Jeremiah 1:4-10; 1 Timothy 4:12-16

Speaker: Mark Rupp

“We commit to: Learn from one another, allowing the wisdom of all ages to teach us”

A few weeks ago, on the Friday evening of our Peace Camp, I made a very exciting announcement.  I told the group that I had recently been elected mayor of the new town of Peaceburg.  Much like the similarly named Pittsburgh, Peaceburg was a city tri-sected by two rivers coming together to form a third river, leaving the city split into three large neighborhood sections. 

But, unlike most cities, my city, Peaceburg, was almost completely a blank slate with lots of resources and lots of room for new development in each of the three neighborhoods created by the rivers.  As the mayor, I needed help figuring out how to design my new city, what to put in it, where things should go, and, perhaps most importantly, how to do all this in a way that helped Peaceburg live up to its name and become a city where everyone could experience and practice peace. 

Lucky for me, I just happened to have access to a group of energetic young people who had just spent some time learning about what it means to be peacemakers and who also happened to be split into three small groups.  It’s almost like someone planned it out that way…

I will spare you all the finer details, but the short version is that in order to prepare the kids to help design Peaceburg, we first spent some time talking about what kinds of different spaces are part of a city, narrowing it down to five different zones represented by five different colors of construction paper: residential in blue, industrial in brown, commercial in yellow, institutional in orange, and public spaces in green.  I told them they could build…

https://joelssermons.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/20190818sermon.mp3

Texts: Daniel 3:1-18; Luke 22:14-30

This is Part 1 of a 7 week series on our Membership Commitment statement.

The August edition of Sojourners magazine features short letters written to the American church – that’s us – from Christian leaders around the world.  The feature is called “Dear brothers and sisters in Christ.”

These letters come from places like El Progreso, Honduras; Taize, France; New Delhi,, India, Johannesburg, South Africa; The Wakka Wakka nation, located within land now called Australia.

As you might imagine, the letters address us as Christians living within a global superpower.

One letter comes from Ruth Padilla Deborst.  She’s the director of a World Vision program in Santa Domingo, Costa Rica.

She begins: “I write to you as a sister from Latin America who yearns to see peace and justice embrace on this suffering planet that is humanity’s home.  I write you in hopes that you will ponder these questions in the spirit they are offered, that of a shared prayer that God’s good will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

She then asks three questions.

I’ll read just the first one.  Here it is:

“First, might worship of God, the creator and sustainer of all life, to whom the whole earth belongs, not be more faithfully embodied in responsible care of all that God created than in elaborate Sunday services while energy, creativity, and imagination the rest of the week are concentrated on consumption and accumulation without a thought for their ecological impact or the effects of privileged lifestyles on the great majorities both inside and beyond the borders or your nation-state?”

It’s a leading question, and one impressively long sentence.

Otherwise, what caught my attention about this question is how our sister Ruth presents her concern as a matter of worship.  Worship of God, she is suggesting, has to do…

https://joelssermons.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/20190811sermon.mp3

Text: Hebrews 11:1-16                  

Wendell Berry, farmer, poet, turned 85 this past week.  He once wrote: “Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.”  These words come at the end of his Mad Farmer Liberation Front Manifesto in which he chastises the many other things in which humanity has placed its faith: the quick profit, mindless consumption, the generals and politicos.  At 85 and counting, Wendell Berry is living a full life.  But according to his own math — 1000 years to form two inches of humus – the full stretch of his life, so far, is only enough time for .17 inches of that richest of soils to accumulate in the healthiest of forests.  Barely visible to the human eye.  Which of course is his point about the nature of faith.

In chapter 11 of the letter to the Hebrews faith is at the forefront of the author’s mind.  Having just finished writing about the importance of provoking each other to love and good deeds and staying in the habit of meeting together, the author ends chapter 10 by stating, “But we are not among those who shrink back and so are lost, but among those who have faith and so are saved.”

That sounds like a pretty definitive statement.  We don’t shrink back.  We have faith.  But the author seems to know that simply naming the importance of having faith is not enough.  So the letter continues with the specific purpose of going deeper into what is meant by faith.  What precisely is it that we have when we have faith?  And so chapter 11 begins, “Now faith is…”

One of the places I notice the word faith showing up regularly is in these…

Text: Luke 12:13-21

Speaker: Scott Litwiller

Jesus has gathered with his disciples and as we learn in the passage before this text, a great crowd has gathered and they so often do when Jesus comes to town. Jesus must have had a frustrating interaction with the Pharisees because he tells his disciples in private to beware of their hypocrisy. He continues talking to the disciples and reminds them that God’s eye is even on the sparrows. Do not be afraid, are you not more important and valuable than the sparrows?

This intimate moment and time of teaching is interrupted by a sibling rivalry. A man yells out from the crowd at Jesus and asks him to tell his brother to share his portion of the inheritance. In these times a father’s estate was divided by the number of his male children PLUS one. The eldest child received two portions of the estate while all the others received only one.

This was the tradition and in a society that gave importance to the lineage it made sense that the eldest who would carry on the name would have the responsibility to maintain the bulk of the estate and grow it and then give it to their children. And yet… Jesus did not shy away from an egalitarian system. In fact, he didn’t shy away from telling people to get rid of their possessions all together. Jesus has worked in instances of family rivalry before and has settled arguments. Why is this time so much different?

In this story, one of my favorite biblical characters shows up: Sassy Jesus. Sassy Jesus has so many of the best one-liners as he calls Pharisees into account and calls them broods of vipers and claps back at his disciples who are fighting for no good reason.

Sassy Jesus snarkily responds to…

https://joelssermons.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/20190728sermon.mp3

Texts: John 20:19-23; Ephesians 4:1-6

The final event of the Kansas City convention, Saturday mid-morning, was a worship service.  As was the case throughout the week, there was lots of singing, led by a full band.  Most of the 3000 convention participants were still present.  The final speaker was Glen Guyton.  He’s been the Executive Director of Mennonite Church USA for just over a year – the first African American to hold that position.  When Glen came out to speak, most of the band members left the stage, but some stayed at their instruments.  This smaller band then broke out with a bass-driven opening I recognized right away from having come of age in the 90’s.  It was the unmistakable sound of the grunge band Nirvana, and their song “Come as you are.”  This was surprising, but then Glen grabbed the microphone and in a voice that surely had Kurt Cobain smiling from his grave, and perhaps slightly confused given the setting, Glen proceeded to sing most of the song with the band in full grunge mode:

Come as you are, as you were
As I want you to be
As a friend, as a friend
As a known enemy

Come doused in mud, soaked in bleach
As I want you to be
As a trend, as a friend
As an old memory

And I swear that I don’t have a gun, no I don’t have gun.

The lyrics kind of make sense if you don’t think too hard.  It was a memorable way to introduce his basic message, his vision for the church: We want to be the kind of church where you can come as you are, no matter your identity or condition.  We’re a peace church, we don’t have a gun, so come as you are, friend or enemy.

Just the sight of a Mennonite leader belting…