Sermon of the Week
No Insignificant Question: How Do We Know God is There?

A sermon preached at The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on August 18, 2019.
Part three of a nine part sermon series on questions and topics submitted by listeners for consideration

#pcusa

Keywords: Particularity, Absence of God, Still Small Voice, Practices of Faith, Footprints.

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Romans 8:26-27, 35, 37-39
and Psalm 22:1-11, 22-24

I’ve been trying to think this week about the times when I’ve been left speechless
with absolutely nothing to say.

It might not surprise those of you who know me
that this was a challenging exercise for me.

I almost always have something to say.

In part, I now know, this is because I find silences awkward.
And for much of my life, until I kind of worked to change it,
I would often be the one to fill the silence with a comment or idle talk or something.

I started seeing this in myself
as I was working my way through high school and college.
Helpful teachers would remark about my propensity to comment
about the subject at hand, all the time,
not that I was unhelpful or out of place or necessarily wrong, or anything,
just that, maybe, where I needed to grow
was to take in what others were saying a bit more
give it time to sit with me more
let the themes and the topics work a bit more
and that I didn’t always need to be the one driving that bus.

It wasn’t just school.
I have always been something of an extrovert
sometimes striking up random conversations with someone on a park bench
or at the check out line at the grocery store
or once at the DMV
getting my first driver’s license.

The DMV isn’t really the most social place.

Most people don’t want to be there.
The waits can be insufferable.
The space has all the charm of an empty airplane hanger.

Maybe the first time I remember being left speechless
was at the DMV going for my first driver’s license.
I was jittery and excited and probably was quite annoying
but I remember when the person in line in front of me
after hearing me say ‘good morning’ and ‘hey I like your hat’
looked me in the eye, and then turned back around
and in the most obvious way possible
put his earphones on over his ears
to tune me out.

I think I stood there with my mouth agape for a second. Speechless.

This has changed with me, as I’ve gotten older
and more aware of my propensities and nuances.

I learned how to sit through an entire class and not have to comment,
how to read other people and whether they’re interested in idle talk or not.
how to let the situation inform good social interaction
you know
how sometimes it is better to just let the silence be
which, by the way, is often the very thing that the DMV calls for.

I had to learn that the silence was sometimes a gift
that it was ok to sit with my thoughts and my feelings
even if those thoughts and feelings sometimes were racing around inside there.

I’m not sure why I was this sort of child,
or where we get our particular inclinations about this.

We’re all different with this sort of thing, I know.
Some people have the exact opposite inclination
never wanting to speak up, or contribute to a conversation
or be the one, God forbid, that the kid in line talks to as we’re waiting.

Why I was the more excitable sort, nervous about the quiet,
or wanting to explore more of the social connection, I don’t know.

But it helps us to note that we all have different personalities,
different approaches to this,
and that that’s ok,
we’re all made just a little bit different, a little bit unique
and we all have to learn about ourselves and our inclinations along the way.

///
We are all particular.

Sure, there are certain things that all of us experience, and feel, and yearn for
but these are more like guidelines and frameworks
than certainties.

For example: we all have capacity for love, yearn for love, need love to feel complete
but how we love, who we love, how potent this is in us varies from person to person.

Or, we all have the capacity for curiosity, for exploration, for seeking understanding
but some of us transform this into something like wanderlust
always seeking out new experiences, new people to meet,
and fill our time with books or travel or seminars or online learning programs
like the one I keep seeing ads for on facebook called Masterclass
where apparently Steve Martin can teach me how to do comedy
and Aaron Franklin how to master Texas-style barbeque,
whereas, on the other hand,
others of us are more inclined to chill out at home, where we are,
comfortable in the curiosity we’ve already undertaken, thank you very much,
taking the new experiences as they come
rather than seeking to make them for ourselves.

No two people are the same. We are all particular. [Read more…]

Sermon of the Week
No Insignificant Question: Are We Doing God’s Will?

A sermon preached at The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on August 4, 2019.
Part one of a nine part sermon series on questions and topics submitted by listeners for consideration

#pcusa

Keywords: Millions, Wesleyan Quadrilateral, Discernment, Community, Prayer, Study, Reason.

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Matthew 28:16-20
and Romans 12:1-18 (included in the sermon text below)

note: news about two mass shootings over the last 24 hours, one in El Paso, and one in Dayton, Ohio, arrived too late to be considered in the sermon today. But we offered the following in our community prayers:

News from Dayton and El Paso came too late this morning
for me to adjust the sermon, but this recent wave of
gun related violence would ordinarily be worthy of special attention there.
It should be clear that, when it comes to gun violence, we are not doing God’s will.
In those two incidents, there were 29 people murdered, and 42 injured,
so 71 total victims, not counting the bystanders and others
whose lives will be forever altered as well. There have been five
so called mass shootings in the past week, when we add
other incidents in Philadelphia, New York, and Gilroy, California.
And every year, in our country, these mass shootings
are just about 2% of the total number of gun related fatalities.
There were almost 40,000 of them last year, two thirds of them suicides
the others a combination of accidents and homicides.
This is a public health epidemic. More people die in gun related deaths
than automobile accidents. Please join me in lifting up this senseless violence,
and let us pray that there will be more than just prayers in our hearts,
but intention, and action, so that we can help save lives.
O Lord, Hear our Prayer.

Today we start a new sermon series
that will take us through August and September.

We’re calling it “No Insignificant Question”
and each Sunday we will explore a topic
that you all submitted for this purpose last month
and we’ll do our best to give it a proper response.

We received 33 topics

and there is no way to go through them all,
but I took the topics that had multiple people ask them–
there were a couple of those–
and then added topics that had a similar theme to some of the others submitted,
and those that echoed what I’ve heard from conversations
and interactions along the way,
and came up with nine Sundays worth.

No Insignificant Question.

The first one is a big one.
The full question was originally phrased this way
“How can you KNOW when you are doing God’s will with and for your life?”
And I tried to shorten it to a maybe more reasonable form

“Are we doing God’s will?”

Truth is, that’s a hard question to answer.

For many, it is WAY too easy to just assume that we are.
Of course God agrees with me,
Of course God agrees with my partisan perspective,
or my budget choices,
what I spend my money on and who I give it to and what I buy with it,
or the vocation I decided to pursue
or the place I bought a house
or how I treat my neighbor
or my decision to tune out criticism
or, maybe, God is just fine in my lack of concern
with whether God is invested in any of that.

It has been pointed out that if the God you follow
looks, and sounds, and acts pretty much exactly like you
then maybe that’s not following God, but something we’ve made out to be God
that reinforces our own biases, preferences, hopes and desires.

On the other hand, it can be far too easy to just assume
that we’re abject failures at this,
that there’s something wrong with us,
that God’s will is just too difficult to figure out,
or there are too many people who claim to be seeking God’s will for their lives
who claim to be actually living God’s will for their life,
and, when we look at them, they look way too hypocritical
way too uncaring,
way too fallible,
and then we feel judgy and nosy and uncharitable
that we feel like we’ve failed the overall point in the first place….

Or we see really really good and amazing people
who just seem to get it
and aren’t people of faith at all
or who go about their faith in quite different ways from us
Buddhists and Jews and Muslims and Atheists and Sikhs and many more besides
how do we know that they’re not doing God’s will?

Maybe they are.

And as for us: Are we doing God’s will?
Am I doing God’s will for my life?
How in the world would I know if I was,
and how can we figure out what is God’s will, and what isn’t?
///

One place we start, in our tradition, is with the bible,
and, importantly, its proper interpretation, as one quite important piece
of an answer to this question
not the only piece, but an essential one.

We’ve talked a lot about what makes for good interpretation,
but here we may highlight what our friends, the Methodists,
sometimes call the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.

The idea is that good theological reflection ties together four components:
Scripture, Tradition,
Reason, or Science,
and Experience.

The idea is that we don’t read scripture in a vacuum,
and that our engagement with scripture should be informed
by how people before us have read it…we call that tradition
and with our thoughtful understanding of the world we live in… reason and science
and with our own experiences of the world.

Because reading the bible to seek the will of God can be tricky.

You can’t just open to a random page, read it literally
and say, well, let’s go try to do that.
In fact, the bible itself recognizes how hard this is.

The Bible itself, as you read it,
reveals different efforts to communicate God’s will for us.

The Hebrew Bible found meaning in theophanies—divine appearances,
in dreams and visions,
or through messengers and prophets and still small voices,
as well as through the law of the old testament, crafted and handed down on tablets,
rituals and requirements and norms,
all of which helped the people develop a sense that it was doing God’s will…

Were they doing God’s will?
Well, sometimes they were, and sometimes they weren’t. [Read more…]