Sermons from Second

Naked Fruit: Aggressive Gentleness

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Read Luke 13:10-17 here.  

Sermon excerpt: 

I’ve been thinking a lot about gentleness this week, and what it might look like for us to be aggressively gentle in our hardened and broken world. I was browsing through quotes on Goodreads.com, looking for inspiration.

That’s how I found this quote about “aggressive gentleness.” It says, “Gentleness is not apathy but is an aggressive expression of how we view people. We see people as so valuable that we deal with them in gentleness,fearing the slightest damage to one for whom Christ died. To be apathetic is to turn people over to mean and destructive elements, to truly love people[causes] us to be aggressively gentle.” (Gayle D. Erwin) [1]

It seems to me that before we can actually BE aggressively gentle, we need first to work on seeing people as valuable, “fearing the slightest damage to one for whom Christ died.” We need to see each person we meet as one for whom Christ died and deal with them in gentleness.

[1]http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/gentleness

Naked Fruit: Faithfulness

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Read Luke 12:49-59 HERE. 

Sermon excerpt: 

Perhaps we, like Beethoven’s salon audience have been lulled into softness and coziness, expecting that our faith will automatically fill our lives with serenity and peace. And like an arm crashing down on the keyboard, we are jarred awake when our faith actually causes division or trial or suffering or difficulty.

And THOSE are the moments that matter the most—will we give in when the world tries to squash our faith or we are afraid of the division it might cause? Or will we let our light shine even more brightly in the darkness so that the world might see our good and faithful deeds and glorify God?  

Naked Fruit: Generosity

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Read Luke 12:32-40 here. 

Jesus knows that where our money and possessions are, there our hearts will be. Where our money and possessions are, there our attention will be and our dedication will be and our interest in success will be.

And if our money and possessions and attention and dedication and success are all tied up in earthly things, that’s where our hearts will be, not in an unfailing treasure in heaven.

Naked Fruit: Kindness

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Read Colossians 2:6-19 here. 

Sermon excerpt

I’m not personally fond of debating … but I AM all for knowing what you believe—in politics as well as in faith and theology. “For freedom Christ has set us free” so we are free, and even encouraged, to share our faith with others. So I’m (grudgingly) willing to debate when it’s necessary and helpful and useful because I think things like believing in something and knowing WHY you believe it is critical.

But can we please do it with just a little more kindness than I’ve been hearing? Can we please just say why we’re not planning to vote for a particular candidate without assassinating his or her character in the process? Or better yet, don’t even worry so much about the other candidate; just stick to talking about what you like about your candidate!

I can just feel people’s hearts becoming harder and harder as the rhetoric gets more negative and divisive. This world does not need more hardened hearts; it needs hearts which are tender and loving and joyful and peaceful and patient. And kind. Can we please have a little bit more kindness in the way we treat each other when we’re exchanging ideas and opinions, especially when things get a little heated, as they so often do?

Naked Fruit: Peace & Patience Meets Martha & Mary

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Read Luke 10:38-42 HERE and Colossians 1:15-23 here. 

Sermon excerpt:

One of my favorite quotes is from The Lord of the Rings when Bilbo Baggins says, “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

THAT’S what a “Martha moment” feels like—completely overwhelmed and over-committed and thinking that you’ve got to hold everything together or it’s all going to fall to pieces, never to be whole again. I know a lot of you feel that way because you have said it to me in your own way.  

Sometimes we get so busy that what we’re doing loses its purpose, and we begin to believe the lie that WE have to hold all things together.

When that happens, we need to stop and have a Mary moment, remembering the truth is that “Jesus himself is before all things, and in HIM all things hold together.” In the end, he WILL hold all things together, especially when we can’t. 

Naked Fruit: Love & Joy (Love the Saints. Love ALL the saints.)

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Read Colossians 1:1-14 here. 

It’s the craziest thing, really—God doesn’t actually need us to do his work; God is perfectly capable of doing all that needs to be done in our world … but He chooses to use us: to share the fruit of love and joy through us.

And all we have to do to be part of God’s transformation of our world is to be in and to stay in relationship with God—to hang on to the vine for dear life by worshiping and praying and studying and serving—joyfully working out our salvation in fear and trembling, as Philippians says. Knowing God and loving God.

When we are able to do that—as individuals and as a church—the fruit of the Spirit WILL grow, quietly but surely, among us. Not because of anything we did … but because it is God who will make it grow.

A Different Kind of Freedom

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Read Galatians 5:1, 13-25 here.  

Sermon excerpt

We have been chosen by God for a different kind of freedom, and it has been given to us NOT so that we can go around indulging ourselves in our favorite sins, falsely thinking that since God’s going to forgive us anyway, we might as well do whatever we want.

Instead, God has freed us and called us to live a different kind of freedom—one that that mirrors God’s own freedom, a freedom which is anything but self-indulgent, a vice which certainly belongs in Paul’s list of the “works of the flesh” in verses 19-21. A vice which very colored my younger perception of freedom—Christ has not freed us from the “rules” so that we can do whatever we want.

Rather, Christ has chosen us for a kind of freedom which mirrors God’s own freedom … freedom dedicated to serving others in love. 

A Room Named Remember

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Read Psalm 77. 

Many, MANY thanks to Mary Baughman for leading the dramatic reading of Psalm 77 from Eugene Peterson's "The Message! "

Sermon excerpt: 

As followers of Christ, we each have our own set of touchstones in our faith, which start at the cross when our Lord and Savior died to save sinners like us. And we discover other touchstones in experiences of God’s holiness or sustaining presence which are mile markers along our journey of faith. Kairos moments in which time seems to stop; times when we find ourselves in a “thin place” and God is close enough that we could reach out and touch him. Memories of moments when we knew, absolutely, positively,without a doubt that there is a God and he loves us very, very much just the way we are. (Though he longs for us to become so much more.)

These are the memories that fill up the room named Remember*. And when the storm is at its most powerful and most uncontrollable and when we feel most alone, we can each open up the door to the room named Remember and“remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived,” lives which are our own beautiful, quirky little testimonies of God’s faithfulness.

*from Frederick Beuchner's "A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces"

Sending Jesus Away When He Disturbs Our Peace

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Read Luke 8:26-39 HERE. 

Sermon excerpt: 

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Up to this point, the people had been able to deal with the evil spirits—they were familiar with the man and his problem, and spent considerable time and effort trying to control the situation. They had learned to live with the evil, managing it as best they could. It wasn’t a perfect solution, they knew—it was far from perfect especially for the man!—but everyone else seemed OK with the situation. They figured out how to live with it and maybe even kind of forgot about it. They forgot about the evil in their midst. 

Then along comes Jesus who disturbs their peace.

He disturbs their way of life, turning everything upside down. “Even when it is for good, power that can neither be calculated nor managed is frightening.”[1]They had no idea what powerful and mysterious and, in their minds, potentially harmful thing Jesus might do next.

Again, they counted the cost of the miracle and decided it was too steep a price to pay to see what might happen next. So they send Jesus away.

[1]Craddock, page 118. 

Simon Says

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Read along with Luke 7:36-50 .  

Sermon excerpt: 
What if Jesus is actually talking about debt in terms of feeling the burden of how much one’s sins weigh? What if instead of the total number of sins, the one whose debt is larger means she is the one who is more acutely aware of her sin and the heaviness of the separation from God that comes with it?
And because she is more acutely aware of the weight of hers in and her separation from God … her response to Jesus’ forgiveness is that much greater and grateful-er than Simon, who is quick to judge both Jesus and the woman, and who seems to think he is almost without need of both forgiveness and forgiving others.