Love Comes to Town

I recently got my sermon podcast up to date and thought I would post one of those sermons here. From the fifth Sunday of Easter, focusing on the text from 1 John 4 and John 15. God's love is a transformative action upon us, not just a feeling.

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Jesus' Prayer.... Our Prayer?

It was an interesting thought...

As I was preparing for yesterday's sermon, I looked at N.T. Wright's John For Everyone commentary (which by the way is a really wonderful series) and he wrote the following.

This prayer has been used for many centuries by pastors, teachers and other Christian leaders as they pray for those in their care. It can also, with only slight variation, be used by Christians of all sorts for themselves. Substitute 'Jesus' where the prayer says 'I,' and replace 'they' and 'them' with 'I' and 'me,' It is one of the most serious things Jesus ever said. That's why, deep down, it is also among the most joyful and hopeful. Pray it with awe and delight. (John For Everyone, Part 2, pp. 96-97, WJK, 2004)

Stop Trying to Reach Young Adults

Things are hopping and popping (as a former pastor of mine used to say) and I have been not as disciplined in my blogging as I would have liked... but that pause does give some time for thoughts to percolate and congeal a little more coherently (I hope) than otherwise.

I continue to read of The Millennials and their aversion to church, and doctrine and such. It is inevitable that after hearing a presentation on the lives of Millennials, particularly as it connects to their faith lives, the crowd gathered begins to ask "How can we reach these young adults?" And I want to stand up and say something like "STOP TRYING TO REACH YOUNG ADULTS!"

Not, mind you, that I am advocating abandoning them to the world. I am a campus pastor after all. And really a significant portion of them feel abandoned by the church. But more to the point, the language is terrible. The language of reaching invokes a couple of images for me. One is a gnarled old hand extended out of a darkened doorway trying to grab a young passerby and then pulling him or her in. Or trying to grab a drinking glass on the top shelf that is just beyond our fingertips. In both cases the reaching is only done to haul in and possess, obtain something for our use. And I know that we use the language of "reaching someone" as a metaphoric way of speaking about making connections, but even then we seem to mean getting people to see our way. The phrase "reaching" carries with it an implicit notion of a power imbalance where we are imposing something on another.

So I say stop. It reduces our mission ultimately to getting butts in the pew. The language may differ but the thinking is not all that different when we reduce stewardship programs to getting people to open their wallets and not their hearts and minds.

I believe young adults are highly sensitive to being pursued. After all they are... by advertisments and universities and countless others who want them, or more importantly their money. The language of reaching only reinforces the image, I suspect, of churches wanting to possess young adults. I know most folk working with young adults in faith settings mean that, but language is important.

I would wish for a change in language that speaks of engaging young adults, relating to them without any motive of reeling them into the church. I know that sounds counter-intuitive. Isn't that what we are supposed to do? Kinda sorta. I think we are called to share our faith but not as a sales pitch. If we treat it as such, young adults will realize that they are being reeled in and will likely back away. Many of them can smell the trap a mile away. So I think a change is needed.

Can we begin to engage them as them? Can we simply start with them as human beings and find out about them? And maybe as we learn about them, and they likely learn about us, there will be some chance to speak about faith issues. And we have to be ready to let them walk away from it. If we thought about it in investment terms we would see it as a failure. But from a perspective of faith sharing, it is not. In that situation, we might only be planting seeds. Fruit might come out of it but it might not. We can simply trust that God used us.  I won't even dare to promise that by changing this language, we will see more young adults in our churches because I wouldn't want this sort of notion to become a program, delineated with all sorts of procedures and such, which is just more of the same.

How Much Does the Gospel Cost?

Well at least according to one sale, fourteen million dollars. The British Library just bought Europe's oldest book, which happens to be a copy of the gospel according to St. John. The book itself, a smart little volume, written on vellum and bound in a red cover, is known as St. Cuthbert's Gospel because it was buried with Cuthbert 1300 years ago.

TheWorld did a nice piece about it on today's show. What was remarkable to me was the journey of Cuthbert's coffin after his death. You can listen to the piece here.



And the Library has digitized the book and you can view the images here.

I am struck by the importance this book has, and that it is a biblical book. The images are really stunning. The print is phenomenal. But it is at its heart this book is rooted to the arrival of the gospel in Europe.  This book is a testimony to the missional character of Christianity. Will there be anything a millennia from now that tells of our missional impulse?

2nd Sunday of Easter -- Sin is Big, And Jesus is Bigger Yet

We have been convinced that sin is something small and insignificant, making the words from1 John ring hollow. But they remain true because sin is much bigger than we are led to believe. Sin is cosmic and we participate in it even without knowing. But Jesus is bigger even than it for he has conquered it in the resurrection. 

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How Many Women Does a Man Have to Bed To Be Considered a Real Man?

The question seems to be one many men look to answer thinking quantity matters most. Stumbling upon an interview on another blog, Joffre the Giant, the poet Remy Williams gives another answer. He writes:

We have bought into certain lies that’s are flimsy as our pick-up lines. One of the most absurd is thinking that the more women you sleep with means more sexual skills, that more women equals more experience. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consider the  man who declares his love of cities, all cities and talks about his vast knowledge of cities. He spends the night in a different city one day after the next. He gets off the bus, buys a t-shirt, notches his belt and hops back on the bus. He is suppose to be a grand lover of cities? Rather his is the most worthless of tourists, he’s the doofus in the fannypack mugging in front of every giftshop across the nation. He knows nothing of the city, does not love any city at all, but rather he loves to see his greasy unshaven mug in different settings each  night. The man that says he knows New York City because he was once laid-over there one rainy insignificant night is a great fool. 

So too the lothario, who beds women with tricks and well worn moves. He’s never had to please a woman night after night. He can only pick up women at the watering hole looking to be watered, the lowhanging fruit. A real man knows how to please the woman who’s dealt with screaming kids all day, who went through the day with peanutbutter in her hair, wearing sweatpants and grannypanties because the laundry is stacked to highheaven. A real man can’t rely on a couple of cheap sex tricks to please a woman, running the same two plays on an unsuspecting defense, a real man has to play the same team night after night and the things that worked last night aren’t good enough for today. Real men bed the same woman every night keeping it new and fresh and exciting. Lotharios, in the extremity of their lameness, have so little game they have to move from woman to woman with their smoke, mirrors and hand dancing.

 I like his answer, but is definitely written from a male perspective. Underlying the answer is the assumption that men are men by the sexual conquest even of the one woman with whom he lives.  Here men are men still by being able to have sex with women. Maybe men are real men by realizing that sex is not what defines their existence. I realize that the author of the post was writing specifically about sex, but I think there needs to be more than that. For instance, maybe a real man is the man who realizes that his wife really would rather not have sex at all and he can let it go because his identity is not wrapped up in whether he or not he gets some. His wife is not just there to gratify him. A real man knows that.

Maundy Thursday and Easter Sermons

I am still getting back into recording my sermons and putting them on my podcast. I thought I was already there, but then forgot to check the batteries in my recorder on Good Friday. So I lost that sermon. I did get Maundy Thursday and Easter though...

On Maundy Thursday I looked at our world's desire for certainty and the ambiguity in the word that Paul uses in the words of institution, paradidomi.

On Easter, I touched upon the abundance of hope that the resurrection lets loose in the world.