Month: April 2011

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Next Sunday's Sermon

John Wesley preaching John Wesley preaching at a meeting house in Nottingham, England, in 1747. Note that his listeners are separated by gender which was customary at the time.

Next Sunday is Palm/Passion Sunday. I’ll be preaching on Matthew 27.11-54. My working sermon title is “Always With Us, No Matter What.” The other scripture readings are Matthew 21.1-11 (the proclamation of Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem, Psalm 22, and Philippians 2.5-11.

The choir will be singing Lead Me, Lord for the introit and Bitter Tears for the anthem. As a congregation we’ll be singing Hosanna, Loud Hosanna; When I Survey the Wondrous Cross; What Wondrous Love is This; and Depth of Mercy as our prayer of confession.

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Infant Soothing Room

The soundproof glass for the new infant soothing room (they used to be called cry rooms) has arrived and Dave Larimore plans on beginning construction this week.

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Voice of the Day: Loving God

Many of us have no sense of God at all, or if we do, it is more like a sense of duty or even fear toward God. Then, because we believe we should love God, we judge ourselves to be religious failures.

Our ancestors made no such assumptions about Christian love. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, characterized the life of the monk in three stages. At the beginning, she or he serves God out of fear, like a slave; next, the service of God stems from the desire for a reward, like that of a hired hand. Only in the final stage does this person erve God out of friendship with God, or out of the pur love of God, as a child of God’s household. The significant point here for us is that the love of God is conceived of as being difficult, something to be learned over a very long time.

— Roberta Bondi, To Love As God Loves

I know that some people have sudden conversion experiences, but the above description better fits my experience and my personal relationship with God. For me, one of the great things about the book To Love As God Loves is the way that she reveals to me that my experience is not unusual, I am not alone. The love of God is difficult, it is something to be learned over a very long time, and yet it is possible to grow in that love by attending to the means of grace.

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Tomorrow's Sermon

John Wesley preaching John Wesley preaching at a meeting house in Nottingham, England, in 1747. Note that his listeners are separated by gender which was customary at the time.

Jenny will be preaching on 1 Samuel 16.1-13 tomorrow. The sermon will be an expansion of the sermon she delivered at the second Lenten luncheon on March 30, but it’s been expanded. Other scripture readings will be: Romans 8.6-11 and John 11.1-7, 17-45. The choir will be singing Lead Me, Lord and Just a Closer Walk With Thee at the second service. Congregational hymns will be Open My Eyes, That I May See; The Summons; and Here I Am, Lord.

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Voice of the Day: Roberta Bondi

Last night several members of the book study group for To Love As God Loves by Roberta Bondi mentioned that they found the following passage about the disturbing thoughts that sometimes arise unbidden into our minds comforting. Therefore I thought I would share it:

But a temptation is neither a passion nor a sin. What we really have no control over we are not responsible for. The images that arise in our minds, our spontaneous moods, these we are never free of. It is only when we seize hold of the thought or the image or the mood, brooding on it and feeding it and encouraging it to grow, that we become responsible.

— Roberta Bondi, To Love As God Loves

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Voice of the Day: Dorothy Day

Via Sojourners:

“What we do is so little that we may seem to be constantly failing. But so did [Christ] fail. He met with apparent failure on the Cross. But unless the seeds fall into the earth and die, there is no harvest.”

— Dorothy Day

 

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A Tithing Confession

We (John and Jenny) have a confession to make. Previously, believing that it’s important to lead by example, we been open about the fact that we tithe. In fact we had increased our giving above a tithe on our salaries to $500 a month. We went to a stewardship seminar last Saturday and the speaker was talking about the importance of pastors leading by example and we were, you might say, proud of the fact that we were doing that. Well, pride goes before the fall. He then pointed out that our parishioners do not get to live in free houses. And that pastors need to include a tithe on the market value of the parsonage. Oops. We did some mental calculations and realized we needed to increase our giving by about $60 a month (that and the amount we were previously giving above what we thought was a tithe will bring us up to a tithe). We’ve started doing that and we wanted you to know. To us this serves as a reminder of three things: that tithing is the grateful return to God of the first fruits of what God has given us, that the important thing in the Christian life is not to dwell on the mistakes of the past but to do what we can to correct them as we move forward and that, in the Christian life, there is always room for improvement.

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Voice of the Day and Opinion: The Death Penalty

Via Sojourners:

“It is impossible to create a perfect system, free of all mistakes. I think it’s the right and just thing to abolish the death penalty and punish those who commit heinous crimes — evil people — with life in prison without parole or any chance of release.”

— Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois after signing a death penalty ban, noting that he turned to the Bible for wisdom and drew strength from the writings of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. (Source: Chicago Tribune)

Sometimes someone is exonerated after they are executed by additional new evidence or the confession of the guilty party. I recently read an estimate that ten percent of the time we, as a society, execute the wrong person. I’m opposed to the death penalty because I think it’s wrong to kill people to show that killing people is wrong. But I’m even more appalled at the thought of the double injustice of executing someone for a crime they didn’t commit (after all, my Lord and Savior was crucified for a crime he did not commit). Given the high moral and financial cost of the death penalty (far above imprisoning someone for life), I think a death penalty ban is both a practical and profoundly Christ-like response. Both of those are reasons one should be implemented in Kansas.

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Area Committee Duty

Several people caught the fact that I’ve been selected to serve on the Asset Allocation Team* for a possible Kansas-Nebraska Annual Conference recommended by the Area Transition Team. Normally, I try to limit my conference level activities in order to better focus on my work at Coffeyville First, but I made an exception in this case because the stakes are just so very high. I would ask your prayers for the myself and the team I’ll be serving on.

*The article at the other end of the link has more details about what we’ll be doing, but even though it’s important, it’s not all that interesting.

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Voice of the Day: Robert Sherman

Our lives and our “reality” are not something we make up, they are something God creates and offers to us. Life is not something we invent, it is something we receive through God’s grace. And if it is to be put to its best and truest use, it must be lived in ways that correspond to the purposes God intends for it.

— Robert Sherman, King Priest and Prophet, 274.