sermon — Page 2

Sermon of the Week:
Join the Club that Would Have You as a Member?

An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on May 10, 2020.

Fifth Sunday of Easter

Keywords: Shame, Forgiveness, Groucho Marx, Many Rooms, The Cracked Pot, The Good Place.
#pcusa

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Psalm 31:1-5, 10-16
and John 14:1-14

Dawn Cooley tells this great story
about this guy in India whose job it was
to carry water for his little village.

He had these two large pots, each of them hanging on the end of a pole,
and would carry the pots by putting the pole across his neck.

Those two pots were almost identical,
but one of them had a crack in it.
The other one, it was just perfect.

That perfect pot always delivered a full portion of water,
every trip, nothing spilled during the long walk from the stream to the village.

On the other hand, that cracked pot,
it arrived only, oh, half full or so.

For a full two years this went on.
Everyday. The water-bearer delivering one and a half pots of water per trip.

Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments.
But that cracked pot.
it felt ashamed of its own imperfection,
miserable that it was only able to accomplish
half of what it had been made to do.

After two years of what seemed like bitter failure
it spoke up, saying to the water bearer one day by the stream:
“I am ashamed of myself, and I want to apologize to you.”

“Why?” Asked the bearer. “What are you ashamed of?”

“For these last two years,
I have been able to deliver only half of the water you place inside of me
because this crack on my side
causes water to leak out all the way back.
Because of my flaws,
you have to do all this work,
and you don’t get full value from your efforts…”

Well, the water bearer’s heart went out to the old cracked pot.

And he said:
“As we return to the house,
I want you to notice all the beautiful flowers along the path.”

And they set off,
And indeed, as they went up the hill,
the old cracked pot took notice of the sun
warming the beautiful wildflowers on the side of the path,
and this cheered it some.

But by the end of the trail,
it still felt said, because it had leaked out half its load of water.
It apologized, again, for being such a failure.

And the water bearer said:
“Did you not see that there were flowers only on your side of the path
not on the other pot’s side?
I have always known about your “flaw…”
So I planted flower seeds on your side of the path
And every day while we walked back from the stream
You watered them.

Without you being just the way you are,
This beauty would not exist…”[i]

///
Every Sunday we hold a few of these ancient texts together,
and we ask ourselves what we can learn about God from them,
and maybe, also, hope to learn a bit about us people in the process.

We’re in this sermon series called “Because he lives, there’s hope for you,”
and the underlying premise is that this Easter story of Jesus’ resurrection should matter
in some way,
for your life, and for mine.

So we’re walking through the season of Easter exploring Easter’s impact
and we find ourselves, today, holding together
this story from the Gospel of John where Jesus begins to say goodbye
to his disciples, to the people he has spend three years with, whom he loves.
This is the start of what are called the farewell discourses,
Jesus’ effort to prepare the disciples that they’re going to have to carry on
this work of being the church without him.

As John tells it, Jesus knows that things are going to change,
and the disciples like things the way they are, thank you.
Why change when things are going just fine, Jesus?

Well, sometimes things happen, and just like that, the ground shifts under your feet
your leader is no longer there with you in the flesh
or your temple is rent asunder by the roman authorities
or you’re required to stay inside for weeks on end
and you have to figure out how to do things altogether differently…

…we find ourselves holding together this story from the Gospel of John
with this interesting reading from Psalm 31:
In you, O Lord, I seek refuge;
do not let me be put to shame…deliver me.
Incline your ear to me;
rescue me…be a rock of refuge for me, a strong fortress to save…

What I love about this little Psalm is that it begins to tackle shame head on,
and I think all of us know a little something about shame. [Read more…]

Sermon of the Week:
You Wanna Go Where Everybody Knows Your Name

An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on May 3, 2020.

Fourth Sunday of Easter #pcusa

Keywords: Aussies, The Good Shepherd, Cheers, Power of a Name, Gospel of John
#pcusa

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Acts 2:41-47
and John 10:1-18

Our family has been talking A LOT about shepherds this week,
but it wasn’t because of this passage from the Gospel According to John.

We’ve been considering adding another pup to our family mix
for a couple of months now
and, yesterday, we adopted a playful and goofy Australian Shepherd named Ryder.

Leading up to all this, I did a lot of research about Aussies, among other breeds.
Was a bit nervous, you know,
not just about Aussies, but about any new dog.
Would they get along with our other pup Annie?
Would they be good with our girls, our neighbors, our couches? All open questions still.

So we looked at all sorts of dogs,
mainly medium-small size pups,
dogs who could both go on a good long walk
and hang out while watching tv
and we fell hard for this Australian Shepherd Ryder.

Turns out they’re not from Australia at all.
Their roots go back to American Ranches in the 1800s,
possibly related to English shepherds and border collies.
The most likely story is that they were introduced
to help herd sheep that were being imported from Australia at the time,
and thus the name.

Like many shepherding breeds, they’re attentive and smart and active
and Aussies reportedly have a high drive to please,
so, needless to say, we’re excited,
even if we might look a bit tired this morning
with the introduction of a 9 month old puppy around here.

These are new surroundings.
We have to earn his trust, go easy with him,
show him we’re dependable and have his best interests at heart.

I have some training to do;
mainly I need to train myself, so I can help train him.

When you research the breed, you find some great youtube videos out there
of Aussies herding sheep.

When THAT’s their job, wow, watch out: they run fast and true,
and can keep hundreds of animals in the right place at the right time.

Some of those videos show the dogs guiding the sheep to stick together,
and somehow they get all those sheep to move as one gigantic horde
as the dogs guide them safely into their pen,
often through what seems to be an impossibly narrow gate,
at least when you’re talking about that many animals.

We don’t have sheep around here, at our house in suburban Kansas City,
so we’ll have to work up some other job for him to do.
Some of the literature suggests asking them
to pick up your dirty clothes off the floor and taking them to the hamper,
and I think we would LOVE some of that around here, if Ryder is up for it.

///
Truth be told, this is all another way to say
that I don’t know all that much about real shepherds,
the kind of work it takes to actually keep sheep and other livestock
on the straight and narrow.

I am, admittingly, a creature of the city and the suburb,
and even though I spent the first twelve years of my life
in some teeny-tiny towns in rural Iowa
and there are some cute pictures of me as a kid at county fairs
doing kiddy tractor pulls or enjoying Windsor chops on a stick,
we still lived in the town town, you know?
The farm life is largely foreign to me.

Some of you have more experience of the farm than I do.
But if you’re more like me,
then these passages about Jesus as a shepherd,
as the GOOD shepherd,
take a bit of translation to get your head around.

That’s ok. We all have our own histories and our own experiences,
and I value farmers and am so grateful for those who work the land, raise animals.
I just don’t have the innate connection
with these stories that they might have,
or, for that matter, that the gospel writer’s audience would have had.

The biblical world was a much more agrarian world.
Both sheep and the shepherding profession,
the people, not just the pups,
were common parts of everyday society back in Jesus’ day,
and more generally in the biblical period.

As a result, you see mentions of sheep all over the place in the Bible.
The people writing and listening to these stories would just get it, naturally.
Sometimes there are references to actual herds of livestock,
and other times, like today, this is offered more as a metaphor
about people and their leaders, or about who God is in relation to us.

The most famous of these passages is the 23^rd Psalm,
The Lord is my Shepherd,
I shall not want…
He maketh me lie down in green pastures
He leadeth me beside still waters
He restoreth my soul… [Read more…]

Sermon: Join the Club that Would Have You as a Member?

Sermon: You Wanna Go Where Everybody Knows Your Name