The Sermon in a Nutshell: September 20

This week our sermon was titled “Jesus Fulfills the Deal” and it came out of Hebrews 1:1-4. We found that the whole book of Hebrews shows us how Jesus fulfilled the Old Covenant by offering Himself as a better sacrifice and becoming a better high priest. For us this means that when we find ourselves in God's story, we find ourselves being led. Unlike the people in the Old Testament though, we find ourselves being led by God Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. Because Jesus was 100% human, He experienced all of the same life situations and temptations that we face in our lives but He was faithful to God and didn't sin. This means that when we find ourselves being led by Jesus, we have a leader who can relate to us; Jesus leads by example. Because Jesus was also 100% God, the sacrifice He made on the cross made it possible to take down the barrier between God and people that sin had put between us. Now, when we follow Jesus, we can follow Him right in to the very throne room of God. Although the book of Hebrews can come across as being packed full of theological language that doesn't seem to really relate to life, we found that looking at it in terms of Christ being our leader makes it very practical for our daily lives. We can follow Jesus in any and all life situations by keeping our eyes focused on Him and the example He sat for us in His life of obedience.

The Sermon in a Nutshell: September 13

This week's sermon was titled “God's People Break the Deal.” As we've been finding ourselves in God's story, I've tried to paint a picture of that story using broad brush strokes. In our first two weeks, we covered all of God's story from the beginning of time up through the call of Abraham when God made a deal with him almost 4,000 years ago. This week I tried to cover the rest of the Old Testament story from God's deal with His people through Moses up until the time when their rejection of that deal had become apparent in the 6th century BC. We learned this week that when we find ourselves in God's story, we have a choice. When God made a deal with His people in the Old Testament, He gave them a choice: either they could choose to obey His instruction and find life or they could choose to turn away from God by disobedience and face death (Deuteronomy 28; 30:11-20). Sadly, as we looked at the way the rest of God's story unfolded in the Old Testament, we saw His people consistently and persistently choosing disobedience. All this disobedience came to a head when Babylon invaded Judah, destroyed the city of Jerusalem and the Temple, and carried most of the Israelites away into captivity in the year 586 BC. Although this was a very dark point in God's story, the light of hope still burned because God is a faithful God. His people continued to look to Him to act in His plans to redeem His creation. This redemption came when God came to live amongst us as Jesus Christ, fully human and fully God. You see, Jesus, being fully human, also had a choice when He found Himself in God's story. Whereas Adam and Eve chose to disobey God by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and whereas God's chosen people, Israel, had chosen to disobey Him by worshiping false gods and oppressing the poor, Jesus chose to obey God by living a life without sin and submitting to death on a Roman cross. It was and is through this death and subsequent resurrection that God brought salvation and redemption to all of His creation through Jesus' obedience. Now today, we too have a choice when we find ourselves in God's story. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that we can either enter through the narrow gate, walk the narrow road of obedience and find life, or we can enter through the broad gate, walk the wide road of disobedience and find destruction (Matthew 7:13-14). By God's grace, may we all enter through the narrow gate and walk the narrow road!

The Sermon in a Nutshell: September 6

This week's sermon was called “God Makes a Deal.” The sermon text was taken from Genesis 12:1-3, although we also looked at Genesis 22:15 and following and then connected it to the New Testament by looking at 1 Corinthians 12:12 and following. As we looked at the way God made a deal with Abraham whereby He was going to bless all nations and peoples of the world, we saw that when we find ourselves in God's story, we play A major role, but we don't play THE major role. When God called Abraham and told him that He was going to use him in His plan to restore Creation to His intended purpose, God gave Abraham a command as well as a promise. As we looked at the life of Abraham, we saw that everything that happened to Abraham was part of a faith journey that led him to trusting God's promise to him. We then looked at the way that God fulfilled this promise to Abraham by sending Jesus, Abraham's Offspring, to bring redemption in His death and resurrection. Finally, as we connected to the New Testament, we saw that we all, as members of the church which is the Body of Christ, continue to play a major role in God's story as He uses each one of us to work together to fulfill His plan to bring redemption to all peoples. All throughout God's redemption story, He has used individual human beings to work with Him in fulfilling His plans. While this does give us a sense of just how valuable we all are, we are also humbled as we see that God is at work behind the scenes in each of our lives, giving us strength and wisdom and guidance. This is how we can say that although we play a major role in God's story as He works through us, we don't play THE major role precisely because it is Him working through us.

The Sermon in a Nutshell: August 30

Our sermon this week kicked off a five part sermon series entitled, “Finding Ourselves In God's Story.” This week's sermon was called, “The Story Begins.” The Scripture text for our sermon was taken, appropriately enough, from the first three chapters of Genesis. I tried to focus on the way that when we find ourselves in God's story, we find ourselves both broken and mended. In the first two chapters of Genesis we see that God had created the world to function in an orderly, harmonious way. Originally, there was harmony in humankind's relationship with God, with their selves, with others, and with creation. After Adam and Eve sinned against God in Genesis chapter three, disorder entered the world and the harmony God intended for us was broken. We can still see the evidence of these broken relationships today, both in our lives and in the world around us. The Good News about Jesus is that God is restoring these broken relationships through the death and resurrection of Christ! The invitation to move from being broken to being mended is extended to everyone through Christian baptism. After we looked at the beginning of God's story, we considered Jesus' command to make disciples in Matthew 28:18-20 in light of this. Although the thought of evangelism can be intimidating to us, when we think of it in terms of telling God's Story and our story and inviting others to enter in to this Story, some of the intimidation goes away.

The High-Tech Redneck!

The church where I'm serving has a website where I post the audio recording of each week's sermon. You can find it at http://www.christsview.net/id7.html.

I'm not asking for pity or sympathy or anything, but if you listen I will be glad to know that my mom and granmda aren't the only ones who download it each week =D

New Weekly Blog

I like blogging, I really do. And I'm getting to where I miss it too. But I don't have the internets in my house and the only neighbornet I can connect to is password protected. When I'm in the office, I try to keep my non-pastoral internetting to a minimum, so I don't really have the time to blog on the clock either.

However, one thing that I've inhereted with my new job is the responsibility to write our church's weekly update. This is more or less a written recap of the service for those who weren't able to be with us on a given Sunday. I don't mind doing it because a lot of the older people, and just people who weren't able to be at church in general, seem to really enjoy getting it. Also, this is a great way to communicate our upcoming events and stuff to as many people as possible. So I'm not griping :)

But part of this weekly update is a recap I do of each week's sermon. This is also cool because it gives people a chance to revisit the week's sermon and maybe it helps them process it. The Christian Ed major in me is always looking for ways to facilitate learning :)

It hit me this morning that in leu of blogging, I could just start posting my written summary of each week's sermon. I know it probably won't be widely read, but there's no harm in throwing out a virtual "Hail Mary." So from now on, that's what I'm gonna do each Tuesday.

Deuteronomy 28 and the Sermon on the Mount: or Sermon Work

So I'm laboring to give birth to another sermon this week. Sermon writing for me is a week long process. I don't know if it is because I'm a perfectionist, or because my attention span is shrinking exponentially as my age increases, or what. I'm hoping maybe that by writing a little bit down here it will help me to shape what I want to say this Sunday.

We are currently preaching through a series titled: Finding Ourselves in God's Story. My intention here was to give a brief overview of the overarching story told in and through Holy Scripture. We began by looking at the Creation and humanity's rebellion in Genesis 1-3. That sermon was called, appropriately enough: The Story Begins. The main idea was that when we find ourselves in God's story, we find ourselves both broken and mended. Then we had a sermon on Genesis 12 called "God Makes a Deal." The main idea there was that when we find ourselves in God's story, we play A major role but we don't play THE major role. This week's sermon is going to finish us up in the Old Testament so that next week we can look at the Incarnation and the following week finish with the last two chapters of the book of Revelation.

Now this week's sermon is using Deuteronomy 28 as a jumping off point to cover basically the rest of the Old Testament (since in a sense the rest of the OT is a footnote on DT 28). I'm calling it "God's people break the deal" and I think the main idea is going to be that when we find ourselves in God's story, we have to follow God's script. I'm thinking I will try to run with the metaphor of Torah (leaning more on the sense of instruction rather than law), as God's script for His redemptive intention for His people. Without coming across as anti-Semitic, I'm going to illustrate the way the rest of the OT tells the story of God's people repeatedly failing to be redemptive instruments because of their persistant refusal to follow God's script.

I'm trying to be careful about always making a connection to the New Testament with every Old Testament sermon I preach. I'm not so sure that it is a cardinal sin to fail to do so, but it is helpful to show people the way the two parts of their Bible are connected. So this week my first thought was to tie the story of Israel's repeated failures in to the call to repentance, first through the prophetic injunction to shoov from their wicked ways and turn back to God, and then through John the Baptist and Jesus' call to repent. But the more I think about it, the less I like it. I mean, I'm a big fan of repentance and I'm trying to cultivate a lifestyle of repentance, but homiletically, I'm just not feeling the groove.

So now what I think I'm going to do is make the New Testament connection to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. I think what I'm going to do is compare and contrast Moses presenting the two ways to Isreal (obedience leading to blessing or disobedience leading to curses) with Jesus's injunction to enter through the narrow gate which leads to life rather than the broad gate which leads to destruction. In terms of comparrison (and I know there are a plethora of interpretations on this Sermon as well as a wide range of opinions as to how it relates to the Christian life), Moses presented Israel with an Instruction for how to live as God's chosen people whom God intended to use as His redemptive instrument and Jesus basically is calling God's chosen people (who now are no longer determined by ethnicity), back to the heart of God's intention in giving His Instruction through Moses.

But I need to wrestle with the contrast here too because the Incarnation of Christ changed everything forever. So I'm thinking of the way Paul, when talking about God's Instruction, said this Instruction was given to lead people to Christ, almost like the way a babysitter watches over a child (Galatians 3:24). But then Christ Himself points us right back to God's Instruction when He says that He didn't come to abolish the Law but to fulfill it (Mt 5:17) and that our righteousness needs to surpass that of the Scribes and Pharisees (Mt 5:20). I don't think what Christ is talking about here is some kind of Protestant concept of imputed righteousness because in the rest of this Sermon He is calling us to a higher standard of righteousness than mere outward conformity to a set of rules.

I guess the thing that is becoming clear to me as I type all this out is that God's intention to redeem His creation does not change from the Old to the New Testaments. In the Old Testament, God called Abraham and his descendants to be His instrument of this redemption. While ultimately that redemption was going to come through Abraham's Seed (singular), that is to say, Christ, God also gave Instruction to Israel as to how they must live if they were to be His redemptive agents. In the New Testament, Christ comes and fulfills the Old Testament by living a life of complete obedience as the Second Adam and the personification of Israel, and then He extends the Kingdom invitation to all peoples, thus establishing the Church. Now it is the Church, as God's chosen people and filled with His Holy Spirit, that is God's redemptive instrument in the world. But just like Israel was presented with two ways to live in Deuteronomy 28, so too are those who accept the call to follow Christ. Either we live a lifestyle of repentance which manifests itself in good works and by which God brings redemption to the world around us, or we live a hypocritical life of double standards and outward conformity to arbitrary rules which will lead us to our own destruction.

Well that helps. There is so much more I would like to cram in to this though! I want to emphasize the importance of our being created in God's image and called to conform to the image of Christ in every sermon! I also want to explicitly include the Trinity in every sermon! If only we had 3 hours to do church on Sunday......