of Praise	Sing Out, Earth and Skies, by Marty Haugen
A Time with Young Disciples
Hymn	UMH #549 Where Charity and Love Prevail (verses 1-3)
Sharing Joys and Concerns
Pastoral Prayer
Lord's Prayer	Our Father...
Hymn	UMH #549 Where Charity and Love Prevail (verses 4-6)
New Testament Reading	Ephesians 3:14-21
Response	One: This is the Word of God for the people of God, to which God's people respond: ALL: Thanks be to God.
Sermon
Hymn of Response	UMH #560 Help Us Accept Each Other
We Bring Our Gifts
Offering Reponse	UMH #94 Praise God, from whom all blessings flow
Offering Prayer	Bless these gifts with your love and grace. Transform even our meager offerings and leftovers into abundant possibilities. Transform us, that rooted and grounded in love, we may give all that we have, and all that we are, to serve you and your world with a love that knows no bounds. Amen.
Sending Hymn	UMH #384 Love Divine, All Loves Excelling
Benediction
Postlude

Sermon -- Ephesians 3:14-21

                Today we’re sticking with Ephesians.  I’ve always liked Ephesians, and in my study of the book over the last couple weeks it has become more obvious to me why that is.  Ephesians is all about making the connections between our worship lives and our discipleship, our theology and our ethics.  That is, what we do “in the church” and what we do “in the world”.  I believe very strongly in the cycle of worship and ethics.  I believe that what we do here on Sunday mornings should frame how we think and live in the world, and that the way we encounter the world should bring us back to worship with new praises, lamentations, questions, affronts, doubts, and joys.  We see these sorts of ideas developed over the course of this epistle.

Today’s reading is a prayer which marks the end of the first half of Ephesians.  But before we get into that, let’s recap where we’ve been.  Our first week in Ephesians we explored Paul’s view of the trinity and of salvation, learning how they might give us endurance on days that seem ordinary.  Last week we dug into Paul’s vision for the church; we are to be a unified and reconciled church, built on Christ’s peace.  Both of these are the theological bases for our worship.  These are things our worship is rooted in.  These are things that give us the ability to offer praise, to dance, in the face of the things we encounter in daily life. 

These are the points Paul is referring to in the opening phrase of today’s lectionary passage, “For this reason I bow my knees…”  While this is an admittedly awkward place to begin a reading, the lead-in to today’s passage essentially states, “because of everything that has come before I get on my knees and pray before God.”

So, this is Paul’s prayer for the churches surrounding Ephesus: 1) that they be strengthened internally by the Spirit, 2) that they be rooted in the love of Christ, 3) and know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, and 4) that they be filled with the fullness of God.

Now, if you’re like me you were following along until we got to the third point.  At the third point I came to a screeching halt, “Wait a minute, Paul wants me to know that which surpasses knowledge?  What kind of nonsense is that?”  That, I think, is a very good question.

How do we know something that is unknowable to us?  It is by it’s very definition unknowable.  We cannot do it.  All of Paul’s focus thus far has been on God, and that is the key here as well.  When Paul is talking about the unknowable, he’s talking about something is beyond us, something that must be revealed to us.  The knowing here is different than the way we usually know things.  But even the way we usually know things is limited as humans.

                Let’s think about how we as humans develop knowledge.  One way we humans know things is by organizing our encounters into categories, which helps us to more easily process our lives.  We learn to do this over the entire course of our lives, which helps broaden our understanding of the world and makes our decision-making easier.  We find patterns in behaviors and similarities in things and create habitual responses to free our brains for higher thought.

                For example, we know how to drive a car.  When we get in we might notice a manual transmission, but we don’t think, “Oh no! I only know how to drive a blue 1995 Hyundai Elantra!  How am I going to drive this grey 2008 Ford Focus?”  It’s the same process for both cars.  Likewise, we don’t have trouble translating the skills we need to read a book into the skills necessary for reading a billboard.  We develop manners and social skills in order to operate effortlessly in polite society.  Except, our knowledge is sometimes limited.  Sometimes there are unknown unknowns.  Sometimes the rules change and the things we think we “know”, the categories we have, no longer work.  Take your polite manners to another culture, or flash a peace sign in the wrong part of the world…and see what happens.  In the face of these unknown unknowns, we realize how little we know.

                Our knowledge is limited.  Another way we try to know things is by their name.  We apply a word to something, often based on our experience of it, and we think we know it.  We think we own its meaning.  If a thing has a name and a definition its operation must be limited to that understanding.  We call this an acorn.  We know its properties.  We know it becomes an oak.  But what do we really know about the life of that acorn or the life of the tree.  Do we really know it?  Perhaps a better example of this are these seeds.  We know “seeds”.  We have a category for “seeds”.  We know what they do.  But imagine someone has handed you some seeds.  You know “seeds”.  What about these seeds.  What do these seeds do?  What will they become?  What kind of fruit will they produce?  We don’t know.  Our knowledge is limited.  The future of these seeds is only made known to us as we plant them and the seeds reveal what they will become.  Revelation is key to knowing that which is beyond us.  Revelation requires that we trust and that we have faith.

                As humans, we are used to being the knowers.  There’s power and security in being the ones who know.  But at some point, our human knowledge breaks down.  We have a category for love.  But the love of Christ?  Without some kind of revelation, that love is beyond human knowledge.  It is beyond our categorization.  It cannot be contained if it is to be understood.

                And that is Paul’s point here.  It is only by letting go of that security and risking opening ourselves to something that is larger than what we can comprehend that we can begin to understand the love of Christ.  We have to be open and become vulnerable, to welcome in the revelation of God’s love in our lives.  In order for us to know the unknowable love of Christ we have to be the one who is known rather than the one who manages the knowledge.  And it’s scary, because we do not, cannot control it.

                This sort of openness does not come to us easily.  There’s risk involved.  Have you ever willingly exposed yourself, been vulnerable to something or someone in that way?  Have you ever told someone the worst things you thought about yourself, or the worst things you’d done and had that person say to you, “That doesn’t change what I think of you.  I love you anyway.”  That kind of love is powerful.  That kind of love fills the fault lines in broken hearts and broken minds.  That kind of love changes lives and verges on miraculous.  And that kind of love barely scratches the surface of the love God has for us—God’s love has height, depth, width, and breadth that we struggle to understand.

                And though God’s love for us is great, there’s risk involved when we open ourselves to God in this way.  The risk is not that we will lose something or that God isn’t trustworthy.  When we open ourselves to God we risk being changed.  We risk having our neatly ordered, comfortable lives upset.  We risk being asked to put aside the things we hold onto internally—things that take up space that God would rather fill with love.

Whether or not we choose to be open, the not so secret truth is that we are already known to God.  Just as with Adam and Eve in the garden, we cannot hide from God.  The best and the worst of us is already open to God’s gaze.  God knows the things that are planted in us, waiting for the opportunity to bloom.  But God gives us the choice to open ourselves to God’s love, to allow that love to water or to weed what is inside of us.  We have the opportunity to be rooted and grounded in love, but we must decide to do the work of opening our hearts to allow that love in.  And though there’s risk, we know God is trustworthy.  We know God only desires the best for us.

If this sounds mystical and touchy-feely that’s because some of it is.  But sometimes the mystics of our Christian tradition are on to something.  I find beauty in their ability to admit limitation, because it is so foreign to our contemporary culture.  In our culture so many people derive their worth from their ability to know and understand, to advance and climb ladders, to complete degrees.  We are driven to know.   Further, we torture ourselves when we refuse to accept that we have limits.  We put ourselves through medical procedures that likely will not extend or improve our quality of life.  We refuse to sleep as we know we should.  Sometimes we put our bodies through extreme exercise and diet regimens, not looking for health, but looking for self-worth.

On the other hand we have Cyril of Jerusalem, one of the early church fathers, bluntly admitting limitation, saying, “For we explain not what God is but candidly confess that we have not exact knowledge concerning Him. For in what concerns God, to confess our ignorance is the best knowledge.”[1]  Cyril is not suggesting that we throw up our hands and go, “I give up.  God is whatever anybody says.”  Cyril is saying that we cannot encapsulate God with our exact knowledge.

This could easily be an unsettling thought.  In fact, we’ve spent generations arguing about the nature of God.  We may argue about who God is.  We may even think that people have gone so far astray from what God desires as to worry about them, but the reality is that each of us only have a small understanding of the bigness and complexity of God.  Just as we try to encapsulate words like “seed” and “love” our human understanding is not sufficient to understand all of who God is.  So God reveals bits and pieces. 

The Bible is the story of how thousands of years of humans have experienced their relationship with God.  Some of the stories don’t match others.  Some of them outright contradict one another.  But the overarching story is one of a god who wants his creation to dwell closely with him.  So, no matter how far they’ve gone this god seeks out humanity, continually revealing his love and presence.  Continually providing new revelation in the hopes that they finally get it.  That’s who Jesus was.  Humanity couldn’t get it.  The garden wasn’t enough.  Angels weren’t enough.  Manna in the desert wasn’t enough.  The land wasn’t enough.  A kingdom wasn’t enough.  Prophets weren’t enough.  Exile and return weren’t enough.  So God came to earth in human form to say “This is who I am and what I mean when I say I love you”.  And sometimes we still struggle to understand.

                Whether or not we get it, the truth is that the love of God is already around us.  We as Methodists understand this as prevenient grace, the grace that’s present to us before we’re aware God is seeking us.  Even as we become aware of God’s love and grace and our need to do something with it, what we understand as justifying grace, God’s love is present.  And when we decide to respond to God’s love and grace and move into the process of transforming into the vision that God has for us, or sanctifying grace, God’s love is present.

We belong to God, and God loves and wants us.  God could have created anything, but God created us.  God desires us to understand the bigness of the love of Christ, the magnitude—the height, depth, width, and breadth—so that we can be filled with God’s fullness.  This fullness is simply that we understand our value to God, value that has God seeking us daily.  Revealing himself to us in our daily lives and daily encounters.  This is what causes Paul to fall to his knees in prayer.  This is why we worship. 

God still seeks us.  Still works to reveal to us our worth.  Where do we see God every day?  In whose face do we see God?  When we head home from this place, when we deliver meals this evening, when we welcome people into our building, when we go to work tomorrow, when we play with friends we have the opportunity to look for the action of God, the love of Christ, at work around us.  God is willing to do this, and far more than we can imagine, for us and in us.  If we’re willing to risk opening ourselves to the new, daily, ordinary revelation of God’s love.

May we be willing to risk it.

---

[1] Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Homilies.

Sermon for July 26

Hey all, here is the sermon I preached yesterday at Trinity UMC, Elkhart, Indiana. The Scripture passage it's based on is Luke 5:1-11, the story of the calling of Simon and James and John.

• “I love you and God loves you” and Prayer
• Opening Joke and Hook
• All throughout time, every child in every culture has played a certain game. Maybe you know the game, it’s called “hot lava.” Everyone everywhere has known how to play this game! You climb on the furniture and you can’t step on the ground or else you melt!
• When we are a little older, everyone knows how to cool off hot pizza. It’s called the “reverse blow” [demonstrate] and it’s just instinct! We all do this when we eat Volcano’s pizza… [ASK CONGREGATION] is that the best? Or whatever the best pizza is, let Tim and me know please.
• Well this sermon series is all about the instinctual phrases, the universal phrases that every parent has said to their children. Every parent knows to say them.
• Last week, Pastor Tim talked about the phrase “Always Wear Clean Underwear.” And we learned in that we must be as good and pure and clean on the inside as we are on the outside, because this is the teaching and the nature of Jesus Christ--clean on the inside, not play-actors on the outside--we don’t just play holy, we are holy.
• JOKE: The Gospel does not concern itself with our underwear per se, but the Gospel is very concerned with the holiness that we have on the inside and how we show that on the outside.
• PIVOT: Today we are going to talk about another phrase that every parent has spoken to their children, and that phrase is: BECAUSE I SAID SO. Moms and Dads in the congregation, I know you have said this before. And your little people, maybe they are obstinate, maybe they just don’t understand, but you don’t have time to explain: you just say Because I Said So.
• Why do we say this phrase? What does it mean? Well I want to look at this phrase, Because I Said So, and I want to look at what the Bible has to say about this question and then I want to talk about what we could learn from this phrase for our lives today. We’re going to talk about the nature of Christ as a miracle worker, Christ as an authority or a King, and finally as Christ the relationship between God and ourselves.
• Jesus the Miracle Worker
• In our Scripture passage today, Jesus is teaching a group of people at the side of Lake Gennesaret. And when he finishes his lesson, he looks at Simon, who has been fishing all night and now he is cleaning his nets. And Simon is exhausted and disappointed. And Jesus SAYS--he doesn’t ask, he TELLS Simon to push out into the deepest part of the lake and put down all his nets to fish.
• Now, it’s broad daylight and if we have any anglers in the congregation you know that nighttime is the best time to fish. And Simon is a professional fisherman, and Jesus is clearly a fishing novice to tell Simon to fish during the day. And Simon is like, “I respect you, Rabbi, but I mean I have been fishing all night, and I’m a pro, and I didn’t find anything.”
• But then Simon stops, and he thinks, “You know, this guy Jesus has been teaching all morning, and he had a crowd of people around him, and maybe he knows something I don’t know. He is an accomplished rabbi after all.”
• So Simon listens to Jesus’ amateur command. He calls him MASTER and he says, “Yes, Master, because you said so, I will give it a shot.”
• And then a miracle happens: Simon goes out with his bewildered, exhausted crew, and they let down the nets, and sure enough, they catch not the normal amount of fish, but so much fish that their nets begin to break. Probably three or four TIMES as much fish as even a great day would yield. All at once. This is like the month’s mortgage that they caught all in one go. Simon cannot believe it.
• And Simon is a pretty impulsive guy and he falls to his knees and says to Jesus: “I am not worthy to be in your presence. I am a sinful man--get away from me!” You are an authoritative rabbi and you’re close enough to God that I don’t want to make you impure by even being near you.
• And Jesus says that phrase that EVERY angel, EVERY messenger of God, says to every unsuspecting person in God’s story: Jesus says DON’T BE AFRAID. I will make you a fisher for PEOPLE. In the King James Version of the Bible Jesus says to the anglers, you are fishermen, I will make you fishers of men.
• Is Jesus a miracle worker because he makes the fish show up? Really, that’s a magic trick in the grand scheme of Scripture. We have seen plagues of locusts and rivers of blood and manna in the desert and the ghost of Samuel back from the dead and all sorts of things, so for Jesus to make lots of fish show up is great for Simon and James and John but not enough to tell everyone he is the Son of God or even all THAT special.
• The real miracle that is going on here is that Jesus, the rabbi, shows up to a bunch of fishermen and tells them to follow him. The real miracle is the end of the passage: that Simon and the rest left everything behind--maybe months of wages and food--they leave it on the shore and follow Jesus not knowing where he’s going.
• See this is a miracle because rabbis NEVER choose ordinary people to follow them. In Jesus’ time in Palestine the Jews respect rabbis big time. And children have to go through Torah training and only the very best are allowed to go on to become followers of a rabbi. And Jesus, who has been a Torah prodigy since he was a child, is doing the rabbi thing and teaching the people and then he goes to these simple, unlearned fishermen who probably didn’t know their Torah all that well and he says: Follow Me. I believe in you. AND THEY DO.
• Yes, it is a miracle that Jesus can make the fish show up, but it’s REALLY a miracle that Jesus can open up the relationship between the common folk and the rabbis. REALLY it’s a miracle that Simon and the others can set aside the small miracle of the fish for the big miracle: the miracle of a relationship of unworthy disciples to a generous master.
• Jesus says “BECAUSE I SAID SO” and they follow, forgetting everything they knew and leaving it behind so that they can follow their master. They are unworthy yet they are chosen.
• REFRAIN: More than a miracle worker, Jesus is a relationship between the unworthy and the love of God. More than a rabbi, Jesus is the one who believes in US before we believe in HIM.
• Jesus the Authority
• So now we understand that Jesus is not just a miracle worker, but the one who shows us the bigger miracle. Jesus is not just the rabbi, he is the one who chooses us as disciples before we choose him as our teacher.
• From our perspective as Christians now, we know that Jesus is beyond both of those things: Jesus is Lord, Jesus is Master.
• That means that Jesus is authority. Not to say that rabbis are not. Rabbis were then and are today important elements of God’s plan for the Jewish people. But our faith tells us that Jesus, in addition to being a master rabbi, is also the Master of the world. “He is the mighty King, Master of everything,” as the old hymn goes.
• Well what does this mean? [JOVIAL TURN] It’s actually a much older phrase, but one of my favorite Revolutionary War slogans--like “don’t tread on me” and “no taxation without representation”--I think my favorite one is “No King but King Jesus.” My Canadian wife might not like that slogan very much. Though Canada has a queen! So I guess you guys are in the clear.
• But here’s the thing: Jesus does not come into the world like a king that we know. Jesus is “King Jesus”, Jesus is “Lord Jesus Christ” in a way that radically transforms what it means to be a lord, to be a king.
• For Simon who would become Peter, Jesus is first a miracle-working rabbi and then the promised Messiah. Simon’s expectation, like that of so many others, is that Jesus will liberate the Jewish people from Roman rule, or that he will reign over Israel as a mighty king. That’s what it meant to be Messiah in their minds.
• But this is not the cause of Jesus Christ. Certainly it is not the purpose of the Christ who will die on a cross in the most un-king-like manner.
• Jesus is King in the sense that he points to the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus is Messiah -- “anointed one” -- because he is anointed to a new purpose in God’s plan, something we have never seen before. Jesus’ reign as King is totally self-giving, a reign of love and forgiveness.
• Jesus inverts what it means to be an authority. He said “I have not come to be served, but to serve, and to give my life as a ransom for many.” (Matt. 20:28) So let kings and queens be kings and queens and presidents be presidents and so on and so on. Jesus the authority teaches us that obedience to God is love and not fear-- and that the one who wants to lead must serve.
• Jesus inverts miracles and Jesus inverts what it means to be a rabbi, to be a religious teacher, and now Jesus inverts what it means to be a King or a Queen or an authority. The first are now last.
• What it means to do as God says because God said so
• [TAKE A BEAT] What does it mean for we who confess Jesus Christ as our Lord that we follow his will Because He Said So?
• Certainly Simon did not understand what Jesus was up to when Jesus told him to cast the nets. And Simon certainly didn’t get it when Jesus told him he could become a fisher of persons. He followed Christ because Christ said so. That’s part of what it means to have a master.
• But surely Jesus isn’t our Lord and our Master because we arbitrarily follow what he says? That is the behavior of a bad parent, that is the behavior of a tyrannical queen or king, and definitely the behavior of a bad rabbi or religious leader. [JOKE TIME] If I ever tell you to do something Because I Say So, with no other reason forthcoming, PLEASE ignore me! But definitely do not ignore Pastor Tim because he really does know what he is doing.
• Good parents, good leaders, and our good God tell us to do things because they care about us, and their reasons are not arbitrary. In his book that we are using for the sermon series, the good Rabbi Gellman keeps talking about the little message and the big message. The little message today is, when your mom or dad says Because I Said So, it will go well for you if you do it!
• The big message is: When your parents say Because I Said So, you should do what they say because you trust them--they are worthy of trust, and that is a part of the relationship you have to your parents and everyone who takes care of you.
• As we saw last week, there is a Gospel message to be learned here too. [GO FAST HERE] We should do what God says when God just says so because it will go well for us. When Jesus tells us to fish, we will catch a lot of fish! We should do what God says because God is trustworthy and that is the relationship we have to God--thus, we leave our boats behind and follow Christ.
• [SLOW DOWN] But the Gospel message is that Jesus is not in the business of giving us commands--either as a rabbi or as a king.
• And we as disciples are not really in the business of following what Jesus says, although we should do that of course.
• RATHER, WE ARE IN THE BUSINESS OF BEING WHO JESUS CHRIST IS. We can never be nor claim to be God, but we as disciples are on a mission to resemble Jesus as much as we can.
• Therefore Jesus’ message to us is not “Because I said so.” Rather, it is “Because I am so.” Because I have become what you are and suffered what you suffer and celebrated what you celebrate.
• Because Jesus has come to live WITH us, we are empowered to live LIKE him. This is what we call perfection or sanctification: this is our task as Christians. We are here to be who Christ is.
• How do we do this? Certainly we should do what Jesus has said to do. He never had a problem with the Ten Commandments [JOKE] although I have had my trouble with a few of the commandments from time to time. I covet pretty much everything.
• So yes we should do as God has told us to do. But really, what it means to be a disciple of Christ is to love as he loved. He loved everyone without condition, and he loved them the way they needed to be loved.
• We should be people who celebrate our God who is not a King or Queen over us but rather a Holy Spirit who is with us.
• We should be people who welcome and invite everyone into our homes, our organizations, and our church.
• We should be people who stand up for the least and find a way for the lost. We should be people who would sooner be harmed than do harm. That’s who Jesus was. And we shouldn’t do these things because Jesus SAID SO. We should do these things because Jesus IS SO.