This past Sunday I had the opportunity to preach as my poor senior pastor got a bad case of the flu on Saturday night. The phone rang at 6:30 Sunday morning and so I had to scramble! The manuscript below is what I preached from on Sunday. I figured the John text was an acceptable bridge piece coming out of Epiphany as we head towards Lent.
Well, back to my new U2 station on Pandora.com
Have a great day!
Melody and Countermelody: John 1:1-18
Let us pray: Gracious God, Lord of all Creation and author of all good things, open our hearts, our ears, and our minds to your Word this morning. I ask that your Spirit might run amongst your people, that we might be able to see your love for us in new ways and so that we might be about taking your Light into a dark world, as we leave this church a changed people. God, may the words of my mouth and the mediations of my heart be pleasing to you. If they be your words, let them be long remembered, if they are not, please let them be quickly forgotten. Let all of God’s children say: Amen!
This morning I want to share with you the most famous of all Christian poems, the prologue to the Gospel of John. Normally, I would ask you to open your Bibles and read along with me but our passage for this morning was originally a hymn! It’s meant to be sung first and read second. So I pray that you will open your ears, your hearts, and your minds to hear what God has to say to you this morning, because, make no mistake about it, God has a word in this passage of Scripture for you!
Read John 1:1-18
I love those words, don’t you? Parts of the passage are really stunning poetry. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Beautiful, hopeful words. These words are poetic and confessional, but more than that, they draw me, and I hope you, into mystery, awe, contemplation, and worship. The light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not overcome it.
The great preacher and author, Fredrick Buechner, along with many Johannine scholars (that is, those who study The Gospel of John for a living) have pointed out that, in essence, there are two voices speaking in this passage. I hope you’ll forgive the musician in me but to put it in musical terms; there is a melody and a counter-melody here. One voice speaks with beautiful poetry, singing for us lines of stunning theological beauty, while the other voices tends to interrupt that poetry with commentary. This morning we are going to look at these two voices and what they might be singing to us today.
At the very beginning of the Gospel, the voice of the poet is asking his community to sing some amazing claims! John the Evangelist, the one for whom the Gospel of John is named, is telling us who Jesus is and asking us to sing it! He asks us to affirm with our voices that the Word, before the universe was formed, was with God. More than that, he asks us to proclaim that Jesus is the incarnation of God and that not one thing came into being without the Word! He asks us to sing that Jesus brought not only light into the world in his human form but that he also brought true life, eternal life, with him, for all of the people of the world. Jesus is God’s Word! John is telling us something about Jesus that is very significant: Jesus is more than just a good guy, more than just an excellent moralist, more than just a person who was born, lived his beliefs to the fullest and was killed because of them, Jesus is the incarnation of God! Jesus is Lord, Jesus is King! Without the Word none of us comes into being, according to John. I find this to be beautiful, amazing, and, in my darker hours, a hard thing to sing! But sing them I do, because I believe them and I have experienced it. Have you?
In the original Greek, the term used for the Word is Logos. The poetic voice from John claims that Jesus was the Logos. In Greek thought, the Logos was the divine principle of reason that gives order to the universe and links the human mind to the mind of God. So this claim, that Jesus was the Logos, would be an incredible, almost incomprehensible statement in the fluid Hellenistic worldview of the time. Many of you may struggle to believe this as well.
For many of us, this is where wrestling with faith, tradition, Scripture, and reason come in. I can tell you that I believe this because I have had a great many experiences in my life where I have known God is a personal, vibrant way. I grew up in and have studied the traditions of the church, that is the incarnated body of Christ, that show me that, throughout the course of human history, I am not alone in my experience of God. The Scriptures tell me many stories of God and of what God is like. I reason that all of this together has allowed me to accept and proclaim what John is asking of us here.
The amazing piece of all of this is that God chose to condescend, that is to say God chose to take on human form so that God could be in relationship with us, so that God could love us in a more complete way, and so that God could show us how to live so that the Reign of God could come about on earth. Jesus is the bringer of LIFE, something more than just life. He is our shining example of God, because he is God. Jesus shows us what God is like, what God is about, how God loves us, and what God desires for us and of us. Can you imagine it? Have you experienced the state of knowing that God loves you so much, that God would take human form out of love for you and for God’s creation?
Because God desires us to be in relationship with God, and to be reconciled with our Creator, God became human so that God could reveal Godself fully to us. It is amazing, isn’t it?
The second voice jumps in next, the voice of one who seeks to clarify. Here, in verse 6, we hear a voice that is far less poetic and much more practical. This voice tells us that John the Baptist came “as a witness to testify to the light.” Clearly, there must have been some controversy in the latter part of the first century between those who followed John and those who followed Jesus. The controversy must have been such that John the Evangelist needed to address who was who and what was what. The author is telling us that John the Baptist was not the light, that Jesus was and is the light, and there should be no mistaking the two!
Certainly, in our lives we experience similar challenges, don’t we? There are so many good things in life to believe in, so many wonderful places to put our faith, our trust, our lives, and the lives of others. The most immediate example I can think of for me is The ONE Campaign. I’ve even got my ONE Campaign wristband on. I contribute to their work and try to participate however I can. They are advocates for what I believe are the two biggest challenges facing humanity today: extreme global poverty and HIV/AIDS. The ONE Campaign is trying to unite Americans with one voice against global poverty and AIDS with the hope of eradicating both in our lifetimes. The campaign brings together people from across barriers that are usually insurmountable. Both George Clooney and Pat Robertson are members, if you can believe that! The General Board of Church and Society of The United Methodist Church is on-board with The ONE Campaign. I love not only what they are doing but also how they are doing it, and it would be easy for me to pour my life, my faith, and my resources into it, because it is a good thing!
The ONE Campaign is not, however, the greatest thing. It is merely good. It is an organization that is trying to improve life for the least of these and to spread a little light into the world. Jesus, on the other hand, the Logos, the Word of God, is the greatest! Jesus is not just trying to spread the light, Jesus is the LIGHT!!!!
I have to be honest with you, on my best days; I do what I do because I love Jesus. I live in this Christian Community because I love Jesus. My wife Sarah and I give money to the church because we love Jesus and the Scripture that Jesus commands us loved to do that. I know many of you get up on Sunday mornings and head to church for that exact reason. I know many of you go on mission trips, or teach Sunday School, or sing in the choir because you love Jesus. I know many of you do what you do out of love for Jesus.
On my worst days, however, I try to do the right things for the wrong reasons. On my worst days I try to do the right things out of a sense of duty, or out of a sense of, “it’s just the right thing to do.” As followers of Christ we are called to be a transforming and reconciling force in our world. So here’s the problem with acting with the wrong motivation: people are not transformed when you do something because it’s just the right thing to do. People are transformed because of an encounter with the living God! People are transformed because of the experience of the love of God given to them through others, so intentions matter! It’s important to do the right things for the right reasons! We must be vigilant and prayerful for it is easy to lose the Logos in the everyday things of the world.
In verse twelve the poetic voice jumps back in here with the pronouncement that to all who receive Jesus, to all who believe in his name, than they are granted the power to become children of God, who are born of God. In essence, all who believe in Jesus Christ are given the gift of eternal life. This eternal life, though, doesn’t begin when you die, it begins now, in this life! It is the difference between life and LIFE!!!!
The passage concludes with our melody and countermelody bouncing off of one another. The poetic voice tells us that the Word became flesh and lived among us and that we have seen the glory of God’s only Son, full of grace and truth while the pragmatic voice reminds us that the Word is Jesus and not John. The poetic voice ends by telling us that, from Jesus, we have received grace upon grace. The earthy voice reminds us that the law came through Moses while grace and truth came through Jesus Christ and that no one has seen God but that it is through Jesus that God is fully revealed.
John gives us the basic essence of Jesus’ life and mission on earth in these 18 verses. Do you see what this mission is predicated upon? All of this, all that we have remembered in the Advent and Christmas Seasons, and what we will remember in Lent and Holy Week and finally Easter, as we trace the life of Jesus Christ, all of this came about because of love!
Only love would make a deity do this! Only the desire to be in relationship with us would make a deity come to earth! Instead of wiping us out and starting over (something God had been known to do in the past) God chose to sacrifice, to come to us, to love us, to teach us a better way to live, and to begin to reclaim God’s creation through Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, and through us, one person, one system, one creature at a time. Jesus, God, did all of this out of love!!!!
Can you fathom that kind of love, that you would give up everything for a relationship?
I pray that we all can recognize the light, that we can be with the light, and that we will not let the darkness overcome us! With Jesus, we can fight back the darkness!
Many of you have lived through darkness, you’ve walked through the shadow of the valley of death, and many of you have dwelled in that valley for years. But Jesus, Jesus has been there to! Jesus cannot be overcome by the darkness, for Jesus is the light of the world! The Light of the Universe cannot be overcome by darkness!!!!!!! See the light, love the light, work with the light, and do not let the darkness overcome you!!!!!
I have prayers for you and I pray for you! I pray that you will look for the light in your life and in the lives of others. I pray that you will merge your life with the LIFE that only Jesus can offer you. I pray that you, with the help of God, will fight back the darkness in your light and that together, you and I can fight the darkness in this world and seek to spread the light of Christ to a world that desperately needs to see the light of Jesus made visible in us! Friends, we have light to offer the world! We have grace to extend to God’s creation. It is our responsibility to do this! Moreover, it is our honor and pleasure to send grace and love out into the world. People of Argyle United Methodist Church, children of God, please don’t hide your light under a bushel basket this year! Let us join together to bring more light, more peace, and more of God’s grace to the world! Let us be the hands and feet of Christ, restored and redeemed and ever seeking to be partners in helping bring about the Reign of God in the world!
Let all of God’s children say, Amen!
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
What a weekend!
I can't believe it's been almost a week since I last posted, oh wait, yes I can! Seriously, you would think as a musician I would be much more disciplined!
I intended to post several times over the weekend about some of the worship things I've been doing but the last few weekends were so full that I decided to spend more time with the family.
Two weekends ago I had the pleasure of leading two contemplative worship experiences at the Perkins School of Youth Ministry. I lead a Taize service that lasted a little less than an hour and then set-up our worship environment with prayer stations for a forty minute session. I've been told it was well-received but I look forward to getting the evaluation sheets back. Following those experiences we had a very informal "mini-lecture" about the afternoon's worship (I took a mystagogical approach, for those of you keeping score at home) and then we closed with communion, celebrated wonderfully by the Rev. Marti Soper.
One of the most interesting moments for me in that entire experience involved the music during the prayer stations. I got to be a dj! I created two different loops for the event and then interspersed them with the music of Aaron Parks, Brad Mehldau, and, when nearly everyone had left, I mixed in some Lauridsen and Branford Marsalis. What a blast! I look forward to our April Soul Cafe at AUMC when we will offer an alt worship experience.
At 6:30 a.m., Sunday morning, I got a call from my senior pastor saying that he had the flu, so I had the opportunity to preach four times yesterday, in addition to being a music minister, and also mixed in a children's choir rehearsal, some acolyte training, a brief praise band rehearsal, and I had the chance to play in the modern service!
Today I've had the great fortune to work on this weekend's worship, both the Sunday morning experience and the evening's Soul Cafe, where we will be offering a Choral Evensong led by our adult choir.
Tomorrow, is, well, of course, the inauguration! I also will be playing at the Denton Wesley Foundation's weekly worship service and giving a brief devotion.
What a great week!
I hope all is well in your world!
Until then, may we breathe peace and life into the world!
I intended to post several times over the weekend about some of the worship things I've been doing but the last few weekends were so full that I decided to spend more time with the family.
Two weekends ago I had the pleasure of leading two contemplative worship experiences at the Perkins School of Youth Ministry. I lead a Taize service that lasted a little less than an hour and then set-up our worship environment with prayer stations for a forty minute session. I've been told it was well-received but I look forward to getting the evaluation sheets back. Following those experiences we had a very informal "mini-lecture" about the afternoon's worship (I took a mystagogical approach, for those of you keeping score at home) and then we closed with communion, celebrated wonderfully by the Rev. Marti Soper.
One of the most interesting moments for me in that entire experience involved the music during the prayer stations. I got to be a dj! I created two different loops for the event and then interspersed them with the music of Aaron Parks, Brad Mehldau, and, when nearly everyone had left, I mixed in some Lauridsen and Branford Marsalis. What a blast! I look forward to our April Soul Cafe at AUMC when we will offer an alt worship experience.
At 6:30 a.m., Sunday morning, I got a call from my senior pastor saying that he had the flu, so I had the opportunity to preach four times yesterday, in addition to being a music minister, and also mixed in a children's choir rehearsal, some acolyte training, a brief praise band rehearsal, and I had the chance to play in the modern service!
Today I've had the great fortune to work on this weekend's worship, both the Sunday morning experience and the evening's Soul Cafe, where we will be offering a Choral Evensong led by our adult choir.
Tomorrow, is, well, of course, the inauguration! I also will be playing at the Denton Wesley Foundation's weekly worship service and giving a brief devotion.
What a great week!
I hope all is well in your world!
Until then, may we breathe peace and life into the world!
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Seeds DO sprout
This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending the annual Dallas Chapter of the Choristers Guild Mid-Winter Conference and the greater pleasure of hearing Sid Davis, the minister of music at St. Luke's UMC in Houston, talk about youth choir. Much of what he said resonated with me but I have been pondering on this particular thought quite a bit: seeds do sprout.
In my experience, it's true. Seeds DO sprout.
As I keep in touch with folks from my previous churches I see seeds sprouting quite a bit! We all have those moments, don't we? We look back in our lives and see that some of the seeds we have sowed have sprouted.
My preoccupation of late has been with the seeds that will sprout that we will never see. As I currently serve in a growing church that is just starting to build an entire new campus and is in a thriving and growing area, as much as any area can grow in our current economy. I am aware that, if God deems it, we are in the process of building a church that could possibly be a light in this community for hundreds of years to come. I wonder, what seeds are we sowing now, what will they eventually become, and, more importantly, are they good seeds?
As of late a few of the works of van Gogh have been at work on me even more than usual. As I reflect on his life (especially when contrasting his works "The Sower" and "Wheat Field with Crows") I am so struck by the power of the idea that seeds DO sprout. We often won't be able to see the end result, however.
It is important to hold on and to trust in God's good grace.
In my experience, it's true. Seeds DO sprout.
As I keep in touch with folks from my previous churches I see seeds sprouting quite a bit! We all have those moments, don't we? We look back in our lives and see that some of the seeds we have sowed have sprouted.
My preoccupation of late has been with the seeds that will sprout that we will never see. As I currently serve in a growing church that is just starting to build an entire new campus and is in a thriving and growing area, as much as any area can grow in our current economy. I am aware that, if God deems it, we are in the process of building a church that could possibly be a light in this community for hundreds of years to come. I wonder, what seeds are we sowing now, what will they eventually become, and, more importantly, are they good seeds?
As of late a few of the works of van Gogh have been at work on me even more than usual. As I reflect on his life (especially when contrasting his works "The Sower" and "Wheat Field with Crows") I am so struck by the power of the idea that seeds DO sprout. We often won't be able to see the end result, however.
It is important to hold on and to trust in God's good grace.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Epiphany Sermon
I had a wonderful opportunity to preach three times this Sunday at Argyle UMC! It was a blast! I preached on the Wedding at Cana and Epiphany. In the early church Epiphany was the second most celebrated feast day (after Easter, of course) and the Wedding at Cana was one of the most frequently read stories in worship on Epiphany. Below you will find my outline for this past Sunday's sermon. Following the sermon we had an offertory and then we celebrated Holy Communion. I set-up two stations of votive candles with tapers and invited the congregation to light a candle of thanksgiving for where God's glory had broken into their lives in 2008.
Epiphany Sunday 2009
The Wedding at Cana
John 2:1-12
I. Explain Epiphany
• Christmas Decorations are still up and it’s January!
• Epiphany Sunday: the Last Sunday of the Christmas Cycle and the first Sunday of the Epiphany season
• In the early church this was the second most important feast day (the first being Easter)
• It’s important to not skip Epiphany because during the Epiphany, we celebrate more than just the birth of a baby.
• We celebrate the fact that the light of God, Jesus Christ, has made God’s love and God’s gift of salvation available to everyone and to all nations! No one, for any reason, is excluded from the opportunity to experience God’s incredible love and amazing grace.
• The early church loved, during the celebrations of Epiphany, to read in worship the story of the Wedding at Cana because in the story Jesus revealed his glory in the Gospel of John for the first time, his inaugural act, as it were!
• I’d like to share that story with you this morning. Before you hear this story, let us pray:
II. Read the Story
• What an incredibly rich story!
• We find Jesus and his disciples, along with his mother out at a big community event: a wedding!
• Jesus decides, after telling his mom he wouldn’t, for some reason unknown to us, decides to manifest his glory through making wine.
• And the wine: wow! We are not talking about two bottles of wine off the lowest shelf here! I did the math and, assuming 30 gallons, Jesus’ created 151.4 bottles of the best wine, that’s 12.5 cases in our time.
• The amount and quality of the wine is significant because, in the words of Gail O’Day, “in a culture of scarcity it represents the shattering of the boundaries of the conventional world, and the disciples become willing to entertain the possibility that this boundary breaking marks the inbreaking of God!”
• This miracle of turning water into wine, and into incredible wine in great abundance at that, shows us how deep and wide the grace of God is!
• And it also foreshadows for us how the world will be transformed though God’s amazing love and grace through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus!
• The miracle reveals God’s glory!
• It is also fascinating that, outside of the disciples, the only people who see the miracle and understand it for what it is are the servants, not the wedding party, not the host, but the servants.
• It reminds me of the Nativity Story: the first people to see the baby Jesus were the shepherds and not the wise men.
• Throughout the Bible, God chooses to be revealed in the most unexpected people and places. God most often chooses to reveal God’s glory to those on the margins of our societies.
• I wonder, if God continually chooses to be revealed on the margins of society, where would we be most likely to encounter the living God today?
• This question is worth considering, for it has significant implications.
III. Irenaeus
• But before you do that, I’d like to introduce you to a hero of our faith: Irenaeus.
• A pretty important guy: he was theologian/bishop that was born somewhere in the second century (between 115-142) in what is now Turkey, he was the second Bishop of Lyons France, and his teacher, Polycarp, was a student of John the Evangelist (the beloved Disciple), which means, Irenaeus was two generations removed from Jesus.
• Irenaeus is also important because he was one of the earliest champion’s of including what we now call the canonical Gospels in the Bible (which had not yet been formed in the way we have it now)
• “The glory of God is a human being fully alive!” Write it down in your notes.
• This is something to think about on this Epiphany Sunday, as we celebrate God’s glory being revealed through Jesus Christ, and then, through us!
IV. Becoming “fully alive”
• As followers of Christ, we are called to be fully alive, fully human, in order that we might become vessel’s for Christ’s glory to be made more and more manifest in us.
• So what does it look like, to be fully alive?
• Obviously, because God made us as beautiful and diverse creatures, we all look different when we are fully alive.
• But, I think we can see three areas that come of out the story of the Wedding at Cana that can point us in the right direction to becoming more fully alive.
1. Community (we are not meant to be alone)
• We are made for community! God does not want us to be alone
• It is not possible for us to become who God made us to be by ourselves. We have to do it together.
• There is an important concept that comes from Africa that can teach us in this matter.
• Ubuntu it is not really a translatable concept in English but it basically means, “I am because you are.”
• In other words: a person is a person through other persons (identity through community) the only way I can be all I am made to be is if you can be all you can be. If you are not fully you, than I cannot fully be me.
• We see this concept at work throughout Jesus’ entire ministry.
• Jesus calls each of us to work for the dignity and humanity of all people
• We must fight against the things that dehumanize others. We must fight against extreme poverty, torture, abuse, terror, and pandemics.
• In essence, by applying ubuntu to our lives we seek to follow the words of Jesus’ inaugural act of ministry in the gospel of Luke, where Jesus stood in the temple and preached the following words: Luke 4:18-19
• We are more fully alive when we are in community and when we are serving others.
o How can you be more engaged in this community in 2009? Join the choir, get in a Bible study, work with the children, go with the youth to the Martin Luther King Center in Denton. Get involved!
• Where is God calling you to serve this year? Maybe it’s working with AIDS Service of North Texas, or Spirit Horse, perhaps it’s working at Argyle food bank, maybe you are being called to advocate for peace and justice with your elected officials.
• How is God calling you to embrace your life by serving others?
2. Faith
• We see in the Gospel story that the disciples “believed.” The root for the word “believe” in Greek in this passage is pisteuo (pist yoo’ o) which means, “to place confidence in.”
• The disciples were placing their confidence in Jesus. These men, with the exception of John, the beloved disciple, would go on to eventually give their lives for Jesus, the one in whom they had placed confidence and trust.
• When we place our trust in something larger than ourselves it dictates how we live, and how we act.
• What are you placing your confidence in this year?
• In many respects that’s challenging question!
• How can we become more fully alive by contemplating what we place our confidence in?
3. Creative Practices (these give life)
• We need to embrace practices that give us life.
• For each of us these practices are different!
• Jesus made wine because it was necessary but also because wine can be a symbol of the celebration of life! Psalm 104 tells us that God gave us wine to gladden the human heart.
• Life-giving practices for some of us include cooking for others, or baking, or making music, some of you probably quilt; I think of our awesome banner team that is making beautiful new banners for our new sanctuary that will point us towards God.
• For some of us life-giving practices include working on your short game, or writing poetry.
• What do you do in your life on a weekly basis that is creative and enriches your life?
• The very first thing we learn about God in the Bible is that God is creative. We are made in God’s image and therefore we are inherently creative beings.
• I challenge you to find something in your life that you can do on a weekly basis to help you become more fully alive, because, the glory of God is a human being fully alive!
Community, Faith that leads to Action, and Creative Practices are just a few of the things that help us become all that God has made us to be.
These things help us to claim the rich abundance that God has provided for us in the midst of times that are filled with talk of scarcity.
One of the practices that we have as a faith community is that of Holy Communion. As we celebrate it, we experience community, for we do it together! We experience faith, in that we put our trust in Jesus. And even if we can’t, we can still come up and receive God’s grace and our neighbor can proclaim our trust for us until we can claim for ourselves. And, we experience creativity in the music being played, the juice that was made for this meal, the liturgy, and the bread that was baked for this moment, we taste, we touch, we smell, we hear and we experience creativity.
Friends, we are called to celebrate a God who has intervened on our behalf! We are called to celebrate a God who continues to show light in the darkness. A God who has saved all that he created and a God who desires each and every one of us!
During the offertory time I would invite you to consider where God’s light has shown in your life this previous year. And, if you feel so moved, I would invite you to take a taper, and light a candle of thanksgiving to God for how God has been at work in your life.
Sisters and brothers, we are blessed: though we are broken, God will make us whole. Though the world can be filled with darkness, God’s light cannot be overcome. Though we may struggle with one another, God has given us the ministry and the power to be reconciled. God love us! Friends, God is good: all the time, all the time, God is good. Amen!
Epiphany Sunday 2009
The Wedding at Cana
John 2:1-12
I. Explain Epiphany
• Christmas Decorations are still up and it’s January!
• Epiphany Sunday: the Last Sunday of the Christmas Cycle and the first Sunday of the Epiphany season
• In the early church this was the second most important feast day (the first being Easter)
• It’s important to not skip Epiphany because during the Epiphany, we celebrate more than just the birth of a baby.
• We celebrate the fact that the light of God, Jesus Christ, has made God’s love and God’s gift of salvation available to everyone and to all nations! No one, for any reason, is excluded from the opportunity to experience God’s incredible love and amazing grace.
• The early church loved, during the celebrations of Epiphany, to read in worship the story of the Wedding at Cana because in the story Jesus revealed his glory in the Gospel of John for the first time, his inaugural act, as it were!
• I’d like to share that story with you this morning. Before you hear this story, let us pray:
II. Read the Story
• What an incredibly rich story!
• We find Jesus and his disciples, along with his mother out at a big community event: a wedding!
• Jesus decides, after telling his mom he wouldn’t, for some reason unknown to us, decides to manifest his glory through making wine.
• And the wine: wow! We are not talking about two bottles of wine off the lowest shelf here! I did the math and, assuming 30 gallons, Jesus’ created 151.4 bottles of the best wine, that’s 12.5 cases in our time.
• The amount and quality of the wine is significant because, in the words of Gail O’Day, “in a culture of scarcity it represents the shattering of the boundaries of the conventional world, and the disciples become willing to entertain the possibility that this boundary breaking marks the inbreaking of God!”
• This miracle of turning water into wine, and into incredible wine in great abundance at that, shows us how deep and wide the grace of God is!
• And it also foreshadows for us how the world will be transformed though God’s amazing love and grace through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus!
• The miracle reveals God’s glory!
• It is also fascinating that, outside of the disciples, the only people who see the miracle and understand it for what it is are the servants, not the wedding party, not the host, but the servants.
• It reminds me of the Nativity Story: the first people to see the baby Jesus were the shepherds and not the wise men.
• Throughout the Bible, God chooses to be revealed in the most unexpected people and places. God most often chooses to reveal God’s glory to those on the margins of our societies.
• I wonder, if God continually chooses to be revealed on the margins of society, where would we be most likely to encounter the living God today?
• This question is worth considering, for it has significant implications.
III. Irenaeus
• But before you do that, I’d like to introduce you to a hero of our faith: Irenaeus.
• A pretty important guy: he was theologian/bishop that was born somewhere in the second century (between 115-142) in what is now Turkey, he was the second Bishop of Lyons France, and his teacher, Polycarp, was a student of John the Evangelist (the beloved Disciple), which means, Irenaeus was two generations removed from Jesus.
• Irenaeus is also important because he was one of the earliest champion’s of including what we now call the canonical Gospels in the Bible (which had not yet been formed in the way we have it now)
• “The glory of God is a human being fully alive!” Write it down in your notes.
• This is something to think about on this Epiphany Sunday, as we celebrate God’s glory being revealed through Jesus Christ, and then, through us!
IV. Becoming “fully alive”
• As followers of Christ, we are called to be fully alive, fully human, in order that we might become vessel’s for Christ’s glory to be made more and more manifest in us.
• So what does it look like, to be fully alive?
• Obviously, because God made us as beautiful and diverse creatures, we all look different when we are fully alive.
• But, I think we can see three areas that come of out the story of the Wedding at Cana that can point us in the right direction to becoming more fully alive.
1. Community (we are not meant to be alone)
• We are made for community! God does not want us to be alone
• It is not possible for us to become who God made us to be by ourselves. We have to do it together.
• There is an important concept that comes from Africa that can teach us in this matter.
• Ubuntu it is not really a translatable concept in English but it basically means, “I am because you are.”
• In other words: a person is a person through other persons (identity through community) the only way I can be all I am made to be is if you can be all you can be. If you are not fully you, than I cannot fully be me.
• We see this concept at work throughout Jesus’ entire ministry.
• Jesus calls each of us to work for the dignity and humanity of all people
• We must fight against the things that dehumanize others. We must fight against extreme poverty, torture, abuse, terror, and pandemics.
• In essence, by applying ubuntu to our lives we seek to follow the words of Jesus’ inaugural act of ministry in the gospel of Luke, where Jesus stood in the temple and preached the following words: Luke 4:18-19
• We are more fully alive when we are in community and when we are serving others.
o How can you be more engaged in this community in 2009? Join the choir, get in a Bible study, work with the children, go with the youth to the Martin Luther King Center in Denton. Get involved!
• Where is God calling you to serve this year? Maybe it’s working with AIDS Service of North Texas, or Spirit Horse, perhaps it’s working at Argyle food bank, maybe you are being called to advocate for peace and justice with your elected officials.
• How is God calling you to embrace your life by serving others?
2. Faith
• We see in the Gospel story that the disciples “believed.” The root for the word “believe” in Greek in this passage is pisteuo (pist yoo’ o) which means, “to place confidence in.”
• The disciples were placing their confidence in Jesus. These men, with the exception of John, the beloved disciple, would go on to eventually give their lives for Jesus, the one in whom they had placed confidence and trust.
• When we place our trust in something larger than ourselves it dictates how we live, and how we act.
• What are you placing your confidence in this year?
• In many respects that’s challenging question!
• How can we become more fully alive by contemplating what we place our confidence in?
3. Creative Practices (these give life)
• We need to embrace practices that give us life.
• For each of us these practices are different!
• Jesus made wine because it was necessary but also because wine can be a symbol of the celebration of life! Psalm 104 tells us that God gave us wine to gladden the human heart.
• Life-giving practices for some of us include cooking for others, or baking, or making music, some of you probably quilt; I think of our awesome banner team that is making beautiful new banners for our new sanctuary that will point us towards God.
• For some of us life-giving practices include working on your short game, or writing poetry.
• What do you do in your life on a weekly basis that is creative and enriches your life?
• The very first thing we learn about God in the Bible is that God is creative. We are made in God’s image and therefore we are inherently creative beings.
• I challenge you to find something in your life that you can do on a weekly basis to help you become more fully alive, because, the glory of God is a human being fully alive!
Community, Faith that leads to Action, and Creative Practices are just a few of the things that help us become all that God has made us to be.
These things help us to claim the rich abundance that God has provided for us in the midst of times that are filled with talk of scarcity.
One of the practices that we have as a faith community is that of Holy Communion. As we celebrate it, we experience community, for we do it together! We experience faith, in that we put our trust in Jesus. And even if we can’t, we can still come up and receive God’s grace and our neighbor can proclaim our trust for us until we can claim for ourselves. And, we experience creativity in the music being played, the juice that was made for this meal, the liturgy, and the bread that was baked for this moment, we taste, we touch, we smell, we hear and we experience creativity.
Friends, we are called to celebrate a God who has intervened on our behalf! We are called to celebrate a God who continues to show light in the darkness. A God who has saved all that he created and a God who desires each and every one of us!
During the offertory time I would invite you to consider where God’s light has shown in your life this previous year. And, if you feel so moved, I would invite you to take a taper, and light a candle of thanksgiving to God for how God has been at work in your life.
Sisters and brothers, we are blessed: though we are broken, God will make us whole. Though the world can be filled with darkness, God’s light cannot be overcome. Though we may struggle with one another, God has given us the ministry and the power to be reconciled. God love us! Friends, God is good: all the time, all the time, God is good. Amen!
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