Scripture: 1 John 4:18-21; Luke 4:18-19

Speaker: Paisha Thomas

Good morning!

Thank you to Pastor Joel for your constant demonstration of what it means to be God’s church, and God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven.

Thank you to Adam Glass for brokering the generous donation that your congregation made to our new non profit LotF. And to all of you for your contributions.

Paul and Jacqui for your preparation excellence this week

And my two friends who are here for moral support.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight oh lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen and Asé.

From the Revised Common Lectionary – NRSV

1 John 4:12-21

4:12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and God’s love is perfected in us.

4:13 By this we know that we abide in God and God in us, because God has given us of God’s Spirit.

4:14 And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world.

4:15 God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God.

4:16 So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

4:17 Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as God is, so are we in this world.

4:18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.

4:19 We love because God first loved us.

4:20 Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or…

Texts: Nehemiah 5:1-13; Mark 3:1-6

By Joel Miller

One month from today, May 21, BREAD will rise and meet at the fairgrounds for our largest gathering of the year, the Nehemiah Action. 

We call this the Nehemiah Action because it is based on a story from the biblical book of Nehemiah.  Truth be told, I hadn’t really looked at this story until I had been through several annual BREAD cycles.  When I did, I was surprised and impressed at how closely what we do with BREAD is modeled after this 13 verse story.  So what I’d like to do is walk through this passage in Nehemiah chapter 5, and make some connections between it, almost 2500 years ago, and now, when we have a goal of turning out 2500 people to re-enact a contemporary version.  If you’d like to follow the text from Nehemiah, it is printed in your bulletin. 

A little bit of context: The story of Nehemiah takes place after a massively disruptive and traumatic period.  The people of Jerusalem and surrounding villages had seen their world collapse at the hands of the Babylonian armies – the holy temple, homes, the institutions of kingship and land useage – all destroyed, the people carried away in exile, with only the poor left behind.  But after several generations of exile, the Persians had conquered the Babylonians, and Cyrus the Great had declared for ethnic groups to return to their homelands to rebuild their cultures.

The story of Nehemiah is a story of that ongoing rebuilding process in and around Jerusalem, now about 100 years after Cyrus’s decree.  Like any rebuilding after loss and generational trauma, it was not always a smooth process.

Nehemiah 5:1 states, “Now there was a great outcry of the people and of their wives against their Jewish kin.”  Now we have to…

CMC Scripture and Sermon 04-14-2024 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.

Mutual Aid and the Struggle for Life 
Text: Acts 6
Speaker: Joel Miller
 

Locusts, beetles, land crabs, termites, ants, and bees.  This could be the beginning of a list of things you hope not to find in your house during a round of spring-cleaning.  These are also some of the creatures that show up in the first chapter of an old book by the Russian Peter Kropotkin called Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution.  I came across the book a couple summers ago in the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.  When you’re in a cool bookstore in a cool city it’s pretty self-evident that buying a book there will make you at least a somewhat cooler person.  This one caught my attention because of the artwork bordering the text of each page, a 21st century enhancement of a 19th century book.  The author was new to me, but the topic was one I think a lot about, mutual aid. 

Peter Kropotkin was writing a generation after Charles Darwin published his theory of natural selection.  At the time, many of Darwin’s ideas were being interpreted as confirmation that life, at all levels, was essentially a battle of gladiators, with the strongest and fastest dominating the weak, winning the war of survival, living to fight another day (paraphrasing Thomas Huxley, p. 32 of Mutual Aid).  If that was how it’s always been, this had big implications on how successful human societies should function, and which people and peoples might be considered superior to others. 

Peter Kropotkin was one who thought this was not only bad politics, but bad science, a poor misreading of Darwin’s theories.  So he wrote a series of essays about…

In Defense of Wonder

Text: Acts 1:1-14

Speaker: Mark Rupp

This is quite a week to have the assigned lectionary reading include admonition from on high to not stand around staring at the sky. Maybe your street was like mine on Tuesday evening when the sun finally fell below the line of clouds that had been threatening central Ohio all day to create one of the most vivid rainbows I have ever seen. From where we were it was solidly a double rainbow, and if I squinted there were moments I swear I could see a third arc.

And I wasn’t alone. Nearly every porch on my street had people emerging to take in the moment. Some of them were neighbors I knew, many were people I’d only seen in passing. But in those few minutes we were all part of something together. Some of the crowd were trying to find the best angle to snap the perfect photo on their phones, others just quietly taking it in. I was also relieved to see that most other people were also already in their jim-jams at 7:15 in the evening. A true moment of solidarity.

After a full day of anticipating tornadoes and hail, staring at the sky with anxiety and fear, this moment of surprise beauty had us all staring at the sky with awe and wonder.

Rainbows are somewhat rare, but not nearly as much as the total solar eclipse that will happen tomorrow afternoon. And our experience of wonder last week was, perhaps, just a warm-up for this greater celestial event, a chance to loosen our neck muscles for more staring up at the sky. And just like our little street seemed to be somewhat transformed by this shared experience in both…

Easter Encounter | Resurrection Mystery By Joel Miller

Mark 16:1-8, ( ), (9-20) – three readings

In the oldest complete manuscripts we have, Mark’s Gospel ends at chapter 16, verse 8, with the women fleeing the tomb.

The vast majority of later manuscripts contain a longer ending of Mark, which appears in our Bibles, often with footnotes giving this information I’m saying now.

As some point, a shorter supplemental ending was also written.  Some ancient manuscripts contain the original ending, plus the shorter ending, plus the longer ending, which is how they appear in our Bibles.  We will hear these read now.     

Read: Mark 16:1-8, ( ), (9-20)

When I say Christ is risen! you say Christ is risen Indeed! 

Christ is risen. 

Christ is risen. 

There’s a joke I heard a while back about the difference between a lawyer and a preacher.  The difference between a lawyer and a preacher is that a lawyer spends all day looking at a stack of papers trying to condense it down to a few paragraphs, while a preacher spends all day looking at a few paragraphs trying to expand it into a stack of papers. 

It’s probably one of the very few jokes where the lawyer comes out looking pretty good. 

With all respect to attorneys and other skilled synthesizers of information, Easter invites, even requires all of us to live into the reality of the resurrection with the mind of the preacher.

Because all we have to go on in the New Testament about Easter morning is just a few paragraphs.  Or, as we’re wrapping up Mark’s gospel, it could be one paragraph.  This can feel both frustratingly inadequate to our inquiring minds, and perhaps, an enticing doorway into the mystery of the resurrection.

Gathered here in the mystery of this hour.

There are two great mysteries at the end of Mark.  And not…