Category: FPC Rolla

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on September 22, 2024. Loosely based on Mark 9:30-37. This message was particularly intended for FPC Rolla at this stage of its life. I am providing it here both for our own members’ reference and as potential inspiration for other churches who seek renewal.

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In today’s Gospel lesson, we get a little insight into the kind of society Jesus wanted his disciples to create. First, he reminds them that he will be going away sometime soon. Remember, Jews were anticipating a Messiah who would return Israel to its former glory. They were expecting a priest-king who would re-establish the independence of their nation, who would kick out the Romans and purify the Temple. Jesus’s disciples thought that he was this Messiah who was getting ready to march triumphantly into Jerusalem to establish his reign.

So of course, they wondered who would reign with him. Who would help Jesus govern the nation? Who would have power and authority? Who would receive the honors and accolades that come with being close to the King?

Well, Jesus wasn’t that kind of Messiah. Jesus told the disciples that he was headed not towards a worldly victory, but towards an ignominious death. He was headed towards glory, but of a sort that the disciples didn’t understand. Boy, they were thick-headed, weren’t they? Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. They simply reflected their cultural understanding, and we have the benefit of hindsight, knowing how the story will end.

But at this point in the story, the disciples didn’t get it. They didn’t understand what it meant for Jesus to be the Messiah, and they didn’t understand what kind of kingdom he would institute. He tried to tell them, again and again, but they didn’t get it. Here he says that rather than seeking power and authority, they should strive to welcome children. They should welcome anyone into God’s kingdom.

After Jesus ascended, he left his disciples to carry on his vision. He set out a bold vision of what human society could be, and the disciples sought to bring it to reality. While God’s goal is a total transformation of the world, our task is just to transform our little corner of it. Eventually, God’s vision of total transformation will be realized, but in the meantime, we are called to do what we can to make Rolla, or at least our church, a hazy, imperfect image of things to come.

Imagine if you will First Presbyterian Church of Rolla at some point in the distant future. I’m going to describe this future church that perhaps none of us will see, just like the Israelites who fled Egypt did not see the Promised Land. But let’s imagine that at some point in the future, we truly meet the Great Ends of the Church. As a reminder, about a century ago, the Presbyterian Church developed these Great Ends:

• the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind;
• the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God;
• the maintenance of divine worship; 
• the preservation of the truth;
• the promotion of social righteousness;
• and the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.

The kingdom of heaven is a place where all people, all people, have what they need to flourish and thrive. That means they all have their physical, emotional, and spiritual needs fulfilled. So let’s start by thinking about who “all” might be.

The demographics of the kingdom of heaven ought to mirror the demographics of the broader community. The median age of Phelps County residents is 36 years old. This is skewed a bit from the statewide median, 39 years old, because of the university’s huge population of 18-to-24-year-olds. At any rate, this church as we are imagining it is filled with people of all ages, from newborn to ninety. There are children, college students, young families, empty-nesters, and people in their twilight years.

Church members are predominantly white, but with a significant Asian contingent and a smaller number of people of other races and ethnicities. One in twenty would live in a household that has a primary language other than English—some speak Spanish, many speak Mandarin and other Asian languages. A significant fraction, perhaps 10%, would have moved to Rolla in the past year, including those who have come here to attend or teach at Missouri S&T. Maybe as many as 10% are veterans.

No matter who they are, everyone is bound by a desire to connect to God and one another. We are a truly intergenerational organization, one where any given group that is working or studying together has a mix of people of all ages. These groups benefit from the wisdom of differing perspectives and experiences. Most members worship on most Sundays, although some participate online instead of in person.

The highlight of the church week is Sunday. We have two services, traditional and contemporary. The traditional service is smaller and skews older, perhaps 150 people with a median age in the 50s. Some younger people too, though, who enjoy the liturgy. A choir that has at least four basses and four tenors, plus a larger number of altos and sopranos, to give us good, full, four-part harmony, occasionally splitting out to eight-part. We continue to include both piano and organ in the service, with occasionally other instruments like brass, woodwinds, or strings. We have a bell choir that participates in worship quarterly.

Between the two services, we have a time of fellowship and Christian education. We have six classes: up to kindergarten, first through fourth grade, fifth and sixth grades, seventh and eighth grades, ninth through twelfth grades, and adult. There’s also a group that gathers in the chapel between services for contemplative prayer.

During the fellowship time, various small groups meet up to make their plans for the week. The associate pastor, who works full-time as a chaplain and part-time for us, connects with the deacons to plan visits to shut-ins. Presby Politics decides what their topic of the week is. This is a mixed group of Democrats and Republicans who meet not to argue or convince, but to seek nuance and understanding. A Bible Newbie group makes sure everyone knows the topic for the week, too. These are folks who did not grow up studying the Bible and need to learn the basics, like the core story of the Exodus and the relationship between the Gospels and Epistles. Another group plans an outing to meditate at Lane Springs, and another talks about a project they are doing for the Mission, and other people are talking about opportunities to serve at GRACE and Russell House and so forth, or just coordinating lunch plans.

After fellowship and Sunday School comes the contemporary service. This is the bigger and younger group, perhaps 250 people with a median age in the early 30s. There’s a band that leads the music, but it’s not a performance—the sanctuary is filled with the full-throated singing of the congregation. Whether they attend the traditional or contemporary service, everyone leaves worship energized and renewed for the week.

Monday through Friday, the preschool is in full swing. As hard as it may be to imagine, they’re doing an even better job than today. Spots are in high demand because of the quality of their programs, which run year-round. The preschool regularly receives national awards for the impact they have on children and the community.

Monday evening, we host a grief support group. Tuesday evening, we host a cancer support group.

Wednesday is for music. The bell choir practices first, and then the chancel choir, and finally the band.

Thursday is for campus ministry. We have a youth leader slash campus minister who was a stay-at-home mom until her kids went off to college. She coordinates a group of about 30 college students who are growing into an adult faith.

One Friday a month, we have a Parents Night Out, where we provide childcare to enable parents to enjoy some adult time together. On other Fridays, we encourage small groups to gather, whether at restaurants or each other’s homes.

Saturday night is for youth group. Our youth leader leads a group of about 20 high school students, most of whom have completed confirmation and seek continued growth in their faith.

All of this is coordinated by our senior pastor, a dynamic preacher dedicated to Reformed theology and the faith formation of the members. The senior pastor is an effective administrator who supervises the youth leader and the associate pastor, as well as three office staff and the music director. This team collectively has all of the skills and knowledge needed to lead this vibrant faith community. They all recognize where their strengths and weaknesses are, and defer to others as appropriate.

The senior pastor also moderates the session, a group of earnest, faithful elders who consistently evaluate our ministries. They consider which ones need more investment—in time, people, space, or funding—and which ones have outlived their purpose. They keep an eye out for conflict, which will naturally occur in a group of 400 or so imperfect humans that might have 10% or more turnover annually due to people moving into and out of the area. The session considers proposals for new ministries, and each elder is typically involved in one or two of our major ministries. One leads the Bible Newbies class, for example, and another leads the outdoor contemplative prayer group.

How does this sound? Does this sound like the kingdom of God? Does this sound like a place where you could thrive? Does this sound like a place that has a significant impact on the community?

I believe that this could describe our church, not next year, maybe not even next decade, but someday. In fact, when I’ve heard descriptions of this church from several decades ago, they sound something like what I described. There is no fundamental reason we cannot achieve this vision. With God, all things are possible.

However, this vision cannot be wished into existence. We must pray for God’s help, but we also need to do our part. A spiritual advisor once told me that we do perhaps 2% of the work and God does 98%, but we absolutely must do our 2% to unlock God’s providence. The kingdom of God is not for spectators. It calls for our total commitment, the dedication of our whole selves.

Right now, today, our church has neither the people nor the resources to make this vision a reality anytime soon. But if we hold out this vision, or something like it, as a possible future, we can find a path to it. Perhaps we start with a cancer support group or a grief support group. Or perhaps we put together a Parents Night Out. Nora has already discussed that with the preschool committee and is working on a version of my vague idea that better fits their families’ needs. Or perhaps we start a contemplative prayer group, whether in the chapel or out in nature.

We can do this. Together. What in this vision resonates for you? What do you feel called to do?

Something I have learned about myself over the past few years is that I am good at providing logistical and emotional and spiritual support to whatever initiative someone else wants to lead. Maybe there’s some part of this you’re willing to lead, but you don’t know how to advertise it or organize it, and I can help. I also recognize that we have diverse skills and talents across the congregation, and I’m starting to learn what they all are. Individually, it’s hard to do anything, but drawn together and empowered by the Holy Spirit, we can accomplish much for the kingdom of God. Let’s get started!

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Preached on September 8, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Mark 7:24-37.

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Let’s start by asking, Why was Jesus in Tyre? Last week, Susan preached on the first part of Mark 7. Jesus had done some amazing things reported in Mark 6. He fed 5000 men, walked on water, and after landing at Gennesaret, he healed many people. Of course, the scribes and Pharisees couldn’t stand for that sort of thing. So they challenged him. The first half of this chapter describes Jesus sparring with his fellow Jews about what is proper behavior in God’s eyes. They argued about ritual purity and interpretations of Mosaic Law.

One of the students who attends Sacred Paths, our campus ministry, commented that she gets the most criticism from other Christians. Just the fact that she attends our meetings while also attending other ministries must mean that she has ideas that are “wrong” in the eyes of those other ministries. And of course, in many Christian traditions, certainty and having the right answers and right beliefs are essential to salvation. They are right and we are wrong, of course. If you argue about certain doctrines, they will either appeal to the authority of the Pope or some other human leader, or cite some scripture that they believe settles things.

This kind of argument is tiring. We are all children of God, all trying to do our best to understand God’s will for our lives. Some beliefs may be more or less life-giving, but it’s hard to say who is right and who is wrong. The stressful nature of discussing matters that are so close to the heart is probably why there is a taboo about discussing religion in polite company. The self-righteous nature of those who think they have exclusive access to the Truth shuts down a healthy exploration of faith that allows for different perspectives and different ways of following God.

Jesus was embroiled in these arguments, had enough, and decided to escape to Tyre for a little break. He probably figured that the scribes and Pharisees wouldn’t chase him that far. Tyre is a good distance from Gennesaret, about 35 miles, probably two or even three days’ journey, and Gennesaret is already a good distance from Jerusalem, about 80 miles. So Jesus could perhaps count on some downtime where he didn’t have to spar with other Jews about the interpretation of written and oral Law.

Tyre was an old and prosperous city. It was the main source of Tyrian purple, an extremely valuable dye that they started producing about 1200 BC. Tyrian purple is extracted from the mucus produced by the Murex family of sea snails. Its production is difficult and time-consuming, and so the dye was literally worth its weight in gold. It was a leading commodity of the Phoenicians that was exported around the Mediterranean and because of its expense, it became associated with royalty.

In the Roman era, Tyre began producing another valuable commodity called garum, which was a sauce created by fermenting fish innards. One source I read compared garum to caviar, because it was so highly prized. The fact that Tyre produced these two commodities by processing fish and sea snails probably made the whole city smell bad, but also made it an extremely wealthy city. On top of these industries, Tyre was also a major port that connected the Mediterranean to the Silk Road and East Asia. Tyrian shekels were almost pure silver so they were the currency used to pay the Temple tax.

So when you hear that Jesus went away to Tyre, maybe it was like going away to Silicon Valley today. Sure, there are poor people in Silicon Valley like everywhere else, but you might expect the random person you meet to be relatively well-off.

The story of Jesus’s encounter with a Syrophoenician woman doesn’t look good at first. A woman comes to Jesus asking for what he has already done so many times before, to heal her daughter. Does he do it? No. He compares her to a dog and seems ready to send her away. I’ve read several perspectives on this story, but the one that makes the most sense to me is that he was implicitly criticizing the wealth of Tyre. As a wealthy commercial center, its residents would have naturally felt superior to a Galilean country bumpkin. So Jesus is essentially saying, You have all that wealth that has been extracted from people like me. Let my people at least have these gifts from God to themselves. Use your wealth to take care of your daughter, and I will share God’s grace with those who have nothing.

In response, the woman asks for the crumbs from God’s table. We have already seen, a chapter earlier, that when Jesus feeds the multitude, the crumbs fill a dozen baskets. Shortly after this story, Jesus feeds another multitude, and the crumbs fill seven baskets. God’s providence is so abundant that no matter how much is showered upon the lost sheep of Israel, there will always be more left for the Gentiles.

So here we have the contrast between the people to whom Jesus was sent and the people who were outside the covenant that God had made with Abraham. The covenant established an eternal relationship between God and Israel in which God would shower blessings upon Israel in return for their love of both God and neighbor. The story of Abraham actually has two covenants within it, first one of unconditional love and grace from God to humanity, and then one that is conditional. My interpretation is that God’s unconditional love and grace are always available to us, but that the conditions of the Law guide us as we strive to build a society that lives as God’s kingdom now.

The scribes and Pharisees in Jesus’s time, as well as many Christians today, put the emphasis on the conditions. You must earn your place in God’s kingdom by following these nitpicky rules as interpreted by someone in authority. Only those who embrace the church’s rules are worthy of a place in the earthly expression of God’s kingdom. But they forget that the rules are built on top of the unconditional love and grace of the original covenant. They forget that no human can limit God.

The Syrophoenician woman, though, focused on what actually matters. She loved her daughter. No amount of wealth or social privilege could heal her daughter. She may have thought that this country bumpkin from Galilee was beneath her station and not worthy of her attention, just as Jews thought that Gentiles were outside the covenant and not worthy of approaching God in the Temple. But one thing was more powerful than any hierarchy of wealth, culture, or ethnicity: love. Her love of her daughter drove her to seek any solution, no matter the cost to her dignity.

I am reminded of the time Rhonda was fighting her facial pain. We have very good health insurance. I wouldn’t say that I’m wealthy exactly, but I certainly have more financial resources and job flexibility than many people. We visited numerous doctors, in St. Louis and at Mayo Clinic and at Cleveland Clinic. But at the end of the day, none of it mattered. Money can’t buy a cure. The only way we were able to get her pain under control was by working with one doctor over a period of nearly two years to find the solution together. My love for her kept me searching for a solution, and our relationship with her neurologist enabled us to find the solution together.

In the same way, the woman’s wealth did not enable her to cure her daughter. Her wealth did not make her worthy to enter Jesus’s presence. Yet her ethnicity did not make her unworthy, either. The disciples may have thought that she had no place asking Jesus for help, but she was bold to ask anyway.

Have you ever been made to feel unworthy of God? Maybe you were too young or too old, or of the wrong social status, or had said or done something outside the norm or contrary to doctrine, or you weren’t dressed properly. People have a way of making outsiders feel uncomfortable and unworthy, and church members are sinful people. We try our best, but sometimes we can’t help but allow our cultural attitudes overwhelm our calling as Christians. Perhaps this woman felt the same way. She went to a house full of Galilean Jews, probably mostly men, and felt excluded because of her gender and ethnicity.

Yet she persisted. She knew that none of it mattered. It didn’t matter that she was a Gentile. It didn’t matter what her wealth or social status were. It didn’t matter if she was ritually unclean. All that mattered was that she loved her daughter, and Jesus could heal her. She needed God’s grace in her life, and nothing would prevent her from seeking it.

Jesus first reminded her of her status, perhaps as a social critique. Perhaps he knew how his disciples would react if he left their fellowship to care for the child of a wealthy foreigner. She could have responded by demanding that Jesus do her bidding, as she had probably done before to many other men she considered beneath her. She could have responded by promising him wealth or power, just as Satan tempted Jesus after his baptism. Yet she knew that Jesus was no ordinary man, able to be bribed or cajoled.

The sacrifice that God desires is a contrite heart. The woman knew that she needed God’s grace and that nothing she could do would make her worthy of Jesus’s service. But Jesus’s response reminds us that nothing she could do would make her unworthy, either. She was in need, and God’s abundant grace overflowed onto her.

In the same way, no matter how worthy or unworthy you feel, you may be bold to approach God with your needs. God cannot be cajoled or bribed. God cannot be argued into doing your will. But if you approach God with a contrite heart as the Syrophoenician woman did, God’s grace will flow over and through you. Even the crumbs of God’s blessings are abundant and life-giving.

You too may be wealthy or poor, an insider or an outsider, a person of high standing in the community or one of the lowly and forgotten. None of that matters. All of us stand in need of prayer. All of us need God’s grace in our lives—unearned and unearnable, a free gift through Christ. All of us need healing in our bodies, minds, and souls. All of us need to be connected to the infinite love of God that transcends the pains and struggles of the world. And all of us may be bold to approach God through Christ who came to demonstrate that God’s love is for everyone. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on August 25, 2024. Based on John 6:56-69.

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Who here is familiar with the book Good to Great by Jim Collins? It’s a famous book about companies that somehow emerged from mediocrity to become great. One that they talk about that has a nexus with S&T is Nucor. Nucor was a mediocre company that provided services and equipment for the nuclear industry, but somehow emerged as the leading steel producer in America.

I’d like to share with you one of the principles discussed in the book: the Stockdale Paradox. Admiral Jim Stockdale was a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton, the highest-ranking US military officer there. Collins had the opportunity to interview Stockdale and ask him how he survived and who didn’t survive. He said, “I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.” Stockdale was convinced that he would eventually be victorious.

But who didn’t survive? The optimists. As Stockdale related, “They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.” The Stockdale Paradox is summed up in his statement: You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—a faith that you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.

When Rhonda was going through her face pain, I was one of those optimists. I would think, The next doctor will fix this. Or the next drug, or whatever. While Rhonda was having a surgery that was ultimately unsuccessful, I talked with my friend Sharon for some moral support, and she reminded me how many times I had thought that we were about to solve the problem. That helped to prepare me for the eventual let-down when Rhonda’s pain returned.

On the flip side, we Americans are notorious for seeking instant gratification and easy answers. When those aren’t available, we just give up and stay in our comfort zone. We think, Oh well, that didn’t work out, so why bother trying? Things are fine the way they are. We stay in the comfort zone. Well, the comfort zone is one of the most dangerous places to be.

Think about it: comfort foods are some of the worst foods for your health. Things like, pasta served in a bread bowl. Or grilled cheese. When I go elk hunting, while I’m at base camp, I eat a lot of grilled cheese because I’m so mentally and emotionally and physically drained from hunting. That’s fine for a week, but if I ate grilled cheese for dinner every day, I definitely wouldn’t be as thin as I am!

Couches are comfortable, too. I try to run every morning, although I’ve been struggling lately due to travel and injury. The reason I run is because if I don’t, my lifestyle is basically sedentary, and that’s terrible for your health. I know some of you are not able to be as active as you once were, but it’s best for your health if you stay as active as you are physically able. Otherwise, what you don’t use, you lose.

So those are two of the ways you can fail. On the one hand, you can live with false hope that everything will be fixed tomorrow. We just have to do this one thing and our problem will be solved. Or on the other hand, you can give up, accept your current reality as the best it can be, and slowly decay instead of reaching your potential.

I’ve read a couple of books by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels. In The Tools, they describe a visualization tool for escaping the comfort zone. It’s a little bit like the image I walked through two weeks ago, where we are drawn to God through the cross. The tool that Stutz and Michels describe goes like this:

1. Imagine the pain that you are avoiding as a black cloud in front of you. Silently scream at it, “Bring it on!”
2. Imagine yourself entering that black cloud and feeling that pain. Silently scream, “I love pain!”
3. Imagine yourself being propelled out the other side. Silently scream, “Pain sets me free!”

There’s a lot more to the book, which I highly recommend. But the basic idea is that you succeed by being willing to confront the pain head-on and blow through it. It’s like a running back breaking a tackle. I had a wonderful clip, but the NFL blocked it from playing. So just imagine it: an amazing running back who runs straight into a defender, keeps pushing, keeps pushing, and finally breaks through for a touchdown. He is courageous—maybe not fearless, but willing to confront his fear and blow through it. Now, the reason these kinds of plays are on YouTube is that nine times out of ten, this kind of play results in a tackle for a loss. But once in a while, the running back succeeds. Do that often enough, and you win games, you win championships, and you end up in the Hall of Fame.

The key is to be willing to endure temporary pain for the promise of eventual success. Now, I’m not talking about being a masochist. Not all pain is redemptive, and I certainly didn’t see anything positive in the misery that Rhonda went through fighting her facial pain. Sometimes, life just sucks. But sometimes, the pain, or discomfort, or embarrassment, or fear, or whatever else is holding you back is just temporary, and if you power through that, you’ll come out the other side stronger, better, and victorious.

Coming back to our Gospel lesson, we hear John again and again talking about consuming Jesus, which we are supposed to take metaphorically. Maybe it’s the Eucharist, or maybe it’s a reference to integrating Jesus’s teachings in our lives. Either way, we are called to abide in Christ so that he may abide in us. We are called to dedicate our whole selves to Christ—not just our Sunday mornings, but every waking hour, all that we have and all that we are. And in return, Christ will strengthen us and bring us abundant life. Not a life of abundance—this isn’t the Prosperity Gospel. Abundant life—love, and joy, and hope, and life-giving relationships. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He is the Way—following him is the only way to enter God’s kingdom. He is the Truth—the hard truth, the challenging truth, but the divine truth that reveals our true potential as beings made in the image of God and a church that is Christ’s body. And He is the Life—the source of abundant blessings that we enjoy when we are connected to each other and to God through Christ, and the source of strength when we are weak, of courage when we are fearful, of wisdom when we are filled with doubt.

But if we really want to know Jesus as the Way, Truth, and Life, we must be willing to confront the facts before us. We can’t ignore the problems that plague us, individually and as a church, and hope that they will just go away. We can’t be afraid that knowing the Truth will mean more work, or sacrificing something good for the sake of something better. We need to turn away from pleasant lies and accept the uncomfortable truths.

At my commissioning service two weeks ago, the congregation affirmed the Great Ends of the Church:

• the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind;
• the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God;
• the maintenance of divine worship; 
• the preservation of the truth;
• the promotion of social righteousness;
• and the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.

These are in our Book of Order, and I think we can all agree that they are all important for truly fulfilling our calling as the body of Christ. I’d like to ask the ushers now to distribute the papers. On the paper, I want you to rate First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on how well we are fulfilling these Great Ends. On the right end, I want you to imagine the nearly perfect church—perfect for you. The church as you think it should be, as closely following God’s will as imperfect humans possibly can. On the left end, I want you to imagine that this church is gone, shut down, the people all dispersed to the community or across the country. On that scale, how are we doing? Are we proclaiming the Gospel? Are we promoting social righteousness? At the end of the service, please place the papers in the basket provided for the purpose. NOT the offering plate! The basket.

We need to know. We need to take a hard look at ourselves and evaluate just who we are, or else we will never know how to become who we could be. Then once we know where we are, we can plot a course towards a better future. And when I say “we,” I mean everyone who is worshipping here today. Whether this is your first time or you’ve been coming for months or years or decades, you matter to God, so you matter to me. I want to know what you think of our church.

There are many paths that we can take, but let’s focus on just two options. One is the easy path: stay in the comfort zone, don’t push ourselves too hard, keep doing what we’re doing and hope for the best. That is the wide path that leads to destruction. The other is the hard path: follow Christ. Follow wherever he leads, even if it means following him to his crucifixion, because we know that the Way of the Cross leads to eternal life.

Jesus’s teachings in this chapter of John are hard. They turned a lot of people away. It’s like he was trying to weed them out: every paragraph gets a little more graphic, a little more demanding. Eventually, he is left with just the Twelve, and Peter says those fateful words: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

Do you believe? Do you believe that Christ is the Holy One of God? As they entered the Promised Land, Joshua challenged the people. He said that the future was uncertain, the path was hard, but if they stayed on it, they would be victorious. Then he said, “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” Jesus Christ has the words of eternal life. Will you serve the Lord? Let us choose each day to take the hard path, the narrow path, knowing that Christ will sustain us and strengthen us, and knowing that the challenges are temporary, but the glory is eternal. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on August 11, 2024. Based on John 6:35, 41-51.

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Let’s back up a couple of weeks and paragraphs. At the beginning of chapter 6 in the Gospel According to John, we hear of one of the few miracles that are reported in all four Gospels. Jesus is in a deserted place, preaching and teaching a huge crowd. Five thousand men! Assuming there were some women and children among them, we’re talking about roughly the number of students who attend S&T. Jesus is moved by their need and feeds them. He feeds them with bread and fish. All ate and were satisfied, and the leftovers filled twelve baskets.

This establishes Jesus’s bona fides. Water into wine is nice, healing a leper or blind man is nice, but how does that help me? What has Jesus done for me? Well, here’s what he did for you: he fed you. In a deserted place, like the Sinai desert, he fed a vast multitude who he was leading to the Promised Land of God’s kingdom.

In case the Exodus symbolism is too subtle, he followed up with crossing the sea. He didn’t split it like God did for Moses, but he did walk over it. So clearly, Jesus is no ordinary man.

The problem with feeding people that day is that the next day, they would still be hungry. In fact, the people he fed track him down in Capernaum so that he can feed them again. But you know the old aphorism, If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Right now, they have Jesus with them, but they won’t always. He can feed them now, and so he did. But he needs to teach them how to survive after he’s gone.

Thus begins Jesus’s teachings on the bread of life. We only read a snippet today, but most of chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, starting from verse 25 that Susan read last week, is about the bread of life that doesn’t spoil, but instead lasts to eternal life. We will discuss how the story ends in a couple of weeks, but for now, let’s stay focused on this basic teaching: Jesus IS the bread of life.

What can that possibly mean? Right after this passage comes what I call the cannibalism verse: Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” We read this from our comfortable seats in 21^st-century America with two millennia of associating Jesus’s body and blood with the Eucharist. But if you put yourself back in first-century Judea or Galilee and imagine hearing this statement, you couldn’t help but be repulsed. This is outrageous! How could a man offer his literal body and blood as food and drink for a whole crowd?

Obviously, he can’t. Obviously, Jesus was speaking metaphorically. Perhaps this is a reference to the Eucharist. Even if it isn’t, though, we need to understand his statement as a metaphor that somehow extends the life-giving sustenance that he offered to those five thousand men into all of eternity.

Each week, after the scripture lessons, the preacher says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of the Lord is forever.” Variations of this statement appear in the three synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John’s Gospel is less explicit and more metaphorical.

The first chapter of John says that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Then the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus was the incarnation of the Logos, the divine Word, the organizing principle of the universe, the absolute Truth. The Word became flesh, and Jesus told his disciples that they had to “eat” the flesh. That is, they needed to, and now we need to, consume the Word, the true Word that transcends the words about God that we read in the Bible, the divine Truth that stands within and behind the Gospels and other teachings that have been passed down to us. We are not supposed to just hear the words read, but also internalize their message. We are supposed to make Jesus’s teachings a core part of our lives, of our very being.

This is a challenge. First of all, we don’t have Jesus here with us to teach us. What we have instead are some stories and teachings that his followers shared and someone eventually wrote down, in Greek, which were eventually translated into English. Jesus taught people in first-century Judea and Galilee, so there is a cultural barrier that we need to transcend in addition to the language barrier. But if we try hard enough, we can receive the message that stands behind the words in our Bible.

Jesus taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” If Christ is the bread of life, then maybe we ought to turn to Christ every day. Think about it: Can you eat a big meal on Sunday afternoon and then fast for the rest of the week? No. So why would we think that we can study the Word of God on Sunday and ignore it the rest of the week? Every day, we need to turn to Christ and receive his nourishing words of life.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to study scripture every day. We are also nourished when we pray. Through prayer, we are connected to our Triune God, if we take the time to listen for God’s message to us.

There are other spiritual disciplines that I’ve talked about before. The point is, every day, we need to do something to re-center our lives in Christ. And then, we need to connect our hearts and minds to our feet and hands and mouths. We need to put Christ’s teachings into practice to further God’s kingdom.

Throughout the Old Testament, God appears to Israelites in various forms—in dreams and visions, as a pillar of fire or smoke, as a burning bush, and so forth. At some point, God realized that wasn’t getting the job done. In order to truly transform the world, God had to enter it as a human being. Only a human can teach other humans how to meet their true potential as God’s image-bearers. And so we have the Incarnation, God Made Flesh, Jesus Christ, who came to really show us how to live.

By truly living into Jesus’s teachings, we too incarnate the Word. Incarnate—that’s kind of a strange word. It means to make something into flesh and blood. It’s not just words and thoughts and ideas and such, but actually living people. We are the incarnation, when we do God’s will. When we connect with Jesus’s teachings, when we allow Christ to dwell in us, when we work for a better world that more nearly approaches God’s vision for a perfect humanity.

Later in John 6, we hear that lots of Jesus’s followers fell away because of this teaching. The truth is that following Christ is hard. It’s painful. Sometimes, it means turning from things that bring instant gratification towards things that you know will be good in the long run, but are unpleasant now. Sometimes, it means giving up the good for something better. Always, it means leaving the comfort zone. But growth never happens in the comfort zone, only when we strive to go beyond it.

Let me give you an example from my career. In 2018, I was promoted to full professor. In truth, there are few positions at a university that are objectively better than being a tenured full professor. I could have just stayed the course, taught a couple classes per year, kept my research program cranking along, and so forth. That would have been staying in the comfort zone. But I knew that I had the potential to have more impact on the university if I chose a leadership path. First I was a research center director and then became department chair. Now, being department chair is a little bit more pay for a whole lot more work and a whole lot more stress, with the added benefit of the opportunity to make lots of enemies. But I was willing to make that sacrifice because I knew that I could make my department better. A similar motivation drove me to become your commissioned ruling elder, effective this afternoon. I know that I’ll do things that make some people angry at me, but I also know that something needs to be done and someone needs to do it, so I’ll be that someone. Lord willing, something better awaits us all.

Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me.” The word translated as “drawn” is maybe a bit more like “dragged.” When I read this, an image came to mind. Look at this cross on the Table. It’s a variation on a Celtic cross, with a ring around the crossing point. I want you to imagine that ring is a halo, which is a feature that appears in the sky when there are ice crystals dispersed in the atmosphere. Under the right conditions, a circular halo appears around the sun. Sometimes the halo is just white, but other times you can see the colors of a rainbow. Anyway, even if you just see the halo, you know the sun is there in the center, too.

So I want you to imagine that this ring is a halo, meaning that the sun must be back behind the cross creating the halo. But you can’t see it, because the cross is in the way. The sun is the light of God’s heavenly kingdom. You feel an irresistible pull towards the sun, like gravity, a gentle force but one that you can’t ignore or escape. God is dragging you towards God’s eternal kingdom, but to get there, you have to go through the cross. There is no way to get there except through Christ, and Christ’s way is the way of the cross. You know that the cross is a place of extreme pain, torture, agony. But you also know that it’s temporary. Everything is temporary, everything except the kingdom of God. And so you let yourself be pulled towards the cross. You get to the cross, and the pain is almost unbearable, but Jesus is right there with you. He too is suffering, but he helps you to bear the pain. And then, you’re through. You emerge on the other side of the cross in the blazing light of God’s glory. All of the pain is gone, and you know that it was worth it.

That’s the Way of the Cross. Jesus was willing to give his life for us all, because he knew that the pain and suffering were temporary, but the glory is eternal. In the same way, we can be confident that any suffering or loss we incur as we help to build God’s kingdom here in Rolla will be temporary, it will be bearable because Christ is with us, and in the end, it will be worth it for the glory on the other side.

This too is a daily need. Elsewhere, Jesus said, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” We must each take up our cross daily. This is hard. Some days, I just don’t want to. I want to take the easy path, just once. But the easy path slowly becomes a path away from God. So I do my best to choose the hard path, the painful path. I am empowered to take the hard path because I am nourished and strengthened by Christ’s flesh, his words of life, his love that continually flows over me. May God grant you the courage to also choose the hard path as you are drawn through the cross into God’s eternal glory, knowing that you are nourished and strengthened for the journey by Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on July 21, 2024. Based on Ephesians 2:11-22.

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In this passage of Ephesians, Paul talks about a dividing wall of hostility that separated Gentiles and Jews. Why? What caused this division? Well, it all went back to the Law of Moses as it was understood and practiced. I’m going to assume that you are all aware of kosher laws in some general way but not in the particulars. There are obvious and easy rules like no pork or shellfish. But truly keeping kosher requires a whole lot more effort than that.

For example, there is a verse in Exodus, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” I don’t think anyone knows where that rule really comes from. Maybe it was some pagan ritual that God outlawed through Moses. Whatever the origin, this is an important part of the kosher laws. It’s hard to know what cow provided the milk you drink, or that you used to make a particular block of cheese. So, to be safe, Jews never boil any meat in any milk, or otherwise allow dairy products to contact their meat. OK, fair enough, no cheeseburgers. Well, how clean do you get your pots and plates and silverware? Is it possible that a little bit of meat residue remains, or a little bit of dairy residue remains? Well, we don’t want to take a chance. So, a fully observant orthodox Jew will have completely separate kitchen items, maybe even a completely separate kitchen. They’ll have pots and pans and plates and silverware that they use for meat dishes, and a completely other set that they use for anything that has dairy.

This is just one of the many rules that cover both the letter of the Law as reported in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and the “fence around the Law” that rabbis developed over the centuries. So let’s imagine you’re an observant Jew in Paul’s time who is striving to follow all of the rules in every circumstance. Suppose a Gentile invites you over for dinner in a show of hospitality. You get there, and first you see that there is meat and cheese on the table. Whoa, hold on. We can’t be eating those together. Then you ask your host how the animal was killed. The kosher laws include lots of details on how animals should be butchered. Your host says, Oh, I don’t know, they took care of it down at the Temple of Artemis. Now hold on. You can’t be eating meat that was sacrificed to some other god. It just keeps going from bad to worse.

So what do you do? You don’t eat anything you’re served. You can’t be sure it was prepared properly, so instead of taking a chance, you refuse the hospitality that is offered to you. You think to yourself, These God-forsaken pagans can never know my Lord if they won’t try to learn God’s rules. Now, not every Jew had this reaction, and there were and are a diversity of ways that Jews observe the Torah, but at least some Jews would have reacted this way.

Now imagine you are that Gentile host. You went to a lot of trouble and expense to offer the best you have to a potential new friend. And what do you get in return? They turn up their nose, say that your food isn’t good enough for them, refuse your hospitality. Well fine. Let them keep to themselves and we’ll keep to ourselves.

This scene played out enough times to establish that Jews and Gentiles just aren’t compatible. In addition to not eating together, which of course is kind of a big deal for hospitality, Jews and Gentiles would not mingle in the same social circles. They maintained completely separate cultures. The separation between Jews and other religions persists to today.

But Paul said, “In his flesh [Jesus Christ] has made both into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” How can the dividing wall be broken down? Only by breaking down the Law of Moses. As long as the Law remains, there will always be a reason for Jews and Gentiles to stay separate. There will always be conflict and resentment. So Paul said that through Christ, the Law has been made ineffective, allowing Jews to freely mingle with Gentiles as one people, members of God’s household.

Before Christ, there was an “inside” and an “outside”—Jews were insiders and Gentiles were outsiders. Now that Christ has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, there is only “inside.” Jews and Gentiles alike are part of God’s family with equal access through the Holy Spirit. Easy to say, hard to do. After centuries of living separate lives and developing separate cultures, simply saying, “The distinctions don’t matter anymore,” isn’t sufficient to bring people together. Our natural inclination is to develop factions. We tend to congregate with people who think alike, who look alike, who act alike.

What divides people today? In Paul’s context, the important division was between Jew and Gentile—a religious and cultural difference. Those divisions exist still today. There is hostility between Christians and atheists. There is hostility between different kinds of Christians, whether Presbyterian or Catholic or Baptist or whatever. There is hostility between American Christians and Christians in Africa and the Global South.

But looking beyond the church, there are lots of other ways we divide ourselves. It seems like politics is the strong undercurrent that drives so many disagreements, especially in a presidential election year. Things have gotten particularly heated and even violent last week with the assassination attempt. Violence is never acceptable, but is the natural result of the apocalyptic rhetoric and our culture of glorifying violence. We don’t really know what drove the shooter, but perhaps a desire for fame or notoriety. Regardless, I’m not looking forward to the next six months of campaigns and election aftermath. Whoever wins, it’s going to be ugly, potentially violent, and relationships will certainly be damaged or broken.

What else? What other ways do we find to divide ourselves? Ethnicity. Language. Gender. Age. Class. Wealth. The list goes on and on. In some cases, the formal divisions have ended, but the damage persists because, like the Jews and Gentiles, simply saying “there is no reason for conflict” doesn’t eliminate it. For example, it was IN MY LIFETIME that women were given the right to get loans in their own names. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed in 1974 and prohibited discrimination against a loan or credit applicant for reasons related to sex, marital status or familial status (as well as race, religion, and other reasons). I suspect that there are people here today whose lives would have been different if the rules had changed earlier. I also know that a decade later, probably two or three decades later, probably even today a half-century later, women still had and have trouble getting salesmen to respect them as individuals capable of making independent financial decisions. This is just one of the many ways that artificial divisions exist in our society and persist even after laws change.

We may be Presbyterians, but we are also Americans. We spend an hour or two each week focused on our church family, but the other 160+ hours living in American culture. We cannot help but inject our American attitudes into our church life. We cannot help but develop a church culture that looks an awful lot like American culture, but hopefully with more love of God and love of neighbor than most people.

So the question I would put to you is this: What aspects of our American culture and congregational culture have we imported into God’s kingdom, that inadvertently create barriers that keep people out? I believe that God’s realm is a state of universal human flourishing—universal, not just for a few people, but for everyone. God’s love is on offer to everyone who seeks it. What do we do that creates barriers? Do we actually have “open doors”?

When I look out at this congregation, I mostly see middle-class, educated Baby Boomers. That’s not a value assessment—that’s just a factual statement of who we are. Problems arise when we take our perspectives as the norm and expect others to conform to us. For example, in 2016, we had our Christmas Eve service at 5:00 pm. I didn’t think much about it, because I have never had to work past noon on Christmas Eve. Schools are closed, so teachers and other staff are off. Of course, if you’re retired, then you’re not tied to a work schedule. But there are plenty of jobs for which Christmas DAY is a holiday, but Christmas EVE is not. This was a decision that was made without any malice or exclusionary impulse, but that did in fact exclude certain people from attending worship.

In what other ways do we take our own lifestyles, attitudes, and family situations as normative? On the one hand, we should adapt to the people who show up, but on the other hand, we should meet people where they are. We all have a particular vision of what it means to worship God, and what a sanctuary should look like, and how the liturgy and music should flow, and so forth. For most of us, that vision has been shaped by many years or decades of worshipping in this church, or perhaps in other similar churches. But none of what we do is the One True Way to Worship God. In talking with my family members and friends who attend other churches, there is a ton of diversity, a wide range of ways that people can authentically worship the same God that we do.

Now, you might say that having a worship service that looks like the broader culture is giving in and abandoning our principles. But again I’ll say, none of what we do is the One True Way to Worship God, and we are called to meet people where they are and invite them into God’s family, not to force them to become like us first.

Once we meet people where they are, our goal should be to enable them to connect to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and to live in shalom, just like the banner says. Paul repeatedly uses the word “peace” in this passage: For Christ is our peace, who proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. The Hebrew word for peace is shalom, but it means far more than the absence of violence. In the book Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, Christian author Cornelius Plantinga described the biblical concept of shalom:

The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a cease-fire between enemies. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness and delight – a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.

Think about that: shalom is the way things ought to be. Life in Christ is universal flourishing, wholeness, the way God intended for life to be. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that something you want everyone to experience? The promise of the Gospel is that shalom is available to everyone if they choose to participate. But how can they choose to participate if nobody offers them that choice? If a person thinks that they are unworthy of God, or thinks that all churches are full of hypocrites who can’t possibly point them to God, or wants to participate but doesn’t know how or where to start, then it is incumbent on us to reach out to them, meet them where they are, identify whatever barriers they are encountering, and break them down.

In a recent discussion about spirituality that I attended, we talked about challenges on the spiritual journey. The biggest one that came up was fear. Too many people who were raised in a church were raised to fear God’s wrath, rather than welcoming God’s love. They were raised to fear that if they do something wrong, they’ll burn in Hell in eternal conscious torment. This fear is reinforced by cultural messages that seem to say that all Christian churches preach “fire and brimstone.” But I saw this Justin Buzzard quote circulating on the internet: “Christianity should feel like ‘My chains fell off’ not ‘I better not screw up.’” There is reconciliation through Christ, forgiveness and love and healing and wholeness. We should radiate that love to all who enter our doors.

Another challenge that came up is one that I struggled with for many years. I thought that I was self-sufficient and that I didn’t need God. This whole Christianity thing didn’t make much sense anyway, so why bother? I know there are lots of young people out there, by which I mean people younger than me, who feel the same way. But someday, they may have a life event that shows them that no, they really aren’t self-sufficient and they need something else in their lives. How can we be that something, a hospital for the spiritually sick, a place where people can turn when they have nowhere else to go?

The core of the Gospel is this: The kingdom of God is at hand! Shalom, peace, healing, wholeness, and flourishing are all available to everyone. Let us seek God’s guidance and wisdom to see the barriers that people encounter and then do our part to remove those barriers, to enable them to welcome Christ’s reign in their lives. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on July 7, 2024. Based on Mark 6:1-13.

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Carol Dweck is a psychologist whose 2006 book, called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, brought her work into popular culture. To oversimplify, she categorized people as having one of two mindsets: fixed or growth. With a fixed mindset, you believe that intelligence or abilities are fixed and not worth trying to change. Here are some example statements:

• I believe that people are born smart or dumb and can never change.
• I think it is too late for most people to learn and gain a new perspective.
• I am who I am, and there is nothing I can do to change that.

By contrast, someone with a growth mindset recognizes that nothing is carved in stone. Sure, some people have more ability in some areas than others, but everyone is able to change and grow in some way. Typical statements include:

• I believe that everyone can learn something new and become good at it over time.
• I always try, even if I think I will fail—failure is just another opportunity to learn, which can help me succeed the next time.
• I think that every opportunity is a chance to grow my knowledge; I can always learn something new.

Now, the reality is that everyone has both fixed and growth mindsets in different parts of their lives. For example, I generally believe that I can’t dance and won’t ever be able to dance. Now, is that really true? Probably not. I took dance lessons as a kid and have decent rhythm. Mostly, I don’t want to change, so I convince myself that I can’t change.

This concept has escaped from academic discourse into pop science or even pseudo-science, so I need to be careful here. Just because you believe you can change doesn’t mean that you can do anything you want. I’m pretty sure that I’ll never play in the NBA, no matter how much I believe I can become a better basketball player. But I can say that if you don’t believe that you can change, you almost certainly won’t change. If you don’t believe that you can ever understand the Bible, you won’t take up the practices that would enable you to understand it. If you don’t believe that you can learn how to sing, you won’t try to sing along with the congregation or join the choir or do anything else that would enable you to become a good singer.

A particularly dangerous form of a fixed mindset is one that is applied to other people. You might believe that, say, a homeless person can never become a stable, productive member of the community. You might believe that people of a certain gender or age or race or ethnicity are incapable of achieving some goal. That belief is thankfully less prevalent now than it was a generation or two ago, but it still lurks beneath the surface of discussions about immigration, for example. Every parent has probably closed off one dream or another of their children because they didn’t believe their child was capable of succeeding in that particular field. Many friendships and family relationships are broken and never heal because neither person thinks that the other one can change.

The people of Nazareth suffered from this form of fixed mindset. They knew Jesus when he was a little kid, and when he grew up and apprenticed as a carpenter with his father. They could imagine him as a good carpenter, but they couldn’t imagine him as a prophet, let alone the Messiah.

I think I’ve mentioned before that my sister is a United Methodist pastor. In the United Methodist Church, the bishop assigns pastors to churches, in consultation with the individual churches as well as district superintendents. One basic principle they follow, though, is that pastors are not assigned to the church where they grew up. See, when my sister was ordained, she became Pastor Jennifer, and she has been an acknowledged pastoral leader in every church she has served. But if she had been assigned to the church where she grew up, there would have been at least some people who couldn’t get past seeing her as little Jennie, the six-year-old girl with pigtails, instead of Pastor Jennifer, the dynamic preacher and leader she grew into.

In the same way, those who knew Jesus, the little boy, couldn’t accept Jesus the Messiah. As a result, they missed out on the glorious life that is available through Christ and in Christ. He was unable to do any deeds of power, so the Nazarenes did not get to witness the inbreaking of God’s kingdom.

The apostles, though, embraced Jesus. These were just ordinary men. We know most of them were fishermen, simple folk trying to eke out a living. One was a tax collector, an outcast that nobody would respect. And yet, they all embraced the possibility of growth. They trusted that Jesus could help them become something more, and become a part of something bigger than themselves. Throughout the Gospels, they all seem kind of obtuse, which I suppose makes sense since they were fishermen, not theologians. But they kept trying and eventually learned what Jesus was trying to teach them, and when the Holy Spirit energized them, they were transformed into the leaders of what became a new religion.

In the same way, God can change each one of us, if we are willing to embrace the opportunity. Through Christ, God’s kingdom is available to everyone. God’s realm is a state of being in which everyone can thrive and flourish and grow. Through Christ, everyone can experience God’s power, but not everyone chooses to do so. The people of Nazareth chose not to, and so they did not experience any of Jesus’s deeds of power. The apostles chose to live into Christ, and so they grew into spiritual leaders. I made that choice, too. It was a little trickier for me, given that Jesus was not physically standing there calling to me like he did on the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee. I had to listen a little more closely to hear his voice. Yet I was willing to change and grow. Down deep in my core, I’m the same person that I’ve always been, a beloved child of God. Yet the way my deepest self is expressed has changed dramatically. If you knew me twenty years ago, you would not have ever expected to see me in a pulpit. Even five years ago, I had a lot to learn about leading and interacting with people, and I still do. But compared to where I was before committing to a life in Christ, I have grown tremendously.

You too can change and grow. You might think you’re too old or too set in your ways or what have you, but as long as you have breath, you can grow. In fact, you probably wouldn’t be here today if you didn’t believe that you could still grow in Christ. We will never become perfect in this life, but we can always improve. We can always more nearly approach God’s will and God’s vision for us.

In a lot of ways, an organization is like a person. Just as a person can have a fixed or growth mindset, an organization can have a certain mindset as well. You may think that you can personally change, but that the church never will. But that’s wrong. We CAN change. In fact, if you think about who we were a decade ago, you will realize that we have grown tremendously. From time to time, as our affirmation of faith, we use the Prayer for Listening and Speaking that the session composed while John Oerter was our pastor. It’s easy to forget how urgently we needed that prayer, how urgently we needed to heal the ways we were communicating and interacting with one another. We have healed and grown, and are a much more unified congregation than we were back then.

We can continue to grow and change if we choose to do so. If we simply accept that the church we are today is who we will always be, we will slowly decline. We will cease to represent God’s kingdom. We will prop each other up, but we won’t really have any impact on the community. But if instead, we believe that God is still at work in the world, and specifically that God is still at work among us, we can continue to grow and change. God’s grace will fall like rain, flowing over and through us, empowering us to become the church God intends for us to be.

I believe that God still has a plan for us. I believe that we have a message of love that people in Rolla need to hear. I believe that we have a vision of Christian community that people in Rolla need to participate in. Yet too often, we are held back by our self-image as an unchanging and unchangeable institution.

Jesus encountered plenty of people with a fixed mindset. Besides the people of Nazareth, he had to deal with the chief priests, scribes, and Pharisees who all had an understanding of God that they had inherited from their forefathers and that they could not imagine changing. Sometimes, Jesus would verbally spar with his opponents, trying to get them to understand who God is and what God’s kingdom is like. Yet their fixed mindset was a barrier to them accepting this new teaching.

So for the most part, Jesus moved on. Rather than spending all of his time trying to get inflexible people to open their minds to a new teaching, he went where the seeds of his message found fertile soil. He told his apostles to do the same—if they were not welcomed, they were supposed to just move on to the next village. Yet when Jesus was welcomed, and when his apostles were welcomed, the world changed. The blind would receive sight, the lame would walk, the sick would be healed, and the outsider would become a part of the community again.

This same opportunity and this same choice come to us today, and every day. Each day, we can choose to cling to the received wisdom of our forerunners, cling to our old ways of being the church, and accept our current reality as the only reality. OR, we can choose to embrace change, embrace the possibility of new life in Christ, and allow God’s grace to flow down on us and out through us. Let us seek now to choose new life, to embrace the possibilities that are available to us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Mark 4:26-34.

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Most of you know that I hunt elk and deer. But that’s not all. I hunt squirrels and doves, too. Doves are an entirely different form of hunting because you shoot them as they are flying by. It’s a very active experience. I’m not a very good shooter, so I average two or three doves per box of 25 shotgun shells. To have any chance at all, you need a reasonably sized field with appropriate food for them, and multiple hunters to keep things moving.

A typical dove field is at least two acres, sometimes five or ten or even larger. Sunflowers are the most common crop, but I’ve seen corn, millet, and buckwheat. The idea is for the crop to mature to the point of producing seeds a couple of weeks before the season opens on September 1, so that the doves have time to find the field. Actually, it takes a couple of years before the doves reliably come back to the field, but they’ll only start coming if you do things right in the first place. Anyway, when the time is right, you bush-hog the field in strips so that there is food on the ground for the doves, then hope for the best.

Several times, I have gone hunting on public land in Missouri. The last couple of years, though, Missouri Department of Conservation hasn’t had funding to plant, so I haven’t been able to go here. Instead, I’ve gone up to my father-in-law’s house near Effingham. Ron has been trying for a few years now to get a dove field going, with little to show for it so far.

First off, his field is just a little too small. It’s more like one-and-a-half acres instead of two. He’s also in the middle of farmland, so his field needs to be extremely attractive to really draw doves in.

Secondly, he has tried different crops and different planting schemes. One year, he used too much seed for the space. The seeds all sprouted, but they didn’t mature and produce a good harvest. Another year, he got the crop planted too late for it to mature in time. Yet another year, his crops matured too early, so the doves had come and gone before the season started.

This year, he’s going to try again one last time to see if he can get it right. As I mentioned, doves actually take a few years to reliably return to a given field. So perhaps he has done enough over the past few years that if he gets a good crop with the right timing, he’ll have success.

I’m not much of a farmer myself. I’m not even much of a gardener, but Rhonda is. It’s too hard for her to get down to plants on the ground, so I built her a couple of containers like the church used to have. We have had varying levels of success with them. Like her dad sowing too much seed in his dove field, Rhonda sometimes plants too many plants in a single container. Also, we have had to experiment with different kinds of plants. Tomatoes seem to do pretty well, as long as you keep them watered. You would think that pepper plants would be about like tomatoes, but you would be wrong. We haven’t had any success growing peppers of any kind in containers, so this year, I planted some down on the ground. Similarly, cucumbers need to be planted in the ground and need a lot of space and the right conditions. Last year, we tried them in a spot that isn’t really sunny enough, and only harvested a few small, misshapen cucumbers. We moved to a different area this year, and so far things look OK, but we have a long way to go.

Jesus was talking to an audience who was intimately familiar with all of this and much, much more. Many of them would have been subsistence farmers, whose life depended on knowing as much as possible about growing crops. They had to know when to plant, what kinds of crops thrived on the land that they could use, how to prepare the soil, how to care for the seedlings, and more. Yet Jesus said, “The seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” As much as ancient farmers knew, they were still ignorant of many of the most basic agricultural concepts that have enabled modern society to enjoy plentiful food.

If someone mentions a parable about sowing seeds, your first thought is probably a totally different parable that Jesus told about different kinds of soil where the seeds landed—on the path, rocky soil, among weeds, and good soil that produced a hundredfold. In that parable, Jesus was talking about evangelism. If you want to spread the Gospel, your best bet is to sow love as broadly as possible. Love is a limitless resource, and in fact, the more you give, the more you have to give. Especially if you let God’s love channel through you, to continually renew you.

But we have other limits that we need to be aware of. Time, first and foremost. Ming alluded to that last week during our informational meeting—how can I possibly have time to do more? Well, I’ll just need to be efficient. But even at maximum efficiency, there are only so many hours in the day, so there’s only so much that I personally can do. Each one of us has limits on our time, and commitments that we cannot avoid or abandon. Plus, there are only so many people who are available to serve our church right now.

Energy is another one. As we age, we have less and less energy and can’t accomplish everything we used to. Oh, we gain wisdom, so that we can work smarter, but that only partially compensates for the fact that our muscles and joints are declining. Another aspect is that some activities revive us, and some drain us. I am naturally an introvert, so spending time in a crowd is sometimes very draining for me. Other people are extraverts and are energized by spending time with friends. Everyone has tasks in their lives that drain them spiritually or emotionally, much more than just the physical effort. And sometimes it’s not the task itself, but the amount. If I volunteer at the Mission to serve one meal a week, I leave feeling energized from having accomplished a good deed. If I do two meals in a week, or try to serve in some other way, it drains me. It shifts from being a joy to being an obligation. It’s important to be cognizant of those things that bring you joy and energy and those things that drain you, and manage your energy level accordingly.

Money is another limitation. It would be wonderful if we could replace our sanctuary doors, upgrade our sound system, and make many other improvements to our church building. It would be wonderful if we could hire a full-time pastor plus a full-time youth or campus minister. Give me a few minutes and I’ll think of lots of ways we could spend more money. But the reality is that we have limited financial resources that we need to manage and allocate for our operations and for new ministries.

So given all of these limitations, we need to be strategic. We cannot be all things to all people, but we can meet some people where they are and help them enter the kingdom of God. We should never turn anyone away, but if we try to do everything, we’ll accomplish nothing.

For example, Fort Leonard Wood is a substantial mission field for Rolla area churches. I don’t know how many people come through the fort on an annual basis, but I know it’s a lot. Some are only here for a few weeks, others for months or years, and still others retire from the military and stay around for decades, working as civilians. These are people who are hungry for interpersonal connections, since each time they move, their lives are disrupted. We could figure out how to reach them and invite them into our Christian fellowship.

It’s a great idea—not mine, one that came up in a discussion with session. But the question is, how do we make it happen? Who has the burning desire to serve that population, enough so that they will learn their needs, determine the best way to connect with them, and coordinate a group of our members to surround them with love? If we do it half-heartedly, we can do more harm than good. Growing the kingdom of God is not the work of a month or a season, but of a lifetime. If we start some outreach and then fade away, people at the fort who stick around will remember us as a flaky church that can’t be trusted.

So, maybe that’s a great idea that we don’t have the bandwidth for. Or, maybe it’s a great idea that we need to talk about more broadly and find a little group who has the passion to make it happen. The effort needs to grow from a sincere, heartfelt desire.

Assuming that all goes well with my commissioning process, my plan is to start learning all of the great ideas that I know are lingering out there in the congregation, and then try to find some commonalities. I’ll try to find two or three or four people who have a shared vision, and then try to give them the tools and support they need to succeed. That’s something that I think I have learned how to do over the past four years of leadership on campus and in the community—not so much to execute my own vision, but to enable other people to pursue their vision. To provide behind-the-scenes support so that others can do the work that suits their particular skills the best.

As we go, there’s another important agricultural practice we need to keep on our list: pruning. If you are growing grapes or berries, it’s important to prune the vine so that the plant has enough resources to produce good fruit. If you don’t prune it, the plant needs to put too much of its energy into growing the vine and not enough into the fruit. In fact, Rhonda has been doing this with her tomato plants. She prunes off some of the branches so that the remaining branches are stronger and healthier.

Pruning your life or the life of a church or other organization is much harder. Pruning a church’s ministries means ending something that you care deeply about, but that has become more of a drain on your resources than a source of life. My friend Sharon starts Vacation Bible School tomorrow. Her church is part of a coalition that works together on several activities, VBS chief among them. They have struggled just a bit since the pandemic, but they still have the people and the energy to make VBS happen. We stopped doing VBS even before the pandemic because it became just too much work, falling on too few people, for the limited impact that we had. Of course, now, it would be hard to have VBS without severely disrupting the preschool’s operations. None of this means that VBS is a bad thing to do in the abstract; it was just something that we needed to prune so that we could put our time, energy, and other resources to work elsewhere for the good of the kingdom of God. It was something that didn’t work during this season of the church’s life.

Fired Up! falls into that category, too. I dearly loved leading Fired Up! and valued the time we spent in that form of worship with a smaller, more intimate group. But there’s NO WAY that I could lead Fired Up! and be preaching here today, or doing any of the myriad other things I do for the church. So, it had to be pruned.

As we move forward, there will likely be other things that we have to prune away. We may start some things that don’t work out. We may start something that ends up crowding out something else that we’re doing. We may find that some things that we thought were essential, are actually vestiges of a different era that are no longer life-giving.

The promise of the Gospel, though, is that the kingdom of God is at hand! If we follow the Spirit’s leading, if we plant the right seeds, if we commit ourselves to channeling God’s love, Jesus taught that God will give the growth. A spiritual advisor once told me that God does 98% of the work. We have to do our 2%—we have to sow the right seeds in the right soil—but if we do, God will do the rest. We have limited time, energy, money, and people, but our infinite Lord will give us the growth. With that growth will come more resources, more ideas, more love to share, more abundant life. Now may God bless us with the wisdom to choose the right seeds and the energy and courage to do our part in growing God’s kingdom. Amen.

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Sermon preached June 9, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Mark 3:20-35.

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A few times in the Gospel of Mark, and a few other places in the Bible, we encounter a rhetorical figure known as an inclusio. One of the most famous examples is the story about the woman who had a hemorrhage. In that story, Jesus starts off towards the home of Jairus, a leader of the synagogue whose daughter is dying. On the way, a woman with a hemorrhage touches his garment and is healed. Then Jesus gets to Jairus’s home and heals the daughter. So an inclusio is where one story is inserted in the middle of another one, like meat in a sandwich.

In today’s lesson, we start out with Jesus going into a house that was extremely crowded, so much that his family was worried about him. Then we have some interchange between Jesus and the scribes about casting out demons. Finally, we wrap up the story about Jesus and his family.

Whenever you encounter an inclusio, you should ask yourself, what do these two stories have to do with one another? I mean, Mark could have told the story in a totally different way. He could have told the story about Jesus’s family, and then told the story of the exchange with the scribes. You might say, Well, Mark was just telling things in the order that they happened. Wrong. That’s not how ancient authors told stories, or modern authors for that matter. When I’m telling a hunting story or a story about my childhood or college or whatever, the details are mostly correct, but seldom in the right order. I arrange the details to suit the purposes of the moment. In the same way, Mark constructs these inclusios to point us towards the connections between the two interwoven stories.

So first, let’s talk about the meat. The scribes are so incensed at what Jesus is doing that they travel from Jerusalem to wherever Jesus is calling home right now, probably Capernaum. They were upset at what Jesus was preaching, and at the signs he was performing, so they made up a story that he was himself possessed by a demon. Jesus points out the foolishness of this assertion. If he were working by the power of Beelzebul, wouldn’t he want his demons to keep causing mischief and misery? Why would he be casting them out from the people they had possessed?

In our post-Enlightenment way of thinking, we imagine that the people that Jesus healed were epileptic or had schizophrenia or something like that. But to the people that Jesus spoke to, the demons were very real. This was spiritual warfare, and Jesus was winning. The scribes were proposing that Jesus wasn’t on God’s side and defeating evil, but instead was like a general on the devil’s side telling his demonic troops to retreat. How ridiculous! A house divided cannot stand. If Beelzebul is telling his demons to retreat, then he has lost already. But if Jesus was who he said he was, he had Beelzebul on the run.

There is a larger message here, though. Not only is Jesus defending himself against ridiculous accusations, but also, he is telling us how important unity is. A kingdom divided cannot stand, and neither can the Church, which is Christ’s body. If Christ’s body is divided, where is its strength?

The last time the Jesus movement was really unified was probably during the Last Supper. Then Judas slipped out and splintered off from the movement, Jesus and the rest of the disciples went to the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was arrested, and everyone scattered. After his resurrection, the movement lived on and there was apparent unity in the early part of Acts, but we can see signs of disunity later in Acts, in Paul’s letters, and in other New Testament writings. In the two millennia since then, the situation has gotten worse and worse: we have perhaps 200 denominations in America and 45,000 worldwide. At first, the divisions were largely about whether Christians needed to be Jews, too. Then there were a bunch of theological divisions, for example, Marcion’s followers being cast out, and Gnosticism being declared heretical. At some point, the Oriental Orthodox Church split off from the Chalcedonian church, and then later the Roman Catholic Church split from the Eastern Orthodox Church, partly over theological disputes and partly over power and authority.

In the centuries that followed, some of the controversies that led to division were about theology, some were about power, and some were about social issues. Often, all three were at work, such as a theological justification for what was really a power struggle between two groups with different cultural backgrounds. Lately, it seems that most of the splits are related to social issues. There is a great sorting going on, where denominations are becoming increasingly extreme—the liberal churches are getting more liberal while the conservative churches are getting more conservative. Few have managed to maintain a middle position. Most of the time, theological or social moderates simply opt out altogether.

We are all the worse for it. We are all better off when we recognize that each of us is just trying to follow God as best we understand.

Most of the differences among churches come down to orthodoxy: we believe different things about God, salvation, relationships, authority, the Bible, and so forth. Orthodoxy is a great way to sow division, since so much of theology is so difficult to understand anyway and it can be twisted to appear to support almost any position. I think it’s more important to focus on orthopraxy, which is to say, we should focus on how we act, not what we think. CrossRoads is an excellent example of a church built on orthopraxy. That’s the congregation that meets above the Mission, where the Vineyard used to be. CrossRoads is clearly Christian, but they have no faith statement that one member could use against another or that they could use against outsiders. Instead, they have core values: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness, love, unity. These aren’t exactly the same as Paul’s list of fruits of the spirit, but there is some overlap. What I want to highlight, though, is that while their pastor, Patrick, preaches the Gospel, none of these core values rest on believing in, say, an inerrant Bible or a particular understanding of the Trinity. None of them rest on saying the sinner’s prayer or reciting the Nicene Creed, as we will do shortly. Yet all of them are core attributes of the kingdom of God. All of them are ways that we should treat each other if we desire to live as one big family, God’s family, God’s kin.

Which brings us back to the “bread” of the inclusio sandwich. The passage today starts with people saying that Jesus is out of his mind and asking his family to come talk to him about it. This is classic triangulation. Do you remember John Oerter talking about triangulation? That’s where person A has a problem with person B, but instead of going to person B, they tell person C to “do something.” Here the scribes enlist Jesus’s family to “do something” about this crazy guy who is messing up their plans. What does the family actually think? We don’t know. It appears to me that the family has been manipulated by gossip to serve as tools of the scribes. The scribes couldn’t get to Jesus any other way, so they use his family against him.

We don’t really know much about Jesus’s family or their relationships with him during his ministry. We know that after his resurrection and ascension, his brother James became a central figure in the early church. We know that his mother Mary was around at the start of his ministry, the wedding at Cana, and she appears periodically throughout the story, including at the foot of the cross. But we don’t know if they followed him during his lifetime. In fact, their absence from the narrative speaks volumes. Here he is, the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, with a dozen close companions and perhaps thousands of followers, but his own family isn’t among them. In Luke, when Jesus makes his first speech in his hometown of Nazareth, did his family step up to protect him from the crowd? No.

It seems to me that Jesus had kind of a difficult relationship with his family. In that way, he was quintessentially human. Many people have strained relationships with their family of origin. Some of us are blessed to have positive relationships with at least some portion of our family, but there is always a little bit of pain, too. Relationships are hard and people are inflexible at times, so the people who we love the most are the most likely to hurt us in some way. This is no criticism of anyone; this is just the way human relationships work.

We all bear the marks of our families of origin, good or bad. My mom always says, “We are destined to be like our parents,” and I definitely see both of my parents in myself and in my siblings. I definitely see both Rhonda and me in both of our kids. For good or for bad, families leave their marks on us. They form us into who we are, in ways that we can never truly transcend.

But then Jesus closes this scene by saying, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” I will always be a part of the family that raised me, but I can also choose to become part of God’s family. Jesus has given us an invitation. We are already welcome in God’s family, just as we are. All that Jesus asks is that we choose to join it.

In a sense, the traditions that say you must invite Jesus into your heart are right about something: Jesus is ready to enter each person’s life, to transform each person’s heart, but he won’t force his way in. Just as soon as we choose to do the will of God, we become an active part of Christ’s family. We don’t have to change who we are, but we do have to change our actions, our attitudes, our behaviors. We do have to practice compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness, love, and unity.

In so doing, we become a part of Christ’s family, and more than that, we become a part of Christ’s body, which is the Church. Whether we call ourselves Presbyterian or Episcopalian or Catholic or Christian or none of the above, if we do God’s will, we become a part of Christ’s family. And what is God’s will? To spread the message of love, peace, and reconciliation that is at the heart of the Gospel. To spread this message in words and deeds. To spread this message through healing—healing the sick, healing the brokenhearted, healing the community, healing relationships.

As the Spirit works through us, healing the world, spreading God’s love, we become a part of Christ’s family, the kin-dom of God. We become an exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world. We continue the process of transformation that has been at work for thousands of years and that begins anew as each generation once again seeks the unity of the Holy Spirit that is at the root of a healthy community.

Who is my family? You. Each one of you, who are all striving to do God’s will. We all fall short, and yet Christ’s continual forgiveness enables us to remain connected to Him throughout our spiritual journey. Now may Christ continue to walk with each of us and with all of us together as we strive to build Christ’s family throughout the community and around the world. Amen.

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Sermon preached June 2, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on 2 Corinthians 4:1-12. If you listen to the podcast, the meditation begins at 20:24.

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We have this treasure in jars of clay. Hmmm. What exactly is meant by “jars of clay”? Well, in Paul’s time, clay jars were the most common storage unit. Anything that had to be ceremonially clean, like water for the mikveh, used stone jars since clay jars could have unclean residue. Most of the vessels used at the Temple were gold, silver, or bronze. But for day-to-day use, clay jars were the common choice. Fragile, common, unassuming.

When I read this passage, I thought of this teapot. (bring it out) Rhonda has had this teapot longer than I’ve known her. It originally belonged to her great-grandmother. She said that almost immediately, she broke the lid, but then repaired it. Clay pottery is fragile like that! She started putting coins in it, and eventually, it became a repository for lots of interesting money. (Pull out a few coins/bills/etc.)

Then the other day, I noticed this on the dresser. This is a clay jar that one of our kids made in elementary school. Rhonda uses it to store jewelry. Now, anything really valuable, we keep in a safe or in the bank. But for general storage, for items of curiosity or items we might use regularly, this pot or this jar are perfectly fine.

If Paul were writing to modern Americans, instead of clay jars, he might say that we have this treasure in Tupperware. Can you imagine keeping your most prized possessions in some cheap Walmart Tupperware?

Yet that’s exactly what Paul is likening us to. We are just simple clay jars or Tupperware, or maybe old margarine containers, but we are entrusted with the most valuable treasure in the universe: God’s love. Modern spirituality focuses mainly on self-improvement and connecting with God, which is to say, it focuses mainly on either making ourselves into fancier clay jars or filling ourselves with more treasure.

Each summer—well, I’ve done it twice now, and I’m signed up to go again this year—each summer, I go on retreat at the White House Retreat Center. Over the course of three days of silence, I listen to preaching, I pray, I read, I go on spiritual walks, that sort of thing. It’s a Jesuit center, so of course the worship is Roman Catholic, but that’s OK. We all pray to the same God. Anyway, the purpose of the retreat is spiritual formation. I come home refreshed, renewed, re-connected to God, and with a new perspective. I’m filled with the Spirit. The treasure in my clay jar has been topped off.

Other people meditate, or go on nature walks, or otherwise try to step away from the world. Now, this is great! As far as it goes. In fact, I remember encouraging spiritual practices on several occasions, things like reading the Bible, or prayer, or whatever. All of these practices and experiences help to make us better pottery or fill us with more spiritual treasure. But at the end of the day, we still hold this treasure in jars of clay. Making ourselves better people is a good thing, but is not truly the Gospel.

What is the Gospel? The kingdom of God is at hand! We go forth into the world spreading this good news, not to draw attention to ourselves, but to direct attention to God. Once, Mary properly chastised me for wearing beard ornaments in the pulpit. I like to be festive, but when I’m preaching, the focus should not be on me, not even on the words that I say, but on the Word Made Flesh that my words point to. In the same way, each time we proclaim the Gospel, we should point not to ourselves, but to the kingdom of God.

Evangelism is kind of a dirty word to many people, largely because of the awful ways some people do it. The very worst are the people who come to campus and shout at students about how terrible and sinful they are. But there are plenty of other examples of bad evangelism. Usually, the end goal of the evangelizer is to make you join them. They want you to believe exactly what they believe, pray exactly as they pray, and so forth. I’ve seen memes about “winning souls.” They want to conquer you and make you a part of their team.

Paul’s message here, though, is that we should not be proclaiming ourselves, but Christ. Now, I do appreciate being recognized on the street, and being connected to the message that I strive to proclaim. The other day, when I was running, I passed a guy I’ve never met but who I’ve seen on the street before. We said hello, and then he said, “I really appreciate your articles in the paper!” I take that as a good sign that my words are reaching beyond this congregation and maybe helping people connect with the God I know and love. The fact that he recognizes me and connects me with my writing means that someday, perhaps, we can have a more substantial conversation than a cordial “Good morning!” Perhaps someday, he’ll share his perspective with me as well, and we can learn from each other.

I would love it if he were to also connect my message with this congregation and come worship with us, but that’s not really the point. Our task is not so much to build this congregation as it is to build the kingdom of God. I believe that if we keep our focus on preaching Christ, preaching a loving God, preaching about a world of universal human flourishing, that other people will want to be a part of what we’re doing here. That’s how we will grow—by being a church that is doing something that people want to participate in.

But as Paul said, we proclaim not ourselves, but Christ. If people join us in worship, it won’t be because of who we are, but because this is a place where they can encounter God. In modern America, people are hungry for connection and for being a part of something bigger than themselves. There is nothing bigger than the kingdom of God! We should strive to make our congregation a visible manifestation of God’s realm, just one among many.

In our creeds, especially the Nicene and Apostles Creeds, we confess to one holy, catholic, apostolic Church. Holy: we are set apart to belong to God. Catholic: not in the sense that Jesuits are Roman Catholics, but universal. We are one Church who worship one God. We should pursue unity in the Church, while recognizing diversity.

We are also an apostolic Church. An apostle is one who is sent out into the world. A disciple is a follower of a teacher, such as Jesus of Nazareth. An apostle is one who is sent out to carry the teacher’s message to others. We are like ambassadors of God’s kingdom, striving to establish diplomatic relations with the world and encourage others to join in.

Indeed, being an apostle, or an evangelizer, encompasses roughly half of the Great Ends of the Church, which are: The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind; The shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God; The maintenance of divine worship; The preservation of the truth; The promotion of social righteousness; and The exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world. As the Church, we are called to proclaim the gospel, promote social righteousness, and exhibit the kingdom of heaven. These are apostolic callings. We have this treasure from God, and are called to put it to good use in the world.

Being an apostle, or an evangelizer, is hard. Look at Paul: afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed. Why was he able to endure? Because he had Christ to support him. He knew that the treasure he had received only had value if he shared it, and he knew that Christ’s love is an endless fountain of blessing welling up within him.

I’d like to share a couple of practices with you, ways that you can be strengthened and emboldened to continue proclaiming the Gospel and exhibiting the kingdom of heaven. The first comes to me from Lindy Hardwick. Many of you know Lindy; among other things, she has preached here a few times. She has spent a lot of her career as a chaplain. When I mentioned that I struggle sometimes with pastoral care, this is what she told me to do. Imagine that there is a hole in the top of your head and that light from God is flowing down through it into you. Then imagine that there is a hole in your chest that channels that light out to the person you are speaking to, who is hurting and needs to feel God’s love. At the same time, if they are pouring out their pain, their anxiety, their anger, or their fear on you, imagine taking it in through your chest and passing it straight up to God.

In this way, instead of trying to store up the treasure of God’s love and dole it out, you become a conduit for love. Instead of relying on yourself and your own wisdom and strength to care for someone, rely on God through the power of the Holy Spirit flowing in and through you to be their ultimate Comforter.

Now, before we turn to the Lord’s Table for holy spiritual sustenance, I’d like to do an exercise with you. I receive a daily message from the Center for Action and Contemplation, and a couple of months ago, they had this exercise led by Brian McLaren and Carmen Acevedo Butcher, which I have edited just slightly. As a background, this “Peace and Light” meditation came at the conclusion of a week reviewing seven stories. The first six stories are ways that community fails to work for everyone: the domination story, the revolution story, the isolation story, the purification story, the accumulation story, and the victimization story. The seventh story is the story of reconciliation. In the Seventh Story, human beings are not the protagonists of the world. Love is.

So now, the practice. You may be a jar of clay, but you are capable of being a conduit, a vessel, for the glorious treasure of the Light of the World. Take a few deep breaths, and let your body come to rest for a moment. Imagine the seventh story, the story of reconciliation, as a tiny point of light. The story comes through your ears or you see it lived out in someone’s life. It enters who you are. It’s a story of peace, whose hero is love. It’s a story of justice and equity and safety and joy. Imagine that story as a little point of light that comes to rest in the center of your being. Then imagine that little point of light becoming a pool of light and a spring or a fountain of light. Just for the next few moments, picture that point of light growing within you.

Imagine yourself becoming full of that light. Now imagine that light filling you and that light shining out through you. Imagine now that this light coming out from you touches those around you, those in your pew, everyone else in the sanctuary, those in your family, your neighbors, others in your neighborhood, those in your workplace, people throughout Rolla and Phelps County, and all others you meet. Imagine that this light embraces them and also that it fills them.

We all know that there are many other stories at work in the world, stories that are wounding people, stories that maybe wounded each of us. Let’s realize that we can be tempted to respond to those stories that wound in a way that continues that wounding story. For a few moments, let’s hold in our heart a prayer, a request, a plea for help, that our lives would not be sucked into the stories that wound, but that we would live on a steady course of a story that heals.

Holy God, May I live in the story of peace, whose hero is love. May that story live in me. May the story of Your peace bring healing to us and to the world. And may the story of Your love bring healing to us and to the world. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on May 5, 2024. Based on John 15:9-17. I deviated from my script more than usual this week, so you may notice some differences with the podcast or video.

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The first time I went elk hunting, I did what I thought was a lot of preparation to get in shape. It turned out to be woefully inadequate. Over the following few years, I set about getting in better shape, primarily focusing on improving my endurance by running. In addition, I realized that I needed to lose weight. Trimming down the weight you carry in gear is good, but trimming down the weight you carry in fat is much better. So, I joined Weight Watchers. I’m sure there are many other current or former Weight Watchers members among us.

Why is Weight Watchers so successful? To my mind, there are three main aspects. First is awareness and intentionality. The cornerstone of the program is tracking what you eat. Each year, they change the formula a little bit, in part to get you to renew your membership but in part to trigger you to pay attention again for a little while. Truthfully, if all you do is track your points, even if you don’t pay much attention to how many points you’re allowed to consume, you’ll start developing a healthier relationship with food. Instead of mindlessly consuming a whole bag of chips, you’ll start thinking about how many chips you really want to eat. Or perhaps you’ll decide that actually, chips have a lot of points in them, and you would be better off eating carrots or grapes or something.

The second pillar is habits. The foundational habit is tracking, but Weight Watchers helps you to develop other habits, too. Habits like planning your grocery shopping ahead of time, or reading restaurant menus before you go so that you have a plan, or grabbing fruit when you’re hungry. They also encourage you to develop habits related to exercise and mindfulness.

The third pillar is community. Back in the “before” times, I went to meetings every week. At a typical meeting, everyone had to weigh in, and then we had a somewhat freeform discussion about progress and challenges in the past week. We would acknowledge milestones and sometimes talk about stuff coming up in the following week. Finally, there was a lesson of some sort. Often, the lesson would be about habits—either how to develop them or which ones would be good.

Intentionality, habits, and community. Honestly, this is a good model of the church. Community is essential to what we do. It’s possible to read the Bible or pursue other spiritual practices on your own, but a community helps you to learn and grow. The community supports you when you need it, and in return, you support others when they need you. Community is why we worship in person, why we have First Friday Out or game night or other gatherings, and why we have deacons to visit people who are sick or grieving or shut-in. Community is why we attend memorial services.

Habits. Habits control our lives. Now, it’s easy for a habit to become a rut, something you do for no good reason except that it’s what you always do. That’s a risk for an individual, and a serious risk for an organization. So, it’s important to shake up your habits once in a while, just like Weight Watchers changes their program almost every year.

Which is to say, intentionality is important. Habits enable you to act without thinking, and so they make life easier. But periodically, it’s important to bring your habits out to the forefront and decide if they are serving you or if you are serving them. Once in a while, we need to ask, Are we doing XYZ because it’s the right thing to do, or because we’ve always done it? Whatever the answer, just asking the question is important.

I’d like you to think for a moment about your morning routine. Everyone has one. Here’s mine. My first alarm goes off at 5:45, at which point I usually lay in bed and check Facebook and such. At 6:00, I get my daily alert from the Washington Post and read the most critical news stories. By 6:15, I’m up and I’ve made coffee. I check my email and read my daily comics while I bathe my brain in caffeine. When I’m awake enough, I do my daily devotion from Common Prayer that I think I’ve mentioned before. Then I go run, usually three or four miles, at least on days when I have time.

Last weekend, Rhonda and I were gone because Jesse graduated from Pitt. It was a great trip. We got to see Jesse and Sam, and Jesse’s boyfriend Howard, and Howard’s parents. On our way east, we visited my old high school friend Sharon and her family, and then on our way west, we met my mom, sister, and brother. Going both directions, we stayed with Rhonda’s parents. It was great seeing everyone, seeing Jesse and Howard graduate, meeting Howard’s parents, everything.

But you know what wasn’t great? My morning routine. Most days, I didn’t get a chance to just be when I got up, but instead had to get moving right away. If I did my devotion, I was just going through the motions instead of taking it seriously. I didn’t run. I wasn’t able to do the habits that recharge me. They refill my spiritual and emotional reserves so that I have love to give others.

As much as possible, I try to follow the Great Commandment. When Jesus was asked which commandment in the Law was the greatest, he said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” My morning routine, especially my morning devotion, is a way I can love the Lord my God and prepare myself to love my neighbor.

Several years ago, I read Atomic Habits by James Clear. It’s a phenomenal book that I highly recommend. Basically, the book teaches you how to harness one of the most powerful forces available: the power of compound interest. Except instead of money, he applies it to life. If you do push-ups on one day, you’ll mostly just tire yourself out, but maybe you’ll become a tiny bit stronger. If you do push-ups every day, you’ll become that little bit stronger every day, and by improving on your improvements, by the end of the year, you’ll be much stronger. Small changes made on their own have small effects, but small changes made in the same direction repeatedly can change your life.

Many times, people say that the key to success is setting goals. In fact, when you sign up for Weight Watchers, one of the first things you do is to set your target weight. Setting goals is a good thing, I suppose, but it is clearly insufficient. When I became department chair, we did some strategic planning and identified some goals. I have been measuring our progress against them, but they aren’t directly tied to actions. For example, one goal is to increase enrollment. But what will we actually do to achieve that goal?

That’s where Atomic Habits come in. The key to success isn’t having a goal, but having a good system. Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. Every coach has the same goal: to win a championship. Which team wins? The one with the best system to recruit and develop and exploit their talent. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Good systems are composed of good habits. Find a habit that achieves, say, a 1% improvement, and do it every day. Then find another. And another. And eventually, they all add up, and the power of compound interest changes your life.

So, why am I talking about habits and systems and performance improvements? Let me return to today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus says, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.” He says to abide. He doesn’t say that we should visit his love once in a while. He says we should abide in it. That means being immersed in a loving system. That means having a set of habits that all revolve around doing as Jesus commanded: acting on a self-sacrificing love for everyone that God loves, which is everyone.

A habit has three main components: a cue, a routine, and a reward. For example, let’s say you want to develop a habit of going to the gym every day. As a cue, perhaps you set your gym bag by your car, so that whenever you see it, you remember to drive to the gym and do your workout. The reward, then, isn’t getting a donut afterwards. It’s the feeling of satisfaction and enjoyment you get from the workout itself.

Here’s a habit I’m developing for love. I’m an engineer, which means my natural inclination is to solve problems. That’s great if I’m confronted with a technical problem, but often, that’s the wrong instinct for people problems. So, here’s my habit. The cue is when someone opens up a little and expresses a problem they are having in their life, like something that is causing them sorrow or anxiety. My routine is to attempt to see things through their eyes and seek understanding first, and then affirm the validity of their emotions. If things veer too negative, I gently nudge them back towards the positive, for example, trying to help them avoid comparisons. The reward, then, is a deeper, more meaningful conversation than I might have otherwise had.

As an example, I was talking to someone who said they had seen me on the street while they were going to a grief support group. Rather than take over the conversation and try to “solve” their grief—which is totally impossible—I let them talk about their situation and what’s going on in their heart right now. They started to veer into comparisons with other people’s grief and how their situation is worse, and I gently counseled them that such comparisons are fruitless, because every grief is different. I expressed my opinion on the Kubler-Ross stages of grief—that they are better understood as modes of grief, with no sequence and no timeline—and affirmed that where they are right now is perfectly understandable and a step along the path to healing. When I left them, I prayed for their comfort. Overall, it was a deeply meaningful encounter that I probably wouldn’t have had a few years ago.

So that’s one habit I’m trying to develop. I need to think of another habit to add, something to do with initiating meaningful conversations. I’m not sure how I’ll do that exactly, but a workshop I attended a couple of weeks ago gave me some ideas.

Here’s a habit that we have as a congregation: When someone experiences loss or is in crisis, we feed them. This is great “spiritual first aid.” Everyone needs to eat, and often, preparing food is challenging when you are grieving or under stress. Both the giving and receiving of meals reminds people that we are a loving community, one that will help lift each other up.

My challenge for you all today is this: Find a way to abide in God’s love by adding loving habits to your life and our congregation’s life together. I have seen how much love you all have for one another and for others in the community and the world. Let’s find ways, individually and as a congregation, to put that love into action by developing habits that will let God’s love flow through us and into the community. And I am certain that if we do that, we will experience the flourishing that comes from living into the kingdom of God. Amen.

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