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

Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-733469. All rights reserved.

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 of the Week:
Love One Another–How to Plan for Tomorrow

An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on November 15, 2020.

Thirty Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Keywords: Purpose, Henri Nouwen, Talents, Stewardship, The Kirk. #pcusa

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Matthew 6:16-21
and Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7, 11

Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-733469. All rights reserved.

A few weeks ago, on All Saints Day,
we talked about everyday saints,
those people in our lives that have loved us and shaped us
and in some cases, continue to do so.

This week, I was thinking about some of those saints,
two of them, actually,
people who loved me by handing me books I should read.

Both of them, it turned out,
gave me books written by the same author: Henri Nouwen.

Nouwen was a Dutch Catholic priest
who explored in great detail what it means to live our faith honestly
with authenticity,
given the challenges of modernity.

Nouwen’s work focused on the intersection
of psychology and social justice and community.
And he wrote with a style that encouraged his reader
to go deeper than what we ordinarily have going on the surface.
He encourages his reader to go beyond the superficial.

I was introduced to Nouwen when I was a grad student,
studying to become a pastor,
when the chaplain at my university
handed me her tattered copy of a little book Nouwen wrote
called The Wounded Healer.

Here. Read this. She said.
Then see if you can live it.

In The Wounded Healer, Nouwen explores
how all of us carry baggage, you know,
the hurt and the scars,
all that stuff we bear from a lifetime of things not going the way they should,
and how our natural inclination is to not deal with all that.

We find ways of covering over it, or burying it, ignoring it.

On the other hand, Nouwen explains,
when we don’t hide from those wounds,
when, on the other hand, we understand them, treat them, surrender them to God,
deal constructively with them,
not only can we become healthier ourselves, thanks be to God,
but we can also become healing people,
people who help other people heal,
by engaging with them in true and authentic ways
and encouraging them to do the same.[i]
In short: The honest healer, the effective healer, is the wounded healer.

That’s the sort of work that Nouwen did:
helping us engage with those parts of our lives
that are tricky, that sometimes we’d rather not expose, or deal with, right.

Nouwen believed, quite rightly,
that we only become stronger, healthier
when we are honest with ourselves and with each other.

Jump forward a decade, when my former colleague Jeff Clayton,
knocked on the door to my office
and dropped a little book on my desk.
Hey, read this. But I want it back.

(If Jeff’s name rings a bell, it might be because he was one of the people
who came to The Kirk on that rather chilly October afternoon last month
to sing bluegrass and folk music for our Music on the Lawn event)

I remember that detail, him saying that he wanted the book back
mainly because I still have that book on my bookshelf.
It ended up in my I-hope-someday-to-read-you-pile of books
and I forgot about it for a few years.

This book was called A Spirituality of Fundraising,
and it contains Nouwen’s reflections on stewardship.

Years ago, I think I put it into that read-ya-later pile
because fundraising isn’t quite how we think about stewardship, you know.

Stewardship isn’t just about raising funds.
It’s never just about that,
even though there are all these jokes,
about how all pastors ever do is talk about or ask for money,
which really goes to show you, I think
how we don’t really like to talk about or think about our money at all.

Some of how we feel about money
is a lot like how we feel about our wounds:
maybe better out of sight, out of mind.

Truth is, we don’t talk about money very much in church. Not here, at least.

We more frequently talk about talents, which is a funny little biblical word
that was an ancient unit of mass.

It varied depending on where in the ancient world you were.
A Greek talent was about 26 Kilograms; a Roman talent was about 32 Kilograms.

It was used to weigh out precious metals—
silver, or gold—
and so it was not just a unit of mass
but a reference to an amount of money.

Jesus told a few parables about talents:
people given some money,
and how they handled it.

We preachers like talents as a word,
because it sounds a lot like our English word talent, as in skills or abilities.

When my kids were in Elementary School
the school put on a Talent Show,
which wasn’t a fancy display
of large amounts of silver or gold (can you even imagine),
but wonderfully daring offerings
of dancing and gymnastics,
brave kids singing their favorite pop songs,
eager efforts at playing the piano
or telling jokes from index cards…
jokes that make any father proficient in telling dad jokes so proud.

Why did the can-crusher quit his job?
Because it was soda pressing.

I’m reading a book on the history of glue.
I just can’t seem to put it down.

This double meaning makes talents a word we love to use in stewardship,
because it reminds us that we’re not just talking about raising funds.

We always stress that stewardship
is about how we apply our faith to our lives,
all of our life,
and commit to using the gifts God gives us for God’s purposes.

Talents is a great double entendre to help us with that.
It means both our gifts and our financial resources,
and for those of us who seek to follow God on the way of Jesus the Christ,
we have to remember that almost 40 percent of Jesus’ parables
dealt with faith’s relationship with our money and our possessions.

What must I do to inherit eternal life?
Sell everything and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven.
Come follow me. (Luke 18).

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also
(That’s from our reading this morning).

You’ll often hear Christian theologians,
such as Mike Slaughter, who wrote a book called
The Christian Wallet: Spending, Giving, and Living with a Conscience
say things like this:
“There is no clearer indicator of our ultimate values
than our financial priorities and practices—how we spend,
how we live, how we save, and how we give reveal the true altar of our hearts.”[ii]

This is why we sometimes say that “budgets are moral documents,”
whether they’re our personal home budgets or our nation’s budgets.
“Put your money where your mouth is.”
Well, we do.

But more than that:
where we put our time and our energy and our passion,
those too reveal our truest priorities, our deepest concerns. [Read more…]