A Plan for Following Jesus.
Faithful Living for Hard Times: Rejoice in the Power of the Holy Spirit.

A sermon preached at The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on September 17, 2017.

The last in a ten part sermon series on our community charge:
Go out into the world in peace;
have courage;
hold on to what is good;
return no one evil for evil;
strengthen the fainthearted;
support the weak,
and help the suffering;
honor all people;
love and serve the Lord,
rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Philippians 4:4-9
and Acts 1:1-8

Last night was a loud night at our household.

For many of you, that might a party with friends
Or blasting the latest Ed Sheeran album throughout your place.
Or the kids running circles around your couch
As you are trying to corral them towards bedtime.

I don’t mean any of that.
I mean that thunderstorm that came through. Still is coming through, apparently.

We have a dog who will pretty much sleep through anything
And she was barking last night at some of that thunder and lightening.

If, as they say, thunderstorms are the best evidence that God likes to host a party
At the heavenly bowling alley
Then she was throwing a really good game last night.

All that power and energy.
A typical Midwestern Thunderstorm.

It had me up later than usual, and gave me fits trying to sleep.
Like Annie, our dog, I generally like sleeping through rain.
It sounds good. There’s ordinarily something comforting about it
But not last night.

Maybe its because we’re one of those people who were impacted
By those major rains in late July and August
And so I was thinking overnight
if we’d wake up again to a few inches of water in our basement.

Thankfully, not this time.

Maybe its because I was reminded,
As loud as the storm was,
As annoying and as costly as a few inches of water have been in my basement
That its nothing like Houston.
That its nothing like the Florida Keys, or worse, Barbuda,
and the US Virgin Islands.
Where for some islands every single house was impacted.
And there is another storm approaching some of these same Caribbean Islands.

For some of these communities, where tourism is the name of the game
And every season matters
This doesn’t portend very well for residents there
Hit once or maybe twice by a hurricane
And then unable to make a living during the busy season to come.

And I thought about not just the dangers and the worry all that causes
But also the way that the storms of life inspire good people to do good things.

–Whether it’s the so called “Cajun Navy” of volunteer boats
Driving down to Houston to help with rescue operations

–Or the Response Teams that Presbyterian Disaster Assistance
Dispatched to Houston and Southern Florida
To coordinate our collective effort on the ground
Alongside forty other National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster. [Read more…]

A Plan for Following Jesus.
Faithful Living for Hard Times: Love and Serve the Lord.

September 10, 2017 “Faithful Living in Hard Times – Love and Serve the Lord” from John Knox Kirk on Vimeo.

A sermon preached at The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on September 10, 2017.

The ninth in a ten part sermon series on our community charge:
Go out into the world in peace;
have courage;
hold on to what is good;
return no one evil for evil;
strengthen the fainthearted;
support the weak,
and help the suffering;
honor all people;
love and serve the Lord,
rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
John 13:12-17, 31-35
and Joshua 24:14-18

 

So much of this sermon series has been about how to be fully alive.

If you were here a few weeks ago
and you remember our reflection about the good Samaritan
you might recall that that entire discussion was about how to have full life
compared to the traveller, the one who was left half-alive, on the side of the road.

We often think that the lawyer questioning Jesus
is asking about how to have “eternal life”
But its more about how we can live authentic, true, full, good, fulfilling lives.
The kind of lives that make God proud, or us proud,
Lives that make a difference in the world.

I have been reflecting on this part of the Samaritan story for weeks now
As we come to our final two weeks of reflecting on the words of our Charge.
This has also been a week where I’ve been reminded about how fleeting life can be
How precious life is, all of our days.

How God grants to us this opportunity of ours to do with it what we will
To love as fiercely as possible
To build something that means something
And to share it with those around us
And, as we do, to be as fully alive as we can be.

Reminded that life is an amazing gift.

A friend of mine knows I’ve been mulling all this over this week.
So she sent me this email the other day. Here’s what it said:

Three ministers, a Presbyterian, a Baptist and a Pentecostal,
are talking with each other about life and death and the legacy each will leave.

The Presbyterian says, “People will be at each of our funerals.
Family, friends, congregants,
they’ll all be looking at us in the casket.
I was thinking, I wonder what would you like them to say?”

The three give that some thought, you know
and then the Baptist said,
“You know,
I would like to hear them say that I was a wonderful husband,
a fine Bible teacher, and a great family man.”

They nod, together,
And then the Presbyterian says,
“I hope that they say
‘she was a wonderful preacher
and a servant of God who made a huge difference in their lives.'”

They nod, once again.

Finally, The Pentecostal speaks up, and says,
“You know, I’d like to hear someone say, ‘Hey, he’s moving.’”

///

So,
this sermon series has me thinking about what it means to live fully-alive,
Awake to all possibilities before us, the options we see
And the options only God can see
The choices we choose, and the ones we leave alone.

Faithful living in hard times: a roadmap for following God on the way of Jesus.

We’ve travelled a long way. Its been two months, since we started.
And we’ve explored some fundamental aspects of Christian teaching
That each, in their own way, give us opportunities for living fully-alive lives.

Go out into the world in peace: That was how we started.
Reminding each other that God’s intention for the world is Shalom
A way of living with one another where all is right with the world
Where justice is secure for all, not just for some
And people do not wage violence against one another
Where people are treated fairly, and where all have enough
And part of our calling is to be peace-makers
To reject violent solutions but to wage peace instead.

Then we talked about Having Courage:
and we thought about Jacob wrestling with God
and how unique it is to be part of a tradition
that recognizes the struggle we have with doing the right thing
the fact that God understands the struggle, but bids us go forward anyway
which pretty much is what Courage means
to step out in vulnerability and risk
for the sake of something or someone important.

And we noted how it takes courage to love someone
Or to love ourselves, to honestly love ourselves
Ourselves as we truly are, that is,
a mixture of beauty and imperfection that, nonetheless, is love-worthy
and beloved by the God who created us that way.

Our meditations then turned to the idea of Holding Fast to what is Good
While Returning No One Evil for Evil.

And these can be harder than they seem, at first glance.

We can be DISTRACTED so easily by the bright shiny thing
that “the good” doesn’t matter
or be lured into a sense of comfort or complacency
that we give up on the courage to do good
because we just get tired, or scared,
or would rather it all just go away.

Or sometimes we are hurt, wounded.
And the inclination is to hurt back, to take what was taken from us
And to return evil for the evil that was done to us.

This might have been the hardest one for me
Because I know how hard it is to hear Jesus’ reminders
to pray for our enemies as well as our loved ones
to love our enemies, which is another way of saying
don’t return them evil.

And we were clear that this doesn’t mean we allow them to keep doing harm
Or we don’t insist on justice.
It means we don’t allow ourselves to make those who harm us
Less-than-human along the way,
worthy in our minds of evil being done to them.

And in holding to that, we claim our own humanity, our own sense of integrity.

[Read more…]