On Joyfully Serving
This Lent we have been journeying through our new mission statement. We heard how we are Called by Christ, remembering our baptisms; we heard also how we are Gathered in Grace, how our sins are forgiven and we gain freedom in community. Today we begin the last part: Joyfully Serving. So how do we be joyful in our serving? Sometimes, it seems joyful serving is more of a prayer than a reality. We don’t really want to serve our neighbors. Given the choice of feeding the homeless at 6am on a Saturday, and sleeping in, why I think I’d rather take sleeping in! For help in this prayer for joyful serving, one place we can look is at the Fourth Commandment. What’s that you say? Honour thy father and mother? What does that have to do with joyful serving? I suppose I’m bad...
Read MoreSermon In Lent: Wrestling With John 3:16
Grace be unto you from God our Father, and our Lord and savior Jesus Christ, Amen. You’ve heard it! It’s been tweeted. Facebook can’t even with how many times it has been posted, liked and shared. It’s been shouted triumphantly, and whispered in fervent prayer. It’s been cross-stitched into wall hangings. It’s on bumper stickers. It’s glammed onto dorm-room walls. It’s embossed into commemorative bracelets. There’s always one low-rez self-proclaimed Christian that holds it up on a sign at sporting events. It has its own line of T-shirts. People have it tattooed on their bodies. I’ve even seen it on the bottom of coffee cups, and in football-player face paint. It’s John 3:16. It is the rockstar bible verse that everyone already knows and just plain gets by heart,...
Read MoreOn FWEdom
Tonight we hear in First Corinthians that in Christ, “each has been given a manifestation of the Spirit for the common Good.” To one is given the knowledge, to one is given sweet licks on the guitar, to one is given joyful noises, to one is given the ability to bake bread, to the one is given the gift of soups, to one the fine painting skills of tiny ceramic eggs, to another the ability to make beauty from their giant mess of paints on the same ceramic eggs. On and on, all of our gifts are given and activated by the same one God. All of these manifestations of the spirit are given to us, not for our own health or our own independence. Not for one-upsmanship, nor the ability to say “my egg is better than your egg, her egg is better than his” but First Corinthians...
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