Sunday September 27, 2009
Preacher: Pastor Mick Roschke
Readings:
Numbers 11:4-6,10-16,24-29
James 5:13-20
Mark 9:38-50
Audio sermon file:
http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/F79E6EA8-8543-AAA2-DCBA-FE4FEAB44CFA.mp3
Are we open-minded enough to those of different gender, sexual preference, age, color, race? Do we ever proclaim that “others are not following US”? … and thus try to fashion God in OUR image?
Pastor Mick shared a very interesting notion today – that maybe we want to be open, but we’re still too insecure in ourselves …
“If you knew me, would you (still) like me?”
Maybe it’s the old Woody Allen delivery of the old Groucho Marx line:
“I wouldn’t want to join any club that would have someone like me for a member.”
Our insecurities can lead us to get defensive about not being gifted as others are – “they’re not following US”. Pastor Mick shared a great story about someone at a Church once handing out brochures exclaiming:
“It’s ALL Happenin’ Here!!”
His response was “Don’t Believe It!”
Sometimes, “it’s happening somewhere else”
... and we must be big enough and inclusive enough to recognize that and accept it and even proclaim it. Women, children, the deprived, the lonely, the poor are in our midst and it’s no good hiding from that fact. We have to dive in and get used to it.
We are often judgmental, in viewing the world Top down. In the Delcaration of Independence, women were seen as 75% human, African Americans a scant 60%! In Mark, today, we are reminded that God does not play favorites.
There are no insiders!
The outcast, the marginalized are held up by Jesus through US, through true fellowship.
And here’s the Good News. THEY, those very outcast and marginalized, those held at bay by US, have something gifted by The Spirit to GIVE US. It is reciprocity at work. Not only are these 100% human beings to whom we give time, money, treasure, food, clothing, BUT there is something to receive FROM them, something of The Spirit.
Today, EVERYONE has something to bring AND something to receive.
People are waiting, in Pastor Mick’s words, for the Church to not just be a sleeping giant! God is ready to “get prayed up” and get excited again. We want to be a church where everybody’s revved up to learn from everyone else, EVERYONE …
… because The Spirit is present in some form in each and every person – for the goodness of all!
Sunday, September 27, 2009
The Cost of Ambition
Sunday September 20, 2009
Lay Preacher: Vince Prantil
Readings:
Jeremiah 11:18-20
James 3:13-4:3(a), 7-8(a)
Mark 9:30-37
Audio sermon file:
http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/786C9C59-967D-0367-BC70-1B6CCF7383CF.mp3
I read the New Testament texts for today … laced with stories of ambition … and I heard a voice. It was a voice of Maurice Boyd, Senior Minister of 5th Avenue Presbyterian Church in NYC ….
And he said if you’re going to talk about ambition, you need to recognize its ambiguity. It can be a very healthy and pretty destructive. We need to say Yes to it and No. We blame people for having it and not having it:
We say of her “Oh, she’s sooooo ambitious!”
And we say “The problem with him, ya see, is he has no ambition.”
No matter what you think about it, ambition has an energy about it … it makes our wheels go ‘round. It can bring out the best in us: ingenuity, discipline, determination. But, in excess, it can become immoral and demonic.
In James, we are asked what pursuits are worthy of children of God.
“If there were dreams for sale, what would you buy?”
We all have dreams, don’t we? We’re all striving for something … buying something? What is it we’re striving for? What are you buying?
… ‘cause everything you’re after’s got a cost. Every day they cost us 24 hours and, in the end, they cost us our life.
The Masoud, the Israeli Secret Service, says it can get anything from anybody with one or a combination of three things: sex, power & money. What does this say about what we really want??
What really drives us?
Is it the promotion? the new car? the new boat? the title of “greatest”? And are we willing to kill for it? To covet out of bitter envy and selfish ambition?
God knows that if we ask for these things, we ask with wrong motives”… God’s not in the wish-granting business … and God knows that these greedy motivations deceive us.
If you want something so bad we’ll do anything to get it, they’ve really got you and we will find our ambition becoming demonic. What drives us is our basic principle and we can’t expect more from our basic principle than it can deliver …
Is that really so difficult? Well, Boyd says, then let’s make it very simple …
If you put self at the center, you’d better prepared to be find your outer limits … and that can be very lonely.
Lay Preacher: Vince Prantil
Readings:
Jeremiah 11:18-20
James 3:13-4:3(a), 7-8(a)
Mark 9:30-37
Audio sermon file:
http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/786C9C59-967D-0367-BC70-1B6CCF7383CF.mp3
I read the New Testament texts for today … laced with stories of ambition … and I heard a voice. It was a voice of Maurice Boyd, Senior Minister of 5th Avenue Presbyterian Church in NYC ….
And he said if you’re going to talk about ambition, you need to recognize its ambiguity. It can be a very healthy and pretty destructive. We need to say Yes to it and No. We blame people for having it and not having it:
We say of her “Oh, she’s sooooo ambitious!”
And we say “The problem with him, ya see, is he has no ambition.”
No matter what you think about it, ambition has an energy about it … it makes our wheels go ‘round. It can bring out the best in us: ingenuity, discipline, determination. But, in excess, it can become immoral and demonic.
In James, we are asked what pursuits are worthy of children of God.
“If there were dreams for sale, what would you buy?”
We all have dreams, don’t we? We’re all striving for something … buying something? What is it we’re striving for? What are you buying?
… ‘cause everything you’re after’s got a cost. Every day they cost us 24 hours and, in the end, they cost us our life.
The Masoud, the Israeli Secret Service, says it can get anything from anybody with one or a combination of three things: sex, power & money. What does this say about what we really want??
What really drives us?
Is it the promotion? the new car? the new boat? the title of “greatest”? And are we willing to kill for it? To covet out of bitter envy and selfish ambition?
God knows that if we ask for these things, we ask with wrong motives”… God’s not in the wish-granting business … and God knows that these greedy motivations deceive us.
If you want something so bad we’ll do anything to get it, they’ve really got you and we will find our ambition becoming demonic. What drives us is our basic principle and we can’t expect more from our basic principle than it can deliver …
Is that really so difficult? Well, Boyd says, then let’s make it very simple …
If you put self at the center, you’d better prepared to be find your outer limits … and that can be very lonely.
If what you’re after is power … then you’d better forget about affection. It’s difficult to be after both.
If you’re interested in justice and not in mercy … you’d better not make any mistakes
If what you’re after is security … forget about ecstasy
If you seek comfort, you might have to relinquish meaning
If you’re consumed by your work … you’d better keep one eye on your relationships
If you’re ruthless on the way up … don’t root for kindness on the way down
It’s hard to be after the things we think will satisfy our earthly desires and the ones God created us for …. What dreams are we buying? … and if we manage to succeed, will what we get be worth what’s it’s costing us?
There’s a great little picture book – Hope for the Flowers … self-described as ‘a tale – partly about life and lots about hope – for adults and others’ … in which two caterpillars, Sprite and Yellow come upon a pile of caterpillars rising into the sky as far as the eye can see. “Do you know what’s happening?” one says to another. “I just arrived myself. No one has time to explain. They’re so busy trying to get where they’re going – up there,” came the reply. “But what’s at the top?” Stripe asked. Again, the reply:”No one knows that either, but it must be awfully good because everyone’s rushing there.” There’s only one thing to do reasons Stripe and he jumps right in. Caterpillars climb atop one another, pushing, shoving, and knocking each other indiscriminately off the pile in an all-out effort to “get to the top”. Eventually Stripe pushes through the clouds only to find there’s nothing “up there”. “High up there”, he concludes, “only looked good from the bottom”. And he climbs back down.Pastor Mohn said it very similarly back in March:“If that’s all there is, we wind up right where we started.”It’s a zero-sum game, you only climb the pile if you’re willing to knock your neighbor off. Our neighbor becomes our obstacle, our enemy rather than our brother, only someone in the way of our ambition for “what’s up there”.So Stripe heads down the pile telling everyone he sees that “there is nothing up there” and that they would be so much the better for building cocoons; that they could fly if only they become butterflies. “I saw a butterfly – there CAN be more to life,” Stripe realizes.The pile of caterpillars climbs on, ignorant of the beauty contained within each of them. There is in each of us a butterfly … and Pastor Mick said it best when he said “You need not be perfect, you need only to be the ‘perfect you’. God has had a plan for you since you were in the womb. You just have to find out ‘what that is’ because it doesn’t come with blueprints”. And we won’t find it by knocking our neighbors “off the pile” only “to wind up where we started”.What does it take to satisfy us? Often when we reach the end of the rainbow, the top of the pile, the pot of gold doesn’t quite have the luster we had imagined. And if what dreams you’ve bought don’t satisfy, more of the same won’t either.
“I learned this from my friends who have sailboats,” Boyd whispers, “No matter how big your sailboat is, somebody’s always got a bigger one!” If I only had a bigger house, a wealthier husband, the boss’ office … and it doesn’t work. Arguing “which among you is greatest” is moot.
Sometimes we know how to spend, but not how to buy. … we tend to spend on the trivial and we’re often willing to pay a lot for it. If we equate “the pursuit of happiness” with sex, power & money, we grant ourselves the God-given right to exploit our neighbor or “do whatever we have to” to get what we want.
There's two morals to the story and they're what Maurice Boyd calls God’s Great Joke. I think it's a two-parter ...
Part I is that, in the end, these things don’t satisfy. There’s less on top of the pile than we imagine. Material rewards won’t satisfy immortal longings. Worldly possessions are not enough for other-worldly creatures.
So then there’s things James says are worth our going after them … character, humility, good-heartedness, sincerity. Pursuits worthy of children of God. How do you attain these things?
God’s Great Joke Part II: … is that …
These things you can’t get by going after them! … and the harder you try, the farther you are from getting them … Imagine trying to be humble and finally saying “Wow, I’m the greatest at humility!” It doesn’t ring true.
There are some people that are desperately trying to be happy and they’re some of the most miserable people on Earth. Out there, there are some people desperately trying to be original and they’re not even interesting. Because they’re after something you can’t get for the reaching.
These things come only by what C. S. Lewis calls “the principle of inattention” – they can be yours ONLY when you’re not looking for them.
… you only get these heavenly things, when you’re after something else, something ULTIMATE and ETERNAL.
Well … that doesn’t sound very concrete, does it?
Perhaps, the good news is that God has endowed all of us … you and I with what Boyd called A Lovely Ambition?
… something you don’t have to try hard at all to do or to be or to chase
… something you are so gifted at that when you find it, it’s as if you’re remembering it more than ever having learned it
… and when you’re “doing this thing” … telling a story, singing in the choir, playing in the band, helping others find their calling, dancing, nurturing K5er’s, loving your children, … well that produces a certain kind of person, the kind that says, well …
… it doesn’t matter if I ever sing at the Met as long as I sing with dignity and purpose
… it doesn’t matter if I paint a masterpiece so long as I paint with creativity, the best way I know how
… because when you’re doing these ULTIMATE and ETERNAL things, those other things … humility, sincerity, the good heart … fly up and land on your shoulder …you get all that thrown in!!
Unsought … it’s God’s good gift … given when least expected.
What do we really value? True worship someone once said is to put the right value on the right thing … rather than chasing after trivial things God did not create us for …
… if you do what you’re gifted to do, if you’re after ‘the perfect YOU’ and you do it with discipline and integrity, God says… THAT is ambition enough
Amen
So then there’s things James says are worth our going after them … character, humility, good-heartedness, sincerity. Pursuits worthy of children of God. How do you attain these things?
God’s Great Joke Part II: … is that …
These things you can’t get by going after them! … and the harder you try, the farther you are from getting them … Imagine trying to be humble and finally saying “Wow, I’m the greatest at humility!” It doesn’t ring true.
There are some people that are desperately trying to be happy and they’re some of the most miserable people on Earth. Out there, there are some people desperately trying to be original and they’re not even interesting. Because they’re after something you can’t get for the reaching.
These things come only by what C. S. Lewis calls “the principle of inattention” – they can be yours ONLY when you’re not looking for them.
… you only get these heavenly things, when you’re after something else, something ULTIMATE and ETERNAL.
Well … that doesn’t sound very concrete, does it?
Perhaps, the good news is that God has endowed all of us … you and I with what Boyd called A Lovely Ambition?
… something you don’t have to try hard at all to do or to be or to chase
… something you are so gifted at that when you find it, it’s as if you’re remembering it more than ever having learned it
… and when you’re “doing this thing” … telling a story, singing in the choir, playing in the band, helping others find their calling, dancing, nurturing K5er’s, loving your children, … well that produces a certain kind of person, the kind that says, well …
… it doesn’t matter if I ever sing at the Met as long as I sing with dignity and purpose
… it doesn’t matter if I paint a masterpiece so long as I paint with creativity, the best way I know how
… because when you’re doing these ULTIMATE and ETERNAL things, those other things … humility, sincerity, the good heart … fly up and land on your shoulder …you get all that thrown in!!
Unsought … it’s God’s good gift … given when least expected.
What do we really value? True worship someone once said is to put the right value on the right thing … rather than chasing after trivial things God did not create us for …
… if you do what you’re gifted to do, if you’re after ‘the perfect YOU’ and you do it with discipline and integrity, God says… THAT is ambition enough
Amen
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