Author: jonathan.kimball

Sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on March 3, 2024, the Third Sunday in Lent. Based on John 2:13-22.

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I’m going to start this morning with a little bit of history. In the earliest part of the Bible, Genesis, we read about the ancient Israelites worshipping God in a variety of places, places that seem holy like Bethel where Jacob had his dream of a ladder reaching to heaven. In Exodus, God and Moses instituted a sacrificial system based around the Tabernacle or Tent of Meeting. This was a sanctified tent, or rather, three tents nested like a Russian doll, and sacrifices to God could only be made there. After the Israelites settled in what was originally Canaan, they set up several shrines where sacrifices were made, but eventually, the Tabernacle was moved to Jerusalem and worship was centralized there. Solomon built the first Temple, and all of the rural shrines were destroyed.

A few centuries later, Judah was conquered by Babylon, the Temple was destroyed, and the Israelites had a crisis of sorts. How would their worship continue when they were exiled and there was no temple? When the exile ended, they rebuilt the Temple and doubled down on its centralized sacrificial system. What had gone wrong? Why were they conquered and exiled? Obviously, their worship of God had not been pure enough. The priests made sure that all Jews knew that worship could only happen at the Temple, which needed to stay pure.

One aspect of that purity was a set of concentric walls, with rules about who could pass which ones. The outermost Court of the Gentiles was open to everyone. In part, this reflected Isaiah’s prophecy:

the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord,
    to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord,
    and to be his servants,
all who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it
    and hold fast my covenant—
these I will bring to my holy mountain
    and make them joyful in my house of prayer;
their burnt offerings and their sacrifices
    will be accepted on my altar,
for my house shall be called a house of prayer
    for all peoples.

Isaiah 56:6-7

This outermost court was 35 acres—a pretty big space in a crowded city.

Next came the Court of Women, where Gentiles were excluded but all Jews, male and female, were welcome. Next was the Court of Israel, where only male Jews were welcome. This is where the priests would perform their typical sacrifices. Next was the Holy Place where certain elements were contained like the incense altar and showbread. Finally, the innermost area was the Holy of Holies, where only the high priest could enter, and only once a year on Yom Kippur.

This elaborate system ensured that the holy places stayed “clean.” Only people who were chosen by God could approach, and how close depended on their chosen status. It seems a little strange from our modern perspective, but it worked for them.

The Temple was the center of the sacrificial system that was spelled out in the Torah and the destination of several annual festivals. There was an expectation that all male Jews would visit the Temple on the high holy days: Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot, and Yom Kippur. My guess is that only the wealthy would visit from far off places on a regular basis, but there was an expectation that those who had the means would make a pilgrimage. It reminds me a little bit of the hajj, the annual festival that Muslims celebrate in Mecca. There are very strict rules around the hajj, regarding who is allowed to come and what they are allowed to do. Similarly, there were strict rules for celebrating Passover at the Temple.

One of those rules was that certain sacrifices needed to be made with unblemished animals. Another was that an annual Temple tax was due and could only be paid using certain coins that did not have any graven images on them. Let’s suppose you’re a Jew who lived far away, say, in Corinth. How would you get to Jerusalem for Passover? Probably by ship first, and then by foot, walking a long way through various Greek-speaking Roman provinces. If you were going to Passover, you needed a lamb. If you had to make a purification offering or some other sacrificial offering, maybe you needed some other animal like a dove or an ox. Would you really bring an animal all the way from Corinth on the ship? Probably not. Too many things could go wrong along the way. Oh, and you would probably be using whatever currency was in regular use in your hometown or in the provinces you passed through.

So now you’re at the Temple and need to come up with an unblemished lamb and some currency to pay your Temple tax. Wouldn’t it be convenient if someone was selling lambs right there where you needed one? Wouldn’t it be convenient if someone would change your bad currency into something you could use at the Temple?

So that’s why there were people who set up shop in the Temple to sell animals and change money. That wasn’t a problem per se. I read somewhere that during Passover in this era, they might sacrifice 277,000 lambs. That’s a lot of animals, and a lot of logistics to deal with. I can’t fault the priests and Levites for working out a system where vendors would provide them right where they were needed.

The problem was that they filled the Court of the Gentiles. Remember those concentric courtyards where only certain people could proceed inwards towards God? The Court of the Gentiles was the only one that was truly open. If you were a God-fearer, that is, someone who embraced Judaism but was not actually Jewish, you would want to be where the action was just to soak up the spiritual energy of that place. But what if you couldn’t get in because there was a bazaar going on?

As we read the Gospels, we see that Jesus was in conflict with the religious establishment and local government throughout his ministry. Yet whenever the conflict got too acute, he would fade away and avoid escalation. His one exception was the cleansing of the Temple. This was the one time he actively sought confrontation with the establishment. He went straight to the heart of the system and challenged them. It would be like someone protesting against the Catholic church at the Vatican. The authorities would see it as something more than a protest—the start of a revolution. This was the one time when Jesus publicly embraced his messianic calling to literally overturn the systems that were oppressing His people. And it had predictable results: cleansing the Temple started a chain of events that ended on Calvary with Jesus’s ignominious death at the hands of an oppressive occupying government that sought to crush the hopes of the movement he had started.

Why did Jesus die? That’s a huge theological question that we can discuss some other time. The literal reason, though, was that he was perceived as a threat to the stability of Roman rule in Judea and the relationship that the priests had established with their occupiers. And the most obvious act Jesus made was to remove barriers between people and God.

The history of the Christian church has been one of cycles of inclusion and exclusion. In the early days, we expanded beyond Jews to include Gentiles. As the church grew, various heresies were denounced, and their adherents were excommunicated. The Reformation was marked by attempts both to make God more accessible, such as translating the Bible into everyday languages, and to control who “counts” as Christian, such as the Anabaptist movement. The tension continues to this day. Yet Jesus demonstrated what was most critical to him: removing barriers that kept people from worshipping God.

I’d like you to think about people who are either unchurched or have been hurt by the church, and what barriers we might put up that keep them from worshipping with us. For starters, we have this beautiful church on a hill that looks a little bit intimidating. Worship spaces are intended to fill us with awe at our transcendent Lord, but awe can lead to fear.

Beyond the look and feel of the church building, what about our schedule? When I moved to Rolla, I made a concerted effort to keep my Sunday mornings clear and dedicated to worship. Previously, we would often travel on the weekend, or do yard work or other home projects, or whatever. Truthfully, in those days, 9:45 was a little late for us. We would have preferred to be done with church by 9:00 so we could get on with the rest of the day. My kids were never hard-core athletes, but I know many kids are, and have games on Sundays.

Let’s think about what happens in here each Sunday. It’s a very traditional service. I wouldn’t say that it’s “high church” exactly, but there is a definite formal feel to the service. That can make people very uncomfortable. It’s like going to a fine restaurant and not knowing which fork to use. Is it appropriate to shout an “amen”? What is appropriate to say when the worship leader asks for prayer requests? Oh, and what should you wear?

I don’t have good answers to all of this. I personally like worshipping at 9:45 am on Sundays, dressing nice, and following a traditional worship format. I’m just saying that perhaps some aspects of what we do are barriers that are keeping people out.

Another problem we face is that we are Christians, and therefore inherit all of the good and bad of our colleagues in ministry. Christians are known for being judgmental. Suppose you were hurt by some church because, say, you got divorced or dared to challenge the pastor. Or perhaps you or someone you know were exploited in some way by a church leader and the congregation chose the perpetrator or the institution over the victim. Or perhaps you consider yourself a “sinner” and don’t think you would fit in with good church folks. There’s a sign at the church down the hill that says, “Come as you are; you can change inside.” I’m sure they intend it to be welcoming, but I read it as exclusionary. I read it as saying, The person you are right now is not good enough to belong with us. You can come worship here, but only if you agree to change into the kind of person we think you should be.

Or maybe, someone thinks they can’t afford to join a church. Yes, it’s important to financially support your spiritual home, but we should never give the impression that people who are too poor to give are not welcome here. The ancient Jewish sacrificial system had options: if you couldn’t afford a lamb, you could buy two doves instead. I could imagine someone making their pilgrimage to Jerusalem, then seeing the prices on all of the animals and thinking, Wow, I guess I can’t really participate like I thought. That’s at least part of what Jesus protested against.

I’m going to give you all homework again. I want you to seriously look at and think about and pray about our church and the people who we would like to have worshipping with us, and what ways we are creating barriers that keep them out. I want you to think about ways we can tell people that it’s OK: God loves you for who you are, and so do we. I want you to think about ways we can meet people where they are and accommodate their needs. I want you to think about ways we can help people experience the loving God that we know, and ways that we can truly and actively love our neighbors.

Jesus flipped tables as a prophetic indictment of the way the priests and Levites were keeping people out of the Temple and keeping them away from God. A few decades later, the Temple building was destroyed. But more importantly, a few days later, Jesus laid down his life so that God could break free of a system that tried to tame God, so that we can all be a part of God’s family. Let us seek ways to welcome more of our siblings so that they can experience the love of our risen Lord through His body, which is the Church. Amen.

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Sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on Transfiguration Sunday, February 11, 2024. Based on Mark 9:2-9.

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Let’s start today by talking about the characters in the story. Jesus, obviously. We’ll get to him in a little while. James and John were the sons of Zebedee, sometimes called the Sons of Thunder. They were the ones who, in the next chapter, will ask to sit at Jesus’s right and left hands when he comes to reign. Bold, brazen even, full of fiery zeal.

Simon Peter is often seen as the chief disciple. Simon was his birth name, but Jesus said that he would be known as Peter, for on this rock will his church be founded. I sometimes call him Rocky, which is a more literal translation. And sometimes he acts like Rocky, a little obtuse. In the previous chapter, Peter first declares that Jesus is the Messiah, and then immediately demonstrates that he has NO IDEA what that means. And on it goes throughout the Gospels.

Moses we probably all know well. He led the Israelites out of Egypt. He was the one to make a covenant with God that turned this group of loosely-organized clans into a mighty nation. Four of the first five books of the Bible are basically about Moses’s life, which ended shortly before the Israelites entered the Promised Land.

Elijah is someone that we don’t talk about too much. He was a great prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel after it split off from Judah, in the time of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. He is a major character in the book of 1 Kings. Although he was one of the greatest prophets, he didn’t leave a book of teachings behind like Isaiah or Jeremiah or even the minor prophets like Obadiah. Instead, he taught with his actions: he challenged the cult of Baal and proclaimed that Israel should worship only God. He proclaimed that Baal was in fact not a god at all and vanquished Baal’s prophets. Unfortunately, that put him at odds with Ahab and, especially, Jezebel, who sought to kill him.

Elijah fled from Israel and sat down beside a broom tree to die. Fortunately, God sent an angel, and after a nap and a snack, he was revived and moved on to Mount Horeb, another name for Mount Sinai where Moses received the Law. On Mount Horeb, Elijah had a vivid encounter with God. In 1 Kings 19, we read:

‘God said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind, and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake, and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”’

1 Kings 19:11-18

God went on to give Elijah instructions for how he was to carry on the work he had begun, and how he should recruit his successor, Elisha. We heard in the first reading this morning that Elisha accompanied Elijah to the very end, until Elijah was swept up into heaven.

But remember, Elijah heard all of the craziness of a world coming apart, like we do every day. We hear of wars and storms and earthquakes and volcanoes and all sorts of violence and strife in the world. But God is not in the noise and terror. God is in the silence. God is a still, small voice speaking to us when we can shut out all the noise in our lives.

I receive a daily email from the Center for Action and Contemplation, which was founded by Father Richard Rohr. The basic premise of the CAC is that our action emerges from our contemplation. We can best hear God speaking to us when we are contemplative, engaged in prayer as a dialogue with God instead of just telling God what’s on our mind. Like Elijah, we need to shut out the noise of a world gone mad so that we can hear God whispering to us, calling to us, telling us how to live and how to build God’s kingdom.

Let me return now to Moses. Where Elijah was pretty much a solitary figure through most of his ministry, Moses was a part of a community. In fact, he led a nation of supposedly 600,000 Israelites who escaped from the Egyptians and wandered in the desert for 40 years. One problem was that the people refused to encounter God directly. They said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen, but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.” So Moses went up on Mount Sinai and entered a cloud full of fire and lightning and thunder and smoke. Moses encountered God face to face, and then brought God’s word back down to the people.

This event is best known for the Ten Commandments, the fundamental rules of the covenant between God and the Israelites that would make them a priestly people. Moses went on to dictate hundreds of other laws that governed their worship, their family lives, their business practices, and a host of other day-to-day activities. He told them what to do. But then in Deuteronomy, he promised that one day another prophet would come to tell the people more.

Well, that happened. Throughout Israel’s history, God sent prophets with messages for God’s people in Judah and Israel, or in exile in Babylon, or as subjugated people in a province of the Persian Empire. God kept sending prophets that the people would mostly ignore, imprison, or kill. Finally, God sent His Son.

So here we are back on a mountain, and Peter, John, and James have a vivid encounter with God. This is a sign of the inbreaking of God’s kingdom. Elijah had been taken up to heaven without dying; Moses had died on the border of ancient Canaan. Yet here they were alive and well and talking with Jesus. Suddenly, the glory of the Lord shone all around them. This was the same cloud that alighted on Mount Sinai and made Moses’s face glow so brightly that he had to wear a veil to talk to the people. This was the same cloud that filled the Tabernacle that first housed the Ark of the Covenant, and the same cloud that filled the Temple when it was consecrated. This is the tangible presence of God shining all around the three disciples.

And then a voice: “LISTEN TO HIM!” Now, this wasn’t a suggestion like, Hey, please be quiet because that guy is going to read a story to you. No, this was a command like a parent gives a child or a boss gives an employee. When your boss says, “LISTEN UP!” you know that means you need to listen to what they say, and then do it. Pay attention! I’m telling you something important, so listen to what I say, then get to work doing it! That was the force of the language God used with the disciples. Jesus is in charge here, so listen to what he has to say, and then act on it.

So, what did Jesus have to say to the disciples? Well, first he tells them to keep this all a secret until after he is raised from the dead. Kinda strange. But I think Jesus wanted to make sure that when they started telling people about Jesus’s message, it had some strength behind it, the strength that comes with conquering sin and death.

But the rest of Jesus’s message was something like this: The kingdom of God is at hand! That is, heaven is breaking through. It’s close to us in time and in space. It’s right here among us, ready to embrace our open hearts. And God’s kingdom is marked first and foremost by love. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love one another with a self-sacrificing love like Jesus demonstrated. Let your love be more than an emotion, but an action, a commitment of your whole self to actively care for your neighbor. Just as you do to the least of these, so you do to Jesus.

Jesus asked for our devotion. He asked us to follow him. The words “belief” and “faith” have shifted meaning over the years, but if you go back to the original language of the Bible, Jesus did not ask us to intellectually agree with some orthodoxy or accept something unprovable as fact. No, he asked us to commit to walking the path that he walked, doing what he did, loving as he loved. Jesus demonstrated that his way of love is the way of the servant and the way of the cross.

The Brief Statement of Faith that I’m sure you have all been seriously studying starts out with, “In life and in death we belong to God.” That’s the first principle: belonging. Jesus asked us to belong to Him and his community. We should identify not as Missourians or Americans or Presbyterians, but as members of Jesus’s family that transcends all labels. Then each section starts with, “We trust”: We trust in Jesus Christ, we trust in God whom Jesus called Abba, Father, and we trust in God the Holy Spirit. Faith is an action, a reliance on our triune God who we can trust every day with our eternal lives.

So I asked you last week to internalize perhaps three or four main ideas within the Brief Statement of Faith. There’s a lot in it, and whatever resonates with you is right for you. One thing that is right for me is this: “The Spirit … sets us free to accept ourselves and to love God and neighbor, and binds us together with all believers in the one body of Christ, the Church.” We are one in the Spirit, yet we cannot see that oneness because of our brokenness. Our task is to seek each day to see that unity among the diversity of God’s people.

Here’s another one, near the end and lifted from Romans: “With believers in every time and place, we rejoice that nothing in life or in death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nothing can separate us. Nothing. God’s love is right here among us. God is close at hand, ready to give us that love if we will only be willing to receive it.

And yet, God is also transcendent. In Jesus’s transfiguration, the disciples got a glimpse of his transcendent divine nature. Jesus was a man who looked like any other man, and yet he was also fully divine and glorious. We can experience Christ’s presence in each person we meet. We get closer to God as we get closer to one another. Jesus chose to reveal his divine transcendence only to those who knew him best. Similarly, it is the people we are closest to who reveal God to us. We all have a hidden self that we only share with certain people. In sharing ourselves, we reveal God as well. And in forging these close, loving relationships with one another, with God at the center, we encounter God’s transcendent love that permeates the cosmos.

So listen up! Jesus taught his disciples that the kingdom of God is at hand! God’s reign is close to us in time and in space, just waiting for us. Jesus taught that the way into his kingdom is a sacrificial love that values each person for the divine spark dwelling within them. Let’s get to work now doing what Jesus commands us: committing ourselves to a life of service to God’s people through whom we encounter the glory of God. Amen.

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Sermon preached on February 4, 2024, Fifth Sunday After Epiphany, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on 1 Corinthians 9:16-23 and Mark 1:29-39.

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Richard Bach is the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which was incidentally the source of my name. It was his first novel and a breakout hit. He is a pilot by nature and training, though, so after its success, Bach turned back to flying as a career. Eventually, he wrote another novel, Illusions. In its preface, he wrote, “I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back on an idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid opening the door to it, I won’t even reach for a pencil. But once in a while there’s a great dynamite-burst of flying glass and brick and splinters through the front wall and somebody stalks over the rubble, seizes me by the throat and gently says, ‘I will not let you go until you set me, in words, on paper.’ That’s how I met Illusions.”

When we speak about a calling, that’s usually what we have in mind. God calls you to do something in particular and won’t let you go. You feel a sense of urgency about it, and it becomes all-consuming. Maybe, like Jonah, you try to avoid your calling, and life falls apart. You find yourself metaphorically swallowed by a great fish, and decide, OK, I’ll do it, I’ll follow my calling.

That’s not the only type of calling, though. A more common form is where you have just a subtle feeling of being on the right path. You feel a little urge to do something, and it feels right. So you do it some more, and it feels even more right. Eventually, you find yourself on a path that is just so natural, you can’t imagine your life any differently. That’s more or less the way I would describe my calling to church leadership. I didn’t have a great vision or anything like that. I just started doing things, and they felt right, so I did some more, and now here I am.

There is a third form of calling, too, similar to what we read in Mark this morning. Jesus did some amazing things, healing Simon’s mother-in-law and many other people. So, people wanted to follow him. Simon and the others who sought Jesus didn’t really know what they were getting themselves into. All they knew was that they wanted to be a part of whatever Jesus was doing.

Whatever form your calling takes, the important thing is to act on it. Grow into it. If you don’t know what God is asking you to do, perhaps a little time encountering the scripture together this morning could help.

Paul’s calling was of the first type. He had a dramatic encounter on the road to Damascus. It took him a little while to decipher its meaning, but once he did, he knew he had to act on it. He was called to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles around the Greek-speaking Roman Empire. This was a transformational message in many ways. First, he had to transform Judaism itself. In Judea, the dominant schools of thought within Judaism were fundamentally nationalistic to varying degrees. Most Jews in Judea thought that Jerusalem was the very center of the cosmos, that historical Israel was the essential homeland, and that “real” Jews were descendants of Abraham. Out in the Diaspora, though, Hellenized Jews had a more flexible understanding. Jerusalem and historical Israel still figured largely in their belief system, but so did the local synagogue. Proselytes, that is, Gentiles who converted to Judaism, were somewhat common.

Paul was born in that Hellenized Jewish environment. His encounter with our risen Lord transformed his beliefs even further. Now, he realized that proselytes did not need to become Jewish to become a part of God’s family. Greeks did not need to be circumcised and initiated into Judaism. They just needed to be baptized and welcomed into Christ’s family, which transcends Abraham’s earthly descendants.

So, as Paul wrote in today’s passage, he lived as a Jew among Jews and as a Greek among Greeks. Between his encounter on the road to Damascus and his travels to Corinth and Ephesus and other cities around the Roman Empire, he spent years in study to determine what was essential to participating in God’s kingdom and what was only culturally relevant to being a Jew.

We could read this passage and think, Paul just goes along with whatever people want to do. He’s just some easygoing, you-do-you kind of guy, right? WRONG! Paul never held back when people were violating some important tenet of this newly-developing religion. I would not characterize any of his writings as “gentle.” He was more of a firebrand, never afraid of a confrontation.

Instead, we should see this as encouraging relational evangelism, rather than colonial evangelism. Pastor Dennis talked about relational evangelism a couple of weeks ago. Colonial evangelism is what a lot of Christians did over the past few centuries. Colonial evangelism emerges from a belief that our God is the True God, and the way we understand God is the only way to understand God, and the way we live is the only right way to live in God’s kingdom. There were some great successes over the centuries. One article I read concluded that there was a positive correlation between Christian missionary activity and the strength of democracy among colonized peoples in the Pacific. Missionaries also brought medicine and hygiene practices and many other benefits to primitive societies, and dismantled evil practices like cannibalism and human sacrifice. But along the way, some of them also destroyed local cultures that were supremely life-giving. They destroyed inherited knowledge about the best way to live in that place and ecosystem. They disrupted and destroyed the lives of children. And they paved the way for military conquest that ultimately led to the loss of freedom for millions of people.

Many forms of evangelism in America today are colonial in some sense. They imagine that there is only one right way to live and only one right way to believe and only one right way to follow God, and they insist that everyone join in. This is a major election year, so I feel compelled to remind everyone that Jesus was not a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or anything else. No political party can claim to follow God’s law perfectly. No nation has been specially chosen by God—not the modern state of Israel, not America, none. We have all been chosen to be a part of God’s kingdom. We all have different ways of doing God’s will.

The task before us, then, is to determine what is essential and what is not. Many of the members of this congregation have at some time been ordained an elder or deacon and pledged to be guided by the Book of Confessions and Book of Order. Well, the first chapter of the Book of Order states that “Human beings have no higher goal in life than to glorify and enjoy God now and forever, living in covenant fellowship with God and participating in God’s mission.” It goes on to say that Jesus Christ is the Head of the Church, who calls the Church into Being. This is essential. The portion of the Book of Order that relates to worship lays out a fourfold ordo, saying that our worship should be structured as Gathering, the Word, the Sacraments, and Sending.

But elsewhere it says, “We acknowledge that all forms of worship are provisional and subject to reformation according to the Word of God.” What that means is, we don’t have to worship in a sanctuary on Sunday mornings at 9:45 am with a piano and organ. We don’t have to center the worship on a sermon where one person talks and everyone else just sits and listens. We don’t need to have a choir. We don’t have to wear robes, or use liturgical colors for our vestments and paraments, or anything else. These are all choices that we have made. They are good choices, and they are meaningful to me as they probably are to most of you gathered here today, but they are not essential.

You know what else is not essential? “Christianese.” That’s the special language we use that marks us as insiders. I just used a bunch of it. What is a sanctuary? Well, the name means someplace holy, but we have taken it to mean a large room marked with symbols of our faith where we gather to worship. What really is the difference between a sanctuary and a chapel? We could use other words, like auditorium. What are paraments and liturgical colors? Paraments are these cloths that we put on the pulpit and table. Oh, a pulpit could just as well be called a podium, I suppose. Liturgy is literally the work of the people, but it has come to mean the words we say in our worship and the seasons of the church and things like that.

OK, those are all churchy words that you probably wouldn’t use in casual conversation. But there are others that have slippery meanings and can push people away from church. Next Monday, a campus group is having a sort of interfaith dialogue. We were trying to decide what topics would be meaningful to people from a wide range of faith traditions—Christian, Muslim, Hindu, secular humanist. One guy suggested “salvation.” I pushed back against that because there are a LOT of assumptions built into the word. “Salvation” means being saved—but from what? If a person doesn’t come from a specifically Christian background, or doesn’t accept the doctrine of Hell, then “salvation” becomes meaningless. What about “grace”? It’s hard enough to explain what grace is to another Christian, let alone someone outside of a Christian context.

Again in the Book of Order, we find that, “The Church is to be a community of witness, pointing beyond itself through word and work to the good news of God’s transforming grace in Christ Jesus its Lord.” If we want to witness to and transform THE WORLD, then we need to meet people where they are. We cannot simply serve people who are just like us. We need to serve people who need to know the God of love that we know. That means learning to see life from their perspective and speaking to their needs.

I’m a professor, so I’m going to give you homework, but I won’t be collecting it or grading it. I still want you to do it, and yes, it will be on the test, the test that our Lord will give you when the race is run. If you have a specific calling—specific people that you want to serve and with whom you want to share the Gospel—your task this week is to learn as much as you can about their perspective. If you do NOT have a specific calling in mind and you’re still searching for one, choose Millennials in central Missouri. Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996, so they are right now between 28 and 43 years old. Probably beyond college and into raising families, if they followed the traditional path. Learn all that you can about what they’ve been through in the past decade and what their needs are today. Do not assume that their life at age 40 is like your life was at age 40. If you have kids or grandkids in this age group, do not assume that everyone in that group is like your family. Read articles online. If there’s a good book that you find, tell people about it. Learn all that you can.

And then there’s a second part of your homework. Once you see life through their eyes, the task before you, and the task before all of us, is to show them a path to the God that we know. The path should start where they are, and lead to a life of love and community. Just as you need to know where they are coming from, you need to know what you believe so you know where to lead them. So the second task I’m giving you is to read the Brief Statement of Faith that you should have received on the way in. This was added to our Book of Confessions when the historically northern and southern halves of what is now PC(USA) merged in 1983. It has some great stuff in it. You might not 100% agree with it all, or even understand it all. But I want you to spend some time with it and internalize those tenets of our faith that really resonate with you, the things that reflect your understanding of God, of Christ, of the Church, and of our place in the world. Maybe three or four things that are really, truly meaningful to you.

It’s time now to turn to the Lord’s Table to celebrate the Eucharist. That’s some more Christianese. If you really think about what it is we are about to do, it’s hard to understand, and even harder to explain to an outsider. I’m not sure that anyone really knows what happens here at the Table. But I do know this: Through this Sacrament, Christ is here among us, and the Triune God sustains us. Through this Sacrament, we are connected to the one holy, apostolic, and catholic Church, God’s people in every place and every time. And we are empowered to go forth and build God’s kingdom. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on January 7, 2024, which combined Epiphany and Baptism of the Lord. Based on Matthew 2:1-12 and Mark 1:4-11.

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Last month, Rhonda and I took a trip to Pittsburgh to see Jesse direct the Pitt bell choir in their Christmas concert. On the way, we visited an old high school friend of mine, Sharon. She has three kids and the youngest is now in high school. We started talking about what comes next. She has a mechanical engineering degree but hasn’t worked as an engineer for more than a decade. Right now, she still has home commitments that limit her career options, but she has been substitute teaching and also teaching an enrichment program for middle school students that is focused on engineering. My comment was that it’s good that she is thinking about the future now, because whatever path she chooses may require a credential of some sort that would take some time to acquire.

I went through something similar a few years ago. In 2017, Lou Ellen got sick one Saturday and asked me to deliver her sermon. Then in 2018, she asked me to fill the pulpit when she was traveling. I was also doing a bunch of other things for the church and wondering what was next in my life. I didn’t know what God had in store for me, but I knew that whatever it was would require some education. So, I started down the path to become a commissioned ruling elder, which meant completing a certificate in congregational leadership through the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary.

Little did I know that I would be called upon to use my skills and talents to help lead this church. Fortunately, I was prepared. I had the knowledge I needed when the time was right. The process towards being commissioned kind of stalled out, but I have started working in that direction again, depending on what the congregation decides to do.

We live in the information age. We are awash in information, some of it good, some of it useless, some of it erroneous, some of it intentionally misleading. Information everywhere, on the radio and TV, on our phones, from legitimate news sources and social media, from experts and from charlatans. In the ancient world, information was hard to come by. That’s why Herod was so desperate to get information from the visiting magi and from the scribes, and to control who knew what and when.

These days, we suffer not from too little information, but from too much. Still, our task is to turn information into knowledge. We need to sift through the information, keep what is good and useful, reject what is irrelevant or misleading, and apply it to the task at hand. This task requires curiosity and, more importantly, focus. I get a weekly email from James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. Recently, he wrote,

Curiosity can empower you or impede you.

Being curious and focused is a powerful combination. I define this combination as unleashing your curiosity within the domain of a particular task: asking questions about how things work, exploring different lines of attack for solving the problem, reading ideas from outside domains while always looking for ways to transfer the knowledge back to your main task, and so on. Even though you’re exploring widely, you’re generally moving the ball forward on the main thing. You start something and you keep searching until you find an effective way to finish it.

Meanwhile, when your curiosity sends you off in a dozen different directions and fractures your attention, then it can prevent you from focusing on one thing long enough to see it through to completion. Curious, but unfocused. You’re jumping from one topic to the next, they aren’t necessarily related, your efforts don’t accumulate, you’re simply exploring. You start many things and finish few.

How is your curiosity being directed? Is it rocket fuel or a roadblock?

James Clear

Clear makes an excellent point. Gathering information doesn’t necessarily lead to the knowledge you need to solve a problem. At heart, I am an engineer, which means that I’m a problem solver. Once I latch onto a technical problem, I am skilled at finding out all of the different possible paths to solve it. If that’s all I did, though, I would not be successful in academia. Research is less about problem solving, and more about problem finding. Sometimes, that means peeling back the layers of a problem to find the root of it, and sometimes that means developing something even more important than knowledge: wisdom.

Thomas Merton once wrote, “People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.” Knowledge is the ability to climb the ladder, but wisdom is knowing which wall to lean it against.

Let’s take an example: our preschool. Tracy is a wonderful director who has the skills and talents needed to solve a wide range of problems. More importantly, though, she has identified the right problems to solve. She could have been content to keep serving the same number of kids in the same age groups with the same basic services. Instead, she recognized some additional needs for the kids—such as nutritious meals—and an additional age group that was severely under-served: infants. Once she identified that problem, she set about solving it. Now we have a renovated upstairs classroom with a fire escape so that we can serve that new demographic.

If you look around the sanctuary today, you probably see another problem: a congregation that is smaller and older than when I first joined fifteen years ago. It’s tempting to say that we need more people and younger people to worship with us. But that is the wrong problem to solve. That is perhaps a symptom, but not the root cause.

The fundamental problem is that there are people in our community who have a deep longing for connection, community, belonging, and love, but don’t know where to find it, and certainly are not looking here. According to a Pew Research Center study, about 40% of Missouri adults do not experience a sense of peace and well-being at least once a week. That’s perhaps 10,000 adults in Phelps County who are surviving more than thriving. We have just celebrated the birth of the Prince of Peace. Susan spoke last week about the coming of Christ’s kingdom, in which Christ judges the nations based on how they cared for those who are in need. Perhaps we have a message for our community. Perhaps we can be a source of love, of peace, of connection, of belonging for those who are struggling to find their place in the world.

The danger, though, is that we would expect their problems to be like our problems, and their desires to be like our desires. The majority of adults in Phelps County are younger than me. Many of them either did not grow up in a church, or grew up knowing church as a place of discomfort and exclusion and guilt, not a place of acceptance and joy. Those who grew up unchurched surely assume that all Christian churches are the same as what they see in the media: judgmental, greedy organizations that protect abusers and only really value straight white men. They don’t know who we are. They aren’t staying away because of our worship style, or our building architecture, or whatever. We aren’t even on their radar screen as a place where they might want to go.

So what do we do? Well, the first step is to really identify the problem, and narrow it down to a problem that we can solve together. Paul Shane Spear said, “As one person I cannot change the world, but I can change the world of one person.” I don’t really think that all 10,000 adults in Phelps County who need to experience peace and well-being should show up here next Sunday. If nothing else, that would make me very anxious, that many people trying to mob their way into our sanctuary! This is why I’ve been asking you to think about your calling. What is one small part of the problems in our community that you think you can solve, or that you think we can solve as a congregation?

The next step, after identifying the problem, is to seek the knowledge you need to solve it. A lot of people in the congregation are Baby Boomers, and a few of us are Gen X. Roughly a third of the population of Phelps County is either Millennials or Gen Z. I would wager that very few of us really know the problems facing those generations or what sort of community they are looking for. Sure, you might have kids or grandkids who can clue you in, but that’s a pretty narrow data set. If they grew up in your household, they probably have already heard the message we have to share anyway. I spend a lot of time around college students, but I wouldn’t say that I really understand their perspective, their desires, or their spiritual needs.

Once you have the knowledge you need, it’s time to act on it. We have heard two stories today about being timely. First, we have the magi and the scribes. The scribes spent their time studying the Law, which is what we call the Old Testament plus the interpretations that were accumulated over the centuries. They knew what to expect, but they didn’t know when. The magi studied the natural world. They knew when something important was happening, but didn’t know what exactly. The two groups together found the Anointed One, a baby who was born to be king. Next, we have the story of Jesus’s baptism. John the Baptist was preparing the way. He was working to make sure the conditions would be favorable when the time came for the Messiah to appear. When Jesus came to the Jordan to be baptized, the skies were opened and God announced that it was time. The years and centuries of waiting for the Messiah were at an end, and the world was ready to receive the Incarnation, God With Us.

But how can you know that it’s time? My first nudge came from Lou Ellen, prodding me towards the pulpit and then towards the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. My second nudge came when she left our pulpit, and it was time for me to get to work.

Sometimes it’s not so obvious, though. Most of you know that I’m also involved with LGBTQ+ Rolla. For several years, I was thinking about ways to serve LGBTQ+ individuals in our community. Then the pandemic hit. I would not say that the summer of 2020 was a good time to start a social organization. We couldn’t really gather, except in very small groups outside or else online. Building a community online is very difficult, much more difficult than building one in person. It would have been better if I had started the group earlier, say in 2018. Or I could have waited until all of the conditions were just right, and I would probably still be waiting.

I should have started earlier, but there’s a proverb that goes, “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is right now.” It’s easy to look back and regret failing to act, just like it’s easy to say that the time is not quite right yet and we need to wait for…something. Perhaps we will be visited by some wise men who saw a star, or perhaps the sky will open and we will see the Holy Spirit descending like a dove, or perhaps tongues of fire will rest on us like on that first Pentecost. But if none of that happens, we still need to watch for the little signs that God is at work, and join in.

So my charge to you this Epiphany is to seek first the wisdom to know which problem God wants you to solve, and then the knowledge you need to solve it. My charge to you this Baptism of the Lord Sunday is to remember your own baptism, your own promise or one made in your name to be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his word and showing his love. Let us together find ways to participate in God’s work. We cannot solve all of the problems in the world, but with God’s help, we can continue the world’s transformation into the peaceable kingdom. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on December 24, 2023, Fourth Sunday of Advent. Based on Luke 1:26-38, 46-55.

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The event we hear today is memorialized by Roman Catholics in their prayer called the Angelus. When I go to the White House Retreat Center, we pray the Angelus three times daily. Each time through includes three Hail Marys. You know, Roman Catholics kind of have a “thing” for Mary. The Rosary is the most obvious example. The complete Rosary has five decades, each of which has ten Hail Marys. That’s fifty times praying, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” And so on. I think the reason they focus so much on Mary is that Jesus seems too intimidating. Yes, Catholics pray to and through Jesus, but more often, they pray to a saint like Mary and ask the saint to intercede on their behalf. Mary seems so close to Jesus, and yet approachable.

Yet along the way, Mary has been elevated to this ethereal woman, almost otherworldly. She seems so serene, so meek, an obedient handmaid of God. She is a source of peace and a role model for women. Sinless, placid, humble, obedient. OK, I can accept that she is a saint in the sense that she has joined the heavenly choirs, but the earthly Mary that we read about in the Gospels is nothing like that.

Protestants have rebelled against this elevation of Mary and instead have degraded her. They treat her almost like an empty vessel. She was just a convenient womb to incubate the Incarnation. This attitude gave rise to the popular song, “Mary Did You Know.” It’s a beautiful song that talks about the man that Mary’s baby would grow up to be. I love the melody, and I love the image of a baby growing into our Lord and Savior. But the song is all wrong. Listen to the last verse:

Mary, did you know that your baby boy is Lord of all creation?
Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day rule the nations?
Did you know that your baby boy is heaven’s perfect Lamb?
That sleeping child you’re holding is the great, I Am.

Mary, Did You Know? Words & Music by Mark Lowry and Buddy Greene

This is a beautiful vision of the man that Jesus would become, and the potential within the infant that we will be celebrating tonight, but the answer to every line is a resounding “YES!” Mary knew, because Gabriel told her.

Mary was neither some perfect model of obedience and submission nor an empty vessel who had no idea what was going on. Mary was tough. When Gabriel gave her his message, she didn’t hesitate to ask what she needed to know: how will it happen? She needed to know what she was getting into.

Motherhood is a blessing, but it’s not easy. It certainly wasn’t easy in first-century Galilee. They had midwives but medical care was, shall we say, meager. Death in childbirth was common—I read somewhere that as many as 1 in 3 mothers died giving birth. Not only that, but infant mortality rates were pretty high, so she would be charged with caring for a very fragile young life. The serene image in Christmas cards or on display in nativity scenes doesn’t reflect the reality of childbirth: noisy, messy, and painful. Nor does it reflect the sleepless nights and utter misery of being a new mother. Compounding Mary’s situation was the fact that she would be pregnant out of wedlock. She was betrothed to a man who was not the biological father, so she didn’t know whether he would follow through with the wedding or not. She didn’t know if the rest of her family, and his, would accept her. And being the mother of the Messiah meant that the birth would be just the beginning. Almost every messianic movement ends in bloodshed. Next week, we will hear Simeon, a prophet in the Temple, tell her, “A sword will pierce your own soul, too.”

And yet, Mary said yes. This was not an act of submission and subservience, but a commitment to take on the challenge. Like so many prophets before her, when God called to her, she said, Here I am, Lord. Choose me.

And like so many prophets before her, she responded with a bold prophetic announcement that we call the Magnificat. This is not a hymn of joy so much as the start of a revolution. “God has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.” And on it goes, declaring that the order of society will be overturned. Mary celebrates her role in the revolution. She rejoices that God has done this great thing for her, allowing her to birth the Messiah. She rejoices at being Jesus’s first disciple.

Catholics pray, “Hail Mary, full of grace,” a phrase taken from the Latin Vulgate. The NRSV translation is, “Greetings, favored one!” This more accurately captures the sentiment that Mary was the recipient of grace, not the source of it. God chose her to give birth to and raise the Messiah. Why? We don’t know. Nowhere does it say that she was particularly devout, or extra kind, or anything else. She was chosen just as other prophets were chosen: for no obvious reason except that God saw great promise in her heart. Her prophetic song helps us to understand the kind of mother that Jesus had. She was convinced that God was doing a great thing for her and for the world through her. She recognized God’s strength and mercy. She was prepared for a revolution that would raise the lowly and bring down the powerful. As we sang earlier, the world is about to turn.

 But wait: in the Bible verses, Mary says that God has done great things—past tense. The hymn says that the world is about to turn—in the near future. Which is it? Well, just as Christ was born and will be born anew in our hearts, the revolution is still going on. The complete transformation of the world takes a while. Yet Mary knew that something important was happening. She knew that without the coming of the Messiah, God’s plan for the salvation of the world could not come to pass. She knew that she had been chosen for a critical role in that plan. God had been hard at work throughout the history of Israel, and had already done a lot, but now the transformation process would go into hyperdrive. She was willing to do whatever God asked of her so that Jesus’s mission could be accomplished.

But again, why was Mary chosen, and what was special about her? Well, nothing, really. She was just an unmarried young woman of unknown lineage from a small village in a backwater. She wasn’t a priest like Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist who received his calling in the Temple. She wasn’t like Simeon and Anna, prophets we will hear about next week who were righteous and devout and spent all their time in the Temple, worshipping with fasting and prayer. She certainly wasn’t one of the rich and powerful. Just an ordinary woman in an ordinary place.

In that way, she wasn’t much different from us. We are pretty far from the seats of power, whether political or economic or cultural. That doesn’t change the fact that God is calling each one of us to take part in the transformation of the world into God’s kingdom. Each of us has a role to play. None of us have as big a job as Mary did, but even small roles are important. I will again remind you to consider how God is calling you personally to work towards the reconciliation of the world. How can you take part in God’s work, and how can this church and its members help to further your calling? What seemingly impossible task has God set before you, and how can you say, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord”?

Tonight, we will gather again to worship and remember that Jesus was born more than 2000 years ago. He took on flesh and came to demonstrate what true love looks like, to help us to turn towards God and participate in God’s work, to re-orient our priorities. Yet that would not have happened if Mary hadn’t said “yes.” May God show you what task has been laid out for you, and give you also the courage to say “yes.” Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on December 10, 2023, Second Sunday of Advent. Based on Mark 1:1-8.

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Repent! That’s the usual word we associate with John the Baptist. He came preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. We commonly understand “repentance” to be related to “penitence.” To repent is to confess your sins, to meditate on your wrongdoing, to make amends where possible, and to suffer the guilt you have incurred.

Prisons used to be set up along these lines. First came the Pennsylvania system, advocated by the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, whose most active members were Quakers. In 1829, they founded the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia that applied the principle that solitary confinement fosters penitence and encourages reformation. Prisoners were kept in isolated cells measuring twelve feet by seven-and-a-half feet. They each even had their own exercise yards to prevent contact among prisoners. They were expected to stay separated and think about their crimes and their sinfulness. Eventually, prisoners were also tasked with solitary crafts like shoemaking and weaving. The Pennsylvania system spread across the US and Europe. There were two criticisms: one, that it had terrible effects on the prisoners’ mental health, and two, that it was too expensive. Guess which one was the more compelling argument.

The Pennsylvania system was largely replaced by the Auburn system, which started in Auburn, New York. Instead of living entirely solitary lives, prisoners were kept in solitary confinement at night but worked together during the day. However, they were forced to remain silent at all times, again so that they could think about their crimes and their sinfulness. Both the Pennsylvania and Auburn systems were predicated on the belief that criminal habits were learned from other criminals and spread like a disease. Ultimately, both were found to be both expensive and inhumane, as well as ineffective.

The conventional wisdom is that repentance starts with confession and ends with some form of penance. But the Greek word that we translate “repentance” is metanoia, which has a slightly different connotation. Metanoia means changing your mind. More broadly, it means a turning of your heart and soul towards God. Only later did confession and penance become a prerequisite for repentance.

Now, I’m not saying that confession is a bad thing, or that there is no need for penance. Both are essential spiritual practices. I’m just saying that the order is wrong. The first step is to turn towards God. John called the people out to the Jordan to have a different look at God. In the Temple, they were too distracted by the rituals and the sacrifices to see what matters. Like so many prophets before him, John called the people not to sacrifice more animals, but in the words of Micah, to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with God.

When you really turn towards God, though, the first thing you realize is just how far short you fall of God’s plans for you. You are made in the image of God. You are made to love like God and to serve others like God and to forgive like God. Yet each and every one of us falls far short of God’s glory, so when we see ourselves in the bright light of God’s love, we see our flaws. We see the ways in which we need to seek forgiveness from God, and so we confess our sins. God’s response is always forgiving and merciful, but God’s justice is ultimately restorative. Seeing ourselves in the light of God’s love moves us to restore what we can—to heal relationships, to care for those in need, to fix the broken systems that we are bound up in. This is true penitence, true repentance: turning towards God, and then doing God’s work in the world.

Baptism, then, is not the end, but the beginning. It is a sign and seal of God’s grace, an outward symbol of an inward change. Baptism is a ritual in which we accept God’s unwarranted grace, God’s unearned but infinite love. It is a time when we start our walk with God and begin looking at the world as God does.

I mentioned spiritual practices recently, both in a sermon and a newsletter article. By the way, the sign-up sheet I mentioned is on a clipboard hanging from the easel in the narthex. Anyway, over Thanksgiving, I had the opportunity to chat some with my sister, Jennifer, who is a United Methodist pastor. I asked her about her spiritual practices, some of which are similar to mine, though her Bible study is deep rather than broad. Then she told me about one that I have added to my life over the past few weeks. She said that every day, she tells herself to “be on the lookout for God.”

That’s another form of repentance. We turn towards God by looking for God’s work in the world. Have you ever noticed that you tend to find what you are looking for? A prime example is that when a woman in your life is pregnant—your wife, or sister, or daughter, or a close friend, or whoever—you suddenly notice pregnant women everywhere. It’s not that there are more pregnant women then, just that you notice them because your mind is primed to see them. In the same way, if we prime our minds to look for God, we will see that God is at work every day, everywhere.

Let me give you an example. Last weekend, I was gone because Rhonda and I went to Pittsburgh to visit Jesse and see their bell choir performance. Jesse is a senior, so this was their last performance as director. Now, traveling with Rhonda in our new van is much better than in our SUV with the lift on the back to haul the wheelchair, but it’s still a hassle. Each time we stop, I have to put out the ramp, undo four straps, move things out of the way on the floorboard, let her drive out, close the ramp up, and turn the car off. Then when we’re ready to go again, I do it all in reverse—start the van, put the ramp down, let her drive in and get positioned just right, strap the wheelchair down, move things around in the floorboard, close up the ramp. OK, it’s not hard, it’s just a hassle that takes a few minutes.

Well, one morning, we both needed a restroom break and drinks. We stopped at a McDonald’s and got unloaded. Then we realized that the dining room was closed even though the drive-thru was open, due to staff shortages. Ugh. Wish I had seen the sign before we got unloaded! We turned around to get back in the van to drive over to a gas station instead, when a woman poked her head out. She said that they were short-staffed but we could go in to use the restroom. We did, then went on to a gas station to get drinks so that we wouldn’t add to their burden.

Now, where was God? Well, the woman just happened to look in our direction and see Rhonda in a wheelchair. She was working behind the counter and wouldn’t normally have seen anything happening out in the parking lot in that direction. Not only that, but she also took time out of her extremely busy morning to let us in. I’m thankful for the grace she showed.

Now I could just write it off as a coincidence that she looked in our direction, and you might say that it was just common courtesy that she let Rhonda in. We get a lot of people helping in small ways when we’re out and about. But I would rather see it as a subtle way of God working in the world to foster human connection and a better society.

Let me give you another. I was at a university event earlier this week, and a woman came over to me. She introduced herself and thanked me for something nice I had done for her mother, something I don’t even remember doing. Now, to me, it was just one of a thousand things I had done on some day in the distant past, but to this woman and her mother, it was important. It was important enough to the mother that she mentioned it to her daughter, and important enough to the daughter to remember me for it. It touched them. That wasn’t me—that was God at work through me.

These are just two things that happened in the past week that were big enough to share with you. The more I pay attention, the more I see God at work in big ways and small. This was John’s calling: turn yourself towards God and see that God is coming into your life, today.

Many of my spiritual practices are organized in my Monk Manual, which is a sort of planner. I would be happy to show you my Monk Manual or to tell you more about it, but the important point here is that it is built around cycles of prepare, act, and reflect. There is a daily cycle, a weekly cycle, and monthly, quarterly, annual, and lifetime cycles. Each cycle includes a reflection so that you can see what good things have happened to you, what has made you feel unrest, and what God has been teaching you. By looking back on how God was working, you prepare yourself to look forward to God acting in your life on the next cycle—the next day, the next week, the next month or quarter or year. So often, we don’t notice God in the moment, but we can look back and see that God has been guiding us and accompanying us, and then that awakens us to the possibility of God continuing to guide and accompany us. In the same way, John’s call of repentance must be answered by a turning towards God each day, each week, each season, each year. That’s why I have daily spiritual practices. That’s why I worship here each week. That’s why we have the different liturgical seasons. And that’s why each year in Advent, we once again prepare for Jesus to be born anew in our lives.

Christ is coming. Advent is a time of waiting, of anticipation for the great day of the Lord when Christ enters our lives. Yet Christ has already come. God is already at work through Christ’s body, which is the church. God has been at work in the world from the moment of Creation and will continue to work towards the restoration and re-Creation of all things. Advent is a time to turn towards God, to be Christ’s eyes in the world and, being moved by what we see, to act with Christ’s heart, and hands, and feet.

On this second Sunday of Advent, we anticipate the coming of God’s shalom, which is a peace that transcends the absence of war and includes healing and wholeness, a restoration of what has been lost and broken. Let us turn our eyes towards God so that we can see and join in the hard work of building a world filled with God’s love. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on November 26, 2023, Reign of Christ Sunday. Based on Matthew 25:31-46.

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Much of modern political philosophy is based on the idea that we are individuals who enter a social contract. That is, the natural state of humanity is fully independent with full freedom, but we choose to give up some of our freedoms for the sake of living together in harmony. I say, hogwash. Rene Descartes famously said, “Cogito ergo sum,” which means, “I think, therefore I am.” He was asserting his identity separate from any social constructs. An ethics teacher once said that his response to Descartes is, “Who taught you Latin?”

The truth is that we are naturally oriented towards community. We connect naturally to our family, then our clan, then our tribe. Think about it: throughout the Bible, people are identified as being the son or daughter of someone else. We use surnames now that basically keep track of what clan we are in. I naturally desire to take care of my wife, my children, my siblings, and my parents. Even people who have difficult relationships with their family of origin are in some sense defined by those relationships. Beyond our immediate family, we have a natural affinity for our clan—I am a Kimball, so I always perk up when I see a reference to another Kimball. I care more about my cousins than about some random people.

This is entirely natural. Humanity has succeeded in ways that other species haven’t because we are cultural. We learn from one another and prioritize our relationships with our community. We cannot survive without the cultural knowledge we have inherited or without the support we get from other people, both close at hand and far away. In modern society, we have somewhat transcended the natural ties of blood relatives to include chosen family, those friends and neighbors and church members who make our lives more complete.

Let me share a story with you about the limits of independence. When I go elk hunting, I feel like I’m independent because I carry all of my own supplies—my own tent and clothes and food and water. But where did those all come from? I didn’t make my tent, or my sleeping bag, or my rifle, or any of the hundred other things I carry. I bought basically everything I need. I pump my own water from a stream, but I use a filter pump that I purchased and fill a collapsible jug that I purchased.

On my most recent trip, on the last day of hunting, we were walking out with a couple of older guys that Wayne had met on a previous trip. Ron and Tom are both in their seventies. It was dusk, probably after official sunset, dark enough that we were all using our headlamps. Ron had a little bitty flashlight. He tripped and fell and dislocated his shoulder. The pain was excruciating. Now, if I did that in Rolla, it would be terrible, but I might be able to drive myself to the hospital, or at the least, an ambulance would be five minutes away. Up on the mountain, though, we were half a mile as the crow flies, and a longer walk, to where Ron could get in a pickup truck, then an hour-and-a-half drive to a hospital. All told, I think there were nine guys involved in helping Ron get out to where he could get medical help. Two of us stayed with Ron to help him keep awake and keep moving; one guy called 911; two guys went ahead to find some other guys who had a chainsaw and a UTV and could drive partway to meet us.

When an emergency like that happens, everybody pitches in to help. That’s because we all recognize that we are ultimately not truly individuals, not truly independent. We need our community. We helped Ron because someone once helped us, or we know that someday we will need help, or at a minimum, we recognize our shared humanity. We are fundamentally connected to each other.

Jesus taught his disciples that “the least of these,” those who are in need, are his brothers and sisters. We naturally organize society into family, clan, tribe, and nation, concentric circles of mutual obligation. But Jesus said that actually, we are all in his family.

When I first started preaching, Rhonda would ask me what my sermon was going to be about. I think she finally got tired of my answer always being the same: the kingdom of God is at hand! That was Jesus’s primary message, the coming of his kingdom that we celebrate on this last Sunday of our church year. We have spent the past few weeks studying parables about the kingdom of God, and this week, we reach the climax. But what is Christ’s kingdom? Well, a mujerista theologian named Ada María Isasi-Díaz said that a better word to use is “kin-dom,” without the “g.” That is, Christ’s kingdom is not like the ancient kingdoms where a strong man (always a man) lords his power over his subjects. Instead, it is like a family, where all of us are equal and all of us are loved by our holy brother and holy father. The text we read today is Jesus’s last message before the events that led to his crucifixion, so it is the most important message he had to give his disciples. The kingdom of God is instead a kin-dom, a state of being where everyone is kin, everyone is family, everyone cares for each other, everyone lifts up the downtrodden, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and cares for the prisoner.

This is actually a very simple message. What do you do when you see someone who is hungry? You feed them. Period. It is simple, but extremely difficult. First, there are limited resources. I cannot personally feed everyone who is hungry. Second, Jesus’s calling is counter to our society’s values and our inherent sense of fairness. So, instead of obeying this simple but difficult teaching, we make it complex. We say, well, sure, feed the hungry, but Jesus certainly didn’t mean everyone, did he? What if the hungry person is a criminal? What if the hungry person is from somewhere else far away? What if the hungry person seems like they could work and feed themselves? Surely Jesus didn’t mean for us to sacrifice our limited resources for those people, right? Surely Jesus only meant for us to feed the worthy hungry people. Surely Jesus only meant for us to house the stranger if they are here legally. Surely Jesus only meant for us to care for those imprisoned without cause, not those who are guilty. Right?

I don’t think so. Jesus was pretty clear, actually. He said, “I was hungry, and you gave me food.” He said, “Whatever you do for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you do to me.”

This is a hard teaching. Yes, I know that there is a place for tough love. We probably all know people who have been given second and third and fifth and tenth chances and continue to fall short. Our goal should be that all people become thriving, full members of our community and of God’s family. Sometimes, that means helping people develop some skills, including life management skills, through tough love. But tough love only works if its root is love, not if its root is toughness. It only works if you are in a personal and loving relationship with someone and they know that your actions flow from that love.

There’s a saying, “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” Sure. I agree—we should be in the business of helping people become better versions of themselves. But it’s a whole lot easier to learn how to fish if you’re not starving. You can give a man a fish and then teach him how to fish. Another analogy I heard is a fire. If someone’s house is on fire, you don’t focus on finding out what caused it. You put the fire out. You save the people and belongings and prevent further damage. And then you try to find out what caused the fire so you can prevent another one, and also help the people put their lives back together.

Coming back to our friend Ron with the dislocated shoulder, we could have tried to put his shoulder back in the socket. But here’s the thing: We didn’t know what the actual problem was. He couldn’t feel his forearm and couldn’t move his fingers, so we didn’t know if the issue was his shoulder or his elbow. For all we knew, he had broken his humerus and somehow pinched a nerve. At some point a few years ago, he had had surgery on that shoulder, which complicated the situation. We could have tried to solve the problem right then and there, but we didn’t really know what we were doing.

So instead, we found someone who did know what they were doing, and we accompanied Ron until he got help. We didn’t let him suffer alone. We gave him as much comfort and assistance as we could until we were able to get him to a medical professional, whose first act was to give him a shot of something that would enable him to bear the pain. Survival first, long-term solution later.

Just a few days ago, America celebrated Thanksgiving. This is a day we set aside to remember all the good things in our lives and all that we have to be thankful for. It was first celebrated as a national holiday in 1789, our first harvest season as the United States of America under the Constitution. It was celebrated intermittently until 1863, when, at the height of the bloody Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was convinced to proclaim a national day of thanks. No matter the pain and suffering and discord and evil in our nation, we still acknowledge that we have been richly blessed. Human nature is to focus on the negative, so it is essential to have a day that we focus on the positive and expressing gratitude.

One of my spiritual practices is to identify three things each day for which I am thankful. My rule is that I can’t list the same thing two days in a row, so that I take a broad survey of my life. The natural response to identifying these blessings in my life is that I am moved to give more of myself to my family and community. Perhaps we should expand our personal thanksgiving reflections to congregational thanksgiving.

We have much to be thankful for. I know that I complain about the ridiculous layout of the sanctuary, but it is a beautiful worship space. It has great acoustics and a pipe organ. We have great staff—Jeff and Lorie here in worship with us, plus Katie in the office, Tracy to direct the preschool, and many other staff who enable us to serve the children of our community. We have lots of people who have stepped up to provide leadership in all spheres of our operations. And above all, we have each other to provide mutual support on our walks with God.

Our gratitude for the blessings on this congregation should move us to greater acts of service. We have been welcomed into God’s family, and so we should help others thrive as members of God’s family. We see the image of God in each other, so we should seek God’s image in people throughout the community.

In Jesus’s last message to the crowds before the events that led to his arrest and execution, he told them the basis on which all nations would be judged. He didn’t say that they would be judged on their beliefs or their words. He said that they would be judged on their actions to build his kin-dom by caring for all his siblings. Let us respond to the gifts God has bestowed upon us by caring for our community, not asking what people have earned, but providing what they need to thrive as God’s image-bearers. Amen.

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