https://joelssermons.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/2013-08-25-whose-will-they-be.mp3

Text: Luke 12:13-21

Last weekend about 20 people gathered at the seminary in Elkhart, Indiana to talk about what the church needs to be talking about over the next decade.  One of the questions each of us was asked to speak to was What is the church most afraid to talk about?   As we went around the circle, the first five answers went something like this: Affluence, wealth, upsetting the seminary donor base, class, how embedded we are in a capitalist system that goes against ­so many of our values.  Do you sense a theme emerging here?

Marriage therapists often comment that typically the most difficult and contentious topic for couples to talk about is not sex, but money – finances.

Lucky for us, the weekend after it was determined that money is not just difficult for couples to talk about, but also the thing that the church is perhaps most afraid to confront, CMC is having a stewardship Sunday in which we talk about that very thing.

Maybe you’ve heard these numbers before, but they bear repeating.  Everence, the stewardship agency of Mennonite Church USA, estimates that in the Hebrew prophets and New Testament teachings, there are about 50 references to baptism, 225 references to prayer, 300 to faith, love – 700, and over 2350 references to money and possessions.  For Jesus, the only thing he teaches about more than money is the kingdom of God – with these two topics often overlapping.  The Bible apparently does not share our present hesitation to address the issue.  According to these numbers, for every one sermon about love, there should be three about economic justice and how we manage our finances.  I confess to not hitting that ratio, although I’m willing to work on it.

Money is in many ways ethically neutral; having potential…

A month ago twelve of us from Columbus Mennonite attended the ­­­Mennonite Church USA Convention in Phoenix.

I’ll give a taste of the Phoenix experience by sharing six different slices from the week.  I guess you could think of this as Phoenix pizza, or a Phoenix pie, sliced six ways, hopefully containing some kind of nutritional value for the mind and soul.

Each slice is introduced with a verse of Scripture.

So the first slice is just to get a sense of the atmosphere of the gathering.  The scene.

1. The scene – Hebrews 10:24-25

“And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as we are in the habit of doing.”

These national conventions happen every two years and are a combination of business, continuing education, fellowship, worship, and fun.  For those of us who have attended a number of them as well as various Mennonite institutions, it pretty much amounts to a sea of half familiar faces, making one at least a partial believer in the idea of previous lives.  Someone comes up and greets you, and you do a quick search through your memory of which life it was when you knew them.  Growing up? Camp?  College?  Voluntary Service?  Seminary?  Or just someone you sat at a table with at one of the previous conventions?  I had the awkward experience of crossing paths with a fellow convention goer, each of us looking at each other in the face for several long and puzzled seconds, both no doubt jogging our memories and waiting for the other person to show the light of recognition, before we both silently averted our eyes and went our own way.

In talking with other CMCers who attended, however, I’m also aware of how foreign such a gathering can…

Text: Ecclesiastes

I am holding in my hand an Illinois Lottery All Jackpot Report slip from a couple years ago.  On the back of it is handwritten ECC Chap 4:9-11.  This ticket was a gift to me, and I’ve kept it as a way of remembering the experience that went along with it.

The handwriting belongs to someone that I knew only as Troy, and he gave me this slip of paper at the gas station where I had taken him to fill up his gas can.  I had been driving from Kansas back to Ohio after spending some time with Abbie’s family and Abbie and the girls had stayed back for an extra week.  I was in the middle of Illinois and saw a guy on the side of the interstate beside his car, holding up a gas can.  It’s not real often that I’m driving by myself, without having to be at the destination at any particular time, so I decided to stop.  Troy got in the car, cursed at himself for running out of gas and asked for a ride to the nearest gas station.  After I asked him his name he asked me what I do for a living, and I told him I’m a pastor.  He laughed at me and replied that there was no way I was a pastor.  Unshaken by his doubt, I repeated that actually, I am a pastor.  He said I couldn’t be a pastor because I didn’t have a Bible on the dashboard.  “Every pastor I’ve known always carries a Bible by their side,” he said.  I didn’t know how to come back at that one, so I told him I was on vacation, which he thought was a really lousy excuse.  He eventually believed me and confided that he was…

Main Text: Luke 10:38-42

Whenever I hear this story of Martha and Mary hosting Jesus in their home, I always have this gut reaction of wanting to defend Martha.  Having a guest takes work, hosting is not a passive activity, and yet Martha’s attention to these practical details gets trumped by Mary’s sitting and listening to Jesus.  Jesus points out that Mary has chosen the better part, and Martha is left pulling the roast out of the oven wondering where she went wrong.  So I feel like Martha deserves some props that.

Part of my motivation here no doubt comes out of my own experience.  Growing up I always wondered how it was that most of us got to read in the living room while Mom was getting Sunday dinner around.  I liked to read and wasn’t overly enthusiastic about being in the kitchen, but I had a great appreciation for the work Mom was doing, which I openly expressed by eating large quantities of food at every meal.  If it would have been left to me, we all probably would have sat around reading until we were unbearably hungry and then eventually scrounged for some peanut butter and jelly.  I’ve matured a little bit since those days, but whenever we are hosting and I find myself in the position of Mary, the one sitting, listening, reveling in the leisure of relationship, I’m mindful of what Martha – aka Abbie – is up to in getting things around and am grateful, convinced that it would be a pretty lousy party without her.  And in the back of my mind I’m thinking that Martha has the more difficult task.  Martha is the answer to that quote by journalist PJ O’Rourke which says: “Everybody wants to save the earth, but nobody wants to…

Text: Luke 9:51-62

As I get my bearings here, we’re sticking with the lectionary as a faithful guide to keep us in the flow of the wider church.  There is a strong theme of discipleship in today’s gospel reading.

I want to start by reading a poem, one that some of you may very well be familiar with.  It’s a poem by Julia Kasdorf, and it’s called Green Market, New York.  By way of brief introduction, Julia Kasdorf could be called the matriarch of Mennonite poetry, and this poem is the first poem that appeared in her first book of poetry, which was titled Sleeping Preacher, published in 1992.  The fact that the matriarch of Mennonite poetry is still mid-career and published her first book just a little over 20 years ago already tells us something about Mennonites’ wary historic relationship to the arts.  She has said that the poem’s location at the beginning makes it serve as something of a thesis for that book, which might also make it something of a poetic thesis for the contemporary North American Mennonite experience.

Here it is:

Green Market, NY

The first day of false spring, I hit the street,
buoyant, my coat open.  I could keep walking
and leave that job without cleaning my desk.
At Union Square the country people slouch
by crates of last fall’s potatoes.
An Amish lady tends her table of pies.
I ask where her farm is.  “Upstate,” she says,
“but we moved from P.A. where the land is better,
and the growing season’s longer by a month.”
I ask where in P.A.  “Towns you wouldn’t know,
around Mifflinburg, around Belleville.”
And I tell her I was born there.
“Now who would your grandparents be?”
“Thomas and Vesta Peachey.”
“Well, I was a Peachey,” she says,
and she grins like she sees the whole farm
on my face.  “What a place your folks had,
down Locust Grove. …