More than Water

Click on the verse to read the text.

Luke 3:15-22

God is always reaching for us, pulling toward him.

In baptism we outwardly and publicly accept that pull, but the act of Grace we receive and is confirmed in the act of baptism is purely God's.

When we pour water or submerge someone and bring them up we remind everyone that when we accept this gift we die to our own selfishness and sin (separation from God). We rise out of the water we are born a new and washed clean from our sin. This does not mean we don't sin anymore, but that we now have agreed to unleash the Holy Spirit in our lives. To let the Holy Spirit guide us and work within us. That we no longer have to be controlled by sin because Jesus conquered all sin.

Baptism does not mean that we no longer feel the pull of sin. It doesn't mean that we don't sin, or that we don't feel the pull, but the good news is that we don't have to be. We have help if we choose it and if we allow the Holy Spirit to do its work we are not alone. Not ever.

The act of putting water on someone's head does not complete our act of baptism. We all have a part in baptism, not just the person being baptized. It is a community event. We as the congregation have a part. The thing with this crazy journey with the Holy Spirit is you can't do it alone. You forget, you loose sight, you become frustrated, you succumb to your own sin (or separations from God) sometimes unconsciously. It is so easy to do. You can easily loose sight of your commitments in baptism. The thing is God doesn't. God does not loose sight of it at all. God loves us still and yearns to forgive us when we are side tracked and bring us back to him. God tugs at our consciousness, but we have to accept it. We have to repent, or turn away from that. This can be very difficult to do alone. This is why we are in community. We (as Christians) make a commitment to support one another on our journeys – not just at the high points, births, baptisms, weddings but at the low points when life is not easy. When one of us feels lost, alone, broken. This is when we need to follow our collective commitments to uphold one another, support each other and give freely of our gifts and talents (see UMH p.44).

Let's face it – life is a hard road. It is easy to become side tracked, to loose hope, to feel alone, and to become isolated. In our baptism though we are not only accepting God's grace, but by being blessed in the Holy spirit we are unleashing the Holy Spirit in our lives. There is nothing that is too big, too bad, too far, too horrible for God. There is nothing that is so dark that Christ's light can not shine through and help us with. This is the glory of our baptism. Every time you see water, drink water or experience rain remember your baptism. Remember you are not alone, you are part of a family of other Christians that you have promised to nurture and that have promised to nurture you. Remember your vows (UMH pg 40) to reject sin and commit yourself to Christ, accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustices and oppression in what ever forms they take. Remember that you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior and that you promised to put your whole trust in his grace, to serve the Lord with all the church which is open to all people, ages, nations and races. Remember your promise to nurture one another by your teaching and example so that all maybe guided to accept God's grace for themselves and profess their faith openly. These are our commitments and God's promise to us is to always pull us, guide us, love us and help us on this journey called life. God's promise is to help us to overcome our separation to rest in his peace. Remember that in the water.

Lorax and How Bad Can I be

This was NOT a sermon, just a reflection.  I did a little bit of it for the kid's service, but just felt like I needed to send it out there.  Click on the purple links to listen to the song or read the scripture from this week.  Please feel free to leave comments.
Missy

Luke 3:15-22

"How bad can I be"

We were watching the Lorax tonight...again... with the kids and the song "How bad can I be" came on.  Besides being incredibly catchy it has a lot to say to Christians let alone a five year old 

I am drawn to this song in particular because we are celebrating Jesus baptism this week.  I keep thinking about what we can end up like if we just continue to do what "comes naturally" as the song says.  We are a selfish people who seem to try and fill ourselves up with everything else in the world, but what is drawing us - God .  We don't always look at the long term consequences, nor do we know them.  We can't usually see around our selves and our own ideas and wants to see that there may be something better, not only for ourselves in the long run, but for everyone, for the collective community that we share this planet with.

How bad can it be when we do what comes naturally?  Well in many places you can't drink the water. In our own dear Hudson River you don't want to eat the fish, and please do not fall off your kayak into it.  Our planet wastes 1/3 to 1/2 of the food it produces and we have millions starving to death.  We have places where our search for precious metals to create faster cell phones and computers have caused the land, the air and the water to be not only unusable but to be poisonous   We cut down our trees without replacing them, dump poisons into the environment and produce so much carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels that our global temperature keeps rising.  And then we have the audacity to complain when the weather is all messed up or we are hit by floods and storms we have never seen the likes of. I think sometimes the question should be "How bad does it have to get?"  How bad are we willing to let things get before we take a stand, before we shake ourselves out of our sugar induced stupors to respond?  I am not sure.

We could also look at it like this as well - how bad can it be when we do what comes naturally in our own lives? More people are dying of strokes, heart attacks and stress related issues than ever before.  We no longer take a Sabbath and no one has time to spend with family or friends.  The computer has replaced conversations and although we are connected to at least two or three devices for extended periods of time constantly communicating with one another more people are depressed then ever before. We are fixated by machines, novelty and new things and that seems to trap many people into constantly upgrading and playing and becoming ever more isolated.   How bad can it be to do what comes naturally?

I do know however that God is letting us have our free will.  We have the free will to destroy ourselves if we so choose.  Yet God is calling us, pulling us towards God.  We have a God sized hole in the middle of our souls and God pulls us toward him.  Do we fight it or do we accept it?  That truly is the question.  As a Christian who accepts that pull we accept it by becoming baptized.  We publicly give God free reign over our beings.  This is not a private act in most cases.  It is not supposed to be a private act.  Jesus didn't get baptized by himself so no one could see.  There were witnesses.  People heard God.  It was big! God claimed him publicly - just as he does for each of us who gets baptized. It is not a private act because we are a communal people.  We are agreeing to let the Holy Spirit in to our lives and our hearts.

This is also not just a safe little routine.  Have you ever experienced a severe rain storm?  Have you felt wind that could blow off a roof?  Have you watched flames consume anything?  These are the elements used in a baptism. It isn't a small thing, it is a big thing.  These are all things that mean the difference between life and death for us and we can not control them.

We need water.  This is our main symbol in baptism.  We use it daily.  We wash in water, we drink it, we clean with it, we spray it on our gardens, we watch it fall from the sky.  Yet this life sustaining water is dangerous.  Just as easily we can drown in it, it can destroy entire towns, it can create slippery roads on a winters evening.   This tension in the gift of water is supposed to be there.  God is bigger than we know.  God can control these elements when we can not.  God can harness a flood, and yet provide water in the desert for his people to drink.  This tension is important because when ever we see water we are supposed to remember our baptism and God.

We are to remember that God is bigger than we know and more powerful than we can imagine.  When we are submerged or sprinkled with water we are told that in baptism we share in Christ's life and death and resurrection   With this act we die to our selves, to our own selfish ways and are given freedom from doing "what comes naturally".  We can choose life, we can choose to do something else, and if we don't we know it, we feel it, the pull is there.  When we are baptized we are born anew in Christ.  We are not trying to fight the pull of sin or separation from God on our own any longer, we are teaming up with a God who is bigger and more powerful than any sin can be who loves us and accepts us as we are.  God who walks with us even when we make poor choices, gives us strength and courage and continually pulls us towards him and his path.  This is baptism.  This is freedom.  This is a whole new life.  This is our journey.

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Time to soak up some light

Isaiah 60:1-6
Matthew 2:1-12

Epiphany! - “Sudden, surprising happening that changes everything completely!”¹

I love the definition of Epiphany that I found above from the GBOD worship planning web site this past week. Usually the only reference many of us have to Epiphany is the Scare-a-crow in the Wizard of Oz declaring he has an Epiphany, or if we have been in church for a while perhaps the idea that it has something to do with wise men. We use the word Epiphany to describe the 12^th day after Christmas. Often times the idea that Epiphany changes everything completely gets drowned out by the three wise men and the gold, frankinsense and myrrh. We think of the traditions and forget that this Sunday marks the beginning for us in the church to start to grapple with what Jesus' birth really means for us. It is time to seek our own Epiphanies – our own realizations about Christ that are surprising and changes everything completely! It is time to begin anew, to seek, to listen to God and to pray.

It is also a time of healing. Isaiah 60:1-2 especially reminds us that it is time to “soak up” some God no matter where we are in life. For the people of Israel this was the time period when they were returning to home. The people felt lost, broken, isolated. They had been forced into exile and were finally allowed to return home. When they did they found it destroyed, and what was standing had either gentiles living in it, or those Jews who were too poor for the government to bother to move them to exile. There were power struggles between those who stayed and those who left and everyone else. Not to mention just pure misery. (Isaiah 59:8-10). Yet God breaks in. God gives them hope about what is to come and God heals.

God does not break into the scene because anyone deserved it. God does not bring light into the darkness of this situation because anyone repented. God does not come because of anything they did or anything we do. God comes because God comes. God comes because we are his people and he pulls us to him. He calls us and beckons us and we get to bask in the light. God is the one that heals, that gives them the strength to rebuild and figure out how to be a nation once more. God comes and then they repent, and then they change, and then they become a collective people again.

This is an important lesson in this season of Epiphany. It is time for us as a hurting people, as a hurting church to just allow God to come. To stop struggling for power, for authority for control and allow ourselves to see the light, to turn our faces towards the light and away from the darkness that surrounds us. It is time for us to “Lift up your eyes and look about you.” As we begin this new time, as we experience the life changing good news of God let us pray for the light. Let us pray for each other and for our own Epiphanies. Let us bask in the light and glory of the Lord before we do anything else. Maybe, just maybe then we truly will be able to share the Good news of Christ. If we do not take the time to truly see what a difference following Christ makes in our lives, how are we to be a light for anyone else? If it does not make our communities any different than the rest of the darkness how is anyone else going to believe us?

So let us stop our hectic races to see who can be the first to fill up their calendar. Let us not even begin to think about what the church needs to do. Let us just listen. Let us just soak up some light and listen to what God is whispering for us to do next. Then we can repent – change the direction of what we are doing and be the light that calls out to the rest of the world.

1 http://www.gbod.org/site/c.nhLRJ2PMKsG/b.3879973/k.9C35/Lectionary_Planning_Helps_for_Sundays.htm accessed 1/5/2013

Finding Jesus

Luke 2:41-52, Colossians 3:12-17

Have you ever had a time when you are so mad at someone you could see red. They did something so stupid you don't understand how they could have possibly did it without realizing they were an idiot. Like when your brother brings up your ex boyfriend the first time he meets the new boyfriend, or your friend takes your car, hits a deer and then leaves it in the driveway for you. This is how I picture Mary and Joseph looking at Jesus when they finally find him and hear his explanation for why he was not in the caravan.

Jesus is 12. At the age of 12 many young men would be apprenticing, they would be treated not as children but young adults. They would have responsibilities and obligations. The family had traveled many miles together for the passover celebration and it would have been expected that Jesus would help get things packed up and join with everyone else to go back. He would know it is time to go home.

At the end of the first day of the journey he was no where to be found. I can see Mary and Joseph and their family searching frantically for him. Where did he go? How could they have lost him? God asked me to raise his son and now we have gone and lost him!? If I was them I would also be thinking about what kind of punishment I was going to give him when I got my hands on him. Then the frenzy turns into three days of searching and going back to the temple. As a mother, by that third day there would be no thought of punishment just gratefulness that I found him and that he was okay. Then, I probably would be angry with his peevish response, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?” This was most likely also insulting to Joseph who was representing his earthly father and had adopted him as fully as any father of the time could have.

I truly tried to put myself in Mary's shoes. Would I be so grateful to find him in one piece and safe that I would not mind his response, or would I be angry because he had made me worry so. Would I think that Jesus knew what he needed to do and where he should have been and he didn't even have the courtesy to tell me what he was doing? Would I have seen red because of his blatant disregard for what I wanted or would I have been grateful for him being okay? Or perhaps both.

Isn't this like our relationships with Jesus now. We go along on our way thinking Jesus is with us and then when we can't find him we get upset, sometimes we get down right mad at Jesus. Sometimes we expect Jesus to be in something and we can't see him. We can't see how it is going to work out, what is going on, where we are going or what we are supposed to be doing. WE feel lost and worried and alone. Yet Jesus is right where Jesus needs to be doing right what Jesus needs to be doing – just like at the temple. When we finally figure out a piece of the puzzle and look back and see where Jesus was and what he was doing are we mad or grateful? Are we still angry that our plan didn't work out? That our little journey home was four times as long and took a huge detour? Are we grateful for that? Or do we get so caught up in our plan that we don't take time to be grateful for the detour and all that we learned on it.

The Colossians passage that we read at the beginning of service (Colossians 3:12-17) tells us in v. 17 that “whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” We don't know where Jesus is in our lives all the time. That is just how it is. Mary and Joseph didn't either. If they didn't and they were his earthly parents then why should we be any different? We are promised that he he is our Emmanuel – God with us. We know that he walks beside us and never leaves us. From Jeremiah 29:11 we hear from God “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 an a future.” With all of that when we can't know what God is doing, when we don't understand or are left looking and wondering as Mary and Joseph were, we are called by Colossians to remember to do everything in the name of the Lord and give thanks for everything. We are called to find things to be grateful for and to keep Jesus at the center of our lives even when we are wondering around feeling lost. We are never truly lost from Jesus, we may just now understand what he is doing. Just like Mary and Joseph we just may not “get it” until later on when we can see the big picture and Jesus is in front of us. Perhaps during this Christmas season and throughout the entire New Year that is exactly what we are called to do – be grateful and do everything in Jesus' name – even when we can't seem to see what Jesus is doing in our lives and we can't find any answers.

Bible Study - Redefining Evangelism

Hello all you happy readers.  I have a Bible study coming in January on redefining Evangelism that I just finished pulling together for a class. It is a way to look at some of those key words - salvation, kingdom of God, evangelism and see what that means to us now.  It also helps you to look at evangelism differently than knocking on doors, and screaming about hell from the pulpit.   It is more about living your faith everyday.  Let me know if you are interested and I can get you details.

Happy Holidays!
Missy

Salvation now!

Luke 1:68-79

At seminary a few weeks ago I heard a sermon on being in the in between times. We are on a journey and we are in between what we want to be and what we are , and what we had been. We are in a journey in school heading to graduation, but are in the in between. But this is true for all of us. We are in between starting a job and retirement. We have in between birth and death, we are an in between people – looking forward at where we want to go, looking back at where we have been and experiencing the now in all its imperfections. That too is Zechariah's story. In Luke 1:68-79 Zechariah speaks for the first time in nine long months. He is told of the coming of his son John and because of his and Elizabeth's age does not quite believe it. So he is struck mute until the child came and Zechariah nodded his agreement with Elizabeth that their son should be John. Which was against the culture and customs of the time. His community expected the son to be named Zechariah!

Zechariah knew from what the angels had told him that he was at the cusp of a new time. That he was in between seeing it actualized and it beginning. He was stuck in the in between. But in that uncomfortable time of knowing change is here and knowing what that is going to unfold like he sang this psalm of joy to the Lord.

Zechariah reminds us that God has been in the mix since the beginning. God has been with Israel in the prophets and the covenants and never has God been unfaithful to his people. God is always faithful to his covenants from Abraham on. He testifies to his son being the one to point us toward the savior of us all, and gratitude for that savior. He does not yet know that John will die fulfilling God's will to point to the savior and encourage people to repent of their separations from God. He does not know how this savior will play out for the world, but he is faithfully waiting in the in between time for God to fulfill God's promises.

Finally he reminds us that the savior will (1:77) “give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. (v. 78) By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, (v.79) to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

That is the summary of Jesus' time on Earth and what the Holy Spirit does for us today! Today this very day a bit more than 2000 years later this message is for us. Knight and Powe remind us of how Wesley saw salvation”

        “Wesley believes in going to heaven, but that is not for him the heart of salvation. Commenting on             Ephesians 2:8 (“Ye are saved through faith”) Wesley says the salvation spoken of in this text “is not a blessing which lies on the other side of death. . . . It is not something at a distance;” instead “it is a present thing, a blessing which, through the free mercy of God, ye are now in possession of.”6 It is the gift of a new life, a life we have in the present, and which death cannot take from us. It is heaven in the heart.”¹

Salvation is a new life now. The forgiveness of our separations our sins is for now in our in between, while we are on our journey. The new life awaits us, the joy, and the “way of peace” as Zechariah says it is here. This is our story at advent. Advent is a time of waiting for the coming of Christ. It is the in between time when we examine our lives and see where we are on this journey. Are we ready for salvation – for a deeper relationship with Christ in our life now? Are we willing to stop holding onto what we think we should be doing, what should be happening and truly offer it up to God. Are we ready to truly, daily give our lives over to God so that we can experience salvation, and peace in our everyday. A way of living where no matter how bad our circumstances are we can truly find comfort in the Lord, offer our worries, fears and anxieties to the Lord and experience the joy of not walking this road alone. To know that the Holy Spirit walks beside us, that we are not alone in our sadness and loneliness. This is Zechariah's prayer for each of us. This is my prayer. May our God who came to us as Jesus, to show us the path to salvation break into our everyday lives and walk with us in peace. Let us truly get ready to invite Christ into our hearts and lives again this Christmas season.

Amen.

1Knight, Henry; Powe, Doug (2006-10-24). Transforming Evangelism, The Wesleyan Way of Sharing Faith (Kindle Locations 75-79). Discipleship Resources. Kindle Edition.