AfterHours Sermon
      






THE LAST SERMON:
ARE YOU CHANGING LIVES?

Rev. Jerry Herships

May 29, 2011

 

Scripture: I John 4:11-12

 

11Dear Friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

What are we called to do? (not save…but love). My work with the homeless has forced me to look at the work we are doing and what differences we are making in the world. It has forced me to be able to articulate what it means to make a difference in the world. The call of Jesus is different than the call of government or social service agencies. Many times our work overlaps, but we have to remember what it is we are called to do as the body of Christ in the world.

Is getting people off the street important? Yes, and we have the money in this church, in this room, to get everyone we serve on one Sunday off the street. But without love….the majority of them will be right back on the street in a year.

A roof is like a sandwich. I had someone say to me recently, “I don’t care how many lunches you serve…are you changing lives?” It’s easy for people to STILL think it’s about the sandwich.” The sandwich, like the roof, only meets their physical needs. It is the love we give, ours and God’s love that makes a difference and changes lives.

If we weren’t giving out communion in the park, we would have stopped doing this a long time ago. I had one of our friends in the park come up the other day and I said, “Can I get you a lunch? He said no. I said, “Can I get you a pair of socks and a water?” He said, “No, first I want a hug, then I need some sacrament.” We are offering God’s love to those who are feeling like they are getting it NO WHERE ELSE. WE are changing lives. Don’t take the easy way. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that meeting peoples physical needs is what people want the most. It might be what they NEED. But it’s not what they WANT. In this case, it’s the WANTS that matter. They want to feel loved, just like us.

The folks on the street at Civic Center Park are not that different from you and me. We, too, can fall into this trap here at St. Andrew. We have a world class facility, world class speakers, and I think world class programs. These are wonderful. But they are only tools to address peoples real needs….to feel the love of God in their lives. If you come here on Sunday, or any day of the week for that matter, and don’t feel our love for you as well as feeling God’s love for you…we have failed you. It’s the same trap, mistaking the needs for the wants. In God’s world, it is the want, the desire, the longing to feel love that lies at the bottom of everything. And when we truly feel that, we can’t wait to put it back out into the world.

When we turn to our Bible passage we see that this is the job for ALL of us. LOVE ONE ANOTHER. With every action in our lives, we have to ask only one question: will what I am about to do put more love or less love out into the world? Is giving someone extra time crossing the street putting more or less love into the world? If I tip this server ONE MORE DOLLAR…am I putting more love or less love out into the world? If I let this person merge in front of me onto I-25, am I putting more or less love into the world?

As I searched for the passage I wanted today, I knew it was in 1 John but could not remember where. When I typed into the search, “love each other,” I got over a dozen references, half a dozen in John alone! As I have said over and over, anyone can find a random Bible verse to prove their point but we need to look for overriding themes that repeat themselves over and over. As far as I can tell, LOVE EACH OTHER is the single most overriding theme in the Bible.

We are called to go out into the world, find its greatest needs and meet them. That is one of the most powerful ways that we fulfill the commandment to love one another. Jesus never said, “Go and sing and pray and tell me I’m great once a week.” He said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” What the church provides us is the opportunity to love each other. If you didn’t love on someone when you got here and felt them loving on you, then you have missed the boat. START LOVING ON EACH OTHER!

The other thing that people forget about the work we do out in the world is that it not only changes THOSE WE SERVE, IT CHANGES US TOO!

Whitney Bradford is a student at D.U. She has been coming to Civic Center Park for well over a year now. She does it because she wants to help people and not because it’s a religious thing. And here is what’s interesting. She recently expressed an interest to me, Ryan Canaday, the director of the Wesley Foundation and to Paul Kottke, the Senior Pastor at University Park. She wanted to formally take the next step in getting closer to God and Whitney asked if she could be baptized. So last Sunday I was at University Park to take part in Whitney’s baptism. Her grandmother flew up from Lubbock, Texas and her parents flew in from California. When I talked to her father after the service he said, “We can’t thank you enough for all the support you all have given Whitney. When she reschedules her flight to come home so she doesn’t have to miss going down to the park, I know you must be doing something special.”

So are we changing lives? You tell me. And who is changing whose life?

Love one another…as I have loved you.

There is another fellow down in the park whose name I don’t know. He goes by the name of Undertaker. Here’s a picture of him. When he started coming to us a year or so ago, he wouldn’t say a word. Then he would nod. Then, slowly, he began to say a sentence or two to me. Now….he is posing for pictures. Are we changing lives? You tell me.

The woman with him is Jewlee. She always grabs a pair of socks, sometimes a water or lunch, but never before she asks for a hug and communion. Sometimes she hugs and doesn’t want to let go. She hugs like a grandma.

Henri Nouwen was a priest and had a position at Harvard. He resigned so he could go and serve a community of mentally disabled people. He said, “We need someone to share our pain, to touch our wounds.” Jewless needs us to share her pain much more than she needs a pair of white athletic socks. The socks are just a vehicle to deliver God’s love.

I know I am a different person than I was three years ago. I have a focus that I didn’t have. I went to the U2 concert last weekend. It was the first concert of their tour. Within the first 10 minutes on stage Bono said, “God is in the house.” The crowd roared.

The concert was great but there were a lot of songs they didn’t sing. When you have been at it for 25 plus years you can’t play everything. I want to mention one they played and one they didn’t.

Probably some of the most noise came out of the crowd when the band began to play ONE. In it Bono sings the line “Love is a temple. Love the higher law.” He is talking directly about Jesus’ message of love being the highest law, higher than the temple, or the church, or the priesthood….Love the higher law.”

The other song they didn’t get to sing was a song called Window in the Skies. In it Bono sings these words…We’ll put them on the screen but I want you to hear it as well.

The shackles are undone, the bullets quit the gun. The heat that’s in the sun will keep us when there’s none. The rule has been disproved, the stone it has been moved. The grave is now a groove, all debts are removed.

Can’t you see what love has done? Can’t you see what love has done? Can’t you see what love has done? What it’s doing to me?

Love makes strange enemies, makes love where love may please…the soul and its striptease, hate brought to its knees. The sky over our head, we can reach it from our bed. You let me in your heart and out of my head…Can’t you see what love has done.

Those are the words of what some have arguably called the greatest rock band in the world…singing about God’s love. In one case, what it does to us…in the other, what it does to others when we see us all as one. At times last Saturday, it felt like being in church…with 80,000 other people.

Are we willing to look for God and God’s love in different places: from different angles, in a Football stadium, a bar or a sanctuary, but in a different way? What would it look like if I preached from here, or from over here? What if I pulled out a folding chair and just sat down right here?

I promised I would allow time for you to ask me anything you want. Here is your chance. Harvey, Cindy and I spend a lot of time on our sermons. There is something though to, every so often, offering up our thoughts as the spirit moves us. It is riskier but I think sometimes the Holy Spirit likes to not be so boxed in. In fact, that’s probably true most of the time.

So, Aaron, kill the cameras and the big screen, let’s just…talk. Questions?

I hope you all know that no matter how much I screwed things up…and believe me I did at times, I tried to love you all. I was told early on in this career that my job is simple. Love the people, and I discovered that when I did that….the rest fell into place. Thank you for letting me learn as I went with regards to how to do this wild and pretty wonderful job. Keep me in your prayers and remember to love each other….the rest is icing on the cake. God bless and Amen.

 



JESUS: A LITTLE GIVE AND TAKE
HOW TO STOP WORSHIPING CHRIST AND START FOLLOWING JESUS
Rev. Jerry Herships
March 27, 2011

 

Scripture: Matthew 16:18

“and I tell you…I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”

 

Matthew 28:20

“…and remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

 

What would I like my last AfterHours sermon to be about? It is a bittersweet day to be sure. We are ending something that so many of us have put our life blood into. For others of us, it is the kind of church that some say they have waited over 40 years to find. For others it is a ministry that brought them back from a long, long hiatus from the church. It is a different kind of church to be sure. From a peanut butter and jelly Call to Worship, Pink Floyd as our opener and the theme song of Mister Rogers neighborhood to close, we have done it different here. The good news is that I think God likes different. Jesus was certainly different.

 

To be clear, different doesn’t mean being different for difference sake. While we have welcomed the new, AfterHours has continued to embrace the old. Candles, extended prayer time and communion have all been things that connect with the idea of “Sustaining what’s best, creating what’s next.” My thanks to the back of Zig Zag Zin wine for creating that catchy phrase. I think it fits just as good for new direction Jesus followers as it does for renegade winemakers…a profession with a few old-school, long held traditions as well.

 

Jesus followers is a term that is beginning to get a lot of traction these days. The sad truth is that for many people the term “Christian” is a derogatory term. A good number of people struggle with identifying as being a Christian. At their core, more and more people want to claim to be students and followers of Jesus, but want to leave the label of Christian behind. I think they don’t have to be two different things. I think the people of this community are helping prove that. We have to be careful that we are members of Christianity and not what author Michael Spencer calls Churchianity. He asks the question in his book Mere Churchianity, “Have you left the church in search of Jesus?” He speaks of a “Jesus-shaped spirituality.” I think we don’t have to leave the church to find this Jesus-shaped spirituality, and for many people, not all, we need to do church differently.

 

One of the things that I think we need to be mindful of is that we don’t have to build the church. That is Jesus’ job. Jesus tells us in Matthew that HE will build HIS church. Interestingly, this verse in Matthew comes right after the verse we looked at last week when Jesus asked his disciples who he was. So first he asks them to be clear on who he is and then he tells them to be clear about whose church it is. The church as a name or as a building will always go away, and remember when Jesus was around; there were no catchy names or huge buildings. Jesus’ church will never be confined that way. The church that Jesus has built and will continue to build will be YOU. You are the church. You are the church that Jesus is working on. When we come together, WE are the church.

 

The question then becomes, how do we create the best church possible? I believe one of the first things we need to do is move from being Worshipers to Followers. Often in church we get caught up worshipping the risen Christ and forgetting that we were asked to follow Jesus. For many people, worshiping Christ is worshiping the Jesus that rose up after three days. It is about worshiping the divinity of Christ. This is awesome…as long as we don’t let that mean that following Jesus goes by the wayside.

 

Jesus, prior to his death and resurrection, had a lot of pretty great stuff to teach us. And they weren’t the water into wine and the feeding 5,000 with a snack. What Jesus taught us was compassion, and caring and acceptance and openness to all and LOVE. We don’t need to be divine to do those things. Yet they are a lot harder to do than just worship. Worship requires belief. This is one of the main things that so many non church goers have a hard time with. Worshiping has come to mean, for many, following a set of beliefs and then stating your allegiance to them.

 

I believe to be a follower of Jesus requires action. It requires doing. Now this doing isn’t required to receive God’s unconditional love. I will touch on that in a minute. But I do believe to make the claim that we are followers of Jesus; we have to act like it.

 

Consider this: when Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount, it was all about ACTION. Blessed are the peacekeepers. Blessed are those who are merciful. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. These blessed ones are people of action.

 

Now we fast forward about three centuries. We are at the Council of Nicene where 318 Bishops gather together to decide what was important, and where in 325 AD, they created the first version of the Nicene Creed. Now, three hundred years after the Sermon on the Mount, there is not a single action statement in the Nicene Creed. It is all about BELIEF. In three hundred years we went from Jesus saying it is all about action and no word about what to believe, to the Bishops of the State sanctioned church saying it is all about beliefs and not a single action is stated.

 

Does it matter to God what we say we believe if our actions don’t reflect those beliefs?

 

Some of you read my Facebook post this week about a certain coat that we needed. A lot of you know Ken Goodwin works downtown at Sing Sing and runs into homeless folks all the time. He knows a fellow without a home that we’ll call Monty. Ken texted me asking if we could have a XL coat and sleeping bag for Monty. I said I would get one. I texted Jeri Dwyer and asked her to try and track one down. She was having no luck. At this point, one of our custodians was walking by and asked her what she was doing and she told him she was looking for a XL coat for a homeless man but she wasn’t able to find one. She said she would just have to tell me we don’t have one. Our custodian walked over to his chair, took the coat off the back of it and said, “You do now.”  Folks, I have no idea what this man believes about Jesus, but I know FOR CERTAIN he is following in the ways and teaching of Jesus.

 

If our job is to follow Jesus, then that means people should see in us what they saw in Jesus. And yes, they saw a person that served, so we should serve. They saw a person who was compassionate, so we should be compassionate. But most of all, what people saw in Jesus was love…and that is where we can model Jesus best.

 

I think us preachers can get caught up in our pet “things.” I can sometimes hit the service piece a little too hard. For other preachers, it’s social justice. For others it is something like biblical literacy. These are all important things and things we should “do” and “care about.”

 

But maybe in our world today, a world of economic crisis and a shrinking job market…a world of tsunamis and earthquakes…a world of war and political uprisings, not to mention the drama that is happening inside every one of our own houses, maybe we need to be reminded of the hope and the unconditional love of God. A love so vast that God gave us a man to show us, in a very tangible way, what love that knows no bounds looks like.

 

I do hope you all will find your place in the world where you can go out and serve in joy. One of the lines that we say during our communion service speaks of joyful obedience. I hope we all find that. It truly is in serving that we will find our joy. But even more important, I hope we never lose sight of the love that God pours out on us regardless of what we do or don’t do. The love that can’t be won or bought, a love that is freely given, a love that is the true backbone of the church. If we keep these two things in mind, the Church of Jesus Christ will survive just fine. And that is very good news indeed.

 

It is this giving of ourselves in service and the taking of God’s unconditional love, which is with us always that are the core of our life in Jesus.  It is these two things together that make up the give and take that is Jesus. Here’s to a lot more give and take in all of our lives. Amen.


JESUS THE WILD MESSIAH OF LOVE

Rev. Jerry Herships

March 13, 2011

 

Scripture: Mark 8:27-30

27Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” 29He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” 30And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Clearly, we are not the first ones who have struggled with who Jesus is. We read here that His own disciples weren’t certain. This makes me not feel so bad as I wrestle with who Jesus is to me.

 

We know the standard answers, the “churchy answers:” Son of God, Son of Man, Messiah, The Christ, The Anointed one, Emmanuel, God incarnate. Even if we can say that, what does all that mean? I think it comes down to each of us wrestling with and asking the question, Who is Jesus to me?

 

Despite the pictures you often see, that probably isn’t what Jesus actually looked like. The traditional ones are the ones I grew up with. Today my preference is something more like the Laughing Jesus or the Buddy Jesus. In reality, Jesus probably looked more like this; if he were anything like the men of his day, and we have no reason to believe he wasn’t, he would have had short black cropped hair, probably 5'4”- 5'7”, 120-140 lbs and dark skin. He definitely did not have long, flowing, blond hair and blue eyes.

 

Most people don’t spend much time thinking about what Jesus looked like. They think about who he was. What was he like? How did he conduct himself? What was important to him? What did he spend his time doing and talking about?

 

I think somewhere along the way, we have developed a different understanding of who Jesus was. Just like the difference between a fair, blond haired, blue eyed, Jesus and one with cropped dark hair, dark skin and middle-eastern features, we have in some cases done the same thing with the persona and character of Jesus.

 

I don’t believe Jesus was meek and mild. He was the wild messiah of love.

 

Some things I believe about Jesus of Nazareth:

I believe Jesus loved a good party. We see over and over again in the scriptures, that Jesus was going to a banquet or a feast. Jesus was not a guy who acted like a hermit, just hanging out with his 12 buddies and staying sequestered away with prayer and suffering all the time.

 

Jesus was out in the world. He enjoyed life. I think if Jesus were here in Denver today, he would be at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival, and a Rockies game and the Great American Beer Festival. Jesus always wanted to be where the people were. He enjoyed spending time with others and there was almost always food and drink there. Jesus understood that when we gather together to eat and drink, we bond in a way that is almost impossible without those things. We become, if only for a short while, family. This was even truer in the first century. When food was present, it was a sign of coming together.

 

I believe Jesus also took time for himself. We all need to refuel. Jesus was constantly going off to pray. He knew that even though being with people, both friends and strangers, was important, so was finding his center. Jesus was intentional about taking time to be in prayer, to connect to God and to discern his next steps.

 

I believe Jesus hated labels and hypocrisy. Jesus didn’t get angry a lot but when he did, it was usually at the religious authorities and the self righteous. His harshest words were for those who thought too highly of themselves. Jesus didn’t even claim specialness in this regard. When someone called him good, he responded by saying that only his father in heaven is good. It was in this way that Jesus was able to relate to ANYONE. He saw all of us as equals and couldn’t stand it when anyone places themselves above anyone else.

 

One of the lessons I learned in an unusual way was back when I was in my early 30’s. I was working two jobs at the same time: I was touring with a PR company doing shows with Dick Clark…and working at the GAP. I remember getting picked up at home by a limo, being taken to the airport, flying first class, and staying at four star hotels every week. I would then get brought home, drop my bags, change my clothes and go punch in to fold jeans at the mall. I CLEARLY remember the respect I got as an ENTERTAINER working with Dick Clark. I was treated like a star, and I also CLEARLY remember how I was treated when people of all ages would come in to the store and boss me around…at 30.

 

Lots of people have had minimum wage jobs, but not a lot of people had them on a Monday through Friday and then on the weekend has limos, first class and the Ritz-Carlton. This showed me, first hand, how radically different people treat each other depending on their job, social status and income. This was not and is not the message of Jesus. Jesus didn’t care if I was stacking jeans or opening for Dick Clark, Jesus treats me and everyone else exactly the same.

 

I believe Jesus has a special place in his heart for the poor and marginalized. I think this is just a fancy way of saying Jesus cared about people who were having a hard go of it. Jesus loved those that society cast aside. This was wild love to be sure. Whether they were prostitutes or criminals or tax collectors, Jesus spent time with people and gave them dignity. That is what we hand out in Civic Center Park – Dignity. It may LOOK like a pair of socks, a bottle of water, or a sack lunch, but what we are really giving away is compassion and caring and a reminder to everyone that they matter to God and if they matter to God then they should matter to us.

 

I have absolutely no doubt that if Jesus were walking around today, after he went to the Cherry Creek Arts Festival, and a Rockies game, he would be hanging out with our friends without homes down in Civic Center Park. As Marcus Borg says in his book titled Jesus, “The Judgment that Jesus speaks about in Matthew 25 will not be based on membership in a group, or on beliefs, or on rule keeping, but on deeds of compassion.”

 

Most of all Jesus loved people, which leads me to this point.

 

I believe it is our job to be like a “little Jesus.” We are not to just praise and honor and give glory to God and Jesus; we are to try to follow Jesus. This is NOT done for one hour on a Sunday morning. It is how we are to live our life every day. This does not have to be drudgery. But I believe we have to be intentional.

 

Are we out in the world? Or do we just hang out with church folks? Do we enjoy life? This is a great world we have been given, we need to be willing to enjoy it. Was it Auntie Mame who said in the Broadway show named after her, “Life is a banquet and most damn fools are starving.”

 

Are we taking time for ourselves, to care for ourselves and connect with the sacred and holy? This is a place where I fall short all the time. It is so easy to just be go, go, go. I’m guessing that others need to slow down, take it easy and do their best to connect with God.

 

Do we fight against labels and hypocrisy? Do we treat the person at Starbucks and the Dry Cleaner the same as we do our Pastor and Bosses? Do we even know the name of any of the people who wait on us week in and week out? I truly believe Jesus would. I slip on this all the time but think I am doing much better than I did before. Are we really seeing people through Jesus’ eyes? That is the goal, to see others as Jesus would see them.

 

Do we have a special place in our heart for those on the edges of society? I think this community has proven over time that is does have a special place for the migrant worker. Jesus said, “When I was a stranger, you welcomed me.” We are living that out every time we make and deliver sandwiches to El Centro. I know this community has a special place for those without homes. And I remember the words of Jesus, “When I was hungry…”

 

I believe it is our job to continue on our quest to be “Little Christ’s.” No matter how radical our love is for others, it won’t be as radical as Jesus’ was. It is our job to reclaim the wild, crazy, reckless love that Jesus showed for the world.

 

When we gather together like this, one last time in two weeks, I will talk more about how we are to carry on the work of AfterHours, and more importantly, the work of Jesus, in the weeks, months and years to come.


WHAT YOU MUST KNOW ABOUT THE BIBLE

Rev. Jerry Herships

February 27, 2011

 

Scripture: II Timothy 3:15-17

15and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.

One of the hardest things I had to overcome when I first began preaching and actually formal ministry in general was talking about the Bible. There were only two kinds of people who talked about the Bible, Bible scholars and Over the top Jesus Freaks. I was neither one. I still struggle with some of the things I say sounding too “Churchy” or “Holier than thou” or “crazy church person.”

 

There is a lot to know about the Bible, and without question it has been used as a heck of a weapon to argue everything from pro-Slavery to anti-homosexuality to why women should not talk in church.

 

In his new book The Rise and Fall of the Bible, Timothy Beal, Professor of Religion at Case Western Reserve University, made the statement, “There’s no such thing as the Bible…and there never was.” Here is more of what he had to say.

 

There is no “the Bible,” no book that is the one and only Bible. There are lots and lots of Bibles. They come in many different physical and digital forms with a great variety of content – different canons, translations, notes, commentaries, pictures, and so on.”

He goes on to say, “Don’t believe me? Next time you’re in a bookstore, check out the huge Bible section, or just type “Bible” in the search box of an online store, and prepare to be overwhelmed. The Bible business sells more than 6,000 different products for over $800 million a year. These are all sold as “The Bible.”

 

He said, even more surprising than all the diversity of Bibles on the market today, that there is no pure original, no Adam from which all Bibles have descended. “During the time of Jesus, there were many different versions of Scriptures in circulation, and no central publishing house or religious authority to standardize the process.”

 

He goes on to say that the same is true of the early Christian movement. He points out that, “… it wasn’t until the 4th century that there was even an official canon of Christian Scriptures. Even then, moreover, there were lots of unofficial varieties….the further we go back in history, the more biblical variety we discover.

 

I don’t believe the Bible is the mind of God. I believe the Bible is mankind’s understanding, throughout centuries, of the mind of God. I believe it speaks to peoples understanding of God and God’s character. I believe there is wisdom in it that is as applicable today as it was then AND I think there are things in it that are better to understand in the time and place they happened. One of the great features of the Bible is that it is a collection of events that happened in specific times and places AND at the same time, is timeless.

 

I believe that it is a document that is so layered and complex that every time we look at it, we can see something different in it, even though we are looking at the same words. 

 

I have started to, and I believe everyone has to stop being afraid of it. We need to continue to honor it and respect its words, but we have to be careful we don’t begin to worship IT. It is only a tool to point us towards God who deserves our love and praise. When we begin to worship the Bible, we begin to turn it into a God…and we know that isn’t right.

 

I did two things I don’t always do when preparing for a sermon. One was I went online and asked the Facebook community: What is the thing people MUST know about the Bible? I got lots of responses. Some of my favorites were: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “There is no single “right” understanding of what it says or means.” “Just be a kind person.” “Every person is of infinite value to God.” “It is available to them with God's love to wrestle with, disagree with and question and still never losing God's love.” And finally, when I asked the question, “What is the thing people MUST know about the Bible, someone wrote, “That is comes in Brown leather as well!” We have to keep our sense of humor. Thanks Jon!

 

I also sent an email out to some of the brightest pastors in our conference asking them the same question. I got back some great answers. One of the overriding themes that kept coming up was that the Bible is a story of God’s relationship to us.

 

Here is a little secret: the Bible isn’t a book. It’s a library. I believe the Bible is a collection of stories within 66 books that tell us two things: how to love God and how to love each other. Regardless of whether we are reading the prodigal son or the woman at the well…the story of Cain and Able or the way our first churches were formed, we are being told how to…and how not to…treat people and God.

 

The question often comes up about whether what happened in the Bible is actually true. Did these events occur the way they talk about them here? Do we even know FOR SURE who wrote what is in this great book? The piece of the letter we read from today is attributed to Paul but many mainline scholars agree that even though it was signed as a letter from Paul, it probably wasn’t actually written by him, which wasn’t an unusual practice in those days.

 

At this point we have to ask ourselves, “does that bother me?” It is what one of my Bible teachers asked me back when I would question EVERYTHING. He would say to me, “Jerry, why is that important to you?” Not accusing, but really asking the question, why IS that important to me? Does the factuality of a story affect the truth or lesson that story is trying to teach us? This is why I love the line that Marcus Borg uses regarding the “truth” of the Bible. He says, “The Bible is true…and some of it actually happened.” The truth that is being taught is bigger than whether those events happened, at those times, with those people, exactly as it is written.

 

You know today, people call something Myth when they want to say it isn’t true. That isn’t what myth use to mean. Myths were stories that conveyed universal truths. Myth is much bigger than fact, not less than. The question to ask is, What is the lesson here? What do we believe is trying to be conveyed here? Do we see ourselves in that story anywhere? We should.  As one Facebook response said, that’s what makes the stories relevant.

 

When we can see ourselves in these stories, THAT is what makes them ring true. These are stories of pain and heartache, stories of beating impossible odds and stories of explosive joy. They are stories of betrayal and revenge, and stories of love and unspeakable compassion. They are stories of people in the Bible. They are their stories for sure…but they are our stories as well. Who hasn’t felt betrayed? Who hasn’t felt heartache and pain? Who hasn’t felt joy and seen compassion? This is what makes these stories relevant…and what makes them ours.

 

It’s almost like Apple’s, “There’s an app for that,” commercials. But instead of apps, they are stories. Ever been betrayed? There’s a story for that. Ever been treated unfairly? There’s a story for that. Ever been a part of a love that seems so big you can’t contain it? There’s a story for that. Ever been forgiven or forgiven someone else? There’s a story for that. Ever watched someone sacrifice for their kids (and pay for it) because they love their kids so, so much? There is a HUGE story for that. It is when we find ourselves in the stories that they come alive.

 

So what are our take aways?

 

This book is not just History….it is our story as well.

Just because it is not a fact, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

There is no original. It has constantly been changing shape.

It is MANY stories over many times and places with many viewpoints and many authors.

It tells us how to treat and love God and how to treat and love others…and ourselves.

 

Don’t be scared of the Bible. Pick it up and browse through it. Get comfortable with it. It doesn’t make you a Jesus Freak or a Holy Roller to start digging into it… and to be comfortable knowing that you will find just as many questions as you will answers.

 

But don’t let that stop you.

 

Happy Reading.

LOVE AND GOD

Rev. Jerry Herships

February 13, 2011

 

Scripture: Deuteronomy 6:4–9

4Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. 5You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. 6Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. 7Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. 8Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, 9and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

In the many previous weeks we have talked about anger, sorrow, and regret. It is time we, as Marianne Williamson would say, “return to love.”

 

I will cover four topics: GOD, JESUS, THE BIBLE and US. I will talk about what I think are the most important things to know about each given topic. I hope you’ll join us.

This week….GOD.

 

The passage Elizabeth read is part of what is called the Shema. The Shema is an affirmation of Judaism and a declaration of faith in one God. It is to be prayed every morning and night. It also has two other sections, another from Deuteronomy (11:13-21) and a part of Numbers (15:37-41). That prayer is inside this tube, as it says in the passage, and is to be put on your gates and doorpost. This is one from my house that I got in Israel. It is a prayer about knowing God and loving God.

 

I want to talk about God from three angles: how we understand God, God’s unconditional love, and the many paths to God.

 

The God of Our understanding

(NO ONE gets God completely. If you do…it’s not God.

 

“Oh God of our many understandings,” that is how Bishop Gene Robinson began his prayer at Barrack Obama’s Inaugural event. Bishop Gene Robinson is the first openly gay priest to be elected Bishop in the Anglican Church. I am currently reading his autobiography, In the Eye of the Storm. I love the fact in that opening prayer, that he extends a welcome to both those who think they have God figured out as well as those who might have not nearly so much confidence.

 

One of the things I like about what little I know about the AA, 12 step communities is the lack of arrogance surrounding their discussion of God. The third step says to, “make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand him (her).” What I find particularly refreshing about this is….isn’t that what we are all supposed to do when we choose to follow God? I just find it hysterical that a “non-church” seems to get this better than many of us in church congregations all over the world.

 

I think we need to release arrogance and find more kindness. Plato said, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” We never know what brings people to a place in time. And, as we acknowledged earlier, NO ONE completely understands God and if they do…what they know is not God.

 

Rudolf Otto coined a phrase called Mysterium tremendum. It means “fearful and fascinating mystery.” It is a Latin phrase which Rudolf Otto uses in, The Idea of the Holy, to name the awe-some (fascinating and full of awe) mystery that was the object common to all forms of religious experience. Otto referred to God as the Wholly Other. That’s not Holy other like in holy water. It is wholly as in completely beyond our understanding. Otto made an entire career of explaining that you can’t explain God.

 

Jesus essentially says that only four words are important, Love God/Love People. As a result, we realize it is not our job, or the job of the church, to tell people what is “right” and what is “wrong” with their understanding of God. We can tell them OUR understanding. We can explain why we think that way. But I struggle with telling people they are wrong and I am right. God can reach people in ways that I will never be able to comprehend.

 

So what is our job? Our job is to love each other. We know that Jesus told us that as we treat the least of these, you do unto me. In the Christian faith, we understand Jesus and the Father to be one. When we put all this together, we realize that the way to love God is to love “the least of these.” The Dalai Lama once said, “My religion is kindness.” I think Jesus would approve of that understanding of how we are to be with each other.

 

The many ways to God (many paths)

I actually left the church in my 20s because I thought there was only one way to do God. I grew up Catholic, and while I never remember a clear cut conversation regarding, “their way was the only way,” it was implied. There was a thought that “It’s our way or don’t let the door hit you.”….and I didn’t. I did not come back for 10 years. I think it is the arrogance of the Church that tells people, “we have the ONLY way.”  That has driven more people away from God than any other single thing and it kept me out for years. When I found out there was more than one way to “do God,” I was so angry that I lost all those years and that no one told me. I realize now that it was the driving force behind my wanting to become ordained.

 

Not only are there many paths, each person is on a different place on their path. One of the hardest things to do as a pastor is try to see where people are on their path and to give them just enough encouragement to take that next step. This is going to be very different depending on where they are. With many understandings, there are going to be many folks at different places along their path. We need to honor people and their paths and where they are on it. Regardless of WHAT path they are on and WHERE they are on that path, our job continues to be, for all of us, to love them.

 

God’s unconditional love

I guess the take away I have regarding God’s love is that it is so easy to take. It is this ease that makes it hard. I don’t think we believe it….but here it is: There is NOTHING we can do to make God love us more. No amount of Bible reading. No amount of volunteer work. No amount of going to church. Nothing you do can make God love you even one iota more. In a world that is constantly asking what have you done for me lately; we have a God that tells us we don’t have to do a thing to earn our creators love. It is amazing to me that our God love saints and sinners alike: Mother Teresa and Lindsey Lohan, Billy Graham and Heather Graham, Rick Warren and Carrot Top.

 

Here also is the flip side of the equation. There is nothing you can do to make God love you LESS. When we are handing out communion down in the park or when I talk to people in bars, one of the saddest things I hear is that people don’t feel they are WORTHY of communion or of going to church. What they don’t know is that God loves them no less than the Pope, Joel Osteen or Gandhi. God loves the bartender and the priest the same, and the junkie and the University president, the inmate and the judge. He loves the barfly and the homeless and the reverend and the homemaker, all the same. Of course God doesn’t want to see any of us in pain and many times the things we do cause us pain. God can be sad in some of our choices and circumstances…but God’s love for us will never waiver.  In God’s eyes….through unconditional love’s eyes….all are equal.  

 

I think the reason we struggle with this is because, for so many of us, there is such a level of dislike of ourselves. Some call it self-loathing. That always sounds so harsh to me. But I do believe most of us have something about ourselves that we are less than pleased with. As a result, many times we try to hide that part of ourselves, our shadow side. We hide it because, not only are we ashamed of that piece of us, but we also think if people saw or knew this part of us they would run for the hills. Yet we know God sees our whole self and then, and here is the wrinkle, think God couldn’t possibly love us with that kind of 360 view of who we are. I think that WE think that we have to be perfect before God. The amazing part is that God loves us…warts and all. No matter what your “problem is,” God loves you absolutely and fully. This Amazing Grace is what makes God so unbelievable for us.

I’M ANGRY, WHERE’S THE JUSTICE?
Rev. Jerry Herships
January 23, 2011

Scripture: Psalm 13

1How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? 2How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? 3Consider and answer me, O Lord my God! Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death, 4and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”; my foes will rejoice because I am shaken. 5But I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. 6I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me.

That’s it. That’s the whole chapter. In six verses we went from “Will you forget me forever?” to “I will sing to the LORD, because he has dealt bountifully with me.”  Psalm 13 is the shortest and simplest prayer for help. It is often cited by scholars as a textbook example of a complaint.

According to one commentary on this passage, the NIV version is preferable when looking at verse 2. It says, “How long must I wrestle with my thoughts.” As opposed to, “How long must I bear pain in my soul?” It points out the writers inter struggle.

Although this Psalm is short, this Psalm is a great teacher regarding prayer. Prayer involves, not only the nice sweet sound of praise, but also things we don’t often talk about: anger, defeat, inner pain, anxiety and feeling abandon.

But it is simple: two verses of complaint, two verses of request, and two verses of trust and praise.

Wouldn’t it be great if life was like that? Wouldn’t it be great if you could go from screaming “WHY ME GOD!?!?!?” to “GOD YOU ARE AWESOME!” that fast?

More often we feel like Psalm 88.

1O Lord, God of my salvation, when, at night, I cry out in your presence, 2let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry.3For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. 4I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I am like those who have no help, 5like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. 6You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep. 7Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves. Selah 8You have caused my companions to shun me; you have made me a thing of horror to them. I am shut in so that I cannot escape; 9my eye grows dim through sorrow. Every day I call on you, O Lord; I spread out my hands to you. 10Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise you? Selah 11Is your steadfast love declared in the grave, or your faithfulness in Abaddon? 12Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness? 13But I, O Lord, cry out to you; in the morning my prayer comes before you. 14O Lord, why do you cast me off? Why do you hide your face from me? 15Wretched and close to death from my youth up, I suffer your terrors; I am desperate.16Your wrath has swept over me; your dread assaults destroy me. 17They surround me like a flood all day long; from all sides they close in on me. 18You have caused friend and neighbor to shun me; my companions are in darkness.

And…..that’s the end. No happy ending. Did you hear the difference? Psalm 88 is unique among the Psalms because of one thing: it is the only Psalm of the 150 that doesn’t end in happy, happy. Every other Psalm has this upturn at the end. Psalm 88 sits in that sorrow.

I wanted to focus on both of these because they represent the fact that we all progress at a different rate of healing. By now St. Andrew knows about AfterHours being discontinued. Even with only one week advanced noticed, you are in a different place than a lot of people that found out only six hours ago. To be completely honest, some of you have already moved on. You think, “Yea, it sucks but life goes on.” You are at acceptance.

Others of you are in that place of grief that is bargaining, “Well can we do it this way, or what about this way?” Bargaining is a different stage of grief. Some of you are at anger. Who is at the anger stage? The “Will you forget me forever!” from Psalm 13 and THE MESSAGE version of the Bible says Psalm 88 this way, “Why God do you turn a deaf ear?” That is the way it feels sometimes doesn’t it? Like we beg and pray and beg and pray and nothing seems to change.

What these verses tell me is that no matter where you are…God will be able to deal with it. God can handle your pain. God can handle your anger. God can handle your bitterness. And God will rejoice in your praise. No matter HOW YOU FEEL….give it to God.

A lot of us want to do that but there are a couple of reasons I think, that we don’t. The first reason is that, honestly, we’re scared. We are scared that there will be a huge lightning bolt that is going to strike us down if we raise our voices to God. Maybe not literally, but there is a little fear there that if we get mad at God…God will get mad at us and CUT US OFF. We are afraid God is going to say, “you are dead to me!”  I am here to tell you, that ain’t gonna happen.

The second reason is that we don’t want to look like anything other than “feelin’ great” in church. I read the other day that the real religions of America are optimism and denial. We feel we have to wear a smiley face a church. Our dark side or shadow side is a side we don’t often want to deal with, especially at church…around all these happy people…at least on the outside. What will they think of us?

We CAN express our dark and even angry side with God. I would even suggest that you write a letter to God. Tell God about your pain, your disappointment, your anger. For some of you this might be about the discontinuation of AfterHours but for others, you have far worse pain like job, relationship, or money issues. Whatever it is, write a letter to God stating your case.

While for some of you this might feel silly, the point is, you can’t keep your feelings stuck inside. You have to tell God know how you feel.

If anger is a prevalent feeling, it is probably coming from a place where you feel like you have been dealt an injustice. It is feeling like you have been dealt a dirty blow. How do we react to injustice? How should we?

We see in books like Isaiah that God is a fan of justice. It says in Isaiah 61:8, “For I the LORD love justice.” This is not the only place. We see it in Psalm 33:5. “The Lord loves righteousness and justice.” And in Psalm 11:7, “For the Lord is righteous, he loves justice.”

We are not usually given permission to be angry at God…for anything. I am going to give you that permission now. I want you to write on a piece of paper in front of you something that you are angry about. It can be anything, the AfterHours thing, or something personal. It can be a world issue and more than one. I want to take a few minutes right now and have you write down your anger at God.

Know that the God we have is big enough to handle all our emotions and loves us now...and always, no matter where we are. 

DISAPPOINTMENT – WHAT NOW?

 

Rev. Jerry Herships

January 2, 2011

 

 Scripture: Luke 24:13 – 17

 

13Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, 14and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. 15While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, 16but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. 17And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad.

 

Well…now what? That is the question that is in my mind. I think it is the right question to ask. So often when we are faced with disappointment, we find ourselves asking, “Why God?” when maybe the real question should be, “What now God?” It isn’t like disappointment is something any of us are unfamiliar with. It could be any number of things. Why did that relationship fall apart? Why am I in a dead end job? Why am I not married? Why can’t we have a baby? Why did they cancel AfterHours? Our first reaction is almost always, “Why?”  I think this is normal. I also think it is normal to get angry. The question becomes how long do we stay in that anger AND is there a constructive place to direct it?

 

I think the place to direct it is to the question, “What now God?” It is here we can go into a moving forward role rather than the angry, bitter, resentful victim role. Do not let anyone at anytime make you feel like a victim.

 

Understand there will be different rates of moving through this and other disappointments. AfterHours is a pretty great thing and definitely a different model for doing church. To be honest I think it is a model that a lot of people don’t understand. It is not the traditional model of attractional church. It is a Missional model of church. Both of these models work but they have very different measurements and timelines. I know more than ever, that we are on the right track with AfterHours and the work we have done. I completely believe it is the model of church for the future. I think we just might have been an issue of wrong place, wrong timing. But that does NOT mean great things haven’t happened. I want to thank Harvey and the church for allowing us to conduct this experiment for two years. Many churches would not have been even this adventuresome. I do think we just didn’t live up to the expectation some had hoped for in the timeline given.

 

I also have great hope for the future. I want to allow people to grieve AfterHours. I have known for weeks and am still grieving and asking a lot of questions and have some pain but I will tell you, even though Afterhours is gone, but not for another three months, the WORK of Afterhours will continue.

               
The Outreach in the Park has been such a blessing for all involved and that work will continue. We have reached out and touched people more than 9,000 times with food, water, clothes and communion over the past two years. We have given out 100’s of sleeping bags with the help of other churches and we have made Christmas amazing for so many people, both those receiving AND those giving. And this work of ours, this living out of Matthew 25 will live on.

 

This is the challenge for all of us as we face disappointment. We have to find a way, rather than focus on what is behind us and beat ourselves up over the past, to instead look to the future and ask God to direct us in the way God wants us to go. Whether it is relationships, a diet gone horribly wrong, a dead end job or no job. We must in our darkest hours turn to God and ask the question, “What now God?”

 

I am sure after Jesus was hanging on the cross, the disciples had to feel disappointment. They had to feel like “Why?” They had to feel like all they had dedicated to this new way was lost. We see some of their disappointment in the verse we read today.

 

Now to be clear…I am NOT looking at you all as disciples and I have NO plans of hanging on a cross, although EVERY pastor has a Messiah complex…they give it to us when we get ordained. The point I am making is that even though the form of what the disciples were doing changed drastically, the work they were doing of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing people of their pain, didn’t change. That work continued all the way up to and including the work we are doing with our ministry. We are doing something different, to be sure, but in another way, the work we are doing at Afterhours is a continuation of the work Jesus did with his team of 12. Afterhours is small, but we are bigger than 12!

 

Know that wherever you are in your life now, if it is something that is not working or not where you want it to be, it is NOT the end of your story. I touched on this Christmas Eve. YOUR STORY ISN’T FINISHED! MY STORY ISN’T FINISHED. The AFTERHOURS STORY ISN’T FINISHED. WHAT’S NEXT GOD?

 

I wanted to allow for some time for you all to chime in with your thoughts. As you are comfortable to share, what are your thoughts? What are your concerns? Where are you thinking we should go next? I know we just dropped this bomb on you and for some of you it’s going to be, “wow, that sucks….where do you want to grab dinner?” For others of you, you might feel betrayed, angry or just hurt. This is true of any group of people that have heard bad news. Writer and Pastor Hamilton Smith writes about the followers of Jesus and makes these comments. “How varied the conditions of the soul in which the disciples were found on resurrection morning. Peter was a backslider, Thomas a doubter, Mary Magdalene was desolate, and the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, were disappointed.” God is there for any of us wherever we are, bitter, angry, upset, or disappointed, God can handle it.

Regarding AfterHours; allow time to grieve this. It won’t be that big a deal to some, but for others…this might take awhile to recover from this news and to figure out a new chapter.

 

I do want to say, how amazing it has been to be a part of this with you. I especially want to thank my wife Laura who has been with this from the very, very, VERY beginning. As a matter of fact, she is the only one who has been here from BEFORE the first service until now. I also want to thank Ken and Aaron, our two paid staff who have been absolutely awesome.

 

The heart of AfterHours has been all of you who have donated countless hours of your time to the work of being the hands and feet and bank accounts (!) of Christ. You have built God’s kingdom and I am certain God is smiling down on the work we have done together.

 

Know that we still have 90 days of services. We have at least two more service Sunday where we can go out and live God’s message of love and grace for all and we have some killer guest preachers coming in throughout the next three months.

 

God is with us and this is not the end and we WILL continue to build the kingdom of God.  


OH BABY!

Rev. Jerry Herships

December 19, 2010 

 

Scripture: Matthew 1:18 – 25

 

18Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. 20But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: 23“Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” 24When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, 25but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

 

What do we think of when we hear the word “righteous?” Do you think of someone who is always doing the right thing? Or do you think of it as a negative? “Well, you don’t have to get all righteous on me.” And we don’t only have to decide if it’s a positive or a negative; we have to decide what the word right really means. The real question is what is right? Who gets to decide what is right?

 

In this passage we read, her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. Righteousness was easy to define in Joseph’s day. Righteous people in Joseph’s day strictly adhered to the law. Period. By being engaged, Joseph and Mary were already considered legally married so unfaithfulness would have been adultery and Joseph would have been justified to divorce her, even have her put to death.  What is a “righteous” man to do? Does he follow the letter of the law or rather side with grace? Joseph chooses to act out of care for Mary rather than strictly adhere to the law.

 

Haven’t we all, in one way or another, found ourselves in similar situations? It may not have been as dramatic, but none the less, similar. We have to decide if we are going to live out the heart of the law or the letter of the law. We are trying to decide what’s…right.

 

It’s not like Joseph doesn’t know the law. This is like a Sermon on the Mount moment; he is dealing with the “you-have-heard-it-said…but-I-say-to-you,” sort of thing. Does he go with what he has been taught his whole life or what he feels is the loving thing to do? This is the dilemma facing the people of Matthew’s church. They were Jewish Christians who always obeyed the law and suddenly, there is a newer, kinder, more grace filled moment presented to them. Do we do what we understand the strict letter of the law to be, or do we follow this new, higher understanding of righteousness to which Jesus leads the people of the Matthew community?

 

To the writer of Matthew’s gospel, Joseph represents the perfect disciple of this new understanding. He is always looking for the grace and the love and the forgiveness in a given situation, rather than following “the rules” that have always been set up. This is the new higher consciousness of the kingdom, a new understanding. This is the kind of thinking that Jesus is going to bring into the world when he grows up. Remember, Matthew knows the whole Jesus story when he writes this good book. He is using Joseph to model the new life that people will have in Jesus. Jesus’ dad represents the message of Jesus. Well done Joe!

 

When have you found yourself in a similar spot to Joseph? You want to do the right thing but realize it might not be the same as “going by the book.” That is a tough tension in which to live. That is the tension in which the people of Matthew’s church found themselves.

 

It is especially hard when the “book” that we are going by is the Bible. Many churches struggle with anyone, ANYONE questioning their thoughts, ideas and practices. I pray we are always open to debate and discussion here at AfterHours. The job of those on the cutting edge of their faith is to question. There will always be questions that need answers. And what scares many Pastors and churches is that we won’t have the answers. Now, I can help you out there, I’ll cut to the chase for you. We don’t. We might have more education on matters of religion, though not always, but we are pilgrims struggling along the same path that you are.

 

Do we have the courage to stand up against the company line when we don’t think its representing the law that Jesus put in front of us? The law to love, the desire for grace or the need for forgiveness. We can find justification for just about ANYTHING in the Bible. There are all kinds of things that were justified in a certain time and place. Does that mean they are right for today and this time and place? Should we stone people? Should we shun people from our community of faith? Should we exclude people for living a less than perfect life?

 

My own life is challenge enough. I have to deal with eating and spending and not exercising enough, with wasting too much time and not praying enough. Not forgiving enough and judging too much. Can anyone say they have it all together? Then how can we possibly point a finger at another?

 

I truly believe that Joseph was hurt when he found out that Mary was pregnant. How could he not have been? And the excuse wasn’t that helpful either! It definitely qualified as “well, that’s a new one! God made you pregnant…well I’ll be.” You didn’t hear that excuse every day. Make no mistake, it wasn’t an easy decision that Joseph had to make. Yet he was righteous. Not only did he not STONE her….he didn’t even want to embarrass her. He knew what would happen to her in the community. Nazareth was a small town, no more than 150-200 people. If you grew up in a small town you know that everybody knows EVERYBODY’s business. It was the same way in Nazareth. She would have been shamed. She would have been considered damaged goods. No man would have any relations with her. She couldn’t work. She would have been persona non grata. It would have been a living death sentence.

 

As we know from the story, Joseph didn’t need to follow through with the “quiet” divorce. The angel intervened. Here is some advice, WHENEVER you can have an angel intervene, do so.

 

I want to dive a little deeper into Joseph’s role, but first I want to tell you a little bit about my and Laura’s exciting days in Hollywood. How’s that for a segue?

 

When Laura and I lived in Hollywood we both started as soon as we got there doing extra work. Extras are the people who help set the environment for a scene. They are like living props. They are not to speak. They are only there to been seen and not heard. The next step up from being an extra is getting a part as an “under five.” They are people who have under five lines. That’s a big deal. Under fives are usually the folks you see saying things like, There’s a phone call for you doctor and your table is ready, right this way. Laura and I both did a lot of extra work on different shows. Ask her about The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.  The show that we both worked on the most was Days of Our Lives. Definitely in the part of seen and not heard. Extras are the low man on the Hollywood totem pole.

 

We have some correlations with our Bible passage today. Both Hollywood and the Bible are big on roles and the parts we play.

 

Once again, in our story, God turns the values of the world upside down. The entire Christmas story is a story of questioning our assumptions. As I mentioned, we have an angel intervene. In fact, the angel is the only one in this passage with a speaking part. Not a “star” but not an under five either! Joseph and Mary don’t say a word in this passage. As a matter of fact, in all the scriptures, not a single word is recorded coming from Joseph. I get the sense that Joseph was the strong silent type. He was a carpenter, a blue collar guy.

 

Regarding this miracle between God and Mary, it is obviously a big deal. As a matter of fact, it is the first miracle of the New Testament and a pretty important piece of the story. And yet, our leads; Mary and Joseph don’t have a single line. The extras in our world are the stars of the Christmas story. This is just the first time we see this happen. We will see it again with the Shepherd’s, and with the location of the Jesus birth.

 

God takes what we deem lowly and makes it the shining star of the story. We have to always remember that the things that this world places in importance God often does not, and conversely, God will take the lowly of this world and raise them up and hold them in high praise.

 

In many ways, Joseph is often viewed as almost an extra in this story. And yet, had he divorced Mary, which by law, he had every right to do, we would have a very different story. If this “righteous” man had adhered to the letter of the law, he could have, in the process, killed both Mary and the baby in her womb! Let’s hear it for those who go against the status quo! Get this: If Joseph had followed the letter of the law, Jesus would never have brought us the good news that we don’t have to always follow the letter of the law! Where do you suppose Jesus learned that? Like father like son!

 

There is always going to be a need for rules and regulations. They are important to keep our society running smoothly. The danger becomes, to paraphrase Jesus, “are the laws made for man or man for the laws?” Let us always question what writer and Pastor Phil Gulley calls, “the spiritual status quo.” I will say more about that next week at 11:00 pm on Christmas Eve at St. Andrew.  Get ready…we are getting close to one of the most amazing things to ever happen in the history of our faith. We are about to watch Jesus turn the world upside down.

 

HOW TO HAVE PATIENCE….RIGHT NOW!

Rev. Jerry Herships

December 12, 2010

 

Scripture: James 5:7 – 11

 

7Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. 8You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near. 9Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged. See, the Judge is standing at the doors! 10As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. 11Indeed we call blessed those who showed endurance. You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.

 

OK….I cheated. This is one of the lectionary passages…plus I added verse 11. It seemed weird without it. So sue me.    I think it is pretty easy to see what the major theme is for this passage. The first two words make it pretty clear. Be patient.

 

I don’t think I have ever preached on patience. Part of the reason, I am sure, is…well I suck at it. Like most Americans, I find myself wanting something and wanting it…well NOW, actually, yesterday. Long term patience does not come easy to me. That is part of the reason I never thought I would make through the ordination process. I am Definitely an outcome person, NOT a process person. If you have to stay up all night every night to get the sermon done…so be it. Stop complaining and start working. If on the other hand you get it done in a day, then the night is yours, enjoy. In the end, it is about the final product not the process.

 

This is not always the best route. Part of today’s passage tells us that the farmer is waiting for both the early and the late rain. Some things just take time, God’s time.

 

No one in my family is of the patient type. Waiting for Christmas to come? Forget it. It was so hard for us to wait in our family that we started doing CHRISTMAS EVE GIFT. Do any of you play this game? Is ours the only family?

 

Christmas Eve Gift came about because apparently as my brother and sister were growing up they were even less patient that I was. The idea was that on Christmas Eve, whoever shouted “Christmas Eve gift” the loudest got to open ONE of their presents a day early, on Christmas Eve. You had one less on Christmas day but you got to open ONE early.

 

My brother and sister didn’t stop playing when they moved out. They would sometimes call at 6 in the morning….then  5….then the night before at midnight to be the first one. I did have the advantage of still being at home. I would shout “Christmas Eve Gift!” as soon as I heard the phone ring…Again, outcome oriented.

 

This passage is telling us that maybe, maybe there might be something to gain by showing a little patience.

 

It tells us that this is the season that we have to focus on Peace. If we follow the advice of this passage we will get through this holiday season with more peace, which is what the Prince is bringing us when he arrives. Now this peace is spelled a little funny. We are going to spell it PES and it is going to stand for the three things that we see throughout this passage.

 

The passage focuses on three main themes: be Patient, Endure, and Strengthen your heart. Let’s look closer at each one.

 

PATIENCE

We all have to have patience in different areas of our lives. To continue on with the idea of my writing sermons, I have to be dedicated to the process and discipline of writing but also stay open to allow ideas (and some would call the Holy Spirit) to flow in and out of the sermon writing process. As I write these words, I have no idea how this manuscript will end. That is many versions and edits from now. I love what I read in Deepak Chopra’s book, Why is God Laughing.

 

He tells the story of the time when a Broadway composer was asked how he came up with his wonderful tunes. His reply was: “Wait, Drift, Obey.” Love that. What is at the core of that is you have to be patient.

 

It reminds me of that often quoted phrase, “release outcome.” It is focusing on the here and now and not spending too much time focusing on the future. I believe patience must be practiced and I now believe I am better at it now than I was five years ago. The process of ordination forced my hand. There are moments when the only requirement IS to wait. You must be at a church for a year. You must be a provisional candidate for two years, You must have a three year degree. Waiting is a huge part of the process. The process itself teaches patience.

 

Where in your life could you use more patience? Where do you find yourself thinking, “Enough God, Let’s get on with it!” In what part of your life do you feel stuck? This section in James is titled “patience in suffering.” Who in the world wants that? For me I am always trying to find the lessons in any given moment, and to be honest, there are times I just don’t see any lessons learned. This does not mean I stop looking. I stay on the path. I keep taking life one day at a time. Which leads us to our next major point, endure.

 

ENDURANCE

Endurance is not a game for the timid. It says, “I can see where life stands now. It might not be that great at this moment, but let’s wait and see what things look like at the end. It is recognizing that God might be putting a comma where you, at first, put a period. That is one of the great things about reading the Bible. We know how it turns out. We can flip to the back of the book. We don’t have that luxury in our life, so we must endure, knowing that God has a great plan for us. It is like we read in Jeremiah. “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

 

It might not feel like it right at this moment. You might feel rejected or in pain or lost and not knowing where to turn next. KNOW that this is not God’s plan for your life. I know of NO ONE who gets out of this life without some struggle. I know of no one who has gotten through this life without some degree of pain. We were never promised a pain free life. The good news is, IT WON’T LAST. You can endure. You can beat the hard times, get through this part. Endure, have patience. God has a very bright future for you. Use this time to do the last thing this passage tells us to do…strengthen your heart.

 

 

STRENGTHEN OUR HEARTS

How do we do this? How do we strengthen our hearts?  I can tell you how we don’t do it. It’s not about getting on the treadmill. It’s not about running a marathon. We do strengthen our heart by using it and making it stronger, but we do it in a different way. We find ways to love more. We find ways to give more. We find ways to care for each other more.

 

I have found that when I am busy strengthening my heart in one of these ways, my patience increases. It increases because I’m not staring at the clock. I am too busy DOING. Time flies when you serve others. I find that my attention shifts off of me and mine, to theirs and them. I become less selfish when I am strengthening my heart by serving people besides myself.

 

It is also easier to endure the hard times when I strengthen my heart because it often puts my life and problems in perspective.  Here is an example. Every Tuesday at St. Andrew we have a staff meeting. It is exactly as fun as it sounds. It usually last between one to two hours. When it’s done, there is meeting overload. It is easy to get into a grumble and complain mode.

 

I leave right from there and go down to hand out lunches and communion in the park. That hour in the park reminds me of how silly so many of my problems are and it reminds me what REAL problems look like. Enduring MY problems becomes a lot easier.

 

Now don’t get me wrong, I know there are REAL problems that people have that an hour of handing out water won’t cure. I totally get that. I guess all I’m trying to say is, when we go beyond ourselves and think of others, our pain becomes reduced.

 

This advent season, let’s all do our best to go outside ourselves and find a way to strengthen our hearts as we prepare for the coming of Jesus. When we do this we will find our patience increasing, as well as our ability to endure. Christmas becomes less about what sales to hit and what presents to buy and more about the message that Jesus coming into the world is supposed to signal: new light, new hope and new ways of doing things in this world.

 

ARE YOU JOHN THE BAPTIST?
Rev. Jerry Herships
December 5, 2010

Scripture: Matthew 3:1 – 12

1In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, 2“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” 3This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” 4Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist and his food was locusts and wild honey. 5Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, 6and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

7But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8Bear fruit worthy of repentance. 9Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. 10Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 11“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 12His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

I have to be honest. Sometimes I read a Bible passage and just go, “huh.” I know there are some of you out there thinking that Pastors and Preachers have it all figured out. Maybe some others do, but I suspect there are at least a few of them like me. There are easy passages to figure out what the writer was going for, and there are others where I am simply looking and going, “I got nothin’.”

It is in these moments that seminary training does pay off. Part of seminary isn’t just teaching us how to interpret text, but also where to go and what resources to use to help us interpret text. Half of knowledge is knowing where to go to find that knowledge.

That was the case here. For the next three weeks, I am going to preach from what is called the lectionary. It is a listing of texts that any preacher in the country can turn to and see what, in theory, all the other pastors are preaching on that week. It gives you an Old Testament verse, a Psalm, a Gospel and one of Paul’s letters to pick from. I went with the Gospel.

I then turned to one of the commentaries. Commentaries are giant books that scholars write to explain biblical passages in depth. How in depth? Here is the Gospel of Matthew. Here is the commentary explaining the Gospel of Matthew. Sometimes they are no help at all. Sometimes they say very interesting things. For example, the commentary on this passage says that Pharisees and Sadducees, during John’s time, would not have been hanging out together. They were opposing religious parties and pretty unlikely to be working together. Matthew isn’t presenting reality in this instance, but rather showing the opposition to John as a united front, in much the same way there will later be a united front against Jesus.

While I think that’s cool, in a Bible geek sort of way, it isn’t what I think we should focus on in this passage. I’ll get to that in a minute.

In the meantime, I am wondering if any of you have ever tried to explain AfterHours to someone who hasn’t been to AfterHours? I’m curious about how you explain it to someone else. After all, not every church’s Call To Worship is slapping together PB&J. We are a bit of a strange duck, although I hope none of you describe us that way.

I usually say something like, “we are church for people who don’t do church,” but that doesn’t explain it all. I will say we are focused on serving others outside our walls. The fancy church word for this is “Missional.” We are part of a larger church, St. Andrew Church, which, in turn, is part of a larger denomination, The United Methodist Church. The United Methodist Church is part of a larger group called Protestant, which is a sub group of the Christian faith. There. Is that clear as mud?

I think a simpler way of saying it is that we are trying to live our lives as close to Jesus as we can and we are trying to do the things, and behave in the ways Jesus told us to live.  That cuts through a lot of BS doesn’t it?

See, I think for a lot of us, there are parts of the wider church community that really rub us the wrong way. I think there are parts of organized religion that really bug me. The good news is that we are in good company because it also bugged John the Baptist and Jesus too! We see value is following God through this master teacher named Jesus. We just sometimes struggle with all the rest of it.

I definitely feel this way sometimes. I feel like I have one foot in the church world and one in the secular world. I think some of you feel the same way. We want to be associated with something bigger than ourselves, and we want to believe that the thing bigger than us is God, but God’s fan club that we often see out in the world, is not necessarily a club in which we want to belong. Having a foot in both worlds is challenging, but I believe everyone here is in that space. It is nice to be a part of each community, but as a result, you can’t really claim either as your true home. It is like we are bridge people.

The passage we read today is all about bridge people, John and Jesus. John already had his own thing going when Jesus came on the scene. He had his own followers, his own disciples. But, John was not necessarily a member of “the establishment.” He wore a camels hair get up and ate bugs. Not what corporate America would call, “a suit.” And I think when you call someone a “pack of vipers” you have to know that is not the way to win friends and influence people. John was not going to be getting a key to the executive washroom anytime soon. Yet, he was doing the work of God. No doubt about it.

Jesus, although he is not in this passage, is still a central character. He too is anti establishment, and as a result, the establishment kills him. But we will save that part of the story for Easter.

Even when Jesus does come, he doesn’t do it the way we expect. John is expecting this wild, separating the wheat from the chaff, type of event. “You watch, he’s going to put the good guys over here and the bad guys over there.” Yet that’s not how Jesus comes into the world. Why would he start his formal ministry that way? He enters the world as a small, innocent baby, born in a strange land in a manger. Put another way, Jesus was a helpless, homeless immigrant baby, born to an unwed mother. God comes in and, right from the start, blows our mind.

 

                So John blows our mind and clearly doesn’t fit the mold. Jesus comes in and he doesn’t fit the mold. Are we seeing a pattern? The God of the universe does not do things in the usual way. We get to see God in a new light, the light of the world. 

Maybe that is what we are to do here with Afterhours and this advent season. We are to own our uniqueness as a community and try to look at Advent with fresh eyes. Advent means to get ready or to prepare. Maybe this passage is telling us that this Advent season, expect the unexpected.

In this passage we see John bust into the story, out of nowhere. The actual passage begins with a Greek word that both the NRSV and the NIV miss. The Greek word means “now” or “but.” It evokes suddenness. John appears without preparation or warning. There goes God again, bursting into the scene in another unexpected way. Out in the wilderness, John is doing God in a new and surprising way.

AfterHours is like John the Baptist, doing church in a new and unpredicted way.  This is always going to involve risk. John ended up losing his head over the deal.

AfterHours is also like John in another way. John is an outsider. He is being a prophet and doing the work of God, but the organized religion of the day doesn’t get him and he doesn’t get them either. He is not outside the faith, but he isn’t hanging around with the Sadducees and Pharisees. As we’ve said, he’s not a company man. He’s not quite “in” and not quite “out.” And yet God is using this “outsider” to make inroads for the Kingdom. It is here in Matthew that we see the openness of accepting others even when they don’t fit inside the nice and tidy box we call “The Church.”

AfterHours sometimes seems too “churchy” for those people who don’t go to church all the time or are new to it. And we are very often not churchy enough for those who are accustomed to a more traditional understanding of church. But we are hopefully opening people’s eyes to seeing God and church in a different way.

In a lot of ways, all of us are like John the Baptist. We are all outsiders in one way or another. Everyone has felt that way at least once in their life, that feeling like you don’t fit in. By claiming Afterhours as your church home, you are saying you are comfortable doing God in new and unique ways. You are a little bit counter cultural, like John and Jesus. You have to be bilingual, you have to be able to talk secular AND church. By doing this we all become bridges that help bring people to God.

This Advent season, let us prepare for Jesus’ arrival by opening our eyes, seeing the season in a different way, seeing the work we do in a different way, and seeing that God is always bursting onto the scene in new and exciting ways.

Let us be John the Baptist in our corner of the world.

Are you John the Baptist? Are you sharing the arrival of something great? All I ask is that you do it in your own way. God is going to love how you get the message out there.

Amen.

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?

Rev. Jerry Herships

November 7, 2010

 

Scripture: Luke 17:20 – 21

               

20Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; 21nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”

 

A lot has happened since the last time I saw all of you. I was asked to preach at the annual Clergy retreat that we have up near Winter Park. I was preaching to preachers…yes it was exactly as fun as it sounds. We had a guest speaker come and talk about Missional Church. Cool stuff that is telling me that we are the future of the church.

 

I was, also, asked to attend a conference in Seattle last week called the New Church Leadership Institute. We experienced great presenters and speakers. When people heard what we were doing here at Afterhours, they got excited. I was asked to come and speak about AfterHours in Portland in March at an upcoming conference. We are on target gang. We are part of God’s new plan for reforming, rethinking and reimagining the church in the coming years. 

 

We were focusing on the Missional Church in the last couple of weeks. And I think it is the kind of church that we all want to do. We want to go out into the world. We want to change the world for the better.

 

Somewhere along the way things got twisted. The Church turned its signs around. I think the Church has an anatomy problem. We started focusing on how to get butts in the seats rather that get feet and hands into the world, and I think God is telling us, in the future, to understand the Kingdom in a very different way.

 

Now I am not about to say we have this piece all figured out. There are some people who had this Missional church thing figured out years ago. People who have been going into the world and focusing on meeting people where they are….and not just to give them directions to the church.

 

I still believe, though, that we all want to bring the Kingdom down to earth. We all want to see God grab people. I have heard it said that the church in the United States loses 1500 people a week, NEVER TO RETURN. Somewhere we are missing the boat.

 

I would love to tell you we’ve done everything right at Afterhours, but the truth is, we have done a lot wrong from a traditional church model. To be completely honest, there is a lot for the first time visitor looking for a church NOT TO like. We have played Pink Floyd, U2, Frank Sinatra and Mister Rogers. We have done some weird things here. I’ve had people read the Bible…out loud…in church! That’s cutting edge. Have you ever heard such a thing? Not just the liturgist. We have broken up into groups and read out loud together. We move around, we have had discussions. We don’t ask for a collection. We just have a basket near the front door.  We are not very familiar for anyone who is church shopping….and that’s just fine.  Because the people we want to reach are not church shoppers. They are people who have given up on the church but haven’t given up on God.

 

And I think what resonates more than anything else with non church shoppers at AfterHours is brown paper bags. What people, who don’t like church, do like is that we are feeding people. There are people who come specifically to make lunches.  They get and understand that serving people with less than you is something that is bigger than organized religion, but not bigger than God.

 

One of the overriding themes at both the conference and the retreat I attended is this idea of going beyond our church walls and going out into the community. Not just visiting the community, but rather, being a part of it. Finding out what they need and listening and helping them with it.

 

We feed the hungry, clothe the naked and offer Gods grace to any and all. We do mercy ministry. Jesus did it and it worked out great for him…granted you have to read ALL the way to the end of the story but in the end it worked out.

 

By many standards, Afterhours is not a success. We have not had explosive growth. We worship less than 60. We have moved three times in a year and a half. If we continue to measure success by rears in the seats, Afterhours is not any great success story. But if, like many of the ministries I heard about in the past two weeks, we use other measurements…I think we have something to talk about.

 

I want to remind you of some of those other measurements. We have now served over 7,000 of Denver’s underserved and hungry. We have put out over 4,000 pairs of socks and countless bottles of water. God is on the move.

 

One of the best things about what we are doing at THE TABLE in the park is giving out communion. I have heard many people over the years tell me they don’t “do” communion.  It wasn’t until the park, when I asked them if they wanted communion they responded by saying, “What’s communion?” What a cool thing it is to get to tell someone for the first time what communion is.

 

I think a lot of you know that Afterhours joins the Wesley Foundation in the park every Friday and I have had the privilege of giving out first communion to at least three of the DU students that come down to the park to hand out sandwiches. I grew up Catholic. I did my first communion with a new suit and tie and all my family and a big party. These DU students did their first communion with the homeless and junkies and drug dealers. I think Jesus would approve. God is moving in a new way in the future in Civic Center Park.

 

I have also handed out the communion bread AS someone’s supper. When they look down at it and ask, “What are you going to do with that,” you KNOW they’re hungry.  You realize this is not just a symbolic meal…it IS a meal. It might not be their last supper…but it’s tonight’s supper.

 

Some of you remember when, with the help of Christ Church and St. Andrew and St. James and a slew of other churches, we handed out over 100 sleeping bags on Christmas day this past year. It made such an impression that we got continued anonymous donations of sleeping bags for the rest of the winter. And I truly believe that by doing that we saved lives. And we are going to do it again this year. Look for an email coming up that will take you to a link where you can purchase a cheap sleeping bag for Christmas this year and quite possibly save a life.

 

I know this may sound like a commercial for AfterHours. We KNOW we are not the only church that is doing this work out in the world. There are OTHERS. People are doing great things for the community right outside your doors and beyond and believe me, the neighbors are watching. In this economy they are watching to see what we are doing for the community and what we are doing for ourselves. I will tell you this, doing God’s work is a great cure for doing church work. You watch as God moves in new ways as we move into the future.

 

The last sermon series we talked a lot about transformation. It is funny how focused we can get on transformation IN the church. If you really want to watch transformation, watch what happens to the people outside the church, the people who are offering the outreach. That is where we can watch lives get changed. See, WE think serving others changes them. Silly rabbit. When I watch a guy, who two years ago never spent any time with the homeless, walk three city blocks carrying two cases of water for people he doesn’t know, I call that transformation.

 

We like to think we are doing what Jesus asked us to do but the institutional maintenance of the church can take up a lot of time. That happens on a lot of levels. I don’t think God cares as much about institutional maintenance as God cares about people.

 

Here’s the rub though, the institutions that we are maintaining are revenue streams. They make money. The big money St. Andrew UMC brings in fuels the ministry of this community. Until there are other revenue streams, we need to thank God for St. Andrew.

 

Unlike churches that bring in money, people cost money. I truly believe I “do church” every week in Civic Center Park and I believe anyone who has been down there would say the same thing. But, the congregation of Civic Center Park WILL NEVER makes the church any money. It will actually cost the church money. And yet, I feel that is the work that we do when we are called to be the hands and feet of Christ. Jesus never filled his calendar with as many meeting as I do. I believe that being the hands and feet of Christ is what it takes to bring about the Kingdom of God.

 

I think this is the future of God and the Church. I think we have to be honest about what the outside world thinks of us. I will tell you that until we spend more time outside our church walls than inside them, the outside world will never take us seriously. I talk to A LOT of people outside the church every week. We have to change our M.O.              

 

I think in the future of the church we will change the equation. It used to be that the equation was: get them into church, help to convince them the importance of being out in the world and then send them out. Here’s what I think is starting to happen. We are starting to turn the equation around. We are getting people out in the world first. People don’t have to be convinced that helping people is the right thing to do. They are a little shaky on church though. When they SEE our good works and when they SEE our love, that’s the deal maker. I think Jesus told us that. THAT is how they will know we are disciples.

 

I know two different bartenders.  One served in the Peace Core helping people in third world countries. The other is saving up money so he and his wife can go to Saudi Arabia where they can teach English to the children there. People are already doing good things. They are waiting for us to lead them.

 

When the Bible talks about the Kingdom of God, I don’t think it was meant just for a moment in time after we die.  I think God is all about the RIGHT NOW AMONG US! And God is looking to create the Kingdom of God RIGHT NOW. I think we will see more people come to this realization as the future unfolds. We have to focus on the right stuff because it’s out there right now. It’s inside us right now. We have to partner with God as God helps us bring the kingdom to earth. If we take the Missional church off the pages of a book and move it out into the streets we will be doing two things, giving the people what they want AND changing the meaning of what being the church means for today and tomorrow.

 

It is interesting to note, that in this passage it says that the kingdom of God is among you. There is a footnote there though. At the bottom it shows that the Greek term used for “among” in this passage is also used elsewhere in Matthew to mean “within you.” The “you” that is used is plural…meaning it is not just directed at one individual. The kingdom of God is both among all of us and inside all of us. It is about both how we each relate to God and how we relate to God through community.

 

It is in this way that the future of God, the church and each of us is intertwined. The future of the kingdom of God is both in us AND among us.

 

I don’t even think we can even imagine what church is going to look like in the future because God will co-create it with us.

 

While I was in seminary, I asked a clergy why he got into ministry. He told me his board of ordained ministry asked him the same question. He said he responded to them the way he saw it, the church was on life support and he either wanted to help make it healthy again or pull the plug. I realized I feel the same way.

 

I say we reach for the paddles, shout “clear,” and bring the church back to life in a dramatic way. The paddles can shock the church back to life. The paddles are in this room. We are those paddles. We are the ones who can either bring the church back to life or we can pull the plug. But I think, because the Church is the manifestation of God in the world, we are going to see a very different vision of what the church of tomorrow is. I believe that as we discover the kingdom of God within ourselves, we will watch the church change as well.

 

The world is sick right now. I do believe that we do have the cure. We can change this world, but we have to be outside our walls to do it.

 

God is going to change the world. God is out in the world changing lives. The church can give that meaning and context. We can show people that we are not all about ourselves and our money and our revenue streams. It will take brave leaders who are willing to look at church in a different way. We will find a different revenue stream than just the butts in the seats and when we do, we can focus even more of our energies on what happens outside our walls and in the process, as a happy benefit, the seats inside our walls will be filled with people who need to hear the good news to recharge and go back out into the world in a huge wonderful circle that has no beginning and no end…just like God.

 

When we do that we will be joining God in doing a really new thing. Amen.

 

 

 

WHAT REALLY MATTERS

TRANSFORMING OUR ACTIONS

Part Three of a three part series

Rev. Jerry Herships

October 17, 2010

 

Scripture:

James 2:17         

In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

 

Matthew 7:20

Thus you will know them by their fruits.

 

Mark 8:35

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

               

We are finishing up a three part series called What Really Matters: Transformation. We started with transforming our mind. Last week we talked about transforming our heart. This week we are going to close the series by talking about how all this leads to transforming our actions.

 

It is not by accident that we talked about these transformations in this order. I believe there is a natural progression. I believe that transforming our mind leads to a transformation of the heart. I also believe that once our minds and hearts are transformed it is all but impossible to not transform our actions, in the same way that a tree naturally produces fruit. When we have transformed our minds and hearts we will produce the fruits of the spirit in our actions.

 

Paul talks about the fruits of the spirit in his letter to the Galatians. He understands them to be: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness and Self Control. All of these are things that are exemplified, not by thinking about them or just “feeling” them, they need to be lived out. People will see our love in action, they will see our Joy, see our kindness, our patience, and our self control.

 

And, much like the tree, if we don’t produce fruit, there is something wrong with the tree. A strong, healthy tree produces fruit. A strong, healthy transformed life in God will produce more love and joy and kindness and goodness in the world.

 

Transforming the mind and heart is the work of the gardeners. It is what we do to prepare to go out in the world. Prior to transforming our hearts and minds, we might have lived a life that didn’t produce much fruit. Some have said it felt like they were just going through the motions.

 

“Going through the motions” goes away after transformation. Remember for something to be transformed, the old way has to go away. It has to die. In this way, transformation is about dying to an old way of being. When it comes to the three things we are looking at, namely mind, heart and actions, we are looking at a new way of thinking, feeling and living. The old ways die. This is what Jesus meant when he said: 35For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. It means we are choosing to die to our old ways. We are choosing a new life. We are choosing a new life in Christ. This is what transformation is about.

 

Now let me be clear about what these scriptures DON’T mean. We will start with the first scripture from James, which is one of the most misunderstood. First off, there is great debate about whether this is James the brother of Jesus or a different James. He makes no reference to being Jesus’ brother. If you were the brother of the Son of God, I would think you would play that card when introducing yourself!

 

Regarding the actual scripture verse, the first point to make is NOT talking about what it takes to get into heaven. We don’t EARN our way into heaven. Our actions do not ring up brownie points that get us closer to the pearly gates. As we have talked about before, God’s grace is a gift. The author of James is not saying that your faith is false because you don’t act and BECAUSE your faith is false you won’t get into heaven. That’s not it at all. The author is saying that your faith will NATURALLY lead to actions. They go hand in hand but it is not a deal breaker regarding the afterlife. Your actions change because it’s impossible for you NOT TO. James believed that true faith will always be manifest in one’s life, especially in the ways one treats the poor and oppressed. James believes that those who have faith need to show it in how they live. For James, religious conviction (“faith”) and concrete behavior (“works”) are inseparable. He writes later in this letter, “be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.

 

So how do we do this? How do we do “work?” It is simple…but not easy. At the basic level it is obeying the one command that matters, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

 

One way of knowing if this God stuff is sinking in is to take an honest assessment of how you are going through your day. I still get mad and frustrated when I have to fix something at home. It  is safe to say you won’t see a whole lot of “Patience.” That particular gift of the spirit is more or less absent on those days.  Remember, the gifts Paul is talking about are:  Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness and Self Control. After days weeks, months and years of going to church, have you seen an increase in these? These are the things that will blossom. It doesn’t mean that you have to give up your job and go work for a leper colony…although if you are called to go, by all means go. It means with all this “God stuff” in your life, are you living your life any different than you were before?

 

The progress will never seem fast enough. Some of you have heard this story about the bamboo tree. If you have heard it bear with me. I think it is a great example of how we sometimes grow.

 

A lot of people are baffled by the way the bamboo tree grows. When it is first planted it looks like nothing is happening for the first few weeks. Then it looks like nothing is happening for the first few months. Then it looks like nothing is happening for the first few years! It barely grows, usually just a few feet. Then in the FIFTH year (!) the tree shoots up and grows up to 90 feet in a single year! Why did it wait?

 

The truth is…it didn’t. During those first few years the tree was growing constantly. The growth was there, you just couldn’t see it. The bamboo, (of which there are over 1600 varieties, was growing during those early years…deeper into the ground. The bamboo uses those early years to develop its root system. It is this early root system that allows for the explosive growth above the ground during the fifth year.

 

I think for many of us our faith looks a lot like the bamboo tree. We spend years developing our root system, trying to develop our foundation. On the outside, it sort of looks like nothing is happening. There is no visible difference to our lives. It is during these early years of developing our foundation that we start to renew our minds and hearts. When that work comes to fruition, we find ourselves bursting out, much like the bamboo, doing everything we can to reach up and out into the world. That early work was necessary, as the foundation, for the dramatic work that will follow out into the world. To establish that foundation, those early roots, and NOT shooting out into the world, would make no sense. So why develop the foundation at all? The bamboo, like our lives, needs a good foundation to withstand explosive growth out in the world.

 

I don’t know where you are in your tree of life. You might be in the first couple of years and growing in your knowledge and asking hard questions. GOOD! You might be in the next couple of years…finding yourself thinking about people outside yourself, being more compassionate towards those less fortunate than you and feeling a nudge to “get out there.”  You might be ready to break new ground and to go out into the world, reaching out and up.

 

Wherever you are, enjoy the journey. Life is too short to beat yourself up. Give yourself a little grace and enjoy the ride, knowing that God isn’t through with you and there are a lot more wonderful growth opportunities still ahead.

 



WHAT REALLY MATTERS

TRANSFORMING THE HEART

Part Two of a three part series

Rev. Jerry Herships

October 10, 2010

 

Scripture: Ezekiel 11:19-20

 

19I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them; I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, 20so that they may follow my statutes and keep my ordinances and obey them. Then they shall be my people, and I will be their God.

               

Last week we started a new sermon series talking about what really matters. Each week we are talking about a different way in which our lives can be transformed by our relationship with God.

 

Last week we looked at how transforming our mind can lead us to a better understanding of how we understand God. We looked at the beliefs many of us grew up with and which of those we want to keep with us and which ones we are okay with leaving behind. We talked about how it is okay to change how we understand God and that our relationship and understanding of God should change over time and it should deepen and get richer if we take the time to really look at our thoughts and beliefs.

 

This week we are looking at what it means to have our heart transformed. What does it look like to have a Christ like heart? What does it mean to have an open heart? Why do we so often harden our hearts? How do we cultivate an open heart and how do we know if we are making any progress?

 

Weren’t we already here?

 

When we talk about transforming our heart there is one huge difference compared to talking about transforming our mind. With our mind we are taking knowledge we learned and reexamining it and to see if it still works for us at this time in our lives. These were all things we learned at one point in our life. We are exploring new ground.

 

Transforming our heart is different. We are trying to return BACK to old ground. We are almost trying to UNlearn things. We are trying to return to the open heart we all had as children. Children are wonderful models of what it looks like to have an open Christ-like heart.

 

Why don’t we open our heart more?

 

If we all know that life would be more joyful, more peaceful and more enjoyable if we lived with an open heart, why don’t we do it?

 

Pain.

 

The things we have to unlearn are all the mistrust, anger, hurt, embarrassment, and sorrow that a lot of us have accumulated over the past X number of years. I think everyone wants to return to an open heart, wants to return to the love and trust that is in children. When we hear Jesus say in Matthew that we need to become like little children to get into the Kingdom of heaven, he is saying that returning to the love that we knew as children will get us to that Christ-like heart.

 

In our passage today we are listening to God talking. We are reading from the book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel was a priest and a prophet during the 6th century BC. He prophesied for 22 years. What we hear God saying in this text is that when we take on a more open heart it is easier to follow and obey God. Our relationship with the holy strengthens and becomes stronger.

 

But there are a lot of layers of that other stuff that have built up over the years. This is what I think it means to have a heart of stone. There is still a good soft open heart there. It is just under layers and layers of hurt and pain.

 

While it is not always the case, we very often have to “allow” someone to hurt us. I know when I get defensive it is usually about a place that is very important to me. In other words, if someone said to me “You have blue hair,” that wouldn’t bother me very much. The reason it wouldn’t bother me is because I KNOW I don’t have blue hair. Their words don’t have any sting because I know they aren’t true.

 

But if they say, “Say it looks like you put on a little weight,” well, now we have a problem. The problem is that somewhere inside myself, I might be thinking the same thing. The things that people say that hurt us, hurt us because chances are, somewhere inside us, we have asked ourselves or thought the same thing about ourselves.

 

So the first way to have an open heart is to start being a little nicer to ourselves. Start thinking a bit kinder about ourselves and work our way out from there.

 

We have a more open loving heart by being more open to ourselves and loving ourselves just a bit more. When we remember who we are and WHOSE we are, we can start healing those less than great feelings towards ourselves.

 

So…how do we have a more Christ-like heart?

 

First, like loving ourselves, we have to choose it. We have to make a conscious choice. This is not always easy. It can sometimes feel as if the world is trying to harden our hearts, to make them callous and closed off. We have to choose to go against the culture. We have to choose to be vulnerable. We have to be willing to let people take shots at us. Sounds pleasant doesn’t it? Actually, it can be. There are a number of things we can do to cultivate an open heart. We need to find those things that soften and open up our hearts.

 

These are going to be different for everyone but some things might be the same. Things like being with good friends for a long dinner with great food and drink. Playing and being around kids (some of it might rub off!). Relaxing with NO agenda. Finding ways to surround yourself with beauty (whether sights or sounds), and giving to others.

 

I think we also have to be intentional to limit our contact with things that might harden our hearts or lead us to a closed heart. These are also going to be different for each person but I’ll give you my partial list.

 

Spending too much time watching the news or reading papers and magazines telling us how awful the world is and how bad things are becoming. It is okay to be informed, but too much can just make us numb. Whenever there is coverage of a huge catastrophe, I can easily get sucked into watching 12 hours of it. By the end, I’m a wreck. This is not useful for creating an open loving heart.  

 

Another one for me is cramming my schedule with just too much, always having to be SOMEWHERE. This is really hard for a pastor NOT to do. When we are too busy, we don’t take the time to slow down and enjoy life. We miss out on the now. We spend a lot of time REACTING, never just ACTING and never bothering to appreciate what we have in that moment.

 

A lot of us might already be doing these things. We are reaping the benefits. There are ways that you can tell if you are moving in the right direction. They can be subtle at first. Then one day you wake up and realize you're a different person than you were last year or five years ago or ten years ago.

 

So how do we know we ARE creating an open and Christ-like heart?

 

Here are some things to ask yourself as you more towards a more Christ-like heart. These are some signs that you might be in the midst of transformation:

WE FOCUS LESS ON OURSELVES. As we start transforming our heart, we find ourselves being less wrapped up in ourselves and more concerned about other people. We may find at first they are just entering our consciousness more. Other people will suddenly pop into our head and we will catch ourselves thinking, “I wonder how they’re doing?” This will move from just thinking about them to wanting to “do” for them. Life becomes more about “the other.”

 

WE FIND OURSELVES BEING MORE THANKFUL FOR WHAT WE HAVE. I have spent the majority of my life always looking for the cool stuff that other people have and wishing I had it. I find myself doing that less and less. My life use to revolve around Life Styles of the Rich and Famous and Entertainment Tonight and figuring out what day my magazines would arrive. It has now been probably twenty years since I watched Life Styles. I know it’s off the air but there are others like it. I haven’t watched Entertainment Tonight in years and don’t get nearly as excited when my magazines arrive. Although I must admit…I still like getting the magazines.

 

I have begun to notice how much we have. How lucky we are to have a roof over our heads, food in the fridge, and clothes on our backs…plus some!

 

The more we begin to notice our haves and not our have not’s, I think we are moving towards transforming our hearts.

 

We feel the pain of others and we want to stop it. I am sure there were awful things happening all over the world before a few years ago but I must have missed it. As we move towards a transformed heart we begin to, not just see the pain in the world, but we feel it as well. This has a name. It’s called compassion. The Latin root of this word means “co-suffering.” We find ourselves actually hurting for other people. And it doesn’t stop with feeling it. We want to stop it. Which leads to our next tell tale sign of a transformed heart.

 

WE FIND OURSELVES GETTING MORE UPSET BY INJUSTICE. We stop living our lives in our own bubble. The world gets smaller. Things that we use to ignore are now, for some reason, harder to get out of our brain. We can’t stand to see people mistreat people. We start to think about how our actions affect others and if they do in a negative way, what we can do about it.

 

THERE IS MORE JOY IN OUR LIFE.

 

But it is not the joy you use to have. It comes from a deeper place. It comes from a place that isn’t as affected by whether or not the Broncos won or lost. It isn’t as affected by how much money is in your bank account, or if you have the latest model car. This is a joy that comes from knowing you are being true to yourself. It is a feeling that you have when you feel like you are firing on all cylinders. It is a feeling that your heart is getting closer and closer to God’s.

 

But wait….THERE’S more!

 

Next week we will look beyond the transformed mind, beyond the transformed heart to the final stage of transformation in this series. Next week we will look and see what we are to do with this transformed heart and mind…

 



WHAT REALLY MATTERS

TRANSFORMING THE MIND

Rev. Jerry Herships

October 3, 2010

 

 

Scripture: Ephesians 4:22-24

 

 

 

 

22You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, 23and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

INTRODUCTION

 

We are starting a new three week series called What Really Matters. I have been thinking a lot about this and have come to the realization that the only thing we can count on is change. The question becomes, in what direction is the change happening? It is this change that really matters. We have to keep changing, we have to keep evolving. Stagnation is never good anywhere in nature. Another word for change is transformation. Changing from what was old into what is new. So in the coming weeks we will look at how we are changing and why that matters. This week we are going to begin by looking at how we are transforming our minds.

 

I think lasting change often starts here. The book title by James Allen states, As a Man Thinketh. The title was inspired by a passage from Proverbs, chapter 23 verse 7, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” That version is from the King James Bible. When we read this in the New Revised Standard Version it comes out much different. The NRSV says: for like a hair in the throat, so are they. “Eat and drink!” they say to you; but they do not mean it. Not EXACTLY what the King James says but it was the inspiration for James Allen’s book and back in 1902, the King James was probably pretty much all Allen had access to.  The NRSV is cautioning us not to eat and drink with rich phonies who will say one thing but mean another. James Allen took it to mean that by controlling what we think about we can in many ways control our future.

 

The verse from Ephesians that we are looking at today is very similar to the verse from Romans we have looked at before when we talked about perfection. But, today I want to look at what Paul meant when he talked about being renewed in the spirit of our minds.

 

HOW TRANSFORMATION BEGINS

 

I think in many cases, the mind is the first place we can feel transformation coming on. I believe this happens usually in one of two ways. First it comes in those moments when long held beliefs don’t work for us in a moment of crisis. Growing up they might have made sense to us, but now when we need them in this moment: we lose our job, someone in our family gets sick, a family member dies, suddenly, long held beliefs don’t work anymore.

 

The second way is over time. Sometimes we just grow out of certain understanding and beliefs. There comes a point when our logical mind just can’t believe something any more.

 

At this point, whether it is from a sudden crisis or over a period of time, we have a choice to make. Sometimes we abandon our belief system all together, which many people have, or we try to reimage or rethink what we believe regarding this issue. Many, many people have chosen the former. The church loses 1500 people a week never to return. Now, not all of them leave because of beliefs. Some of them leave because the church picked the wrong color carpeting and the color they liked was voted down. None the less, many times people have left church because what they were taught to believe growing up is not what they can comfortably believe now that they are grown up.

 

It is at this moment, whether it happens instantly or over time that people have what might be called a crisis of faith. For those who chose not to leave their faith they start on a journey, trying to renew their mind.

 

WHAT ARE YOUR QUESTIONS?

 

So the question becomes where are you on your journey? Do the old ideas still work for you? If they do, great, but I would encourage you to be brutally honest with yourself and ask, “What are the things that I have a really hard time with in regards to my faith?”

 

 Are there things having to do with your faith that you believe differently than you did say, 20 years ago? 10 years ago? 5 years ago? Last year? I believe this is part of the process of transformation.

 

This is where I believe a lot of people at AfterHours are. We are wrestling with the questions. We are struggling to find the answers that work for us…even if “I don’t know” is the final answer. It isn’t coming up with the answer that is important. It is asking the question in the first place.

 

DISCUSSION

 

Turn to the people around you and list two or three of the questions you have heard people ask about religion. These don’t have to be questions you struggle with, but questions you have heard that people struggle with. Take about 3-5 minutes…

 

So what did you get? Some things that I have heard challenged other people in the past in their thought system:

Do I have to believe Noah’s Ark?

Do I have to believe that Adam and Eve were actual human beings?

Do I have to believe in the virgin birth?

Do I have to believe in a physical resurrection?

Is it required to be a Christian that I believe that Jesus performed miracles?

Can I still call myself a Christian if don’t believe in hell? Or the devil?

 

There are very bright, loving committed Christians that believe none, or some, or all of the above. The question isn’t whether you believe a certain belief as much as it is that you have wrestled with the question. 

 

I may have mentioned this before, so forgive me if I did, but this was the main reason I got into this job.

 

MY STORY

 

I grew up Catholic as I have mentioned many times. The Catholic Church does a lot right but tolerating questions was not one of them, at least while I was growing up back in the mid west. I grew up understanding that there were certain things you believed, and that was that. You just…BELIEVED them. If you didn’t believe them well then….I guess this God thing isn’t for you. I was kind of told, “don’t let the door hit you…” and I didn’t. I got through the door pretty quick and it was over. I remember I wasn’t bummed. I was just sort of like, “well now what?” I knew I still liked asking those questions. I just had to find places where people didn’t mind hearing them. I soon moved out to California and boy if there was ever a place that liked asking questions and didn’t shy away from the new…it was California, specifically, L.A.

 

While I was in L.A., I went to see Bernie Segal, and Wayne Dwyer and Marianne Williamson and Deepak Chopra. You name it. I wasn’t in a crisis of faith but I was clearly searching. I heard lots of good stuff and I just kind of…went on.

 

It wasn’t until I got to Orlando that I met a clergy person who told me that there were multiple ways of understanding Christianity and that one way wasn’t the only way. I was like, “Are you kidding me? Does anyone else know this? Someone better tell these people that they can still love God and love Jesus and struggle with all the rest and STILL be a follower of Christ.” I wanted to be that someone. I have been struggling with the rest ever since.

 

STRUGGLE IS GOOD…FIND OTHERS!

 

I guess what I want to say is that if you are struggling with the questions… that’s good! I believe that is one of the signs of transformation. Find others to struggle along with you. Sometimes just knowing you aren’t the only one asking these questions is enough to keep you from giving up! Finding others might be harder than you think. I believe anyone really on their way to transforming their life for God is at some stage of the wrestling match. The challenge is that none of us wants to admit that we are struggling. None of us wants to admit that we have gotten in the ring with God. I’ll let you in on a secret, clergy struggle with questions as well. In many ways clergy are the LAST people who should be struggling with the questions, at least that’s what people think. We are supposed to be the ones who have the answers! I hope by now you all realize I am not the guy with the answers. I guess if nothing else tonight I want to officially give you permission to wrestle with the tough questions.

 

When I was at seminary, one of our professors was a United Methodist Clergy. When he was taking roll in the beginning of class he would call each of Rev. and he would ask us a question. He would say something like, “Rev. Herships, would it change your faith if you knew Jesus went to the cross kicking and screaming?” You would answer him and he would just stare at you. Just stare. Then he would mark that you were “here.” He never told us if we were right or wrong. He didn’t need answers. He wanted us to start asking ourselves hard questions. He said he never asked a question that he didn’t ask ministry candidates when he was the Chair of the Board of Ordained Ministry. He wanted to give us permission to ask hard questions. I want to give you that same permission.

 

QUESTIONS AREN’T ENOUGH

 

There is a risk here though. Sometimes we get so comfortable with asking the questions that that is all we ever do. We get stuck at this place in our transformation and we go no farther. We sit around and ask questions about what we believe and we think that is enough. It’s great to struggle with the hard questions…it just isn’t enough. God created us to be more than just computers that learn data and update it and then spit it back. We need thoughts that inform our hearts and actions.

 

NEXT WEEK

 

Next week we will continue to look at what it means to be transformed. What does it mean to have a heart like Christ? What does it mean to feel your heart strangely warmed? What does it mean to have a change of heart? How does our heart play a role in our personal transformation?



AFFLUENCE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rev. Jerry Herships

September 26, 2010

 

Scripture: Luke 12:13-21

13Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” 14But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” 15And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” 16Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. 17And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ 18Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ 20But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ 21So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

I am wrapping up a three part series called: the three A’s. Two weeks ago we talked about Appearance. Last week we talked about Achievement. Today we are going to look at the granddaddy of them all, Affluence. 

Money is a popular topic in the pulpit. I would even go so far as to say that the desire for affluence, money, accumulation, STUFF is the number one opposition to God. And to be clear, I am not saying it’s bad to actually be affluent. Money is neutral. It can be used for good or bad. A fancy mansion can be a selfish thing to spend money on…or it can be a location to hold wonderful benefits for needy organizations that otherwise wouldn’t have such a location.  Money, or rather Stuff, is an easy tool to pull us away from God. This stuff can cloud our vision. This stuff can make us confused about what is really important. In fact, I view S.T.U.F.F. as an acronym for:  Striving To Untangle Fact from Fiction. 

Chances are pretty good that we all have too much of most everything. Today there is estimated to be 1.9 billion square feet of self-storage space in America. We sometimes use this stuff to show the world how affluent we are. If we have the money to buy…fill in the blank, we must be pretty well off. Money is at the center of affluence but there aren’t a lot of opportunities to actually show off our wealth with actual dollars. Unless we are a wise guy mobster, we probably don’t carry wads of actual cash around with us. Plus, that can seem gaudy. There are more subtle ways to show the world you have money.  Especially in these times, it can be a bad move to “show off” too much. I read an article recently that says that in this economic climate the very affluent haven’t changed the amount they’re spending at all, they just do it more behind closed doors.

Most of us want bigger and bigger. The average American home went from 1,660 square feet in 1973 to 2,400 square feet in 2004.  I know we are getting bigger as people but seriously do we need that much space? We are, as a culture, obsessed with more.

Our passage today warns against the desire of affluence and greed. It is a parable known as The Parable of the Rich Fool. This story looks at an ordinary man. This man is not evil. He is by most people’s standard a success. His fault isn’t with him having too much wealth. What we get to see in this parable is how he plans on using his wealth.

In this parable we actually get to hear this man’s thoughts, his internal monologue. By hearing his internal monologue, we hear his real feeling, not those that he has polished for public consumption. As we listen in, we hear that all of his thoughts are how he can benefit from his riches. He never even entertains the thought that he could take some of his riches and share them with the wider community. In fact as we listen in, we realize how self centered his thoughts really are. I will pull down MY barns and I will build bigger ones, then I will store all MY grains and goods, and I will say to MY soul, Eat, Drink and be Merry.” All of it is ALL….ABOUT….HIM.

As a matter of fact the whole story is just him. Did you notice? It’s just him and his stuff. This man and his STUFF are the only characters in the story until God enters the picture at the end. It is all possessive pronouns: my crops, my barn, my grain, and my goods. His things are all fictions. They aren’t the things that are real and they aren’t the things that matter.

The story didn’t have to be that way. This story is not about the evil of having things and riches. It is about how we chose to use those things and riches. Never once did the man even consider giving to others. His great abundance should have lead to great responsibility to the wider world…but it didn’t.

We are faced with the same problems today. I don’t need bigger barns, I need bigger closets. As a result of this realization I realize I also have to share my riches. This is one of the best things the Bible can do for us. The Bible can be a mirror to our lives and show us how we are doing and where we can improve. But all my things are my fiction. They are not what really matter.

In contrast to the rich fool, Warren Buffet is a good example. As many of you might have heard, Warren Buffet, who is worth $44 billion, began giving away 85% of his wealth in July. Most of it will go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As the interviewer for FORTUNE magazine pointed out, the second richest man in the world is giving his money to the first richest man in the world.  Buffet has a very different view from the rich fool who is in our scripture. In an interview with FORTUNE magazine he has this to say: “We agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society.”

To whom much is given much is expected.

To be clear, again, it is not the man’s wealth that is the problem. It was how he chose to direct it. At its core this story is about consumption. How much more do we need? As U2 sings, “You can never get enough of what don’t really need.”

Where and how do we allocate what we have? Does all of it need to stay with us? Does it go out into the world? Personally I flat out have too much. When you have too much you spend all of your time trying to maintain it. Maintenance of our stuff can take up all our time and eat up time that we could have used for helping others and building the kingdom of God.  We think maintaining our stuff is important but it isn’t. It is another fiction that keeps us from what is real.  

For me, this story is also about the man not trusting God. He is so worried about the future that he thinks I better horde, I better keep what I have all to myself. I know there are needy people out there but I need the security. Helen Keller’s great line, “Security is mostly an illusion. Life is either a daring adventure or it’s nothing.” Even though the man is rich…did you notice he was rich before he had his bumper crop, this man still worried about the future? His security is a fiction. It isn’t real.

This is addressed again immediately following this passage by Jesus talking to the crowd. In verse 22 Jesus is telling them not to worry about the things of this world. He warns them not to put their trust in the things of this world. In vs. 34 Jesus says “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Whatever we invest our time and our money in…those things will pull us closer to them, and farther away from God.

So the questions are many: What do we spend our time thinking about? What do we spend our money on? What do we focus all our energies on? These are the things that we have to be careful don’t take the place of God in our life.

So for me as I read this, there are multiple questions I have to ask myself.  Where do I not trust God in my life? Where am I hording? Where is my desire to consume more and want more blurring my ability to give to the world? Where have I put my confidence? Where have I placed my security? Have I put it in things of this world, which are a fiction, or in the fact of God’s love?

Fictions are untruths. Facts are based in truth. To put our trust in things is to put our faith in fiction. To believe that things will give us security is to put our trust in another fiction. And to believe that things will bring us lasting happiness is the biggest fiction of all.

We live in a time when people worship affluence. Consumption becomes our God. “More” becomes a disease that is hard to break free of. This desire for more, this chasing of affluence brings on stress, heart disease, broken relationships and crippling debt. And in the end, it can change you. It’s like the quote that says, “All my life I wanted to be somebody. Now, I am finally somebody…But it isn’t me.

You will know when you are moving into more Christ like space. You move from consuming to sharing. Your joy won’t be in your collections, it will come from giving away what you have accumulated. I am moving in that direction but have a long way to go.

This sharing or giving back is a sure sign that you are moving in the right direction. Albert Schweitzer said it well when he said, “You must give some time to your fellow man. Even if it’s a little thing, do something for those that need help, something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it. For remember, you don’t live in a world all your own. Your brothers are here too.”

Al had the right idea. Whether we are talking about Appearance, Achievement or Affluence they all center on ourselves. All of our time, energy, and focus are spent looking at ourselves and wondering, “What does the world think of me now?”

To be completely focused on God would mean for us to stop the focus on ourselves. Can you imagine trying to go even one whole day not thinking about yourself? Living your whole day focused on others? That would be the definition of being rich towards God.




ACHIEVEMENT

Rev. Jerry Herships

September 19, 2010 

 

Scripture: Phillipians4:5-9

5Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. 6Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. 8Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. 9Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.

Every year Vanity Fair magazine prints a list of what it calls, “The New Establishment.” This year the list is topped by a 28 year old. This is the list of the most influential people in the world. His name is Mark Zuckerberg. Does he sound familiar to anyone? He is the creator of Facebook. His website is valued at 25 billion dollars. His website has more banner ads than any other website, 176 billion…a quarter. Revenues this year could top two billion.

Other people in the top ten of this list include some slouch named Steve Jobs, as well as Jeff Bezos the head of Amazon and Larry Ellison, the head of Oracle. Johnny Depp is way down at number twenty.

This is the kind of list everyone wants to be on. It screams to the world, “Look what I’ve done. Look what I’ve accomplished. I am someone important. I HAVE MADE IT.”

Granted everyone’s measurement of achievement is a bit different. I think of Steve Martin in THE JERK getting so excited that the new phone book arrived and that he was in it. “I’m SOMBODY NOW!”

Isn’t that all we want to be? Somebody? We want to, in varying degrees, stand out. We want people to see our achievements and what we have accomplished. I don’t think there is anything wrong with wanting to be acknowledged for our hard work. The challenge is that achievement can be like a drug. The more we get, the more we want. When it is bad, we want a wider and wider circle of people to know what we have done and how much better it is than the average person.

We do this in a wide variety of ways. Some people will do it through sports. Athletes get paid millions of dollars in endorsement deals when they are at the top…and have those deals taken away if they fall off the top…just ask Tiger Woods.

Others mark their achievements through academic’s. How many letters can I get after or before my name? Into what schools was I able to make it? What were my GPA and SAT scores? Still others made their way by climbing the corporate ladder. How quick can I make it to VP? Do I have a corner office? What company do I work for? Do people take notice when I mention my place of work?

Laura and I had a number of friends who worked for Disney when we lived in Orlando and one of the people that left the company came back once for a visit. I will never forget what he said about leaving the company. He said his new job was great. There was more money, better hours and it was closer to home. He said that the only thing he missed were the times when he would travel and the person on the plane with him would say, what do you do, and he would get to say, “I work for Disney.” He would watch the whole demeanor of the person change. Now he said that when he mentions his new company’s name the conversation usually fades away. Ironically, he did the same thing at both companies but his “achievement” was working for Disney.

We want to win. We want to be the best. We are a society that applauds the victor and does everything we can to reward those that make it to the top. It is important to always do our best. The question is…WHY?

Why is it so important to achieve? The more interesting question is: Would we want to do all we do if we couldn’t tell another soul? Would we achieve as much if we had to keep it to ourselves? My gut tells me no. I think a big part of wanting to achieve more is so that others can know.

Achievement is about striving, constantly working for that next thing. It’s about believing that we have to prove our worth and value to the world. It is using the present to chase the future. It is thinking that “when that happens…” I will have achieved what I need to achieve. The problem is that the finish line is always moving.

I know I felt this for years going through the ordination process. It seemed like it would never end. Year after year of getting approved and RE approved, passing from committees to BOARDS. I worked through three years of study to get a Masters degree, to then get to serving two years ON PROBATION. I was constantly striving for the next thing. I thought for SURE once I got ordained that would be over. I would have my achievement. Wrong.

We get through ordination and then the topic becomes, “what church are you going to serve?” There is a hierarchy, you know, and St. Andrew is at the top. Then it is, what programs are we going to do and what services to lead and how many people are showing up. The list of achievements is never ending.

Most people reach a point in their life where they move from achievement to serving. The focus moves from “me” focused to “other” focused. There is a huge desire to get off the Merry-go-round and start doing for others. The applause and awards begin to fade. There is more comfort in being still and quiet. Stress drops. Anxiety drops. Peace arrives.

It is often at these moments when we understand Jesus’ words. “Peace be with you, my peace I give you.” When we accept that peace, we recognize that we are not our title or our GPA or our credentials or our resume. We rest in knowing that we are enough RIGHT NOW. To think otherwise is to say God isn’t enough.

Peace and Surrender go hand in hand. Striving and surrender rarely end up in the same sentence. By giving up outcome and results we are saying to God, “I trust you on this. I know your hand is at work.” It is a place of immediate release. This release goes for all parts of our lives; our work, our love life, our family. We stop trying to MAKE things be and just LET things be.

Contrary to what some people think, we will not become lazy good for nothings. We will find our focus gets sharper for the things that really matter. When we release our striving for achievements and awards and accolades, we find we have a lot more brain space to think about what we are truly passionate about. We never have to strive towards our passion, it is already inside of us. And it was put there by God.

We live in a time of off the chart stress and anxiety. While there are some things that are very real, like our health and keeping a roof over our heads, much of pain comes from striving in a world that uses false measurements to determine value. We are enough from the day we are born. Everything else is extra.

I see so many people who don’t think they are worthy of any good at all. They have forgotten that they are children of God. They have forgotten that God is not only with them but God is within them as well. This alone should give us peace. Peace is a wonderful achievement….as long as we don’t make it a goal and an award and an achievement that we strive for….LOOK AT ME I’M STRIVING FOR INNER PEACE…AND TOTALLY STRESSED OUT! This is not what we are shooting for. We cannot get caught up in striving for any achievement, even inner peace.

 

So if striving is the wrong way to go, if looking for achievement at every corner, if the constant pull of trying to prove ourselves isn’t the way, what is? Releasing it to God. We see it in today’s scripture. The Lord is near. Don’t worry and ask God for what you want. For me, I want peace. I want that gentle peace that as the scripture tells us surpasses all understanding.

To truly follow this passage we have to do everything is says. It tells us how to behave. When it says, “Let your gentleness be known to everyone,” gentleness doesn’t mean what we think it means. The Greek term is more positive than that. Generosity towards others and consideration towards others is closer to what the passage is shooting for. Remember if we are not occupying our minds with striving and running and pursuing the things of tomorrow, today; if we aren’t doing that, we have some brain space to fill. And this scripture tells us just what to fill it with: truth, honor, justice, purity, excellence. These are the things to fill our minds with and as we get more and more in the habit of doing that we will find, more and more, that we will feel the God of peace being with us and in us.

This peace is also not exactly what we might think of as peace. It does not simply mean “lack of conflict.” Again, it is more than that. Its meaning is closer to total well being. It is a sharing of Christ’s attitude. Christ’s mind and heart becomes yours.

Some of you might be fine fighting along and making your way in the world. I was for a long time. I liked fighting for it. For years I had a “rugged individualist” vibe about me…at least I thought I did in my head. The problem was that I got tired. I got tired of striving and pushing and constantly trying to achieve, achieve, achieve.

Don’t misunderstand, goals are good for the right reasons. If it is for the betterment of yourself and for the world around you, go for it. But if it is just so you have one more award to impress the world with, that will never bring you joy…and it certainly won’t bring you peace.

Let the striving go. Release outcome. Be thankful and focus on the good in the world. Focus on truth and justice and excellence. DO NOT WORRY ABOUT ANYTHING. If we do these things we will find ourselves with more joy, more peace and more God in our life.

We probably won’t find ourselves on the next Vanity Fair list but if we have more joy, peace and God…do we really care?  

 

 

 

 APPEARANCE

Rev. Jerry Herships

September 12, 2010

 

Scripture: 1 Samuel 16:7

7But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

I have mentioned before that one of the favorite shows of the Herships family is Biggest Loser. We are always amazed at the transformation that takes place over those few weeks. You can watch them change little by little right before your eyes. Along with their physical appearance you can also watch their personalities change as well. They come out of their shell. They smile more, they laugh more. Their appearance changes everything.

The other show that Laura and I have watched for years is What Not To Wear. Clinton and Stacy go through someone’s closet, throw out a bunch of the person’s lousy clothes and then give them money to buy new clothes that work for them and help them figure out what looks good on their bodies. The guest also gets tips on Hair and make-up. Again, we watch, week after week transformation. It is just so cool to watch these people blossom.

Having said all that, I have mixed feelings. On one hand I love seeing people transform into these new, amazing, confident people. On the other hand, I struggle with how much our physical appearance affects, and in many cases determines, our emotional well being. I know if I lose a pound, I’m happy, if I gain a pound I’m sad.

This is not an accident. There are many people in the world, with salaries attached, to make sure that there is always something wrong with us…and if we just hand over our credit card…THEY can fix it. Here are a few facts you might not know.

The FASHION INDUSTRY draws in $47 billion dollars a year.

According to current estimates, The COSMETICS INDUSTRY, including toiletries and cosmetics, comes in at over $45 billion in the U S and 66 billion, annually, worldwide.

For the PLASTIC SURGERY INDUSTRY, over 10.2 million cosmetic surgical and nonsurgical procedures were performed in the United States in 2008, according to statistics released by the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. The second most common procedure was liposuction.

And last but not least…

It is estimated that the DIET INDUSTRY alone is worth anywhere between 40 to 100 billion dollars a year in the U S. They sell temporary weight loss because 90 to 95% of dieters regain the lost weight.

We might know that beauty is only skin deep but that is not stopping us from doing everything we can to make that skin look GOOD.

As I have said before, I am often preaching to myself when I am up here. While I have not had liposuction, and don’t buy make-up, I have spent my fair share on gym memberships, have more than a few pairs of jeans and must admit that I do have a favorite moisturizer. See me after for the name.

Why do we spend so much time, money and effort trying to look good? It must be important to God. After all, it is God we want to please, right? God is the source of our pleasure correct? How we look must matter to God.

I was very tempted to use the Book of Ecclesiastes as the sermon text today. After all, one of its most famous sayings is “Vanity of Vanities.” The word vanity in the Hebrew Bible takes on a meaning that goes beyond our understanding of being caught up in our looks. The Hebrew word is hebel and it literally means “vapor.” Some scholars say the modern day equivalent is “absurd.” The key point of the word though is how transitory life is. Nothing lasts, including our looks. Appearances…don’t…last.

Understand that I am not saying it isn’t important to put our best foot forward. I think it is very important to be healthy and to do our best to eat right and exercise so we can be healthy. I just think there are a lot more people at the gym trying to get a six-pack and lose some of their rear end than there are people trying to lower their cholesterol.

I should also tell you where the idea came from to preach a message on this topic.

Many of you know Marcus Borg. He is a professor of Religion at Oregon State University. In his book, The Heart of Christianity, which I will be leading a class on in the next few weeks, he says that we are caught up in what he calls THE THREE A’s: Appearance, Achievement, and Affluence. We will be looking at these topics over the coming weeks.

This week we are focusing on our appearance, which is not that unusual for many of us. At some point in our lives we start to focus our lives on the outside more that on the inside. Theologian Frederick Buechner calls this, living our lives from the outside in, rather than the inside out. There becomes a shift when we start to concentrate on what Thomas Keating calls, “Our False Self.” This is not nearly as important to God as our true self, our real self, our inside self. Our Souls.

This is the point of our passage today? Our story today comes from 1 Samuel. The two books of Samuel were found on a single scroll in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Bible Scholars also tell us that 1 Samuel was not all written by the same author. In this part of 1 Samuel we are told part of the story about how David became anointed by God. Jesse brought out all of his sons, except David, to show them to God but God kept saying, “What else have you got?” Finally God said, “Is that everyone?” And Jesse said yep…well except for David. He is the youngest and ruddy and hasn’t been on What not to Wear. He surely isn’t the one. Guess what? God saw things differently.

God ALWAYS sees things differently. That is the nature of God. God is not concerned with the things that take up all our mental space. What do our bodies look like? What do our clothes look like? What does our car look like? What does our home look like? God doesn’t care if your car isn’t waxed, your backyard is a mess, your jeans are torn and you need to lose 20 lbs. God sees our heart. It tells us right here, “Do NOT look on his appearance or the height of his stature…the Lord does not see as mortals…they look on the outer appearances but the Lord LOOKS ON THE HEART.”

How’s your heart? I know even with my line of work, I spend more time on outer Jerry than inner Jerry. Better than I was, not as good as I could be.

We live in a world where appearances matter. We got a letter a few weeks ago that we had to cut down three trees in our back yard because they were dying and unsightly. It cost us over $400. That’s $400 that we could have used. Now I want our yard to look nice but there are thousands of dead tress in the Rocky Mountains and people are always taking pictures of those! They go on vacation to be in the woods…woods with no HOA. But we have to keep up appearances. We live in Highlands Ranch. I know it’s good for resale value and it keeps the neighborhood looking great but boy do you know how many jeans and hair products I could have bought with that money?

It is interesting to note that nowhere in the Bible do we get a physical description of Jesus. It is safe to say, he didn’t have wavy brown hair and blue eyes. His looks were not what drew people to him. He was not George Clooney. It was his soul. It was his heart. It was the way he treated people. I sometimes wonder if it isn’t a preacher’s job to remind people (and themselves) that if you want to attract people to you, worry less about your weight and more about your heart condition.

How is your heart? Is it open? Is it loving? Is it the kind of heart you want God to see? I hope it is…for all of us…because that’s all God is going to see. God cares more about the size of our heart than the size of our waist.

I want to close with a story I heard a long time ago about Jesus. Jesus gets invited to a party and is very much looking forward to it. He wants to arrive early but knows that’s not what the “cool” people do, so he waits till it’s time for the party to start. When the time arrives, Jesus gets to the front door and knocks. The host opens the door and lets Jesus in. As soon as Jesus walks in we see the scenario. It’s a formal black tie affair. Everyone is in formalwear. Tuxes, ball gown, high heels and patent leather shoes. Everyone is dressed to the nines. Everyone except Jesus. Jesus didn’t get the memo. Jesus is wearing jeans, and sandals and a long sleeve t-shirt.

What would Jesus do? WWJD. Literally, WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? What happens next?

Talk about that with the people around you for a few minutes and then I’ll tell you the rest of the story.

Ok let’s come back. So Jesus is at a party and underdressed. What does he do? I will tell you first how mortified I would be to be Jesus. That would just be awful. I’d probably look at my blackberry, pretend I had an emergency and turn and run out the door. But I’m not Jesus and I have a long way to go. What kind of answers did you all hear? The answer lies in three words. HE WOULDN’T NOTICE. He wouldn’t notice the fancy gowns or the shiny shoes. He wouldn’t see who was wearing what designer. He wouldn’t care if the tuxes were double or single breasted and who was wearing a peak lapel (those are very in this year you know). He would see their heart. That’s all.

I encourage all of us to start looking less at people’s skin condition and more at people’s heart condition. I pray for the day when I can be anywhere at any time and not only not notice what others are wearing/or driving but that I don’t care what I am either.          

That would be a transformation that leaves Biggest Loser in the dust.

Amen.    

  

PERFECTIONISM: WANTING TO BE GOD

Rev. Jerry Herships

August 22, 2010

Scripture: Matthew 5:48

48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Many of you know of Anne LaMotte. She is an awesome writer and writes about God and faith and not in the most traditional of ways. Someone posted a quote from her on their Facebook page this week: "Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.” Now that is a great quote, but what I noticed was how many people commented on it. TONS. People REPOSTED it on their page. Clearly this hit a nerve and got me to thinking about how does trying to be perfect all the time affects our lives and why this relentless pursuit?

I don’t think most people openly admit to wanting to be perfect and I think the pursuit of excellence is important. I think we all should try to be the best we can be. But there is a difference between wanting to be the best we can be and shooting for perfection. I also found myself thinking about what is attached to the drive towards perfection. What happens when we don’t achieve it? How is our performance attached to our understanding of self worth, our understanding of others or our understanding of our relationship to God?

I wonder if, at the core, there is some kind of thinking that if we do everything JUST RIGHT, THEN everything will work out. That is TREMENDOUS pressure to put on ourselves, every Step…just right. I’ve heard people say, “I did everything just right, I did everything I was supposed to do…and then THIS.” I think it is this thinking that every step in our lives has to be perfect that sometimes prevents us from taking that first step at all. The rest of the quote by Lamotte, says perfectionism, “is the main obstacle between you and a lousy first draft.” But she didn’t use the word lousy. There is a mind set there these days that, “if it can’t be great right out the chute, I don’t want to do it.”

I have had to adjust my thinking with preaching and writing. When you do stand-up, you work on a given twenty minutes for YEARS. Every breath, every pause, every word….constantly edited and reworked. With preaching you are given one week to strike gold. And then….you will never say those words again!

If you are a perfectionist, that is a recipe for crazy making. Plus it leaves no room for the Holy Spirit to work within you and come out in your writing and in your speaking. Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John, "I am the Vine; you are the branches. If someone remains in Me and I in them, they will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."

That does not just apply for preachers doing preaching. We have to allow God to work in our lives, all of our lives. Part of the problem of perfectionism is the mindset that we can do it (whatever the “it” is), ourselves. We have to remember we are in partnership with God in our lives. It is like the St. Augustine quote, “Without us God will not. Without God we cannot.” It’s a partnership.

I think this is one of the things that we forget when we begin to lead a perfectionist life. We edge God out…We have said before that E.G.O. is an acronym for Edging God Out. I think this is at the center of perfectionism. In those moments we catch ourselves thinking, “I…can…do…it…myself!” that we get in trouble. I have had those moments.

We can trace this back, I think, to fear. What will people think if I am less than perfect? What will my co workers think? What will my kids think? What will my parents think? What do I think of myself if I am less than perfect? What will God think?

We don’t even have to go all the way back to the Bible. Our own John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was fond of saying we are moving towards Christian perfection. He wrote an entire book called A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. So we have Wesley and Jesus telling us to be perfect.

Which brings us to today’s reading. It is just one verse. We see it in other Gospels as well. In Luke it is slightly different…it substitutes “merciful” for “perfect” so we are off the hook there.

What is Jesus telling us in this passage when he asks us to be perfect? I have spent this whole time trying to persuade us not to be perfect and then Jesus comes along and mucks up the works. Are we to be perfect or not? Shouldn’t we do what Jesus tells us to do? Isn’t it our job, as disciples, to follow in his word? If he is calling us to perfection we should go, right? The words are pretty simple aren’t they? Actually, it might not be as straight forward as we might think it is.

This is not the only place in the Bible where we are told to be perfect. We first see it in the Hebrew Bible which we call our Old Testament. It is in Deuteronomy 18:13. “You shall be perfect before the Lord your God.” When we couple this with, “Be perfect, therefore, as your Father in Heaven in perfect,” it almost seems like we are not just being asked to be perfect, we are being commanded to be perfect. THAT’S PRESSURE!

The first thing we have to do is look at the time when this was written. What did the words mean then, what do they mean now? How has the meaning of the words changed?

The Hebrew Bible word, used in Deuteronomy, is tamim, which means wholeness in the sense of not being partial. To “be perfect” is to serve God with the whole heart, not a partial heart, to be single minded in devotion to the one God. It is not splitting our focus. It is not having more than one God. It is being in love with God; completely and totally.

When we get to the New Testament, the Greek word, "perfect," in this Matthew verse is telios, a word which doesn’t imply a no mistakes kind of perfection, but instead means full development and growth into full spiritual maturity. The focus of the verse falls more along the lines of meaning a "committed and close relationship with God." (The Complete Biblical Library:101) This verse is also in the context of love. The challenge is to love as our God loves, not only loving those who love us, but loving even our enemies and those who persecute us.

So the Deuteronomy verse is telling us to love God with our whole heart, our whole self. And the Matthew verse is telling us to love our neighbors. When we put these two together it sounds an awful lot like what we hear later in Matthew 22:37. It says for us to love God with all our heart, soul and mind and to love our neighbor. This is called the greatest commandment and we’ve talked about that before. Suddenly, “Perfect” looks a lot different now doesn’t it?

See I’ve discovered it is not to be thought of the way we think of being perfect today which has its root in the Greek philosophical understanding of perfect. Perfection is not to be understood in the Greek sense of living with absolute perfection, which we know is impossible for us to do.

We are not asked to not make mistakes. We are not asked to live a life that never fails. We are not asked to make the perfect and right decisions every minute of every day.

We are asked to give our whole heart to God. That is the “perfect” God wants from us.

So that clears up what the Bible means by perfection but it doesn’t clear up our desire of perfection, does it? I think there are maybe a handful of us who put the perfectionist pressure on ourselves because of these verses. I’ve got to be perfect because of Matthew and Deuteronomy. But I think that’s not the case for most people. I don’t think most people even know about passages. I think the pressure comes from any number of other places; our culture, our families our co-workers. I, also, think the vast majority of us put the perfectionist label on ourselves. It might have started in one of those other places but I think we are the ones who turn up the volume on our desire, or drive, our need to be perfect.

There is only one perfect. That’s God. When we want to be perfect, we want to be God. When perfectionism kicks in, we find ourselves, on some level, wanting to be like God.

So what can we do about it and how do we know if we are a perfectionist?

On a quick search of the internet, I found the following perfectionist thought patterns. See if any of them sound familiar to the tapes that might have played in your head in the past…by the past I mean up to the last hour. 

I should be liked, approved of, and loved by everybody, especially those important to me. 

I should be able to do anything and everything perfectly; if I cannot, it's better not to do it at all, or wait until I can. In other words, I will procrastinate in doing anything until I am convinced I can do it perfectly. 

I must be perfectly confident and successful before I can consider myself to be a worthwhile person, or before others can consider me to be worthwhile.  

I should be able to make and keep everyone around me happy; if I don't, there is obviously something wrong with me.  

Here’s one for the Social Justice folks. It is my personal responsibility to right the wrongs of this world, to solve its problems, and to correct all of its injustices.  

Because I have never been able to fully please my parents, friends, and/or peers, I must be less than desirable and worthwhile as a person.  

Here are some that have to do with how we think of God and being perfect:
God only accepts and loves me when God can approve of everything that I am, think, feel, say, and do.
God saves by God’s grace, but only maintains this relationship with me if I read, pray, witness, serve, and do enough for God.

Perfectionism is about self image. It is about how we see ourselves and how we think the world sees us. Neither of these are the right source from which to get our information. We need to constantly remind ourselves that our worth comes from God and God’s love for us. This is a love that is equal to all. This is a God who loves Mother Teresa & the drug dealers the same, a God who recognizes all as children of God, and a love that’s not determined by income, skin color, sexual orientation, neighborhoods or countries of origin. That’s God’s love and we’re being asked to love the same way.

Our identity comes from what our God thinks of us and our God loves us regardless of how we perform, the titles we have, the grades we get, or how “perfect” our last project turned out. Nothing can stop God’s perfect love…and that’s all the “perfect” we need in our lives. Amen.

 

THE BEST SERMON YOU’VE EVER HEARD

Rev. Jerry Herships

August 15, 2010

Scripture: Acts 20:7-11

7On the first /day of the week, when we met to break bread, Paul was holding a discussion with them; since he intended to leave the next day, he continued speaking until midnight. 8There were many lamps in the room upstairs where we were meeting. 9A young man named Eutychus, who was sitting in the window, began to sink off into a deep sleep while Paul talked still longer. Overcome by sleep, he fell to the ground three floors below and was picked up dead. 10But Paul went down, and bending over him took him in his arms, and said, “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.” 11Then Paul went upstairs, and after he had broken bread and eaten, he continued to converse with them until dawn; then he left.

I NEVER want to hear that my sermons are too long or boring. Essentially what this passage tells us is that Paul preached till someone fell asleep, fell to their death, Paul revived him and said, “OK, where was I…”

Today’s sermon topic started when I decided to take a friend out for a celebratory beverage after the birth of his daughter. He is in the ordination process and we discussed the future of the church. We have both read a lot of books about church but what we discovered as we talked was that those books aren’t addressing what we really want to address. Then he said something that hit me right between the eyes. He said, “I don’t want to know how to market church different. I want to know how to DO church different.”

Now there might be a lot of you thinking, “Why do we have to do anything different? Church is just fine the way it is.” That’s true for a lot of people. It isn’t true for the majority of people. We often forget that the majority of the people in this country are sitting home relaxing on Sunday morning. There have to be things that we are willing to do different if we want to see new people come through our doors.

And by new people, I don’t mean people that were worshipping somewhere else. That isn’t introducing new people to this Good News we say we have. That is just people of the faith worshipping under a new roof. This is why bodies can be deceiving.

I think if we are going to attract new people, we have to do new things and I am willing to start.

What is the primary function of the preacher on Sunday morning? To preach. I think this is a fine place to start. There is something about the way pastors do sermons that is not engaging for most people out in the world. Preaching has even taken to mean something derogatory: “Don’t preach to me.” Here is something I’ve learned; when your profession becomes an insult, it is time to rethink that profession.

We have to get at the core of what a sermon is, what the purpose is and what do people hope to get out of it. I try to make all my sermons have at least four things: something for the thinker, something for the feeler, something for the realist, and something for the innovator. I also try to toss some hope in there because I think that is good news.

The question is: Does all that need to be done the way we’ve been doing it? I did a little research.

Did you know that the word "sermon" comes from a Middle English word which was derived from an Old French term, which in turn came from the Latin word sermo; which means "discourse." The word can also mean "conversation," which could mean that early sermons were delivered in the form of questions and answers and only later did it come to mean a monologue.

Now the Oxford dictionary defines discourse as coming from the Latin discursus, meaning "running to and from."  It means either "written or spoken communication or debate" or "a formal discussion or debate."

The scripture we are talking about today looks different in a King James Bible. The King James Bible says Paul preached to them. When we look at the Greek text, the word used in that passage for preaching is dialegomai, from which we get our English word dialogue. Paul wasn’t preaching at them, he was in dialogue with them about the gospel, and even then managed to put at least one guy to sleep! This makes me wonder how many other places in the Bible the word “preach” is used when it is actually the word “dialegomai.”

This is fascinating to me because discourse and conversation and question & answer and dialogue are pretty far from what I see in sermons today, mine included.

As a lot of you know, we have tried various models of discussion at AfterHours. We have given a topic to discuss, we have had table discussions and discussions while making sandwiches. No one is currently reading the scripture to the congregation, they are, instead, reading it themselves and TO EACH OTHER and then discussing it. Imagine that! People reading the Bible IN CHURCH! OUT LOUD! We are a wacky, cutting edge bunch!

The hardest part is getting people to have a back and forth conversation with me. This is so not in line with our tradition. Our tradition says, “Sit down, shut up and you might learn something.” O.K. maybe not that harsh but there is that feel sometimes. And please understand, I am not against learning and teaching. It is one of the main reasons people come to hear a sermon. But I believe there is lots of knowledge in the room and that too often we are afraid to share it. I want to give you a different way to do that here today. Let’s see what happens. On the screen is my cell phone number. It is a phone that will take text messages. I want to ask a question and give you a chance to answer without having to deal with talking in front of others. Here’s the question: What do you hope to get out of a sermon? What do you hope to change after you hear a preacher speak? If you have a thought, even if it’s one word, text it to me now.

Now just a quick thought. If you heard me talking earlier when I said I try to have something for Thinkers/Feelers/Realists/Innovators and you don’t know which one you are; if you think this is the coolest thing you ever saw, you’re an innovator. If you are thinking, “this is the dumbest darn thing I’ve ever seen, you are probably a realist. If you are still thinking “So it’s a Middle English word that came from a French term that came from Latin?” you are probably a thinker. If you like what I’m wearing, you’re a feeler.

The bottom line is: how can our communication together bring all of us closer to God? Preaching has become not only an insult, as I said earlier, but it is also a punch line. There’s a joke about a priest whose sermons were very long and boring, he announced in the church on a Sunday that he had been transferred to another church and that it was Jesus' wish that he leave that week. The congregation in the church got up and sang "What a Friend we have in Jesus!"

So what is preaching? What did Jesus do? How did he preach or teach? John Dominic Crossan, the professor emeritus at DePaul University did an interview on PBS. He said, The primary teaching of Jesus is not taking texts out of the Hebrew scriptures and explaining them, blasting them, commenting on them. What he is doing is telling a perfectly ordinary story and using that as the major teaching. The Kingdom of God is like this. Now you have to think, well, I hear the story, but how on earth is the Kingdom of God like that? That's your job as the hearer. So it's open to anyone. And that's, I think, the point of the parable. The interviewer said that it sounds like Jesus’ teaching depends on interpretation. Crossan said, If you teach in parables, you give yourself to interpretation. If you really want to tell people what to think, you preach them a sermon. If you tell them a parable then you're leaving yourself open, inevitably, to interpretation.

Jesus didn’t try to shove a message down anyone’s throat as so many preachers are accused of doing these days. Jesus told stories that created discussion. Haven’t you always found that conversations are always more interesting and educational than having someone talk at you? This is especially true of people in their 20’s and 30’s. They have, for much of their lives, interacted to learn. Question and dialogue is the way they have always obtained knowledge. I think it is harder for them to listen to a monologue without having the chance to question, comment or state their points of view.

I’m curious about how many people, by a show of hands, we have that are 60 plus. In their 50’s? Their 40’s? Their 30’s? Their 20’s? Under 20 you might still be coming because someone else wants you here. I think if we are going to further the message of Jesus Christ we have to be in dialogue about what we read in the Bible and not just have a message delivered at us. And I think when we do we might see an explosion in young people.

I know some of this comes from my background. It was always more engaging when there was exchange with the audience when I did comedy and corporate training than when it was just me doing my monologue or lecture. It was also more dangerous. You never knew what was going to happen next, what was going to be said next and what kind of insights would be made.

Shouldn’t the gospel be dangerous? Shouldn’t we be willing to dialogue and discuss and debate and when it is over we shake hands and go to IHOP? Those are the conversations that you will remember. If you have been going to church regularly for the past, say twenty years, that would come out to being about 1,040 sermons. How many do you remember? A hundred? Fifty? Twenty-five? Let’s say it’s 25. That’s two and a half percent. There must be a better way to engage with scripture.  

Turn to the people around you right now and ask them how long they have been going to church and how many sermons they remember?  Do you remember the best sermon you ever heard? Tell the person next to you about it. I’ll wait.

Let’s get in there and rough it up a bit. Let’s chew on the gospel of Jesus Christ and digest it and really lift each other up and teach and learn and remember. I think we are going into an amazing time in the future of the church. Get excited. It is going to be an awesome ride.

Any questions? I hope next time I ask…there are. Amen.

 
PEOPLE, PRAYER AND POTLUCKS
Stacy Spehn
August 8, 2010 

Scripture:  1 Corinthians 12: 4-11

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. 7To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. 8To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, 9to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, 10to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. 11All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

Let’s imagine a potluck. People are gathering together and sharing a dish. It might be their favorite comfort food. It might be something simple and inexpensive because they are out of work or they are overworked. It might be a recipe passed down for several generations. Who knows? Who knows what food will be there? Who knows what people will be there? Some of the dishes will get our mouths watering and some … not so much. It is like people. You never know what you will get. But, our part is to accept and honor this unusual combination of food and people who have come together. We can learn so much from each other and the more dishes the better.

Some people like to organize the potluck so they don’t end up with a dozen of the same dish. We might have all potatoes. But, come on… Does it ever really happen that way? And it if did we would probably get a dozen different types – garlic mashed potatoes – potatoes au gratin- that great casserole made with hash browns. A literal comfort -food smorgasbord! This is a lot like people. Even if people appear similar, they are never the same. The potluck is a great metaphor for community.

With the continuing rise of technology and our increasingly hectic lives, many of us are realizing that we need to make an intentional and unique effort to establish community, which goes beyond a virtual community. Some of us are asking the questions “What is community?,” “Where can I find community?” and “Do I truly feel I belong anywhere?”

I am a student at Iliff School of Theology. As someone who is considering becoming an ordained minister, I have been looking closely at the importance of being in community and what constitutes community. I am coming to believe that we can grow and learn and heal more deeply when we join a welcoming and open faith community, rather than trying to go it alone.

Is it necessary to join a community to find God and a sense of meaning in our lives? ---Maybe not in an absolute sense. But – the journey can be quite long and lonely without one. We are certainly called as Christians to value our relationships with others. Jesus said that the greatest commandment was to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength. He could have just stopped there. It’s already a pretty tall order. In his wisdom, he added, “and the 2nd is this.. Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:28-34). If he had stopped with the first commandment, we could have found a way to isolate and have it be all about our own individual journeys. Jesus is teaching us that it’s about both – learning to love God AND people.

At staff meeting the other day, one of our staff members shared the notion that the symbol of the cross can represent our love of God and our love for each other. We need both in order to live as fully engaged Christians. I can think that I am the most loving person in the world when I spend time alone, but boy… put me with a large group of people and I have to learn to be more accepting and less judgmental. Some of this can’t be worked on in isolation.

Two books helped me decide the title for today’s topic. Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and Women, Food and God by Geneen Roth. Hence, the title – People, Prayer and Potlucks. These 2 books reveal the journey each of these women took to discover God and themselves. Elizabeth Gilbert took a one year journey traveling to Italy, India and Indonesia. Her book discusses what she learned about simple pleasures, spirituality and love. She has been criticized by some for being on a journey of self-absorption, but here are her own words: “Mine is just a simple old human story — of one person trying, with great rigor and discipline, to comprehend her personal relationship with divinity.”

Geneen Roth made her discoveries by being aware of what food she was putting on her plate and into her body. This was her pathway to God. Towards the end of her book she states, “If you are willing to refrain from dieting and needing an instant solution, and if you want to use your relationship with food as the unexpected path, you will discover that God has been here all along.”

These two books really resonated with me. I have struggled with a relentless need to find God and meaning and I spent a lot of my 20’s hardly able to stay in one place as I searched. I identify with the struggle with food and I realize that this is a spiritual issue for me. I can sometimes use food like a drug and become numb to others, God and myself.

The one thing that isn’t emphasized in these books is our need for community. Most of my young adulthood was spent thinking I didn’t need a church to find God. I was one of those people who felt I was spiritual, but not religious. This was an important time for me – realizing that God goes with me wherever I go… This is part of the vertical line of the cross. But I am recently discovering the richness of the horizontal line – the path of community.

Here is a quote about interdependence from the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca, who lived around the time of Jesus. “We are members of one great body. Nature planted in us a mutual love, and fitted us for a social life. We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole.” This is similar to our scripture for today from 1 Corinthians. Verse 7 states, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” This is why we are given gifts – for our common welfare.

I think there are certain things that every one of us is longing for – a sense of belonging, of making a difference, of finding and using our gifts and of feeling like we matter and that it matters that we are here on this planet. Most of this has to do with our interdependence, rather than it being all about our personal solo journey.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her book, Women Who Run with Wolves, tells the story of an old African American man who came out of an alley and to some he might have appeared crazy. He was shuffling along, speaking to anyone and no one and pointing a finger into the air. In Clarissa’s particular Mexican tradition these people are to be listened to for their wisdom. He sat down and told Clarissa a story which he called “One Stick-Two Stick: The way of the old African Kings.” The story is about an old man who is dying and he calls his people to his side. He gives a short sturdy stick to each of them and asks them each to break their stick. They are all able to break their sticks. He says to them that “this is how it is when a soul is alone without anyone. They can easily be broken.”

He then proceeds to give each of them another stick and says. “This is how I would like you to live after I pass. Put your sticks together in bundles of 2s and 3s. Now, break these bundles in half.” No one was able to break the sticks. The old man smiles and says, “We are strong when we stand with another soul. When we are with another, we cannot be broken.”

A couple of months ago I was really struggling with what church is all about. Part of the struggle – and I am not the only one who has ever had this struggle – was asking the question “should we just be out on the streets or should we be learning about God and praying and becoming better people so we don’t scare the people on the streets?”

I tend to fall into the second category. However, we contemplatives and lifelong learners can fool ourselves and never get to the streets. But somehow this question is too black and white. It doesn’t get to the crux of the matter.

On one particular day after I was journaling about this, I got into the car and turned on the radio. It happened to be on K-Love. (Aside---a bit conservative , but I just rewrite some of the lyrics in my head.)This song came on and I didn’t even drive out of the garage. I sat in the car and listened to the whole thing with tears running down my face. Three words in this song pierced through me --“We’re here now”.

The song really got me thinking about community. What if church was a place where you walk through the door and they say, “We’re here now. You don’t have to walk this path alone. We’re in this together. We don’t exactly know where we are going, but it will be so much better if we head there together.“ I don’t even know if the writer intended for this song to be about a church community, but that is how I heard it.

There is even another way we can welcome the new person who is walking through the door. We could say, “You’re here now. Thank goodness! We value your gifts and your unique spirit. We will be a stronger community now that you are here. ” We might not actually say this aloud. We don’t want to scare people. But -we can say it in our hearts. And somehow they will hear it or feel it. The word "community" is comes from the Old French communité which is derived from the Latin communitas (cum, "with/together" + munus, "gift"). Together- gift. Maybe we can start saying, “let’s have a ‘gift-together’”, rather than a get-together.

Do we realize the gift of community? Can we even comprehend the power of being with others and sharing our gifts? And if we add prayer and food to the mix, we our unstoppable! Imagine this on a bumper sticker - People, Prayer and Potlucks – a tool to change the world!

JUST ONE MORE THING….

Rev. Jerry Herships

August 1, 2010

Scripture: Philippians 4:10-12

10I rejoice in the Lord greatly that now at last you have revived your concern for me; indeed, you were concerned for me, but had no opportunity to show it. 11Not that I am referring to being in need; for I have learned to be content with whatever I have. 12I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need.

I am going to be hypocrite tonight.  I am going to talk about the monkey on my back and it’s been there for a long time.  My hope is that you all aren’t carrying the same monkey.  My guess is that’s not the case.  I’m talking about contentment…or lack thereof.

 

Even when I know right from wrong, when it comes to contentment, I can slip into not being content at the drop of a hat.  I’m not proud of this, but it would be a big fat lie if I said anything different.  It’s not unusual for me to want just one more thing…

 

I think we have been trained to think that somehow the people who make working for God their professional work as having less struggles and less baggage to deal with. This is so untrue.  I think we are moving away from that and starting to understand that clergy, and other people who work in the church, are on this journey with us.  Ideally we can all walk, together, through the places that we all deal with. This is one of the things I like about Paul.  He does brag about what a great disciple of Christ he is, but he also speaks openly about his shortcomings.

 

Laura and I were talking about this earlier in the week.  She pointed out that there are different ways to look at being content and there are different things with which to be content or not be content.  We naturally go right to the material stuff but it goes deeper than that and we will be looking at that tonight.

 

I used to think that contentment meant the same as a lack of ambition.  There was a time in L.A. when that was unthinkable.  I would do anything and everything to get ahead when I lived in L.A.  Contentment wasn’t just about stuff but was about what I had achieved in life as well.  What did others think about what I had achieved?  Knowing the right people and getting to the top was the goal.  At one point I was working at a talent agency for comics during the day and Emceeing at the Improv in Hollywood at night.  I would get the Premier magazines power issue that came out every year and cut out every person’s picture and make flash cards so that if the head of production for Paramount came into the club I would know who he was.  I wanted to be able to spot the V.P. of casting for ABC at a glance.  It was all about getting ahead.

 

I’m here to tell you that is an exhausting way to live.  I was NEVER content.  And I was never happy.  But no one could say I wasn’t ambitious.

 

I was warned against this by my brother Gene.  At one time he had the highest rated talk show in Canada.  Better numbers than Johnny Carson.  But I remember the day he told me the story about the first day he got his first talk show.  He said that instead of living in the moment and taking a minute to congratulate himself, he said he remembered thinking as soon as the show went off the air, “How can I make the show syndicated?”

 

This is not the life God has planned for us.  When we live in the place where God wants us to live, we live a life of inspiration, not a life of ambition.  We live a life where we are constantly asking God, “What direction do you want me to go next?” and then….being okay with where God might lead us.  We go from being DRIVEN to being GUIDED…and we are okay with God leading the way.

 

This is an important distinction.  I think when we are moved to change a situation in the world, we are being divinely guided to do so.  We are inspired.  Anyone in history who wanted to change the world didn’t do it because they were content with the way things were.  I believe that anyone who wasn’t happy with women not getting to vote, with slavery, with the struggles of gays and lesbians are people who aren’t ambitious, but rather they are inspired by God to change the world.

 

When John Wesley, the founder of Methodism wrote, “Do all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, At all the times you can, To all the people you can, As long as ever you can” …these were not the words of a contented person.  I would like to believe Wesley was inspired but not ambitious.

 

This does not mean that life will be easy.  Paul tells us he is content in ALL things, even the not so great ones.  His hope, satisfaction and comfort lie in something beyond what is happening in his life at any one given moment.  Paul is saying that when he is stripped of everything…which happened to him more than once, he was still content.  He lived a life guided and inspired by God.

 

Paul is also telling us that he knew what it was like to also have plenty.  He didn’t feel guilty about it.  He didn’t put all his faith into having it.  He didn’t define himself by it.  Paul is telling us that regardless of what the world bestows on us, it is not the determining factor of satisfaction in life.

 

And we church people aren’t immune to it either.  We might cloak it a different way but I have to be very careful I don’t succumb to materialism and ambition.  Have inspiration to serve God – absolutely but ambition to succeed on the world’s terms is dangerous.  I have to remember whose Kingdom it is that I’m building.  It’s not Jerry’s kingdom.  It’s God’s kingdom.  We work hard, we pray hard, we do the best we can and then allow room for the Holy Spirit to operate.

 

Now I also wanted to look at this from the angle of what we talked about last week, spiritual gifts.  We can often get caught in the trap of not being content with not only the stuff we have or the place we are in life but also of the talents and gifts that others have that we don’t.

 

God has no interest in making a second best of another person.  God is very interested in making a first best of YOU.  We are called to constantly find out what is unique to us, what makes us great, what makes us different than everyone else.  We spend so much time comparing ourselves to others that we forget to spend time finding our uniqueness.  We need to spend time finding those spiritual gifts that God has given to us in a unique combination for just us.

 

 I have to admit I would love to be in better shape, have less debt, and have a better singing voice.  Contentment doesn’t mean I stop working out, stop paying off debt, or stop singing (mostly in the shower).  What it DOES mean is that I don’t define myself by those things.  Contentment means I love me where I am RIGHT now.  God does.

 

All the rest of the stuff is frosting on the cake, a cake that God made for us.  When we fully understand just HOW MUCH God loves us…it will be at that moment that we will find our contentment.  We will not have to buy shoes and cars and brag and impress and strive and fight to PROVE we are special.  We will rest in the knowledge that God thinks we are special.

 

And that will be enough.

 

Are you content with who you are?  Are you content with what you have at this moment in time?  Are you inspired or ambitious?

 

I pray that the peace and contentment that is offered to all of us will be a gift we recognize sooner rather than later.  When the moment comes when ALL of us will know, deep in our bones, that we are loved children of God, not only will we be content, but we will see the arrival of the Kingdom of God.

YOU LOOK GREAT!
Rev. Jerry Herships

July 25, 2010

1 Thessalonians 5:11

11Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.  

God has a sense of humor. No doubt about it. I planned weeks ago to talk about encouragement and optimism. Being positive in your own life and being positive towards other people. Well God said, let’s have a little fun.

 

Tues the garage door broke. Wed morning I greeted the day with a sound I had never heard before. It sounded as if all the shirts, pants, sweaters and belts in my closet came crashing to the floor. It turned out it was all my shirts, pants, sweaters and belts crashing to the floor. I broke my closet. Now I don’t believe God broke my garage door or closet but I gotta admit, the timing was a little suspect.

 

Telling people to be encouraging and positive sounds almost new Agey and that is really kinda a shame. We live in a place now where to be positive and encouraging to others is seen as almost quaint. Sometimes it seems even naïve. It also makes you suspect. I love the t-shirt I saw that said, “Smile, people will wonder what you’re up to.”

 

Turns out, as I look thru the bible I see that encouragement isn’t New Agey at all. It’s biblical. As we saw with spiritual gifts last week, the bible loves to take important themes and tell them to us again and again in different ways. Ephesians 4, Proverbs 10, Acts 15. Hebrews 10 tells us, “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another”. And we see it again and again in Romans and other parts of 1Thessalonians.

 

So if we see it over and over again, why don’t we do it? For one, I think a lot of us didn’t know it was a reoccurring theme in the bible. Note to self: read bible more.

 

Two: honestly, I think we have become a society that if you are positive and encouraging you are seen as weak. I certainly saw this in entertainment over and over again. I have seen something like it in ministry. You might be surprised to hear this but here it goes: there are some pretty big egos in the ministry business. I know…you’re shocked. Big egos don’t hand out a lot of compliments. Insecurity doesn’t breed building each other up. A lot of people in our conference want to see you doing well in ministry…but not TOO well. Encouragement is handed out very sparingly.

 

I brought this to people’s attention while I was going thru the ordination process. They said they want to make sure probationary Elders don’t get a big head.  I said, “Yea heaven forbid they display any confidence.” They didn’t like that much. Luckily I was ordained anyway.

 

We are in a world that can beat us down time and time again. Many times people really are out to get their own because that is all they have ever been taught. They see the equation as, “if they win, I lose and I ain’t gonna lose.” That equation is old math.

 

God does new math. God wants us all to win. God wants everyone to shine. And God knows that God is not always going to be able to get that message thru to everybody every time. That is why there’s us.  We are not just to be God’s hand and feet in the world, but also God’s mouthpiece. We are to help people understand they are a wonderful. We are to remind them they are unique, special gift from God.

 

I heard a preacher say one time, “In any given moment we can choose to bring more love or less love into the world.” There is a book I will do a sermon series on called Three Simple Rules. The rules are simple: do no harm, do good, stay in love with God. Simple, but not easy. We chose if we want to bring more joy or less into the world. A million times a day. It can be the smallest thing to us. Not to them. Don’t be surprised if you start making peoples day on a regular basis.

 

 God modeled this very type of encouragement. We hear it in two of the most famous verses in the bible. The master in Matthew 25:21 “Well done, good and faithful servant.” And Matthew 3:17 “This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased.” That second one was what my dad toasted to me on our wedding day, just over 18 years ago. As much as we don’t want to admit, we like when people say nice things, it feels wonderful when they do. It’s ok to like it….it’s not ok to NEED it. If God can hand out praise and encouragement…consider it a green light for us as well.

 

And so many people don’t. It costs us nothing and yet so often we stop ourselves before we say anything. I say, let the encouragement fly. It might be the single best thing you do all day. People are starving for encouragement. I think it is as essential as food. Talk to anyone who has achieved anything great and they will tell you they had their cheerleaders along the way. People who believed in them… and told them so. 

 

Paul tells us in Romans, "Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification" (Romans 14:19). So that is pretty straight forward…except for that edification part. What is edification? The Greek noun translated edification as oikodome. This is a compound word made up of, oikos, a house, and demo, to build. According to W. E. Vine, Oikodome is "only used figuratively in the New Testament, in the sense of edification, the promotion of spiritual growth". One of the reasons we gather together is to lift each other up when we get here. We are here to encourage others out in the world but that doesn’t mean we can’t start right here with each other.

 

So let’s look at 1 Thessalonians. For one thing, it’s the oldest book in the New Testament and as a result, it is the earliest piece of Christian literature that we have. It was written at least 15 years before Mark which is our earliest Gospel. It was dated to about 20 years after Jesus’ death.

 

Paul set up this church in a large urban area. This was his M.O.- to stay in or close to the city so that he would have the greatest opportunity to meet the most people. Sound familiar? We know they were a tight knit group and that they had suffered persecution from the wider community. We also know that the community was doing well even after Paul left. This letter, unlike many of Paul’s other letters, is not sent to “fix” the problems the community is having. It is more of a fan letter. Paul is telling them “good job and keep up the good work”. In a phrase, it’s a letter of encouragement.

 

I also want to be clear in saying that I am not talking about being a Pollyanna and ignoring when the lousy stuff happens. The garage door isn’t going to fix itself. It is just making a choice to see it in a better light, to see people in a better light.

 

One of the guys down in the park broke his ankle awhile back. He already was homeless but now he is homeless AND in a wheelchair. He told me last Tuesday that the doctors told him that his ankle is healed and that he is to use a walker to re acclimate his ankle to walking again. I told him what a pain this must have been for him and he told me, “I’m just glad it healed right and everything is working out. I don’t have health insurance so I got to deal with that and can’t afford a physical therapist to come by and my meds have run out but wow, it could have been so much worse. I thank God every day.”

 

That is what being an optimist looks like.

 

Write the note, tell someone you love them (preferably someone you already know), give that compliment. Encourage the folks around you. God did it. Jesus did it. Paul did it. That is some pretty awesome company to be in. I’m thinking its time to join the club.

 

I want to finish with a story about George Carlin. Years ago he was performing in a little club in Phoenix and a college kid who lived in Tucson, about two hours away drove all the way to Phoenix to give Carlin some jokes he had written. Carlin was polite (he always wrote his own stuff) but told the kid if you come back tomorrow, he would look over the jokes and they could talk. The kid drove two hours home that night. Then turned right around and drove two hours back the next night. The kid when in the back of the comedy club and there was his material all marked up and Carlin went thru each of the 20 or so pages one at a time with the kid. He told him, “You’re very green, but there is something funny on each page.” Then Carlin said very earnestly, “If you’re thinking of pursuing this, I would.” The kid decide right then to try to pursue comedy. The kid ended up becoming the mentor to a generation of people at the very top of the comedy world today. The top writers, directors, performers. One magazine says he is a kind of Yoda to every funny person born since 1960. And all because back in 1968 George Carlin told Gary Shandling he should consider pursuing comedy.

 

We never know what encouragement will do to someone and the ripple effect it will have. Why not encourage someone and then sit back and see what happens.

IDENTIFICATION PLEASE

Rev. Jerry Herships

June 20, 2010

Scripture: John 15:8 – 12

8My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.9As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. 12“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

John 13:34 – 35

34I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

 

How do you identify yourself? What makes you….you? In our society, we have a lot of things that we use to identify who we are. We use titles like mom and doctor and custodian or where we live: Greenwood Village, Downtown, or Colorado. We also describe our cars: Volkswagen, Jeep, Humvee. All these things tell us a little bit about who we are or at the very least, how we project who we are.

 

Another part of us is the community part, the people with whom we associate. With our community associations, we say to the world, at least in part, “this is who I am.”  I am a member of Greenpeace, or a member of the NRA, or a republican or democrat. I am a member of St. Andrew UMC or Cherry Hills Community Church.

 

Like it or not, all of these things make a statement to the outside world about who we are. They are of very little interest to God. In these two scripture passages, God tells us what we need to do and, by doing it, what the outside world will see and say about us.

 

I have talked about John 13: 34-35 before but tonight I am looking at it from a different angle. Why we are disciples, how to know if we are disciples and what the world will think of us if we truly follow Jesus’ commandment.

 

Both of these passages focus on and show a connection between love and discipleship. It is really amazing how many things AREN’T mentioned pertaining to the qualities of being a disciple of Christ.

 

Harvey Martz is doing an excellent series right now about what we promise when we become members of the Methodist church. We promise our prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness. These are all things that can lead us to being better disciples.

 

Thousands of years earlier, Jesus didn’t make anyone take membership vows. He didn’t need to. He used one measuring stick to define someone as being his disciple or not. Do they love? Both verses tell us that this is how they will become and how the world will spot them as disciples. It is the “bearing of fruit,” the “doing” of love that is the visible, meaningful, nitty-gritty, proof-is-in-the-pudding sign of discipleship.

 

If we are to abide in God’s love, we have to, as individuals and as a community, bear fruit. Abiding in Jesus’ love, just like Jesus abided in God’s love is about as good as it gets. Another word for abide is dwell. We dwell in God’s love. No wonder the verse tells us that when we do this our joy will be complete. Yea, I’m thinking that’s true. And we find that joy, we find our discipleships, we find our connection with God and Jesus through service in the world, love in action.

 

We struggle with this idea that service can bring us joy. Service is so often tied to work and, let’s face it; it is called “work.” For so many people work and joy are not things that just naturally go together. But what if we looked at service as not drudgery but rather as simply a road we take leading to discipleship and leading to God’s joy? Not too shabby huh?

 

Rabindranath Tagone, Indian poet, playwright and essayist won the Noble prize in literature in 1913. I hadn’t heard of him prior to this week. He wrote these words. “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”

 

This is an old concept but not one that I heard a lot about growing up. Many dads got up, went to work, did their time and came home. (For the record, moms did, too, but it’s Father’s Day so they get the shout out.) What is interesting is that if we dig just a little bit deeper, we see that the REASON the Father did this was for the joy of his family. It was bringing others joy…even when the work was less than fun.

 

Our Father wants the same thing (and yes, I realize the masculine language, if I was giving this on Mother’s day….She would want the same thing)…our joy to be complete.

 

Our job is to find the way that our love manifests in the world. This will become our calling card. Not the car or the neighborhood, or the job title. We will become the thing that we use to make into the physical Jesus’ love for us and our love for him.

 

I have mentioned commentaries before. They are the gigantic books that biblical scholars write to talk about the Bible. Sometimes there are entire books written about ONE book of the bible. It is fascinating but it’s not what we know that makes us disciples.

 

I just spent four days at the Rocky Mountain United Methodist Annual Conference here in Denver. We have been doing it over 100 years. Not me personally, but honestly, sometimes, it can feel like it. It is the structure and the order that keeps the United Methodist Church running. It, too, is necessary but it’s not what makes us Disciples of Christ.

 

I am now on The District Committee of Ordained Ministry. We are the first panel who grill, for lack of a better term, the people who want to go into ordained ministry. It is an important part of the ordination process to make sure people have had the proper training and have given enough time to discerning God’s call in their life. But it’s not what makes any of us disciples of Jesus.

 

I sometimes think I had more faith and more comfort and more appreciation of God BEFORE I got all this other stuff into my life: the formal education, the conference politics, the committees and boards and panels that help to run the system. It is easy to get caught up in all of that and forget what it is that God and Jesus ask us to do.

 

Love each other. Love the world. Find a way to show that love in doing something for others and through that, we will find our joy. When we do that…we will find ourselves living out what it means to be a disciple.

 

As we have seen before, when God wants something to stick to our hearts, God makes sure we can’t miss it. I had my awesome assistant Kathy print up these sheets that show us a good number of verses that point to this one great commandment. Pull it out whenever you get caught up in too many committees, reading too many books, attending too many things and remember, all you have to do is love on people. Find the best way to do that so you affect the most people in a real tangible way and you will be doing what God commands of us. You will be a disciple. No one will have to come to you and ask for identification as proof of being a follower of JC.

 

House Where Nobody Lives   by Tom Waits

 

There's a house on my block
That's abandoned and cold
Folks moved out of it a
Long time ago
And they took all their things
And they never came back
Looks like it's haunted
With the windows all cracked
And everyone call it
The house, the house where
Nobody lives
Once it held laughter
Once it held dreams
Did they throw it away
Did they know what it means
Did someone's heart break
Or did someone do somebody wrong?
Well the paint was all cracked
It was peeled off of the wood
Papers were stacked on the porch
Where I stood
And the weeds had grown up
Just as high as the door
There were birds in the chimney
And an old chest of drawers
Looks like no one will ever

Come back to the
House were nobody lives
Once it held laughter
Once it held dreams
Did they throw it away
Did they know what it means
Did someone's heart break
Or did someone do someone wrong?
So if you find someone
Someone to have, someone to hold
Don't trade it for silver
Don't trade it for gold
I hav´got all of life's treasures
And they are fine and they are good
They remind me that houses
Are just made of wood
What makes a house grand
Ain't the roof or the doors
If there's love in a house
It's a palace for sure
Without love...
It ain't nothin but a house
A house where nobody lives
Without love it ain't nothin
But a house, a house where
Nobody lives.


THE COOLEST TATTOO EVER
Rev. Jerry Herships
June 13, 2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scripture: Romans 3: 21–24
21 But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, 22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, 23 since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; 24 they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

For some reason, I keep going back to Romans. I have preached on other sections of Romans and it keeps bringing me back. It is considered one of Paul’s more complex writings and yet there is so much there for us to sink our teeth into. We are looking right at the beginning of Paul’s letter. In the third chapter Paul is off and running. After a few niceties in the first chapter Paul is explaining his theology in what many consider his magnum opus.

There are a lot of places to go with this passage. As I was looking at it, I was reminded of a study we did on this passage while I was in seminary. I want to mention it because it speaks to how we read the Bible, what it says, what it doesn’t say and how sometimes…we just don’t know.

Pam Eisenbaum, the New Testament Professor and Paul scholar at Iliff School of theology was pointing out that the text in verse 22 can be misleading. It says "…through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe." Pam was explaining to us that, while the verse is written with the words, "through faith in Jesus Christ," because it was originally written in Greek, it can also be interpreted to mean, "… through the faith of Jesus Christ." It depends on whether the writer was using a subjective genitive or an objective genitive and we can’t know for sure. You can even see this footnote in your Bibles in the NRSV. While I know a certain portion of you are thinking: "Hi, Bible geek talk, you’re on the air." The point is that, just by changing that one little two-letter word, WE ARE CHANGING THEOLOGY.

Our faith in Jesus Christ is saying that the fact that WE have faith is part of what saves us. The second says that it doesn’t have anything to do with what we do. It was Jesus’ faith, his willingness to go to the cross, where we find our saving grace. One says it’s our faith in Jesus that brings us saving grace; the other says it’s Jesus’ faith in being willing to go to the cross that brings us grace.

What this tells me is that we have to constantly investigate and reexamine our faith, continue to ask hard questions and yet STILL be comfortable in the mystery of not knowing. Some answers we will just simply never know. This God stuff is not science, but that doesn’t mean we stop asking questions.

There. I’m glad I got that off my chest.

Now, on to the coolest tattoo ever. But before I do, let me be clear, I am not for or against tattoos. The scripture verse in Leviticus that people often use to oppose tattoos is in connection with pagan worship and God is speaking in the context of it being part of Idolatry and worshiping other gods. I think we all know…God ain’t cool with that. I don’t think that is the case with most tattoos today.

The coolest tattoo belongs to my cool holy religious friend and woman of the cloth Nadia Boles Weber. She has the entire Christian Calendar year tattooed on her arm: Lent, Advent, Pentecost, the works. Even with that though, that is not the coolest tattoo she has. The coolest tattoo she has is just four words in Latin: Simul Justus Et Peccator. It is a quote most attributed to Martin Luther founder of the Lutheran faith. It means, simultaneously, sinner and saint.

I think I’ve mentioned before that Luther isn’t saying that Christians can never "improve" their conduct. Instead, what he is trying to say is that Christians should neither rely on nor despair because of their own conduct or attitude. Isn’t this where so many of us sit? In that place of being, both at the same time, pretty great people and knowing we have done some pretty lousy things in our life? As much as we want to make it so, no one is either all good or all bad, or as Paul puts it, "since all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." No matter how hard we try, we simply are not going to EARN our way into heaven. Everyone screws up. EVERYONE.

Even our beloved Saint Paul says later in Romans Chapter 7, which is the chapter that really is used to support Luther’s idea behind this sinner and saint thing, "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate." You can almost hear the frustration with himself from this verse, verse 15, in Chapter 7. Every time we do that thing or rather those things that we hate, we are reminded that we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

As a reminder, don’t forget how I use and understand the word "sin." It is separation from God. It is that separation from perfection. Is anyone perfect? Here Paul is saying that ALL have sinned, All are not perfect, and ALL are not in full, wholly, perfect connection with God.

And, here is the AMAZING good news. It’s ok! Wait, did he just say it’s ok to sin? No. Get that idea out of your head right now. What I am saying is that perfection is not required for God’s love. Perfection is not required for God’s grace. Perfection is not required for God’s forgiveness. That would be odd anyway, if you were perfect, for what would God be forgiving you? Forget trying to be good so your ticket can be punched and you can get into heaven. It doesn’t work like that. Through this amazing guy we call Jesus, we are in right relationship with God. We are given grace EVERY TIME we screw up.

I was having this conversation with one of my friends down in Civic Center Park. He said, "I don’t know. There has got to be a limit. God has to give up on some people." And I knew he was thinking of himself. I told him this is not true. That is the amazing part of God. NOTHING can separate us from God and God’s love. STOP TRYING TO EARN IT.

God’s grace is real. You can stop trying to win it. This scripture tells us. It spells it out: Grace is a gift. Celebrate your goodness, try to do it more. But stop beating yourself up for being less than perfect. Let me put it another way. God’s love is so big…God loves even you.

And by the way, you are all pretty great too. Don’t forget the second part of this phrase, "At the same time both sinner AND SAINT." I know some of you pretty well. You do amazing things and you shrug them off. You raise amazing families and sacrifice for loved ones and you laugh at the same jokes your husband has told 500 times, at least Laura does.

It is far too easy to write people off as one or the other. Again, last week in the park, I was talking to a guy who we’ll call Brandon. He is a junkie. Addicted to heroin. He told us last week that he has decided to go home, back to California. He had his bags with him and was waiting for his bus to leave that night. He was nodding off a bit while he was with us and I was pretty sure he was coming off a recent fix. He was dirty, and tattooed and homeless and high. Safe to say, he had nothing in common with Mother Teresa.

About ten minutes before we were ready to pack up, two guys came running up. "Do you have any sack lunches left?" We had to do something that we do every week in the park. We had to break someone’s heart. "No I’m sorry, we have given them all away." Randy said, "I got two ends of a loaf of bread." The guy said I’ll take them. Have you ever been so hungry that you ate the two ends of a loaf of bread? I haven’t. I’ve had other options. It is a hunger I pray me and my family will never know.

Just as they were starting to walk away, Brandon, who was a few feet away, nodding off in his high, came out of his buzz and said, "Wait a second," and reached into his bag and handed the guy a banana and his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He was saving that for his bus trip. I am certain with his trip, he literally had no idea when his next meal would be. But he gave his food away anyway. At that moment in time, Brandon, the tattooed, homeless, dirty junkie had everything in common with Mother Teresa.

I might not have seen Simul Justus Et Peccator tattooed up his arm like I do every time I see Nadia, but I guarantee it was tattooed on his heart.

Just like it is on mine. Just like it is on yours.





WE'RE DOIN' A NEW THING

Rev. Jerry Herships
St. Andrew United Methodist Church
June 6, 2010

Scripture: Isaiah 43: 18 – 1918

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. 19I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.



I am about to do a new thing. Those are the words of God and again from Isaiah. We looked at another passage from Isaiah two weeks ago. This time God is promising good for the people and reminding them that He is with them. Last time, from the first chapter of Isaiah, God was pretty upset about hallow, false assemblies. This time, God is singin’ our praises, saying, I have your back. What gives?

Here is a little background on Isaiah. While tradition holds that Isaiah was completely written by one author, Isaiah, more modern scholarship says that it was two, maybe even three authors. In the first 39 chapters, most all agree that the writer is Isaiah. More modern scholarship believes that the last 27 chapters were written by other people and many of these modern scholars believe that Isaiah was written over as much as four centuries.

Scholars believe that Isaiah was written over as much as four centuries.

Our Scripture today comes from a section in Isaiah called The Book of Comfort and begins around chapter 40. We hear God telling His people to have faith and be ready to be amazed. God is promising that what is about to happen is something, the likes of which, have never before been seen. The old ways are just that. God is telling them that it is time for a change.

One of the overriding themes in Isaiah is a concern with the connection between worship and ethical behavior. We saw last time that one of Isaiah’s major take always is God’s refusal to accept the ritual worship of those who are treating others with cruelty and injustice. If you aren’t treating people with kindness and fighting injustice, God doesn’t care how fancy your worship is.

Isaiah is a concern with the connection between worship and ethical behavior. We saw last time that one of Isaiah’s major take always is God’s refusal to accept the ritual worship of those who are treating others with cruelty and injustice. If you aren’t treating people with kindness and fighting injustice, God doesn’t care how fancy your worship is.

I think Afterhours is living out the connection between worship and ethical behavior. That is why service is such a big part of what we do. I think this is an idea that we see applauded in Isaiah.

Isaiah 43 is telling us to dream big and to not let the past get in our way. From this moment on, don’t let the previous challenges or obstacles that might have made the going slow, concern you. We do that quite a bit don’t we? We think that the problems we had before are going to be the same this time around. Bad experience with Mexican food the first time out? Chances are you are going to assume that it is that way every time. What a shame. The real shame is that food is not the only thing with which we do this.

You can spot this thinking when you talk to people about an idea and what you hear is; we tried that before. Actually, they didn’t. They did something like it but it was at a different time, in a different place, and with different people. This is a new thing.

Afterhours being here? In another Methodist Church? In another district? This has not been done before. I have to thank the District Superintendent’s and Rev. Al Scarff for their willingness to do a new thing.

When we decided to make PB&J’s during the service, God was doing a new thing. When we started giving out communion in the park to the homeless of Denver, God was doing a new thing. When we decided to advertise in bars, God was doing a new thing. And now, at this location, God is doing a new thing.

When we were deciding about using this location, one of the things that came up was storage. Laura made the comment that AfterHours is pretty portable. We need five – eight tables, chairs and about 6 bins of stuff. This has proven to be a good thing because we have moved two times in a year and a half.

Portable worship is not a new idea. This really resembles the tent mentality of the Israelites while they were wandering in the wilderness, even before the first temple in Jerusalem. While they were wandering, God went with them wherever they went. God wasn’t something they went and visited. God was with them on their travels. And, God is with us.

We are much like those who followed Moses. During this last year and a half, AfterHours has been doing a little wandering itself, first at St. Andrew, then at LifeSpot and now here close to the city at John Collins UMC. With each move, it feels like we are getting closer to where we need to be. People who saw this site prior to today said that they thought this area is our best yet. I have to agree. The opportunity we have to do a new thing is greater than ever before. The opportunities to do outreach are greater than ever before. The opportunity to reach people who have been left behind by the church is greater than ever before.

God is telling us to forget about the past and that He is getting ready to do a new thing yet again. Our response is that we are going to do that new thing right alongside of God. Our outreach potential is higher than it has ever been.

So I want to take just a minute or two, here in the middle, to ask you to turn to those people around you and say what you think would be a big dream for Afterhours. Just take two minutes and answer the question: What’s in the future for AfterHours? Talk for just a couple of minutes. Go.

I hope you dreamt big. I pray that God will show us the full potential of what this new thing looks like. We have to remember, we cannot out dream God. I’m going to say it again: WE CAN’T OUT DREAM GOD. God’s plans are always bigger than ours plans. Just when we think, Whoa, this is a big idea, God’s idea is bigger. We have to think of the thing that can’t be done….then watch God use us to do it.

The scripture tells us, Now it springs forth. Do you no perceive it? I think that happens a lot in our lives. There are miracles happening all around us, everyday. I can think of amazing things that have happened in the lives of people in this congregation. And yet, so often we get so caught up in our day to day, that it floats right on by. I think that is why God is telling us, Do you not perceive it? THEN WAKE UP! This is God telling us, pay attention. Look around. You are about to be a part of some pretty mind blowing things.

I think we need to be prepared to be amazed. But we can’t just sit back and watch. God wants to be in relationship with us. That means we have to do our part, too.

Our faith is an active faith. Not an act OF faith (although it’s that too!), An ACTIVE faith. There needs to be action. So the first thing we need to do is pray. We need to pray. We need to pray that God will bring the right people, resources, and circumstances our way to build the kingdom of God. Did you hear that last part? We have to remember whose place it is that we are building. We just need to make sure to remember whose Kingdom it is.

It isn’t the United Methodist Kingdom. It isn’t St. Andrew’s kingdom. It certainly isn’t Afterhours kingdom. It is GOD’S kingdom. We remember this by placing God clearly in the center of all we do. We do the work, God is at the center. We do the praying, God is at the center. We do the outreach, God is at the center. We do the loving, God is at the center.

As long as we continue to put God at the center of this ministry and at the center of our lives, we will watch God do a new thing. The old things will be but a memory, and over time, a faded one at that. God tells us that God will make a way in the wilderness. God will make rivers in the desert. This might seem impossible to us, but as the Apostle Paul tells us, nothing is impossible with God.

It is going to be so exciting over the coming months to be on this journey, and I am thrilled to be on the roller coaster with all of you.

The new thing is about to begin.

Actually, it already has….do you not perceive it?





THE FINAL REASON

Rev. Jerry Herships
St. Andrew United Methodist Church
May 23, 2010

Scripture: Isaiah 1: 13 – 14, 17

13bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and calling of convocation— I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. 14Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them.

17learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

Amos 5: 21-24

21I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. 22Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. 23Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. 24But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.



Today I am wrapping up a three part series on outreach. In the first part, I talked about how important the world needs us to reach out. The second time we talked (I make that sound like we were just sitting around chatting…really, you just let me just go on and on and on.), I talked about the benefits to each of us when we go out and serve the world. Today I want to give the final reason. I saved the best for last. If the first reason is, it pleases the world, and the second reason is that it pleases us, the third trumps them both.

It pleases God.

It actually is more than just pleasing God. On some occasions, God commands it.

There is a challenge when you do these kinds of sermons or sermon series. By the third one, you can start to be tuned out. "Yea, yea, yea we get it…go out and serve." I can start to sound like a broken record. There is also the risk of sounding holier than thou. Bill Barnes, my pastor in Florida, use to say, and I am blatantly stealing from him now: Don’t you know? I preach to myself and let you all listen in.

This is my stuff to work on, too. So many people have said to me that I give so much to the homeless. I am down in Civic Center Park two hours a week. Two hours. There are people who give their LIFE to helping the poor and oppressed. If I spent on the homeless what I spend on clothes and wine and fast food…well let’s just say, the homeless would be in a much better place. Please know this message is for all of you but there is a healthy dose of, "Physician heal thy self," thrown in.

There is a famous saying in clergy circles. You didn’t even know we had clergy circles did you? The saying is that a preacher’s job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Now no one in this room knows what category anyone else falls in. It is safe to say, though, that a good many of us are comfortable. I read recently in a book called Crazy Love by Francis Chan that if you make $52,000 a year, you make one hundred times more money than the average person on this planet? Only you know what category you fall in. Appearances can be deceiving.

Appearances are what our scripture passages are talking about today. They are taking it beyond a person’s individual appearances and moving into people’s group appearances. Both of these passages come from the Old Testament and are directed at those who participated in and lead worship that, to the naked eye, looked wonderful.

All the right things are said and done. Every rule is followed and every area covered. God is telling us in this passage that how things appear on the outside is not what concerns God. God is more concerned with what happens on the inside. God is telling them and us, I don’t care what the outside of the church looks like; I care what the inside looks like.

In both of these passages we are not just looking at what God doesn’t like. It is clear in both Amos and in Isaiah that God doesn’t want us to just go through the motions. In Isaiah God says, I cannot endure solemn assemblies. And again in Amos God says, I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. In both passages God states that God won’t take their offering and to take away the noise of their songs. None of that is pleasing to God when it is offered in a shallow way.

But God doesn’t leave them there. God tells them and us, in both passages, what IS important to God. Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, and plead for the widow. Those are what count to God in Isaiah. In Amos we get the same feeling but different words. … let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream. These are powerful words. So powerful, that Dr. Martin Luther King used them in one of his more famous speeches.

This week is the celebration of Pentecost. It is considered the birth of the church. Pentecost is not about a solemn assembly. It's a time for excitement, energy, movement, birth. It is about fresh air and fresh commitment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are going to be living these ideas in the coming months here. Not just with our new building, which will help us reach out to people in our neighborhood, but in how we go into the world as well. As many of you know, AfterHours is going to be homeless in two weeks. We are in the final stages of dialogue with a location that will allow us to be in ministry even closer to the city. It will be a location where the homeless are blocks away, not miles. Local demographics indicate that this is a location that has a very low receptivity to traditional denominational religion. Sounds like just the place for AfterHours! This move is about new life and new commitment and new birth. This move may be a modern day Pentecost. But it will take more commitment, both from the leaders of the church, and from those who attend. It’s about 15-20 minutes from here. It is not as convenient as going to church in this building. It will be a reminder that part of our relationship to God and church are not about convenience but about commitment.

It is a time to get fired up about God and the church. Pentecost is the exact opposite of going through the motions. Pentecost is feeling the fresh breath of God. It is feeling the spirit move among us and around us and in us. It is about taking this power and making great things happen for the mission of the church. And what is the mission of the church? God tells us. Seek justice. Rescue the oppressed. Defend the orphan. Plead for the widow. How does this translate to today? In a phrase: Help those who can’t help themselves.

Amos and Isaiah are not isolated cases. It has been said that you can find a Bible verse to support just about any thought or action you want to support. Remember the bible isn’t a book, it’s a library written by many different authors from many different places in time. They are going to have different points of view making the next thing I say even more amazing.

Do you know the scriptures mention poverty more than 2,100 times? It’s mentioned throughout the Bible in the Old Testament and New and in the gospels as well as the epistles. It is everywhere, 2,100 times. That is not just passing commentary.

Early Bibles were rare things. Remember, the printing press was not created until the 1400’s. Prior to that very few people had their own Bible. The earliest materials where costly to reproduce and every word mattered. And yet over and over and over we see this mention of the poor. It is clear to many people, myself included, that this is a central piece of the scriptures. Make no mistake: the poor matter to God. And when we help the poor, we are making God smile. Who doesn’t want that?

When we talk about Pentecost being the birth of the church, we don’t mean structures or committees or potlucks or long hymns and even longer sermons. We are talking about the birth of Christ in and among the people as a group, to go out and change the world. The 3000 people that agreed to follow Christ on the day of Pentecost were mobilized to go out and do the work that Jesus did. And what did Jesus do? He fed the hungry, healed the sick and ate with sinners. He made people feel whole again. Is there a more important mission in the life of the church than to emulate Jesus?

Let us never lose sight that for God church is not solemn assemblies, shallow offerings and token praise. Does anyone enjoy token praise? This is a time for us to get recharged. It is a time to feel God’s love and life fill us up so that we can go and do the work in the world that pleases our God.

We know that going into the world helps the world. We know that we feel better when we do it. And we have over 2,100 reminders that when we go out and help those that need our help, it makes God happy. What are we waiting for? What more do we need? Feel the spirit of Pentecost. We have the opportunity to go out and show the world what a church on fire looks like.

We do it for them. We do it for us. We do it for God. Sometimes the old words are the best: Go out to love and serve the world.

Thanks be to God. Amen.