Sermon Message by Matt Brown from Feb., 28, 2010 @ FBCL:
Fear, Love, and Trust
(readings: Psalm 27, Luke 9: 28 - 36)
To participate in a mountain story I don’t think you need to be up in the Utah Wasatch at 10,500 ft, where my 12-year old son Asher and I went with our skis two and a half weeks ago. A hike up Lambert Ridge, Pinnacle Hill, Ann or Aaron climbing the steps to the pulpit to do the Scripture readings just now, these are all in their way sacred mountain ascents.
The story of the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountaintop in today’s reading from Luke's Gospel is a mountain story. In the Bible dramatic turns often happen up on mountains. Moses up on to Mt. Sinai received the tablets of the Ten Commandments. (Twice actually, the first set of tablets he smashed in a fit of anger on finding the Hebrew people worshiping the golden calf while he was on retreat in the mountains.) And both Moses’ and Jesus’ mountain stories involved a hearing of the voice of God up in the mountains.
Well, up on a ridge out in Utah I heard a voice as well. It was on a particular afternoon, just before sunset when I had skied off trail into the top of a canyon of unbroken powder where no skier had yet been. It wasn‘t a booming call from behind dramatic clouds; what I heard was a peaceful quiet, emanating from across waves of distant peaks stretched off to a blue and pink horizon.
This voice had in it a message. It was a message of love. It was a message that across all the miles of peaks and canyons, across the millennium of activity that had formed and shaped these cliffs and spruce tree dotted slopes, that it was love that pervaded this whole scene. Love of tree for mountain, love of mountain for the snow and for the rain, love of ridgeline for the sky. And it was a message that within this all-encompassing love things are not all quiet and settled. There are within this larger love two realms: a realm of happy trust and a realm of fear.
As walking, thinking, skiing beings we move back and forth between these realms of trust and fear. Even as you listen to this message of mine you are doing it. For a bit you might be feeling the trust. “Oh I like this. Seems like maybe Matt is onto a good message this time.” Then you begin worrying. “But how long is he going to go at it? Doesn’t seem he has any idea where he is headed and I’ve got a lot to do on this Sunday. If he doesn’t wrap this up soon . . .“
Skiing along, trying to keep up with Asher going down deep powder slopes or glades of trees, I noticed that my mind would move back and forth between the two realms. There were times I would feel confident and slip around moguls and fly off jumps in a way that felt great. There were other situations that brought up for me fear: steepness in a narrow chute between trees, or fog that would settle in making it hard to see. And when I would be filled with fear, then I would often crash.
On an afternoon after I heard the voice we were skiing at Park City through aspen trees. Threading through openings between them I watched myself hesitating as to whether to go right or left around a particular tree. It happened so fast: I hit this tree with my leg. Most of me went to one side and one ski went to the other. Though a bad shock, I kept skiing and I resolved to try to get my mind to work differently, I tried hard to concentrate on the spaces between the trees. I’d see the trees, but as I swooped along through I worked to keep my mind focused on the path I wanted to follow, on the space between, on the trust. Right away I found the technique worked better, my speed and finesse increased. I happily hit no more trees that afternoon, it was a memorable moment. In many of my activities since that afternoon I have been trying to focus with trust on the sweet spots between the perils. It’s a technique that has been working out . . . well, mostly great, seemingly.
A week after Asher and I returned from Utah, I visited a little rope tow hill in South Berwick, ME with a friend and his boys. Not having enough snow to run the rope tow lift everyone was sledding. Thinking of Olympic skiers on TV and full of the hubris, I hiked up with my skis to take a single run down the gentle slope. At the top I clipped in and then noticed something left of a tiny jump someone had built. Wanting to show off how relaxed and skillful my skiing approach had become after our time in Utah, I confidently headed for this little lump. But as I hit it I got my weight wrong, skis headed skyward, and I landed on my tailbone. A shot of pain and shock zipped up my spine. I instantly regretted having slighted our friend fear.
The realm of fear mustn’t be ignored. I think what that voice whispered to me up in those Utah mountains just before sunset was that we have a choice. We can befriend both our trust and our fear. We can be quietly aware of how we make choices between the two realms and have confidence in our choosing. And we can nudge ourselves into having more trust in our God in helping us make the choices. The skis we steer through life, they are wanting to slip quietly through the trees. We who ride them can choose, and always a bit more than before, to have trust. We can trust to notice the fear and the perils and we can trust to allow those skis to carry us sweetly between those perils into a life of safety and of love. And we can remember that no matter what happens, no matter what situation in which we find ourselves, there will always be that love, that opportunity for choices between trust and fear.
Sermon Message for FBCL, 3/14/10:
Two Brothers
(readings: Psalm 32; Luke 15: 11 - 31)
Holy Spirit, the words that I speak are mine. Let the words that are heard be thine.
With my message this morning I am thinking of parents of two siblings of the same gender. I am one of these, and believe there may be some others here who . . . how many others here have two sons or two daughters? Its kind of a special burden and blessing.
I will begin by sharing a bit about my preparation of this message. I try to use the Scripture reading as the guidepost and motive for a Sermon’s direction. And I also believe it is best to have the Scripture readings follow the lectionary. Most, or at any rate many, churches follow the Revised Common Lectionary in their selection of each Sunday’s Scripture readings. The lectionary is a calendar of Scripture readings that have been worked out by an ecumenical group of church representatives. It makes for a nice bond between Christian churches. If I am speaking with my Dad (who goes to an Episcopal church near Washington, D.C). about a morning’s reading or message it is likely he has heard the same reading. Often the sermon message is related to the one I may have heard in church that morning. It makes for a nice connection.
So when my friend Tom Kinder, who is pastor of the Congregational Church on Thetford Hill, called me up the other day, and I explained I would be leading worship here with you in Lyme Center this morning, we were like two students working with the same essay assignment, in this case the parable that Aaron’s father Bill just read from the Book of Luke of the prodigal son. Now I can count the number of sermons I have prepared on two hands. Tom has done hundreds, and he was obviously also a lot farther along in his thinking on this particular one than myself. So I was all ears.
As we talked I kept asking about the two brothers. The father’s forgiveness of the younger son is beautiful, but what of the older brother? I had been thinking about forgiveness in the parable, I had been thinking about the parable as a description of salvation through grace rather than through deeds. My thoughts wandered over the younger brother’s humility and the father’s joyful celebration of reunion. But I kept ending up, as the parable does, on the problem of the jealousy and resentment of this older brother of his younger brother’s return. Twelve years of parenting two boys has made me sensitive to the jealousies between brothers. Though all three men in the parable are experiencing the return of the one of them very differently, for me the older brother’s reaction really stands out. He is the one unable to let go: let go of his jealousy, of his expectation, of his resulting resentment. After having been dutiful and obedient for so many years, he is in the end the alienated one, the one ‘on the outs’, unable to forgive.
Tom shared that he sees both brothers as selfish, one in his heedless and self-indulgent living, the other in his pride. But the younger brother is transformed by his misfortune. “Father”, he says, “I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” His humility is keen and sincere. The parable describes no such reconciliation for the older brother. He feels entitled to something because of his faithful deeds. He is angry that his younger brother isn’t punished because of his wandering and rejection of a more righteous path. We can see this older brother as a personification of a cause and effect view of life and of morality. He is a man caught in a world view in which actions always have consequences, a world view relying on a God who judges and metes out punishments and rewards. And perhaps we may feel this older brother is not as fully human as his forgiving father, who reminds him he will receive no less of his entitlement because of the unearned reception awarded the wayward younger brother. The parable leaves the older brother hanging, and we are left to guess as to whether this older brother is ever able to let go of his jealousy.
I wish for you to imagine for a minute a somewhat different parable. A younger brother asks for his inheritance, heads to a far off country, and enjoys success. He multiplies his wealth, marries into royalty, becomes a powerful king of this new land, and one day returns to his home wishing to be lord of both his father and his older brother. For me this picture is one of a younger son in greater peril, more apart from harmonious relationship with his family, his God, and himself, than that younger son who groveled for food with the pigs in Luke’s parable. This made-up younger son of mine who has enjoyed success, his separation would be even more acute than that of the older brother trapped in resentment. This hypothetical picture led me to another notion.
The notion is that for me the parable is a story of misfortune as a pathway to grace. We know the younger son is returning a better man, grateful and sincere in his humility because of his failures. And we can see the father’s admirable forgiveness and joy in reconciliation is born out of a failure as well: the loss of that younger son. The father states it clearly: “But we had to celebrate and be glad, for this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and now is found.” Both of these men are letting go of the past, the spilt milk of what has happened. For them failure has become opportunity for reconciliation, for a closer relationship with each other, and maybe, with God. The older brother? The older brother is that part of us which can’t let go, which clings to judgement, which obsesses with expectations for justice delivered, an expectation that leads to resentment. Let’s try not to be like that older brother, and instead celebrate the awarding of forgiveness and reconciliation that is undeserved. It is a most wonderful opportunity in being human.
May the Lord bless the hearing of these words in this his house of worship. Amen.
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Matt Brown sermon message for FBCL, May 2, 2010:
A New Commandment: Love One Another
(reading from John 13: 34, "'A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.'")
The story of my being here before you this morning begins at our most recent Church Council meeting when our head deacon, Kathy Perkins, asked me if I would led worship on this day, May 2nd. I told her I would check my calendar, but when I got home I also checked the lectionary. When I found the Gospel passage, the part from John 13 that Jane shared with us just now, I knew I would do it.
The following Sunday morning – this would be two weeks ago - I began my study. I read ahead and behind a bit to get more of a context for these words of Jesus that are shared towards the end of the momentous Last Supper evening. A new commandment, I thought, hmmm, perhaps I should check in on the old ones, the 10 that I realized I really didn’t know by heart. Back and forth I searched through the Book of Exodus, I glanced at the clock, and gave up when I realized I had run out of time.
So I was quite pleased when Pastor Bob, coming to the Children’s Time later that morning, jumped right into a sharing of . . . the 10 Commandments. And when he offered to us where in Exodus the 10 Commandments are to be found, (Exodus 20) and when we actually went through the 10 together, I was thinking, what a sweet coincidence! And I was surprised. I had forgotten a number of the Commandments. I was particularly surprised to be reminded of the first five.
The first; “Thou shall have no other gods before me.”
I am wondering what this one really means.
The second: “Thou shall not make for yourself any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, of that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters under the earth . . . for the Lord your God is a jealous God.”
As a two-dimensional artist this one has always given me confusion. Am I breaking one of the Old Testament God’s laws by making pictures of God’s mountains, rivers, people, the ocean? In image-making is there a line to be crossed?
The third: “”Thou shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.”
I guess this is might be an admonition not to swear, try not to say for instance “God damn it”.
Remember not to do it.
The fourth: “Remember the Sabbath Day, and keep it holy.”
OK, make Sunday special. This is one that some Sundays is easy to forget. I feel it is a sweet thing to set aside some regular time in our lives as extra special or sacred.
And the fifth: “Honor your father and your mother.”
Hmmm, here is another one that seems a little tough to remember at times.
So in his Sermon message you might remember Pastor Bob took his work on the commandments to another list of does and don’ts. He shared in a handout a long list of coping mechanisms, a list of all manner of techniques we use to deal with the stress of our lives. Most of them were negative, techniques we use to avoid responsibility, to shift blame, to avoid dealing with the real stuff of our life situations. Many were passive-aggressive defense mechanisms. A few were positive, coping mechanisms such as ‘telling the truth’, ‘slowing things down, giving your self time’, or ‘referring a decision to a higher authority’. One coping mechanism that struck me as being missing from the list is that of being mindful, of taking time and energy to listen to the elements of a situation. And I have at times thought this might be the most helpful and important coping mechanism of all.
What do I mean by meaning mindful?
To try give you an idea I wish to think back to today’s Scripture reading.
Can we can be mindful of the moment of nearly two thousand years ago, the one recounted in John’s Gospel on page 938 in your pew Bible?
We can go over it. “When he (the ‘he’ referred to here is Judas) had gone out, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of man glorified, and in him God is glorified . . . You will seek me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going you cannot come’.” Judas, Jesus’ most controversial disciple, in this moment leaves the group. And Jesus shares that he himself will also shortly leave. Often we wait to share our most important thoughts, our greatest concerns or gifts, until just ahead of the moment of a parting. The reading continues with the big idea: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” What we are hearing in this story I believe is Jesus sharing his most essential thoughts and teachings ahead of an anticipated parting.
So how can we be mindful of what Jesus meant in the giving of this new commandment to love one another? I have been asking myself, asking friends, what does it mean to love? how do we love? how do we better love one another? what are the kinds to love? One love I struggle with a great deal is parental love. I have two sons, and there are times when I just can’t figure out how to show or work my love for my two boys. If I go to help, if I reach out, this can be clearly the wrong way to love them, for they often let me know more they want or need to do things on their own, without my help, or seemingly my love. If I ignore them, often it is clear this is not what is wanted, I will sense them acting out in their need for attention. It is a fairly recent discovery for me that often the best I can do is just be there, and listen, and just be mindful. And this has led me to the thought that perhaps this actually is the greatest way that we love. Just to be aware, to be awake, to listen. To be mindful.
So let’s now for a moment try to be mindful of this moment. Here we are together, a special group in a special place in a sacred time on a moist calm May morning. We are joined in collective mind in as much as we have shared together a gospel story, and we are hearing the same shared words, thoughts I have prepared ahead of time and am speaking to you now. We are not of a unified mind, for we are here and there we are distracted by our thoughts, but we are more or less together, and by God’s grace, through the tradition of his beloved church, we are pursuing words given by Jesus on the Last Night that perhaps most essentially capture his message to his disciples and all of us. It is repeated again in John 15, verse 12: “ This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this.” It pervades the following four pages recounted in John’s Gospel, thoughts and images shared by Jesus with his disciples related to love, to himself as the vine, the way and the truth, thoughts related to the disciples’ life after his departure, and finally that the love which the Father had for himself, Jesus, “may be in them, and I in them.”
Let’s try to follow this: to learn to love one another as Jesus asks, he is suggesting we imagine how he loved his disciples. Each of us will do this imagining in our own way, but we share some happy ways to help. In the Gospel reading we have shared a story. We also can share a ritual, given to us by Jesus in the earlier verses of John 13, initiated in that Passover evening before Judas slipped out to walk the streets of Jerusalem, kept alive by the Holy Spirit during the centuries since. This gift of a ritual, this Christian Holy Communion, is a vine that connects across millennium, all around the earth. It can work as a reminder to be mindful. To be mindful of our love for basic elements of this life we live, of the bread and wine that sustains each one of us, of our connectedness to each other, of our connectedness to Jesus, his disciples, and his Church. And it is a reminder to be mindful through our senses: through our sense of sight (for you will watch me break the bread), through our hearing (for you will hear the words of the ceremony, and the rustlings of the passing of the elements and the footsteps of our deacons), through our sense of smell (for we can smell this air we share in this special house of the Lord on this special morning), our sense of touch (for we will hold the bread, the little glass of grape juice), and our sense of taste (for we will taste the bread, we will taste the fruit of the vine). And along with these impressions of our senses we can all sense, with another sense, a more intangible spiritual sense, our connection to each other, to that night of the first Lord’s Supper, and to our Lord Jesus the Christ, to whom by this Holy Communion we become connected spiritually along this vine, thanks to the presentation by Jesus to his disciples of this special gift.
So I wish to share with you it is my conclusion, for this Sunday at any rate, that in our celebration of this ritual can be found a following of Jesus’ new commandment. It is a conclusion that we love each other more than in any other way by just being present, by accepting the gift, by being aware, awake, informed, by just being here, with all our heart, all our body, and all our mind.
May the Lord bless the hearing of these words in this his house of worship. Amen.
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Excerpted from a sermon message, Sept. 12, 2010:
A Lost Sheep, a Lost Coin (Luke 15: 1 - 10)
Each and every one of us, in our own way, is lost in a wilderness. These wildernesses are for each different: different tangles, different obstacles, confusions, difficulties. But we share in our experience of our wildernesses a wish to discern a path, to see more clearly, to be found and brought back to a home. We share a wish for a joy of reunion, a restoration to a grace we knew when we were with our flock, when we were together with those to whom we belong.
It is not hard to see what Jesus refers to in this morning’s parable about the lost sheep. There is a pain in losing a thing that is more than the thing we have lost. There is joy in the finding of a lost item that is more than just the regaining the relationship with the thing. “Who will not leave the 99 sheep in the wilderness and go searching for the one that is lost?” What Jesus is getting at is that when the one sheep is lost, there is something else that is lost along with it. The flock becomes not a flock of 99, but a flock of 100 with one missing. So it is when we leave or are lost to a flock that we have been a part of.
Luke has Jesus following the lost sheep with a story of a woman who cleans her whole house to find a lost coin. Her joy in finding the coin is more than just having the money back. Even when we lose or misplace a small thing, a pair of glasses, a favorite pen, our world is in some way diminished, and what we joy in when the thing or animal or person is found is our world restored.
So it is with us. Each of us is member of a flock, or many flocks. A gossip group, a church congregation, a family, a school, a work force, whatever groups we are involved in sense our alienation when we stray, and there is joy when we are reunited. As we are lost and then found to our various flocks we might remember Jesus’ idea. Is there not a flock to which we are all members that looks for our return: some kind of universal flock, a community of God’s kingdom of heaven?
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(reading: Luke 10: 25 - 37, a telling of the story of the Good Samaritan by Jesus to answer a lawyer's inquiry about accessing eternal life)
Jesus asked: “Which of these three, do you think, was neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?"
The lawyer answered, "The one who showed him mercy."
Jesus said to this lawyer, "Go and do likewise."
Open your eyes fully and you will be able to find each and every day neighbors who are in need of help. This man Jesus describes left in the ditch after being attacked by robbers, we have all around us similar sufferings. If you have lived in an urban place, a city perhaps, you can easily recollect this. Pick any day, in any city in this country, walk yourself for a few hours down streets, across parks, in and out of buildings, and you can find and witness sufferings equal to and beyond the one of this man who was robbed that Jesus described two thousand years ago. If you have only lived in a rural place, it is also not hard to find sufferings and need. Young folks, middle aged folks, older folks unable to find rewarding work, children estranged from parents, older folks caught in loneliness, devastating disease or injury, spouses in fear of each other . . . we can easily realize none of us are strangers to sufferings and trouble.
And most of us, most of the time, have more in common with the priest and the Levite, than the Samaritan, of this morning’s reading. To walk or drive on by . . . this is not unusual, this is not uncommon. Even if we are wealthy and put all our effort to philanthropy and good works, we actually can only now and again be the good Samaritan, truly. The needs of our world are too great, the sufferings are too common, the robberies are too frequent, for us to truly live up to the implications of this parable. Most of the time we walk by. To do otherwise would be to become depleted, to lose our direction, for the needs are so great. In our pursuit of the Truth we would do well to recognize this, to recognize we are mostly like the priest and the Levite; we are more like them than we are like the Samaritan.
But this doesn’t mean we can’t consider the spirit of the parable, its message. This message is an idea that in the degree to which we are like the Samaritan, in the degree to which we do seek out need, and act with compassion as neighbors, in the degree to which we do these things, in this degree do we achieve something special, a participation in an eternal life.
So Pastor Bob called me up Sat. of a week ago to explain he had overlooked a thing on his calendar, he hadn’t realized he and his wife would be attending a wedding in Washington, D.C. on this weekend and couldn’t lead worship. Thinking that my Dad might come to church on this morning, and curious about the opportunity to preach at my Dad from the pulpit I volunteered to take his spot. I took a look at the lectionary readings for the Sunday, and began my thinking. I guessed there would be plenty to say about the good Samaritan, and eternal life, that might be fun to be thinking about, I was curious what thoughts might come up, what the Lord might share . . .
So on the next day, Sunday, July 4th, I was down at the gas pumps at Huggett’s in East Thetford and who should drive up but Pastor John Hartley. I shared with John again thanks for having led such a wonderful service here a week ago Thursday evening. We spoke a bit more, and I mentionned I would be leading worship next, now this, Sunday, and that I was inspired to try and build on some of what I remembered from his service, which was truly wonderful. I mentioned to John the lectionary reading, the story of the lawyer and the tale of the good Samaritan. We needed to clarify for a moment, for John explained the parable is developed more than once in the Four Gospels. I explained, this is the instance that involves the lawyer, and access to eternal life. Oh yes, he exclaimed, and then we got onto a bit of a discussion about Samaritans at the time of Jesus. He described it: the Samaritans were a group of Jews who had gotten into deviant theology and had intermarried with other peoples. They were ostracized, and were denied access to the Temple in Jerusalem. John went on to say that for us, Jesus is in many ways the Samaritan, a developer of a deviant theology, an outsider awake and aware of the humanity of all people, a spirit working out of a deep compassion the rest of us in great degree don’t share.
As we spoke I listened to John’s emphasis on compassion, on this increased awareness of shared humanity. I found myself thinking of an event that had happened also along Rte 5 earlier in the day. I had been driving north from Norwich, and just after passing a group of cars heading south along a section where Rte 5 is near the river, I noticed something in the road ahead. As my car buzzed along closer I could see the thing was moving, fluttering, what is this? as piece of trash? a leaf?, a toad in the road?, . . as my car zoomed up past it I saw it was a songbird, feebly fluttering on its back, and I had the impression I had caught in my rear view mirror its last bit of life, having just been hit by one of those cars I had only moments before passed. Emotion filled my mind. It was so fresh; only a minute or less earlier as I had turned onto Rte 5 that bird had been a beautiful thing, busily involved perhaps in bringing food back to a nest, and now its life was done. Should I be like the Samaritan and go back? I felt that bird was dead, I felt I had seen its fluttering stop even in the short moment as I drove past. I decided just to watch my thoughts and drive on. I allowed myself just to imagine this little bird, I let myself get sad; I surprised myself at the empathy I felt for this bird. The beauty of the morning, the quick turn in that bird’s life, my thoughts then connected to what had been on my mind: what could I collect from this little event related to the Samaritan story from the book of Luke?
When later that day John was speaking of the Samaritan and his empathy with a fellow human, I was drifting on to thinking of our empathy for not just other humans, but for little birds laying in the road hit by cars, and to an empathy that I believe we feel for all life on this earth. We live in a different world than the time of Jesus’ ministry. We are much more powerful as a species in relation to all the other life on this earth. Each time we drive our car, each day that we go to heat our house, when we fly on an airplane, go buy groceries, we are involved in some small or sometimes larger way, in impacting life on this earth. Remember the Samaritan had means, he was able to help the man who had been robbed. We are a people of much means, we have available to ourselves time and resources people of biblical times would not have imagined. We are also able to be more aware that the needs for our help, they are persistent and they are endless. Oil spills, the threat of climate change, poverty and hunger, the knowledge of needs that modern media and communication makes available, it is no great stretch to see endless suffering that asks for our attention. We are able to have an awareness of an impact and interrelatedness with life on this earth in a way that puts us in the situation of the Samaritan, the priest, the Levite, all the time.
“Love the Truth, Delight in those that Love the Truth, and walk in the Way of the Truth.” Standing by the gas pumps, John helped me to remember the concept he had emphasized in our Vespers service. To hear his message that evening, it had seemed the Holy Spirit was truly calling out from behind this pulpit. It felt like a true moment of truth, a true blessing by the Lord. Now on this Sunday ten days later, speaking from behind this same pulpit, what truths can I speak of? What truths can I discern?I will try to tease out a truth of eternal life.
In the Book of Luke there is so much about the kingdom of God, and the references to eternal life seem connected to the idea of entering into and dwelling in, this kingdom. Lets think, why does Luke have Jesus answer the lawyer’s query by leading the story to this parable of the Good Samaritan? The story is kind of a humorous back and forth exchange between Jesus and this lawyer, and the logic is pretty simple. The degree to which we inherit eternal life is connected to the degree to which we can be neighbor and offer mercy and help to needs we find in this life.
Lets think a bit more on why this might be so. I will be blunt with my thoughts, and remember, they are just my thoughts. We all receive an inheritance of eternal life. This life we participate in is an endless cycle, a great compost heap of life that leads to life. There is no matter, no flesh of ours, no air we breath, no water we drink, no stories we experience, that will not in some form, on some level, reconvert, reconfigure and go on to participate in continued life. This is a physical scientific fact. The life we experience has been lived before us, the food we eat, the emotions we experience, the music we hear, the words we speak, all these things have been configured, arranged, utilized, in countless ages before us. We are part of a great inheritance. But we not only receive these traditions, these stories, this flesh of ours. We also pass it on to days, years, generations that will come. This parable is about an idea that the degree to which we exert our energy, utilize our capacities and reach out to our neighbor, to all life we find we share on this earth, to the degree to which we are able to utilize our talents for this life around and outside of ourselves, to this degree does our soul participate in that which is eternal. And to the degree that we can discern, who is he, she, it, or they that we might be neighbor to, to this degree are we walking in the truth. I was probably right not to have slammed on my brakes and zoom back to watch a dead bird in the road. We cannot be neighbor to everyone, to everything. To walk in the truth is to be able to discern those moments when we can help, are meant to help, to be able to select and choose, to hear the intention of the Lord, and find the right time and the right way to share our capacity for mercy.
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Sermon message delivered to the Lyme Congregational Church, July 25, 2010:
Ask, Seek, Knock (Luke 11: 1 - 13)
A shortened excerpt of a sermon message I am still working on.
Its basic idea is that there is a way that all our living is about seeking, and asking, and knocking.
As parents we give to our children gifts, talents, an inheritance. In the same way the Lord gives to us talents, power, help in our living. In the same way as parents we wish our children to approach us, to seek us out, to love us, so we need to approach our Lord, to seek out our Lord.
There is a particular gift we have been given to help in our asking: the Lord’s Prayer. It is an admonishment for us to seek our heavenly Father, to be intimate with our God, to ask in the way that Jesus taught us to ask: with reverence, with persistence, and with love.
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