Think and Let Think

Hear the Good News: The mercy of God is going to catch you. It might happen in a backyard summer celebration. It could happen in church on a Sunday. Or it might happen when you spin a record with some friends. But the mercy of God is coming, and there's nothing you can do about it...

The world rings with praise only because the whole of creation is in on it! Praise the Lord! The sun and moon, the sea, fire and snow, speckled frogs and spotted dogs, wrens and thrushes, old men with walkers and little babies who do little more than drool and sleep. The world joins up in the praise parade not with words, but with being. The snow whirls, the fires roar, the frogs croak, the cows moo, the birds sing, the old men sigh, and the little babies burp. In short, we learn to praise God not by paying compliments, but by paying attention. Have you ever watched a forest dance in the wind? Or listened to the symphony of a thunderstorm? Or sat in the silence and sound of a church service? Or experienced the fog lifting while you're on the back of a motorcycle on your way to the zoo? We can praise when all is well and when all is hell because, as Frederick Buechner puts it, “What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”

God works in ways seen and unseen. The psalmist can only sing this song as one who has made it to the other side and is able to look back and see how God was in the business of deliverance. Maybe you're able to look back and see the same. But if you're in the pit right now, hear me when I say, it's okay to not be okay, and this isn't the end...

Good music, and I mean good in the true and beautiful sense, good music has a magic to it. It hits us, brings forth from us feelings we didn't know we had. Music can travel us through time, backward and forward. Music moves. And its not always entirely clear how music does to us what it does. We can take a song that has shaped us, play it for someone else expecting similar magic, only to have them look back at us as if to say, “That's it?” But that's also the beauty behind the bands and artists that make the magic we call music. Even though the songs, melodies, and words stay the same, we all receive them differently. Just as music has a magic to it, so does scripture. It might not appear as such, hidden away under the dust covered Bibles of our sanctuary or living rooms. But, if you take out the Bible, and flip near the middle, it's like finding an old mixed tape or CD. The psalter is a playlist of the prayers of God's people.

Matthew tells of an angel who comes like lightning to roll back the stone. Mark recalls the women waking up early to go anoint Jesus' body, John starts with Mary running back to tell the disciples about the empty tomb. But when Luke is finally ready to describe the power of Easter, he begins with the word “but.” The previous chapter ends with Joseph of Arimathea wrapping up Jesus dead and forsaken body and leaving it in a tomb. “But” Luke begins, “on the first day of the week, at dawn, the women came to the tomb and found it empty.” But, yet, however, nevertheless. These are the words that signal a sacred intrusion into reality. The gospel always turns on a great but...

If you don't have one already, Holy Week will give you a low anthropology. It shows us at our worst. It's not just the story of good vs. evil. It's also the result of such human sentiments. Disagreements, jealousy, moral posturing, denial, betrayal. It's not an easy thing to reckon with, that when God in the flesh comes to spend time among us, we nail God to the cross. Hence the great Lenten prayer of confession: Lord, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those thing which we ought not to have done; there is no health in us. Have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Perhaps that's why Martin Luther said, “If I were God, I'd kick the world to pieces.” But, thankfully, Luther wasn't God. God is God, and God doesn't kick the world to pieces. No, God so loves the world! God keeps entering into the world, marching into our little fickle Jerusalems. God keeps showing up, by grace, and keeps blessing our broken lives. Or, as the musician Kevin Morby puts it: “Everything we do is a mess, but, oh honey, may this mess be blessed.”

There are these threads in the scriptures that if you just start to pull on one of them you'll begin to see how the whole thing is bound together. And the same happens in our relationships. How we spend our time, how we speak, think, and move, who we eat with, are very real examples of where we find our hope. And I know these might seem like really small things. What can a dinner party really accomplish? Can a card in the mail, or an handshake in the pews, or a unexpected phone call do much of anything? How does reading this scriptures, singing these songs, and praying these prayers bear fruit in our lives and in the world? Well, little things repeated over time can have a major and forming impact. It's why so many people remember things like the Lord's Prayer and Jesus Loves Me even when they cannot remember anything else. It's why we lose track of time when we're sitting at a table with friends. As the great theologian Saint Winnie the Pooh once said, “Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”

Little things matter! Everything we do, whether we realize it or not, enfolds us and those near us into a vision of what we might call “the good life.” We are habituated by our habits and rituals toward the importance, or unimportance, of community, friendship, and faith. How we eat, how we speak, how we spend our time is a very real expression of where we find our hope. At some point or another we will find ourselves feeling like one of the sons in Jesus' parable. We will yearn for something that isn't ours, or we will grow angry over perceived slights... But God, the author of salvation, is training us, habituating us, litugizing us, to see the Good News of the Gospel. Like the prodigal father who is filled with nothing but love, there's nothing we can do to make God love us any more and there's nothing we can do to make God love us any less. No matter what we do or leave undone, there's always room for us at the party.

Our God is nothing if not incarnational. That is, despite what others may say, we have a very materialistic faith. God takes on flesh and moves into the neighborhood. Which means God meets us where we are, and not where we ought to be. We might imagine that to get close to God we have to do all sorts of things like sit idly by while the flood waters rise high. We might imagine that in our despair, pain, and brokenness that we're got to cure ourselves, heal ourselves, and put ourselves back together before we can get together with God. That's not the Gospel. God isn't waiting for us to get it all figured out. God shows up in our lives right where we are to help re-figure us...

Amazon, Instagram, and Facebook (just to mention a few) are frighteningly good at captivating and capturing our imaginations as we spend our days exploring the digital architecture of the modern mall we call the smart phone. That why I really love that one line from the prayer of confession I shared earlier. “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” It's amazing how prescient a line from 1662 can be today. For, the devices we carry in our pockets absolutely drive the desires of our hearts, and most of the time we don't even realize it, we don't notice the water we're swimming in. Hence, the remarkable quote from Charles Baudelaire: The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. These forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter are some of the most countercultural and subversive days in the entire church year. While we swim in the water of a culture driven by success, power, winning, God uses Lent to repent us, to turn us back around to the One who saves us through the waters of baptism, through the bread and cup of communion, through the cross and the empty tomb.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince, explains the power of the heart over the mind like this: “If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” And "teaching the longing" is exactly right. For love is a habit. We, of course, may imagine that love strikes like lightning, without explanation or warning. But we are actually habituated toward our loves. We are shaped by habits that present those things that are worth our love. Love, in short, takes practice. Our hearts are calibrated through imitation and immersion into practices that, overtime, curate our hearts to particular ends. We learn to love not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form the habits of how we love. Rituals train us to love rightly. In the church we have a different word for ritual: liturgy.

Will Willimon tells of having once served a church where there was a long standing tradition in which lay leader would rise at the conclusion of the sermon to offer a prayer. And, one Sunday after preaching a tough sermon on a difficult text, the lay leader stood up and prayed a simple, clear, and direct prayer. “Lord, today we've heard your word. And we don't like it.” We don't like this Word of the Lord because it cuts right to the heart of our faith. It's impossible to live like this, we think. How could we ever really love our enemies? They're our enemies for a reason! Shouldn't we be doing the opposite of love toward them? Have you ever tried to pray for those who mistreat you? Better to run away and never think of them than to pray for them! It's impossible, what Jesus wants us to do. Thankfully, though, nothing is impossible for God...

Robert Jenson once said, “It is a great achievement to know yourself a sinner.” It sounds paradoxical, but to know you're a sinner puts you (and me) in a place to really listen to what Jesus is saying. Hence the parable of the publican and the pharisee. The dirty rotten scoundrel of a tax collector leaves worship justified, rather than the do-gooding religious adherent, because only he is able to confess that he is a sinner. It's not easy to receive this sermon from Jesus (particularly the woes) but somebody has to say such things. One must really know the people to which these words are delivered lest we leave thinking the preacher is talking about other people. Bashing people with the law achieves nothing unless the one preaching is the One who comes to fulfill the Law. Martin Luther reminds us that “God receives none but those who are forsaken, restores health to none but those who are sick, gives sight to none but the blind, and life to none but the dead. God does not give saintliness to any but sinners, nor wisdom to any but fools. In short: God has mercy on none but the wretched and gives grace to none but those who are in disgrace.”

People always assume that the church's primary business is to get people to behave themselves, to teach morality, and then keep them on the right track. Which is fine, except it often leads people to feeling more overwhelmed than they were before they walked through the door. Jesus doesn't meet Peter by the lake and clobber him with calls to righteousness and goodness and the law. He doesn't belittle him for his lack of fish or for his lack of faith. Instead he invites him to a new reality, an adventurous life, filled with unbelievable beauty and wonder and grace. So, open you ears and eyes and hearts to what Jesus says to Peter and what Jesus says to you. Jesus comes to your life, sits down, and says, “I am with you. I will never leave you. I believe in you. I see possibilities that you can't even imagine. I have plans for you, I'm going to show you what makes the Good News so good, or I'll die trying.”

There's nowhere Jesus goes without outsiders becoming insiders. That's part of the mission. But it's nothing new! Over and over and over again in scripture God commands the people to care for the people no one else cares about. Open your eyes, God says, to the plight of your neighbors who have no bright hope for tomorrow. Open your ears, God says, to the anguish of your enemies. Open your hearts, God says, to the very people who drive you crazy. If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody...

Whenever there is deliverance, liberation, recovery, and release, there is the preaching of the Gospel. In other words, preaching isn't just for preachers, it's also for all of you. Preaching doesn't just happen in church. It happens in our words and actions in the classroom and at the grocery store. Preaching happens at the bank and in the backyard bbq. Preaching happens in the hospital and in the home. Preaching happens whenever there is deliverance and liberation, recovery and release. It's as if Jesus is preaching to us through scripture today and he says, “Things are not as they ought to be. People are afraid. They don't have hope. Well, I'm here to bring good news to the poor, to announce pardon to prisoners, to include the excluded, and to set the burdened free. Who's coming with me?”

Robert Farrar Capon said, “Whatever the church is, it should enable us to realize we are at a party of outrageous proportions; and, at the same time, it should make us want nothing so much as to shout the invitation to that party at the top of our lungs.” Is that how we feel about the faith? Is that how we feel about church? Does all of this feel more like a funeral, or a wedding? What John points to in Cana, what we are being called to see, is the glory revealed in Jesus Christ. The party that is salvation is right here and right now. We have been invited to the marriage Supper of the Lamb and we didn't have to do a thing except show up for the festivities. Just as Jesus commandeers the wedding and becomes its host, so too Jesus has conquered the world and now rules at the right hand of the Father. This is what glory looks like. The author of the cosmos condescends to our existence and opens up the doors and clears the dance floor and says, "The time has come to celebrate!"

With the magi and the manger we discover how the kingdom inaugurated in Jesus extends even to the Gentiles. And with the baptism in the Jordan we learn that we do not have the righteousness we require to acquire the kingdom, but that's okay because Jesus fulfills all righteousness. In other words, the heavens open at the river not just for Him, but also for all of us.

The wild proclamation of the Gospel, made manifest in a baby in a manger surrounded by some certainly strange gifts, is that God knows everything about us, the resolutions we keep and break, and chooses to be with us anyway. You see, this odd God delights in getting down in the muck and mire of life to dwell among us. This odd God speaks and heals and teaches and preaches and reveals the truth that we all need but struggle to believe. This odd God even goes to the cross on our behalf, manifesting the paradoxology of the Gospel: There's nothing you can do to make God love you any more, and there's nothing you can do to make God love you any less...

Here's the truth of Christmas, the great proclamation of the Gospel - God makes time for you and me. And not only that, but God has given us all the time in the world, redeemed our time and our foolish use of it because Christmas is the reminder of the lengths to which God was and is willing to go to give us the one thing we really need. The wonderful word of Christmas is "with." God takes on flesh in Jesus Christ and moves into the neighborhood "with" us. There is, of course, elements of “for” in Jesus' life: Jesus is for us when he teaches and heals. Jesus is for us when he dies on the cross and rises on Easter. Jesus does for us what we can't do for ourselves. But the power of what God does for us is made manifest because God is with us.

The strange and serious proclamation of Christmas is that though things change, we're always in the moment of Christmas. Even when we snuff out the candles, and get in our cars, and go to bed, we're still in Christmas. Because Christmas is the miracle of God making time for us...

Mary praises God through song for cracking open the heavens and pouring out justice on a world thirsty for it. She points to the power of the Spirit because her Son will relieve the proud and powerful from their self-righteousness, and He will fill the poor with more than money can buy. And she sings of it already having happened because time is different with God. The incarnation is not God's last minute hail Mary to fix the world. It is, was, and always will be God's decision to dwell with us. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. God was always going to dwell with us because God always dwells with us and God will always dwell with us...

Willie Jennings says that Joy is an act of resistance against despair and its forces. Again, it's not living in denial, it's not pretending things are better than they are. The joy we speak of in the church is the knowledge that, like the crowds who gather to hear J the B, we really are a brood of vipers. Seriously, according to the witness of the Word we're all on the naughty list. But the axe is lying at the root of the tree because God is cutting down our sin and using it for the divine bonfire the banishes the darkness forever.

John the Baptist appears in the middle of nowhere and says to the gathered people, “Here comes the Lord! Get ready to change direction, be surprised, all shook up, and turned upside down. Hills are coming down and valleys are filling up!” In other words, when J the B shows up he says, “You can't stay the same!” God is up to something! God is on the move! And God is going to get what God wants. We, of course, can certainly put up a fight and make a mess of the whole operation. But God's cut-and-fill operation is already among us...

Jesus is reminding us that no matter how broken things seem, nothing is so broken that God can't make something beautiful out of the brokenness. There is no soil so ruined that God isn't willing to toss another seed on it. There is no sinner so sinful that God can't make a saint out of them. Frederick Buechner said that the grace of God is the declaration that beautiful and terrible things will happen but we need not be afraid because God will be with us, always. Advent, as we've been saying, is the time when time gets confused. We look backward, forward, and everywhere in between. But one thing that endures through time is the hope we have in the Lord. It's that hope that sustains us through what is coming upon the world. The time being really is the most trying time of all, but we can look straight into the darkness because we know the dawn will break from on high.

It's interesting, I think, how almost no one in the New Testament self identifies as a Christian. In fact, the label of being a Christian is a public one. That is, it is applied to those in the church by the world because the world can't make sense of what the church is doing. Today we take the practice of generosity as rather ubiquitous, particularly at this time of year, but in the first century it was inconceivable. And so, when people outside the church saw these individuals who were selling their possessions to help the poor, and people opening up their homes and tables to those who had no homes and had no food, they couldn't wrap their heads around it. What kind of people would do such a thing? People who worship the King named Jesus.

By the power of Christ, through cross and resurrection, we are forgiven. More pertinently YOU are forgiven. That's the heart of the gospel and it's why people like me won't shut up about it. But when I tell you you're forgiven, whether from the pulpit or at the table, it's not because you've somehow wiped your slate clean, or gotten all your ducks in a row. I am simply encouraging you to open your eyes to what you already have. To become what you already are: forgiven. The great gift of ministry is that I don't have to stand day after day, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins. Instead I get to share the Good News, “your sins are remembered no more,” and then I get a front row seat to the power of the Gospel at work.

Grief isn't something to be fixed or gotten rid of. To deny our grief is to deny our humanity. The best we can ever do for others in their grief is just be there, to manifest the love that refuses to let them go. And the best we can ever do when we experience grief is exactly that - experience it. Weep and be angry and let it happen. Because that's what Jesus does. Jesus, knowing full and well that he can make all well, still weeps at the grave of his friend. And it's not just the tears, Jesus gets angry in his grief. There is nothing in this life that we experience that is beyond God's knowledge. God knows our sorrow and our grief and our anger. When Jesus raises his clenched fist, when he lets the tears go, he does so with every person who has ever known loss. It's as the old hymn says: What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear! Can we find a friend so faithful who will all our sorrows share. Jesus grieves, and Jesus grieves with us.

It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me. At tea time, everybody agrees. I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror. It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero. Who knew Taylor Swift was so Pauline? Even with all the accolades, all the money, all the power, all the influence, she sings of a life that is simul justus et peccator. In Paul's letter, as he gets his Swiftie on, sees his own inner anti-hero, he crescendos to these words: “Wretched that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” And notice, Paul doesn't ask “What will deliver me?” There's no program of spiritual development or improvement that can overcome this inner turmoil. There is no what that can deliver. There is only a who. And the who has a name: Jesus. The proclamation of the Gospel is that Jesus jumps into the pit with us to show us the way out. Jesus climbs the hard wood of the cross on our behalf. Jesus rewrites our biographies so that they mirror his own. Jesus stands to be judged in our place. Jesus baptizes us into his death so that we rise into his life. To put it rather pointedly: Jesus becomes the sinner atop the cross so that we become saints in him. That's why Paul can make such a bold declaration like there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Jesus sets us free from the law of sin and death. To use language from Taylor Swift, even when we're left to our own devices with prices and vices that end up in crisis, they are no match for the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Preaching is foolishness, Paul says, because lofty words of wisdom and grandeur do not bring us closer to God. Instead, God comes close to us. So close, in fact, that we have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us. Which means who only really know who we are in relation to, and because of, who Jesus is. We can develop and put on all sorts of identities and qualities. But our primary identity, the outfit with which we've been clothed, is Jesus. We live in Christ and Christ lives in us...

God's grace is unmerited, undeserved, and untakeawayable. The offering plate is too small for God's gift to us. God doesn't give us 10%. No, God gives us everything. The whole kit and caboodle. For God is the gift. This is the Gospel, the goodest part of the Good News: God gives and gives and gives. God seeks and seeks and seeks. God forgives and forgives and forgives.

The strange theological truth is that the world does revolve around us. I know that's a dangerous thing to say, particularly in a time in which narcissism is on the rise and the evidence of our destructive tendencies toward Creation are all too apparent… But there's an important distinction - the cosmos is ours not so that it might serve selfish ends, of course, but that, through creation God might delight in us. Perhaps that's why God tells our first parents to have dominion over Creation and not domination. Domination would mean we get to do whatever we want whenever we want. Dominion is different. Dominion is a responsibility for this wondrous gift we've been given.

The church isn't supposed to do or make anything. We're not a factory or a company. We're the church. We're in the business of being. All the doing or making we've ever needed has been done and made by Jesus.

The witness of the church, straight from the lips of the Lord (and Paul), is that there is always a space for you in this place of grace because our differences make us the church. We have eyes and ears and fingers and toes. We have friends and family and strangers and foes. In other words, the church is an antidote to the loneliness of the world, and the loneliness that far too many of us experience. It's here, among this body, that we learn of our shared story, that we are not alone, and that we are valued not because of what we can do, but because of who we are. The church opens us up to a future we cannot conceive on our own. It trains us in the habits of gratitude for one another. And it sets us free to delight in diversity.

Remembering your baptism, whether you actually remember it or not is just the same as taking time to consider who loved you into being. In baptism you enter into the oneness of the community of faith we call the church, in which you are surrounded by people who care about you and want the best for you. In baptism, your eyes and ears are opened to those whom God delights sending into your life just for you. We say that the Good News of the Gospel is for the world which is true - but it's also just for you. You. Regardless of who you are, whether or not you even understand it, whether or not you are a good and pious person. God loves you, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Ephesians 4.1-6 & Deuteronomy 6.4-9 Jesus offers us an alternative epistemology: Love God and love your neighbor. Paint those words on your doors, talk about them with your kids, get them printed on stickers and adhere them to your water bottles. Unlike what the world tells us over and over again: think for yourself, make your own way, don't worry about anyone except yourself… Jesus frees us from having to bear the burden of everything. In the Kingdom of God 'tis better to receive than to achieve. You see, the Shema, even as a commandment is actually a gift, a gift just like the one that we will shortly receive at the table. It is a new way of knowing, and of being known, that helps us makes sense of this strange world. And we make sense of it together..."

God is not sitting idly by, far away, waiting for us to pray. Prayer isn't putting pressure on God, or persuading God. It's not about getting God's attention, or changing God's mood. God's mood toward us never changes. God yearns for a world that looks more like the kingdom than all of this. That's why God gives us these songs to sing and prayers to pray. That's why God give us Jesus, to embody the new future so that we see what we're actually praying for...

Psalm 51.1-12 Confession is often nothing more than telling the truth about ourselves to ourselves, to one another, and to God. The community of faith that confesses is not a church without sin (for there is no such thing), instead the church that confesses is a church without secrets. And yet, it's important to talk about what we talk about when we confess. For, confession has nothing to do with getting ourselves forgiven. It's not a transaction, it's not a negotiation in order to secure mercy, it's not the first step on the road to perfection. Confession is the last step - it's what happens when we are finally able to confront the truth: we are not as we ought to be, and yet we worship the Lord who looks beyond what we've done to what's been done for us by Jesus.

Exodus 3.1-6 Prayer is what happens to us when we encounter the inconceivable surprise of living - it is a conversation born out of the realization, just as Moses discovered in the burning bush, that God is with us, always.

The Freedom To Be A Sinner by Taylor Mertins

John 21.20-25 John doesn't earn his belovedness. He's not the lovable disciple - he's the beloved disciple. He doesn't do anything better than the other twelve, he's not striving after the gold medal of morality or the sanctity of spirituality. He is simply called to a life that he would not have had on his own, and he has fun along the way...

Luke 5.1-11 Jesus knows full and well what a mess Peter is and still calls him anyway. Jesus should've absolutely left Peter on the shore that fateful morn, but instead calls him to a life of discipleship that conveys the freedom to be wrong. And it is a freedom. Consider how many of our relationships have faltered if not floundered because we can't accept wrongness. Think about how many institutions are founded on the fundamental failure to see that we all mess up at some point. Imagine how different our church, or community, or even our world, would be if we took seriously the truth - we are all like Peter, and Jesus never gives up on us. In fact, the only thing Jesus gives Peter is the same thing that Jesus gives to all of us: grace.

Mark 4.35-41 Music is perhaps the greatest technology of the heart, and singing in particular. To lift our voices together is to stand against the disorder of the world. Notice: singing is not a denial of reality. The Moravians on the boat with Wesley weren't singing in order to pretend like the waves weren't beating down upon them. No, they were singing because they knew how the story ends - they had seen the whole picture. So too, we stand and sing not out of naiveté, but because we know not all is as it ought to be. We sing in defiance of the wind and the waves because we know, deep down, that God is going to get us to the other side. It might not be pretty. And it certainly won't go according to plan. But God will get us to the other side because God will always stay by our side...

Mark 4.26-34 In the end the parables are stories that Jesus tells about himself. He is the Good Shepherd off in search of the lost, he is the fatted calf sacrificed for the party, on and on. And the branches of his kingdom are a place of grace for everyone. Grace, as Frederick Buechner was apt to say, is something you can never get but only be given. There's no way to earn it, or deserve it, or bring it about, anymore than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream, or earn good looks, or bring about your own birth. And a crucial eccentricity to our faith is that we are saved by grace, by God's action toward us in the person of Jesus Christ. There's nothing *you* have to do, there's nothing you *have* to do, there's nothing you have to *do*. Which means grace might seem like a small thing, but Jesus does a lot with a little...

Mark 3.20-35 The church is where God assembles us to imagine and day dream about how beautiful the world could be. It's wild stuff really. It always has been. That people like me can stand up in a place like this and say “Welcome home.” Or: “I declare the entire forgiveness of all your sins.” Or: “You are loved beyond measure.” I sound like I'm out of my mind! But such is the power of God's grace, it calls into existence things that do not exist, it creates a community where strangers become sisters and others become brothers, a family, where there is always a place for you no matter what. It sounds impossible - but God does God's best work in the realm of impossible possibility.

Mark 2.23-3.6 Jesus has a word for all of us. A word of gospel rather than a word of law. A word of relief rather than expectation. Jesus says, 'Stretch out your hand.' Whatever it is you've done, or left undone, it is no match for the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world. Stretch out your hand. Come to the altar to receive the one thing needful, the body and the blood. You are more than your worst mistake or your last slip up. Stretch out your hand. Take hold of the Good News of salvation, this is the day that the Lord has made and we are here to rejoice and be glad in it. Stretch out your hand.

Psalm 29 The church has a word of relief, and that word is the Gospel. It's a very countercultural word, one that threatens to undo everything we think we know about what we think we know. The church can be safe and secure, unthreatening, unassuming, with our pews bolted to the ground, where we mutter and muster an 'Amen' only once in a blue moon. But God will not let us remain as such. The Spirit will start stirring things up through songs and scriptures and sermons to remind us that God is God and we are not. Jesus will speak right into our heart of hearts the story of salvation and we won't be able to help ourselves from shouting “Glory!

Acts 2.1-12 To be a Christian is not so much having a certain set of beliefs that give meaning to our lives. Instead, to be a Christian is to be initiated into a community with practices and habits that actually transform our lives. Which is just another way of saying, we only ever learn what it means to be Christians by watching other Christians and doing what they do. To be Christian means being together. Which, of course, isn't easy. After Pentecost, the story of Acts tells of the great challenge of being the church. The church stand for, preaches, and speaks the language of the heart that runs completely counter to the language of the world. The world worships the first, the greatest, the found, the big, and the alive. God comes for the last, least, lost, little and dead. The world runs on deception and destruction. The Spirit conveys grace and mercy. The world is full to the brim with bad news. Jesus comes bringing Good News. On Pentecost, the Spirit is poured out on all flesh, the tall and the small, the sinners and the saints, the found and the forgotten. Not because we earned it or deserved it. But because we needed it. And we still do...

John 17.11-19 Jesus' prayer in John 17 is rather unlike the compact prayer that he taught the disciples to pray, that prayer we will all pray later in worship. The theologian NT Wright says this very long prayer of Jesus is “so rich that we may choke on it unless we chew it slowly.” One of the people who has chewed slowly on this text is Brian Zahnd. Brian is a gifted writer and the pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri. He's got this knack for focusing the Gospel into bite size pieces. Like this: “God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus. There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus. We have not always known what God is like - but now we do.”

Psalm 22.25-31 & John 15.1-8 The odd proclamation of the Gospel is that there is no hope in us. We are all withering branches in need of some pruning and care. We're all sinners. We're all incompatible with the Messiah because we tend to make such a mess of his message. But that's okay. In fact, it's better than okay because Jesus comes to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. He says, Abide in me as I am in you. All of you. God meets us where we are, not where we ought to be. That's the difference between the bad news of religion and the Good News of the Gospel...

Psalm 23 & John 10.1-18 The first task of a Christian is not to forgive, but to learn to be forgiven.