sermon — Page 17

Sermon of the Week:
Those Who Dream–Prepare the Way

An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on December 6, 2020.

Second Sunday of Advent

Keywords: Good News, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Prepare the Way, John the Baptist, Advent. #pcusa

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Isaiah 40:1-11
and Mark 1:1-8

The Gospel according to Mark begins
with one of the finest opening lines in biblical literature.

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Once, many years ago,
I did a word study on ‘good news,’
the translation of a unique Greek word euangelion
that Mark uses in this opening sentence.

I hope this doesn’t bore you, because it is really fascinating to me.

Euangelion is also the word for ‘gospel’
so whenever you hear ‘gospel’ that means ‘good news.’
Listen closely, and you also might hear the word ‘angel’ in there, eu-angelion,
and if you did, well done, an extra gold star for you.

It all comes from the same ancient word,
because Angels are the ones who bear the news
the ones who come with a word from The Lord.

This book is meant to tell us something
and that something is good:
it is a big glass of cool water after a hard workout
it is a generous slice of mom’s apple pie
it is a hug from someone you love but haven’t seen in years.

Good news.

That Greek word euangelion became bona annuntiatio (annunt-i-at-i-o) in Latin,
or the ‘good announcement’
and when English speakers got a hold of it,
it became god-spel (spiel), a Godly Story,
or a good news story.

And there you see the way the word became ‘gospel’. God-spel.

Interestingly enough,
English speakers also just transliterated the letters just a little bit
meaning they mapped the Greek letters onto our English alphabet,
and euangelion also became our word ‘evangelical,’
a word that originally meant “one who announces good news”
before it got co-opted by the right wing of the church
and the news was snuffed of a lot of its goodness.

It is one of those words that I wish we could reclaim, but I doubt we can.
Which is too bad, and makes me sad.

///
Proclaiming Good News though,
that’s what Mark set out to do,
and it is a crazy ambitious,
and truly audacious task.

Good news.
We need to hear some good news.
We ache for it.

Mark Yurs argues that there is a hunger these days for Good News.[i]
And one place you can see it, if you’re looking,
is in a church’s prayer list:

Nearly every congregation has one, he writes
and it is almost always fully occupied with the concerns of parishioners,
their family members and friends.

Meanwhile, every congregation is full of concerns
that never make it to the prayer chain
because people keep their thoughts stored in their hearts
until they can utter them to God.
Someone has cancer.
Another is looking for work.
Here a heart is heavy with grief,
and a dreadful worry weighs upon another soul.
There is no end to the list of concerns.
Tennyson’s line still obtains:
‘Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break.’

Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote that line in a poem called ‘In Memorium A.H.H,’[ii]
a requiem for his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam,
who died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 22.

You might have heard a more oft cited line from that same poem:
‘tis better to have loved and lost
than never to have loved at all..
which, it seems to me, is a prayer all of us utter at some moment in our lives. [Read more…]

Sermon of the Week:
Those Who Dream–Keep Awake

An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on November 29, 2020.

First Sunday of Advent

Keywords: Dear Hank and John, Ryder the Aussie, Apocalypse, Keep Awake, Advent. #pcusa

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Isaiah 64:1-9
and Mark 13:24-37

So, I want to give you all a bit of an update about our new-to-us dog Ryder
and talk a bit about a podcast that I listen to from time to time
a podcast called Dear Hank and John, hosted by the Green Brothers:
Author and Biologist Hank Green and young adult novelist John Green.
Some of you may have read one of John’s books
or follow Hank on Tiktok. More about them in a moment.

Ryder is our rambunctious one-year-old Australian Shepherd,
and I introduced him to you all back in the Spring in one of our sermons
when we were looking at this image in the Bible
where Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd
and where the Psalmist says The Lord is My Shepherd, I shall not want.

I promise, we didn’t get Ryder, the Australian Shepherd,
just for the sermon illustrations.

But some of you have been asking me how he’s been doing
and the answer is that he’s doing just fine, thank you. Great, in many ways.
He’s a bit older now, a bit bolder, and he’s certainly made our house his home.
He fits in nicely with our other pup Annie.
He knows which chairs are good to lie around in.
He is such a lover, and he will lie for a spell in your lap
spread out awkwardly, all 40 pounds of him.

He will sometimes bark to tell us the neighbor dogs are out,
so if you hear him during the service, well, he can’t always help himself.

And, yes, I get frustrated with him from time to time.
He’s still really young, and he can be a lot,
particularly when we’re out on a walk and trying to get some of his energy out.
Oh, like most dogs, he LOVES to go on his walk.
See the sights.
Smell the smells.

And maybe, more than most dogs,
Ryder loves the squirrels.
He’s obsessed with the squirrels.
If they come close to our path, he’ll watch them, closely,
and more often than not, he’ll let them know we’re coming
with a bark or two or three
and a potent lunge on his leash.

At this point, let me ask:
Have you noticed, lately, that there are a LOT of squirrels this year.
A lot.

Even before we brought Ryder home,
we noticed the extra squirrels in our neighborhood
and we had guessed that, well,
maybe that was because the pandemic had such an impact on driving, you know:
fewer cars on the road, people staying home for weeks,
and fewer cars meant fewer obstacles for the squirrels,
meaning maybe more squirrels,
meaning squirrels more for Ryder to see
as we try to go on a peaceful walk around town.

So that’s been annoying, if I’m honest.
I try not to get grumpy with him. I understand that he’s young, and that he’s learning.
And sometimes he gets it. Sometimes he’ll heed my ‘leave it’ command.

But he’s inconsistent, at best.

It is one of two things that he does on these walks that frustrate me so.
The other one is the way that he will try to eat all of the stuff that is on the sidewalk
as we mosey our way down the street.

Sometimes these are leaves, or worms,
but really he’s just pushing those things around looking for the good stuff:
the acorns.

Maybe Ryder secretly wants to be a squirrel or something,
because he eats those acorns like the best of them.

So that’s the detail that might help explain this story.

I was out walking Ryder and Annie this week on our last walk of the day.
Sometimes I take them out alone, after dinner, for that walk,
and we go a bit further than normal.
On these walks I often put in my earbuds and turn on something to listen to
so I can maybe take my mind off all the squirrel lunging and acorn eating
that I’m sure we’ll encounter.
That sounds so negative.
Let me stress that we love Ryder so much and
I love walking around with both of our dogs…
these are small potatoes
in the overall joyful collection of gifts that Ryder brings to the table.

But on this walk I fired up my podcast app
and started on the most recent Dear Hank and John[i]
because they’re silly and they try to answer the most interesting and innocent questions
like do planes that go from Chicago to India go over the Pacific or Atlantic oceans
(Answer, by the way, is that some of them go over the north pole)
and those are just the kind of mindless topics
that will take my mind off of Ryder’s scavenging
after I had worked the last two walks that day
to try to rid him of some of that.

He and I both needed a break.

And turning on that podcast mainly worked,
though I was thinking to myself how puppies can be hard
and how he’ll hopefully grow out of some of this
and how I’ll hopefully work to help him grow out of some of this, if I can,
and why are you still hungry after all that dinner you just had…
I was thinking all of that
when Hank and John started talking about something spectacular.

They were answering listener mail, and someone had written in to bring up
something that John had mentioned in an earlier episode,
an episode that I didn’t listen to,
where John was complaining about all the acorns on the ground in Indianapolis
so many acorns
he couldn’t walk outside, barefoot, because he’d step on them. Ouch.
And the writer mentioned to them that this was probably due to this being
what’s called “a masting year.” [Read more…]

Sermon: Those Who Dream–Prepare the Way

Sermon: Those Who Dream–Keep Awake