Rev. Dr. John Judson
April 8, 2018 Listen Print Version Genesis 12:1-3; Ephesians 1:1-14 “You…you Americans. I choose you.” I can still hear the words echoing in my head. Cindy and I, along with another couple, had taken a spring break trip to Venice. One day we rented a car and headed to Verona. It was late in the day and we needed to eat. So, we were wandering a plaza filled with multiple outdoor dining spaces. I would like to say I was looking for the best place, but I wasn’t. I was looking for the cheapest. As we were examining the menus and their prices we heard, “You…you Americans. I choose you. You are always in a hurry to eat. Come here and I will give you the best meal of your life and show you how you should eat.” The person speaking was the smiling, pleasant looking, owner of one of the open-air cafes. I’m still not sure why we agreed but we did. In fact, not only did we agree to eat at his establishment, but we let him choose the menu…and I didn’t even look at the prices. In the end, we all thought it was one of the best, and most leisurely meals we had ever eaten…and still think so to this day. “You…you Americans I choose you.” What I would like you to do for a moment is to close your eyes and imagine hearing those words, “You, you people I choose you.” But instead of imagining a wonderful café owner saying them, imagine for a moment, that it is God speaking. “You, you people, I choose you.” If you can do that, then you can understand the heart of the Letter to the Ephesians. You can begin to sense how it is that God chooses individuals to be Alleluia People. As a reminder, Alleluia People are those who through faith in Jesus Christ live lives filled with gratefulness, joyfulness and fearlessness. What Paul tells those folks in Ephesus, and tells us here this morning, is that we are Alleluia People, not because of luck or fate, but because we have been chosen by God to be so. Just as surely as Abram and Sarai were chosen by God, the Ephesians and we were chosen. In fact, he says we were chosen before the foundation of the world to be Alleluia People. And as those who have been chosen, in order that we live into our new Alleluia People lives, we are invited to an amazing five course spiritual meal that has been prepared for us that we might become capable of being the Alleluia People God desires us to be. If you are ready then, let us go to the table. Course one is redemption. Paul tells us that in Christ we have been given the gift of redemption. Redemption is that process where a person is moved from a captivity to freedom; from being useless to useful. One of my vivid memories as a child was getting Green Stamps. Green Stamps were given away for purchases at grocery stores and gas stations. People saved them and put them in little books. My mother would always let my brothers and I lick the stamps and stick them in the books. When you had enough books, you visited the Redemption Center and exchanged them for things like toasters and waffle irons. In a sense then you were redeeming them. You were taking them out of captivity and into freedom where they could be useful and live into their toaster potential. This is the sense in which Paul used redemption. We were moved from captivity, perhaps captivity to our self-centered lives, and into a new freedom of Christ-centered lives in which we could live into our full potential as Alleluia People. Course two is forgiveness. Paul tells us that we have been given the gift of forgiveness. What this means is that our past is our past. One of the great problems of life is that sin and sins, refuse to allow us to move forward in our lives of faith. They are like anchors, dug in, restricting our movement. Not allowing us to move forward and living into our potential as Alleluia People. Forgiveness is alike a pair of bolt cutters that snaps the anchor chain and allows us to move forward. To move more and more toward being Alleluia People. Course three is wisdom and insight. What this means is that we can begin to see God’s purpose behind the work of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. We can see in Jesus what an alleluia life ought to look like. We can see the path that we are to be taking as we live into our Alleluia Person potential. We can also see this path as an outpouring of God’s love for the world, intended to transform us. Course four is inheritance. This is where our story connects with the ancient story of God’s people. The children of Abraham were chosen by God to be blessed so that they could be a blessing to the world; so that they could be God’s change agents working to make this an alleluia world. By our faith in Christ we have been adopted into that family of blessing and so we share in their inheritance of blessings and blessing. We become capable not only of being Alleluia People for ourselves and for our own journeys of faith, but we become those who can bless others that they might discover what it is to be Alleluia People as well. Course five is the Holy Spirit. We have been given the very Spirit of God to live and move within us, insuring us that all that we have been given and promised in this spiritual meal will never be lost. I am not sure how many of you may remember or have seen the videos of some of the first space walks in the Gemini program. As the astronauts left the capsule, they would be tethered by a cable which provided them with life support and insured that they did not drift into space. This is what it is like to be sealed in the Holy Spirit. We are tethered to God and God’s blessings. We are insured that the life support we need to be Alleluia People will never be lost. Even with all of that having been said, there is still one more gift we receive, and it is probably the greatest gift of all; that this meal is already paid for. Unlike in Italy where we had to pull out our plastic to pay for dinner, Jesus Christ, in his life, death and resurrection, paid the full price so that we can come to the table and feast. In fact, there is nothing we have or could pay that would make this meal available to us. Our good works cannot buy this meal. Our prayers cannot buy this meal. Our failings cannot keep us from coming to this meal. All we can do is participate in this act of infinite love. This morning then as the communion elements are passed I hope that you will ask yourselves this question, “How I am allowing this meal, this five-course meal, to empower to me to be an Alleluia Person and to be part of an Alleluia People?” Sunday, April 1, 2018
Rev. Dr. John Judson Listen Print Version Isaiah 25:6-9; Luke 24:1-12 He stared at the columbarium plaque. At the age of 104 it was not something Fletcher had ever wanted to see; the plaque on his wife Bea’s niche. She had died a year earlier and at the memorial service he had refused to go outside and watch her ashes be interred. But a year later, on All Saints Sunday, Fletcher was willing to have his son wheel him outside to see her plaque. As his son tells the story, his father stared for a long time in silence, seemingly taking it the reality of his wife’s death. Then, slowly he looked up at this son and said, “I guess nobody gets out of here alive, do they?” Smiling, the son replied, “No dad, they don’t.” Less than two weeks later Fletcher died. After the memorial service and the placing of his father’s ashes in the niche beside his wife’s, the son turned to me and recounted that moment. Then with a wry smile, he said, “Yeah, I think my dad thought he would be the first one.” Nobody gets out of here alive. It is the one reality with which human beings have been dealing with since, well since, there were human beings. And yet, for almost the same amount of time human beings have lived with this remote hope, that there is something on the other side of death. I say this because archeologists have found evidence of religious grave goods, meaning items that are placed in graves with the deceased, dating back at least 30,000 years. Some eastern religions talked about and believed in reincarnation, while others believed that their ancestors became ghosts. Egyptians talked about a person’s ka, or spirit moving to the Kingdom of the dead. Greeks and Romans talked about Hades. Jews talked about Sheol. Norse religion had Valhalla and other realms of the dead. Native Americans spoke of the dead going into the Spirit world or perhaps becoming stars. Though many civilizations didn’t believe in an afterlife, most had some remote hope that there was something on the other side of death. It was into this living with this struggle between the reality that no one gets out of there alive and the remote hope that there is something more, that the prophet Isaiah’s words came pouring out and offering something completely new. He declared that a day would come when God would defeat death itself. Listen again. “And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces.” It was a remarkable thought. Could it be true, the people wondered that this God of creation could indeed change the rules of the game and create a new reality in which death no longer ruled. Slowly out of this prophetic vision arose the idea of resurrection, meaning that even after death, people would be raised and live again. That’s when people said, “Alleluia” because death might lose. Time passed. People died. No resurrection. No one got out of here alive. All they had was a remote hope. The hope though lived on. With each new generation there were those who hoped and prated that Isaiah’s words would become more than a remote hope. The people looked for the one messenger of God, the messiah who might make this possible. Who would usher in God’s kingdom in which the last enemy, death itself would be defeated. Jesus of Nazareth was one of those on whom many placed their remote hope. People flocked to hear him, to be healed by and hopefully to become part of that new kingdom over which death had no power. When he came into Jerusalem they cried out, “Alleluia” because they thought that the kingdom of God had come, death had lost and life has won. But all of that ended one Passover night. The authorities came for him. Arrested him. Tried him. Crucified him. And he died. And he was buried. All the remote hope remained nothing more than that, remote hope. One more time, the possibilities of Isaiah’s vision becoming a reality, faded away. On the first day of the week the women who had followed Jesus came to his tomb. All they had was a remoter hope than when they had first begun. They were there to mourn their friend, their teacher and the loss of their hope once again. What they found however, stunned and frightened them. There was no body to be anointed. There was no body to mourn over. Instead there were two men in dazzling clothes standing beside them. Speaking to the two terrified women, the men asked why they were looking for the living among the dead? Jesus, they continued, was not dead but was alive, resurrected. In that moment the women began to make sense of so much of what Jesus had taught them, that he would have to die in order to be raised. That he would have to die in order to defeat death. The women ran to tell the other disciples saying to themselves, “Alleluia” death is defeated and life has won. Without expecting it, without realizing it, what these women had stumbled into was not a new hope to replace their remote hope. What they had stumbled into in that empty tomb was a new reality; the reality predicted by Isaiah, that death had been swallowed up forever. They had stumbled into an alleluia life. This my friends, is the gift of Easter. It is a reminder to all of us that we no longer live simply with a remote hope. We live in a new reality. We live in an alleluia world in which we are alleluia people. What does that mean? As Alleluia people, we live with gratefulness. We live with the gratefulness that God keeps God’s promises and especially this promise to defeat death now and forever. We are grateful that death is no more; no more for ourselves and for all we love. As Alleluia people, we live with joyfulness. We live with joy because we know that we are loved; that we matter. We matter so much to God that God was willing to die and rise for us and for all whom we love. We have joy because we know that God’s love does not end at death, but gives us life eternal. Alleluia people live with fearlessness. We are fearless in the face of all that comes to us because we know that in life and death we belong to God; that God has given us a life that no one can take from us, and so we can live faithfully in every moment never fearing what might transpire. Nobody gets out of here alive. That is what Fletcher saw. That is what we see. But that is not what we know. We know that we live in a new reality as alleluia people, living gratefully, joyfully and fearlessly because God has raised Jesus from the dead. My challenge to you then is to ask yourself, how am I living each day as an alleluia person. Rev. Joanne Blair
March 25, 2018 Listen Print Version Isaiah 50:4-9a Matthew 5:9, Mark 11:1-10 “Don’t get mad, get even.” We often laugh when we hear this quote (and its variations), as it’s often heard in comedy settings. But this quote, attributed to Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and used by his sons, Jack and Bobby, actually speaks to wrath. Many of us have heard, and perhaps used, this quote in our daily lives. As I was searching for the person this quote is credited to, I came across a book by the same title—its full title being, “Don’t Get Mad, Get Even… the Big Book of Revenge.” It’s described as: “More than 200 utterly satisfying ways to get revenge on the fatheads who make life that little bit less worth living every time they get out of bed.” Last published in 2006 and now out of print, you can still get it on Amazon through third-party sellers … and the going price is a mere $558.10. And while I’m sure (at least I hope!) that people bought the book for a grin and a giggle, I just couldn’t find the humor in it. Anger, is a normal emotion. We all feel angry at times. Anger can allow us to recognize and respond to injustices toward ourselves, and in the world. It can motivate us to seek solutions… and encourage us to heal damage. But anger left unchecked is not only unhealthy, it can be dangerous and destructive. It can turn in on itself, feeding on itself until it distorts our sense of right and wrong …. and it can turn into wrath. Wrath transcends anger and turns our agenda to hurting and bringing pain to those who hurt us … or those whom we fear have the power. Dante called wrath a “love of justice perverted to revenge and spite.” Wrath is considered one of the “deadly sins” because it leads us to work for vengeance instead of love. And, as with the other sins we have examined throughout this series, there is an antidote: being a peacemaker. “Blessed are the peacemakers…” Notice that Jesus did not say “peace-lovers, or peace-hopers, peace-dreamers or even peace-prayers”, … he said the peacemakers. Too often in our world, we associate “peace” with the absence of war. In the 1900’s, 292 peace treaties were signed. So far in this century, 39 have been officially recorded. Do we live in a peaceful world? I think not. Certainly not the kind of peace Jesus is talking about. And in our personal lives, when we settle an argument, we say we have made peace. But have we? So often we harbor bad feelings, even resentment, and carry that baggage with us. Is that really peace? When Jews greeted each other, they would say “Shalom” – one of my top five favorite words in the Bible. We all know that Shalom means peace … but do we really understand the scope of it? This big simple-sounding word means health, prosperity, fulfillment, freedom from trouble, harmony, and wholeness. They were wishing each other the full presence, peace, harmony and prosperity of all the blessedness of God. It’s a beautiful word. The Greek verb that “peacemakers” comes from means “to do, or to create.” It is an energetic word demanding action and initiative. A peacemaker is never passive … their very being is always active in the making of peace. Matthew 5:9 says “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” The original Greek translates, … “they will be sons of God.” The reason I bring this up, is that there is a difference in intention. We are all God’s children, and the use of the word “sons” does not leave we women out of the blessing! But “Children of God” means being part of the family. “Sons of God” was used to mean not only a part of the family, but also those who share resemblance to their heavenly Father. Those who actively participate in God’s mission of peace … in Shalom. Jesus is saying that as we become peacemakers, we will be recognized as the sons and daughters of God who share in God’s name and God’s mission. Indeed, we are all God’s children … we are all part of God’s family. But are we all peacemakers? Are we all sons and daughters of God? Peacemaking, true peacemaking, is a divine work. And Jesus is the ultimate peacemaker. On this day, Palm Sunday, we celebrate Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. On that first Palm Sunday, the crowds lay down their branches and cloaks, and spread them on the street before him … literally giving Jesus the royal treatment. They had heard about his miracles and regarded him as the leader who would deliver them from the Roman Empire’s domination. Quoting Psalm 118, and seeing the prophecy of Zechariah fulfilled, they rejoiced as they welcomed their new King. Jesus would now free them from oppression. Now things would be the way they should be! But Jesus himself came profoundly-- yet quietly … proclaiming the peaceful reign of God. New Testament scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan remind us that there was also another procession that day. As Jesus came from the east, a Roman procession came from the west. As Jesus came on a donkey in peace, the other procession came with horses and weapons. As one came for deliverance, the other came to ensure oppression. As one came in peace, the other came in threat of violence. Jesus could have retaliated, but he chose not to. There are a lot of things Jesus could have done, but he came with an agenda. There are those who see Jesus as being meek at this point … he was not. Matthew 5:5 of the Beatitudes says, “Blessed are the meek…” One way to define meekness is “strength under control.” We often think of a meek person as someone who is passive and lets others take advantage of them. This was not Jesus. Biblical meekness requires strength … a lot of strength. Biblical meekness requires control … a lot of control. Jesus had both … and he was incredibly proactive. Those with Biblical meekness trust in God, commit their way - and their ways - to God, and wait for God. Sounds like the makings of a peacemaker, doesn’t it? “But sometimes I just get so angry,” we say. Well, there is a place for anger. Anger at injustice. But there is no place for wrath. “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.” What we are called to do is make a place for Shalom. We all have dozens of opportunities every single day to make peace in our world. But we need to be sensitive enough to see our opportunities, and close enough to God that we will choose to do so. It is then that we become not only God’s children, but also sons and daughters of God … reflecting God’s likeness. And so, the challenge is to ask ourselves, “What can I do this week to be a peacemaker? What can I do to be a reflection of God’s Shalom?” As we enter into this most Holy Week, may we focus on what is known as the Peace Prayer of Saint Francis. Let us pray: Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope; Where there is darkness, light; Where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; To be understood as to understand; To be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen. Rev. Dr. John Judson
March 18, 2018 Listen Print Version 2 Samuel 13: 1-2, 7-19 Matthew 5:8; Philippians 4:4-9 You saw it. You heard about it. You have to have it. It is the 208-in-one tool that will allow you to take apart and put back together a Boeing 777. And it fits in your pocket. You saw it. You heard about it. You have to have it. It is the two-pound burger with a pound of bacon inside. You can just taste it melting in your mouth. You saw it. You heard about it. You have to have it. It is the i-phone twenty. Not only does it search the internet and make phone calls. It thinks for you and makes your coffee in the morning. You saw it. You heard about it. You have to have it. It is the self-driving sedan that has 400 horsepower, goes 167mph and will gives you a massage on the way to work. You saw it. You heard about it. You have to have it. Then you get it and suddenly, it is just a tool, a burger, a phone and a car. You wonder why you had to have it. You have buyer’s remorse…but wait there is something else. You see it. You hear about it. You have to have it. Ever been there…even a little? Well if you have then you have had at least a mild case of Lust. I realize that most of you, when you heard that the sin of the week was lust, were probably expecting me to talk about sex. And that would make sense since most dictionary definitions imply that lust and sex are inseparable; and all of the reference material I use to prepare my sermons focuses on sex, and nothing more; and that so much of what we read in the Bible about lust seems to have to do with sex. Yet, lust is about far more than sex. In fact, excessive sexual lust is only one of many symptoms of lust. Think about how we use the word. People lust for power. They lust for wealth. They lust for fame. They lust for sex. With that in mind, how then should we define lust? Since you asked, here is my definition. Lust is the desperate drive to be complete. Let me explain. All human beings are born incomplete. What I mean by this is that all human beings are born with a need to be in communion with God and neighbor. We have this place inside of us that can only be filled by authentic love and relationship. We can see this in the second creation story when God says of Adam, it is not good for man to be alone…and not simply because he can’t load the dishwasher correctly. It is that we are created to be complete only in community. Unfortunately, all of us, to some degree or another never find ourselves completed. So, we hunt for those things that will accomplish that task. The problem with this is that, to paraphrase country singer Johnny Lee, we go looking for completeness is all the wrong places. We look for it in sex, in material possessions, in experiences and so on. What happens when we don’t find that thing that completes us is that we become more and more desperate, and lust is born. It becomes this insatiable craving for completeness. And unfortunately, this desperate desire not only leaves those who have it unhappy and incomplete, but it leaves behind it a wake of pain and destruction. This understanding of lust is at the heart of our Old Testament lesson this morning. The characters involved are Amnon and Tamar. They are step siblings. Amnon “falls in love” with his step sister so much so that he becomes “ill.” This my friends is not love, but lust. It is a desperate desire to be made complete. Somehow Amnon believes that if he can “have” Tamar, that his life will be full. The problem is that she does not share his lust. The result is that Amnon, with the help of a friend, devises a scheme so that he can have Tamar. When she refuses, his lust causes him to rape her. The results of this horrific act are first, that Amnon becomes disgusted with Tamar because his rape of her did not complete him, and Tamar’ life is destroyed because she is no longer a virgin and so cannot marry. This is how lust works. It focuses on an object. Obsesses over the object. Gains the object. Then is deeply disappointed when the object does not fulfill their longing for completeness, which leads to the object being discarded. Lust leaves the one lusting unhappy and the thing or person, lusted after, abandoned and used up. We might think, that after almost three thousand years, we would have learned to deal with lust. Unfortunately, rather than learning to deal with it, we have learned how to use it. We have learned how to use lust to make money. The pornography industry has learned how to use sexual lust to sell magazines and videos. The food services industry has learned how to use it to draw us in to eat food that is probably not the best for us. The smart phone industry uses it to sell the latest phone that is probably not much better than the one we have now. In fact, Apple is worried that lust for their phones may be running out. And Kia has Emmerson Fittipaldi driving his car, with tires smoking with a 365hp engine, hoping that our car and speed lust will draw us into their dealerships. And in the end, these lusts lead us to be unhappy, disappointed, in debt, with poor health and often with broken and shattered relationships. All of this leads to the question, how do complete ourselves and leave lust behind? The answer is that we become those with purity of heart. Blessed are the pure in heart Jesus says, for they will see God. In our culture, to speak of purity often brings up an image of some holier-than-thou, glowing figure dressed in white, who never has any fun. Purity in Greek has a very different meaning. It is more closely linked with the idea of purifying something by removing the impurities that are in it and adding beneficial ones to it. You can think of it as what we do with water. We floc it to separate sediment, then we filter it and then we purify it while at the same time we add fluoride to it to make it ever better. This is a good way to think about Jesus’ use of pure. The pure are those who are in the process of ridding themselves of the objects of their affections that do not complete them, while at the same time filling themselves with those that do. They are intentionally moving their focus away from non-life completing “things”, and back to those attributes and virtues that allow them to connect with God and neighbor, thereby finding completeness; namely those things that Paul writes about in his letter to the church in Philippi. He writes, “Finally, 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. Keep 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.” Lust is out there. Lust is in here (in us). It is the result of being incomplete human beings. But you and I have a choice as to how we let it drive our lives. We can give in to it and find ourselves continually disappointed and unhappy. Or we can begin purifying our hearts by removing the objects of lust and replacing them with the virtues of God, and in the process, seeing the love of God filling our lives and moving us toward completion. That is my challenge then, to ask ourselves, how are we working to purify our lives that we might be made complete and whole in Christ? Rev. Dr. John Judson
March 11, 2018 Listen Print Version Matthew 5:7; Luke 12:13-21 How many of you here this morning saw the movie Finding Nemo? For those of you who never saw it, it is a movie about a Clown Fish, Nemo, who gets separated from his family, and the ensuing adventure as Nemo’s father goes in search of him. It had everything that a movie ought to have. It had comedy. It had drama. It had great characters. It showed us what bravery and loyalty look like. It even had a happy ending. But the best parts for me were the sea gulls, as they zipped around the screen saying…and you can say it with me. “Mine, mine, mine.” This was one of the best parts because it not only reminds me of how gulls sound, but it also reminds me of the way our children once sounded. “It’s mine and you can’t have it.” It was then the first image that came to my mind when I began to think about greed; people who went around saying, “Mine, mine, mine.” But the reality is that those gulls are not greedy. They are hungry. Rather than greedy they are needy. And when they are full, they stop saying, “Mine.” I’ve never seen a gull, take more fish than they need, fill up a cooler with them and then keep other gulls away. They only take what they need. Greed is different. I define greed by using a three-part test. Greed is when people say “Mine, mine, mine” over something that they do not need, do not appreciate (or are not appreciative of) and do not share. All three of these are necessary for greed. What this means is that all of you gear heads with classic cars are safe, because even though you don’t need that hemi-cuda in the garage and you don’t share it, you do, or at least I hope you do, truly appreciate it. But, back to greed. We can see all three of these factors at work in our Jesus’ story for the morning, which by the way, Jesus told as a story of greed. First the farmer does not need all the grain that the ground produced. He could spend the rest of his life trying to eat it and he would never get through it. In fact, Jesus’ audience would know that so much grain would probably rot before the owner could eat it. Second, he was neither appreciative of, nor did he really appreciate his grain windfall. If he were, he had would have joined his fellow Jews out in the fields during the Feast of Booths, and given thanks to God. All he could think about was what to do with it. There was no sense of gratitude or even accomplishment. Finally, he did not share it. Again, to fully appreciate his not sharing, the Jewish Law was very clear that one was to share what one had with widows, orphans and the poor. To not share with the multitude of the poor was a sin. This was greed at its worst. Some of you here this morning, might wonder why this is such a big deal. After all, who does greed hurt? The answer is that greed is a sin that hurts not only the person who is greedy, but others as well. Greed affects the greedy person by isolating them from others. All that matters to them is themselves and what belongs to them. If they connect with others, they might have to share, and they cannot bear to do this. Walls are then created to keep other people out. By keeping people out, the greedy become less and less human and begin to simply be what they possess. For those of you who have ever seen or read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is the perfect example of how greed isolates. He has great wealth but he is all alone. Greed also affects others. We live in a world of great need. People are hungry. People are thirsty for clean water. People need housing. People need so much. What greed does is that it takes what might be shared with others and keeps it locked away. This is the image of the man building better and bigger barns. Rather than selling some and giving alms to the poor, or giving away the grain to the hungry, he keeps it all for himself, and others suffer. Greed is a sin that cuts both ways. So how do we turn things around? The answer is to be merciful. Jesus tells his friends that, “Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy.” This may appear to be a bit odd because we usually don’t associate greed and mercy. Sometimes when we think of mercy, we think of the “mercy rule” in sports where when one team is so far ahead of another that they stop the game, so the losing team is not totally embarrassed. Sometimes we see mercy as what a judge gives to a defendant. Rather than sentencing someone to harshest penalty the judge shows mercy and lightens their sentence. While both hint at what Jesus is referring to here, there is another aspect of mercy that comes to us from the Psalms, and that is mercy refers to God showing mercy by giving human beings things they cannot earn or provide for themselves. God gives us this creation. God gives us love. God gives us forgiveness. In our story this morning we see mercy being extended to the farmer in that it is the earth that gave him the crop. Jesus’ listeners would know that the farmer did not provide the rain, or make the original seed, or probably even work the fields. That would have been done by others. The farmer had been shown the mercy of God, but in his greed failed to pass that mercy on. But the gift of God is that when we show mercy, we reverse the curse of greed in two ways. First, when we show mercy we leave isolation behind. When we show mercy by sharing what we have as God shares what God has created, then we become connected with those with whom we share. The walls between us and them come down allowing us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Second, when we show mercy, we offer to others what they cannot earn or provide for themselves, and in so doing make a difference in the lives of others. Greed is left behind and mercy becomes a way of life. And by so doing we open ourselves up more and more to the mercy that God shows to us. Returning to A Christmas Carol, we see what happens when Scrooge begins to show mercy. He reconnects with his nephew and family, and Tiny Tim gets his surgery. Mercy wins and greed loses. How can we do this? How can we learn to show mercy? How can we leave behind the words, “Mine, mine, mine”? The answer is to say, “Ours, ours, ours.” For those of you who are history buffs, this is not socialism or communism. This is a way of understanding what we have is the result of the mercy of God. To say what we have is, “ours” is to say it belongs to God, it is ours on loan, and it is for the benefit of others. In the other words, the “our” in ours, is God, us and neighbor. By thinking in terms of “ours” we begin to be those who show mercy in all that we do and with all that we have. My challenge to you for this week then is to ask yourselves, “How am I seeing all that I have as “ours” and not “mine”? Rev. Dr. John Judson
March 4, 2018 Listen Print Version Ecclesiastes 2:1-17 Matthew 5:6: Philippians 2:12-13 Finally, we have a sin that we don’t have to worry about, Sloth. I say that because if there is any civilization that is always busy, it is ours. We work hard. We play hard. We power-nap. We give 110% if not more…not sure how that is possible but we do. Half of us do not use all the vacation we are owed and as a nation we give up nearly 650 million days of vacation. We are driven to do well and to do better than the person next to us. Sloth? We don’t have time for sloth. And in terms of hours worked in a year, well we are only 17th, which is due to so many people working part time. So, we need to get going and become number one…work, work, work people. I know that we like to think of whatever the youngest generation coming up as being slothful; that they do not know how to work. But that has been happening since time immemorial. The reality is that we are a hard-working, hard-driving people who spend less time that people in other Western nations stopping to smell the roses, or even to notice them on the way to whatever the next “thing” is we need to do. I suppose then that we could just let sloth go, except…except we can’t, because it has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with our inner-lives. The sin of sloth is not about being lazy. It is not about not going for all the gusto. It is a spiritual disease. One way to describe sloth is that it occurs when we go into spiritual retirement. Spiritual retirement happens when we decide that we have learned all that we can learn, that we know all that we can know about this God stuff, so we no longer need to bother trying to grow in faith and faithfulness. We have been to church, check. We’ve prayed, check. We have tried to make the world better, check. We’ve learned all we can learn, check. We’ve done all that we can do, check. Time to kick back, relax and go into spiritual retirement. And, so long as I stay busy it is all good. This is why Paul warns his readers that they are to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling. He senses that it is easy for Christians to go into spiritual retirement, to believe that as long as they have professed Jesus, then all is well and nothing more needs to be done. He insists instead, that they ought to continually be at work, living their faith. Even so, this still raises the question of why does Sloth rate a place in the top seven sins. Sure, we are to be working on our lives of faith, but is spiritual retirement all that bad? The answer is that spiritual retirement leads to spiritual starvation, which ultimately cripples our very humanity. It leads us to becoming no more than empty shells of what God created us to be. One way to think about this is to consider how we maintain our physical existence. We do so by eating and drinking. We know that we need to consume carbs and proteins, fruits and vegetables and an occasional cheeseburger. We know that we need to stay hydrated. We need to drink enough to keep our body going. The same is true for our souls. For if we believe scripture, there is more to us than our physical existence. There is an inner life of the soul. This needs to be fed as well. And it is fed through what the church has called the means of grace, or spiritual practices. These include things such as worship, prayer, service, fellowship, scripture study; actions that allow God to fill us with God’s presence and power. It is in these actions that we are made into the people God created us to be. The gift of God, as Jesus tells us, is that if we hunger and thirst for God’s presence, we will be filled. Jesus puts it this way, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled. To be clear here, we ought to recall that righteousness is not self-righteousness. It is not about becoming somehow morally better than everyone else. Righteousness here means living in right relationship with God. It means staying connected to God and living as God desires. It means taking in the love and grace of God and giving it away to others. The only way we can do that then, as Jesus says, is to hunger and thirst for it. We are to not only know that we need this spiritual nourishment, but we are to desire it. We are to remember, as I said a moment ago, that as surely as food and water nourish our physical selves, our connection with God nourishes our inner-selves. And so, when we desire these things, Jesus tells us that we will be filled. We will be filled with the love of God. We will be filled with the presence of God. And rather than end up like the writer of Ecclesiastes who could find no meaning and purpose in his life, we will find ourselves continually challenged with new opportunities to love God and neighbor. This morning we are given a wonderful opportunity. We are given the opportunity to be fed both physically and spiritually at this table. In the bread and cup, we see, touch and taste Gods love for us. We connect with God. As we pass the elements from one to another we connect in community with others. My challenge for you then on this morning is this, to ask yourselves, how am I hungering and thirsting after God such that I am filled and made fully human again? Rev. Dr. John Judson
February 25, 2018 Listen Print Version Genesis 4:1-16; Romans 17:9-21 I want to begin with a diagnostic test this morning. What I want you to do is to write down the numbers 1 – 7. Then if you answer in the affirmative to any of the following questions, either circle or place a check mark by the number. Questions one, did you root for the Philadelphia Eagles in this year’s Super Bowl? Question two, did you root for the New England Patriots? Question three, did you not care at all? Question four, if you rooted for the Eagles did you do so because you wanted to see the Patriots and Tom Brady lose? Be honest now, no one will see your answers. Question five, if you rooted for the New England Patriots were you angry that the Eagles won? Question six, if you rooted for the New England Patriots do you believe that they were cheated out of a victory by the referees? OK, if you checked even one of questions four, five or six then you have confirmed case of the sin of envy. And not only that, but it may be that those of you who checked question one and not two, might have a slight case as well. I realize that this may seem like an odd way to start off a talk about envy, but it gets to the heart of envy because envy is one of those sins that is diagnosed by its symptoms, more than clarified by a definition, and the symptoms are all there. So, what are the symptoms? They can be summed up in the letters, RPD, which stand for Resent, Prevent and Destroy. First there is resentment of the good fortune of others. Envy resents the fact that someone else might have something, or has achieved something that we have not. Thus, people resent Brady because he is successful, rich, good looking and married to one of the world’s great super models, or people resent the Eagles because they won. Second, is prevent, which is what happens when we resent. We are prevented from enjoying and sharing in the success of others. Those who don’t like Brady and Patriots cannot enjoy the quality of their game or his amazing abilities. Those who resent the Eagles can’t share in their amazing victory. Thus, they cannot share joy. Finally, there is destroy. This is where envy leads. It leads to a desire to destroy, or in this case, defeat the enemy; defeat the one we resent. We can see RPD at work in our story from Genesis this morning. The background is that Cain and Abel are brothers. Each has been assigned a different way of providing for themselves. Cain is a farmer and Abel is a shepherd. Each decides to bring to God an offering of their produce. Abel’s is accepted and Cain’s is not. We have no idea why this is so. We have no idea how they know that one’s was accepted but the other’s was not. All we have before us is the story. Needless to say, Cain begins to become envious of Abel. Why was Abel’s accepted and his was not? Why does God think that Cain is not as good as Abel? After all Cain probably worked harder than Abel. All Abel did was following some smelly sheep around. The story tells us that his countenance fell. Here we can see the resentment building. Here we can see that Cain is prevented from being happy for his brother that God had accepted his brother’s offering. God tells Cain that, “Sin is lurking at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must master it.” The sin here is the green-eyed monster, which is slowly consuming him on the inside. Finally, this envy moves to the final step, where Cain takes Abel out into the field and kills him; the first case of domestic abuse. If you want to see this in the real world there are two places to which I would point you. The first is to a bumper sticker I saw on a semi-regular basis in Texas. It read, my kid can beat up your honor roll student. Here is envy for those whose children had done well and whose cars sported a bumper sticker saying, I am proud of my honor roll student. The second is in cases of domestic abuse. Envy is at the heart of this epidemic and happens when one partner resents the other’s success, friends, happiness, joy and is thus prevented from celebrating those things with them and this leads to destruction through mental, verbal, emotional or physical abuse. Envy is not pretty. Once again then, we ask, what is the antidote to this sin. The answer is to mourn, for when we mourn we are comforted. Again, this may appear to be a very strange way to look at escaping from the trap of envy, but bear with me. First, the word Jesus uses for “mourn” is a Greek word that connotes the deepest kind of mourning or grief. It was the kind of mourning one did at the death of a family member or close friend. So why, we might ask, would that sort of mourning free us from envy. The answer comes in the other way in which this word is used in scripture. It is used to describe the mourning the people of God did when they sinned. They mourned for their disobedience to God and their worship of other gods. We can also see how mourning is used in the story of Jonah. Jonah is sent to the people of Nineveh, the capital of the brutal regime of Assyria, to tell them to repent. Their response to this message was to mourn by covering themselves, and even their animals (a nice story telling touch) in sack-cloth and ashes as they mourned their sins. And when they did so, God forgave them. What mourning for our sins does is to move us out of the inward, all-consuming spiral of envy, and move us to spiraling outward to God who is ready to heal us. Again, we can see this movement in the story of Cain. God confronts Cain about his misdeed. At first Cain pretends he has no clue as to the whereabouts of his brother. When God reveals that creation itself, is crying out because of Cain’s murderous act, God pronounces his fate. Cain will be all alone. He will be vulnerable and could be killed at any moment. Cain’s response is to cry out. To mourn his fate. He mourns the reality of where his envy has led him. “Today,” he says, “You have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face.” In that moment of mourning, his deliverance comes. He has ceased to turn inward and has turned outward toward God. He seeks God’s protection. And God gives it. The one who mourns is comforted. The Greek word for comforted means to have someone come along side of you, of us. When Jesus speaks of blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted, he tells his listeners and us, that whether we mourn from the loss of someone we love, or for our sins, God will draw alongside of us. God will hold us up and restore us to full humanity. If we want to see what this restoration looks like, we need look no further than Paul’s letter to the Romans, where Paul reminds us that we are to weep when others weep and rejoice when others rejoice. We are to mourn our sin of envy to the point where we emerge from RPD and exercise LOVE instead. When we are able to do this, we will know that we are cured. The challenge I want to offer you this morning is this, to ask yourselves, how I am mourning my sin of envy, such that I rediscover my full humanity as one who loves rather than envys. Rev. Dr. John Judson
February 18, 2018 Listen Print Version Genesis 3:1-7; Matthew 5:1-3; Luke 15:11-24 She is 5’-5” tall. She weighs 115 pounds. She is seventeen years old and there she sat calm, cool and collected as she was being interviewed by Lester Holt. Chloe Kim had just won the gold medal for women’s half-pipe and was reflecting on the event. Holt asked her why, when she already had the gold medal won before her last run, did she go all out to have a better one. Her replay was that she was not there to beat anyone, she was there to do the best that she could. And then, almost as an aside, she said, “And I’m really proud of myself.” I am really proud of myself. What’s wrong with that? I ask because the first of the seven deadly sins is that of pride. Pride is referred to in negative connotations throughout the scriptures. Psalms, Proverbs and the prophets never view pride in a positive way. And yet, we teach our children to be proud of who they are; proud of their accomplishments. We encourage people to take pride in their schools, their friends and their nation. So, what’s wrong with that? The answer is nothing…nothing until pride turns to the dark side. Let me explain. Pride, as we have noted, is not necessarily a bad thing. It comes out of our sense of an appropriate love of self. Remember, that Jesus teaches us that we are to love others as we love…ourselves. We are to see ourselves as children of God, beloved, cared for and embraced for who we are, as we are. We are to see ourselves as individuals with gifts that we are called on to use for the good of God and the good of the world around us. When we use those gifts and use them well, it makes sense that we should take some pride in a job well done. The problem comes when sin enters the picture. What sin does is take what is good and suggest that if a little of it is good, then more is better. If a little pride is good, the more pride is better. And if more pride is better, then even more pride is better than that. This is where we encroach on the dark side of pride. What happens is that this dark side pride causes us to do three things. It causes us to demean others. After all if we are as good as we think we are then others are beneath us. It causes us to destroy relationships. Again, if we are better than others then we do not need them, so we cast them aside. Finally, it causes a diminishment of our own humanity. It does so because our pride has isolated us from the life that comes from God and neighbor. One way to see how this works is to go to Jesus’ story about the Prodigal. What’s at the heart of this story is pride. It’s the story about a man with two sons, both of whom are overflowing with dark-side-pride. This morning however, we will focus only on the younger son. The younger son’s dark-side-pride and its results can be seen in three events. First, the younger son believes that he deserves his inheritance even though his father is still alive and well. This dark-side-pride leads him to demean his father, by treating him as if he were already dead, his older brother by demanding his inheritance first, and his God, by not honoring his father and mother. Second, we can see the dark-side-pride in that almost immediately after he is given his inheritance, he chooses to leave home and go to a distant country. By doing so he destroys the only relationships that give his life a sense of groundedness; groundedness in faith and family. Finally, after he has squandered his inheritance he finds himself living not with human beings, but with pigs whose food he longed to eat. Jesus’ audience would have understood that the younger son, was now an animal and not a human being. This is what dark-side-pride does. It leaves us empty and alone. What then is the antidote? How then do we avoid the dangers of dark-side-pride? The answer is to be poor in Spirit. Even as I say those words, there is something about them that is a bit unpleasant. It is unpleasant because, in our American Christian culture, we are not supposed to be spiritually impoverished. We are supposed to be spiritual giants. Rather than being poor in Spirit we are to feel sorry for those who are poor in spirit…oops a bit of dark-side-pride there. The thought then of pursuing spiritual poverty is anathema to our American sensibilities. What we need to realize though is that being poor in spirit is not something we pursue, it is something that we are. Let me say that again. Being poor in spirit is not something that we pursue. It is something that we are. And only when we embrace that spiritual poverty can we truly find our way to the Kingdom of Heaven. For you see, we are all poor in spirit. What this means is that we all have some place inside where we are less than fully human. There is some place inside where we are broken; where we are hurting. Someplace where our lives are not what they need to be; Where we are in need of love, grace and redemption. The gift of admitting we are poor in spirit allows us to reconnect with God and neighbor, thereby bringing us back into the fullness of being human. Once again, to see this, let’s return to our prodigal son. We pick up the story where the prodigal son comes, as Jesus puts it, to himself and realizes that even his father’s servants eat better than he does. In other words, he realizes his own poverty of spirit. He realizes that he is not capable of living on his own. He realizes that he needs life-giving relationships. On his way home he practices his speech, where he apologizes for his past pride and offers himself up to be less than he was; to be a servant rather than a son. What happens next, not only could he not have predicted it, but neither could Jesus’ listeners. The father, seeing the son coming, runs to him and embraces him and basically ignores the son’s apology. He ignores it because it is not necessary. The son came to himself, acknowledge his poverty of spirit and through that reconnected himself with the Father; the act which makes him whole again. The temptation to dark-side-pride is all around us. It is part of the human condition beginning in the garden and continuing to today. It is there regardless of our race, gender, sexual orientation, income level or nationality. It crosses all boundaries. Yet its victory is not inevitable. It is not because we have been given the antidote in this first beatitude; blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. The challenge for us then is to embrace our inner spiritual poverty and recognize our ultimate dependence on God rather than on self. My challenge to you then is this, to ask yourselves, how am I embracing my own spiritual poverty such that I can stay lovingly connected to God, neighbor and the Kingdom of Heaven. Rev. Dr. John Judson
February 11, 2018 Listen Print Version Mark 1:40-45 My friend almost lost it. It was years ago when I was in the Peace Corps and one of my housemates and I were traversing Manila in a jeepney. A jeepney is a jeep-looking vehicle with an extended covered bed with benches on each side of the bed. People pay a fare and hop on and off as the jeepney runs its set route. We were on the Jeepney, packed in with a about a dozen people, with two Filipinas sitting next to my right-hand side. I could hear them discussing the hair on my arms. Then the Filipina closest to me, reached over and began feeling the hair on my arm, all the while giving a commentary to her friend. Then her friend reached over and did the same thing. Then they continued their conversation. My friend was stunned. He gasped, in a whispered voice, “How could you let them touch you like that?” My response was, “They have a very small sense of personal space.” So how many of you would have been a bit uncomfortable with what the woman sitting next to me did? I would assume this includes the majority of you and that makes sense because we Americans have a large sense of personal space. For the children in the room this morning, I want you to think of personal space as an invisible force-field that we adult place around ourselves. We have this force-field and we don’t want people getting too close to us, or to put it another way, up in our face. We see someone up in our face as being rude and domineering. There is a great story of an American business man visiting a nation in the far east where their force fields are almost nonexistent and the closer the host moved toward him, the further he moved away until he almost fell off a balcony. We have large senses of personal space; large force fields. What is interesting is that our force fields operate not only in physical space but in emotional space. They surround our inner life keeping it safe from inquiries from the outside. Someone asks, “How are you.” Our force fields are activated and we say, “Just fine”, even when we feel our life is not good at all. Someone else asks about our faith, the force field goes up and we say something like, “My faith is really personal.” We protect our faith and religious beliefs, working hard to keep others out of them. This is one reason that we like Jesus so much in this morning’s story. He has begun his ministry and is out healing and teaching. He comes upon a man who had leprosy. The man begs to be healed and believes that Jesus can do it. Jesus, feeling compassion for the man, reaches out and touches him and the man is healed (As an aside, Jesus never had a large sense of personal space. His force-field was always down for those in need.). At that point Jesus tells the man to go see the priest in order to receive a clean religious bill of health and then, and this is what we love, not to tell anyone what Jesus had done. Thank goodness, we say to ourselves. We can keep our inner faith-force fields up and running so that we don’t have to tell anyone else about what God has done for us. We don’t have to get up on anyone’s business and make them uncomfortable. At the same time, we feel some relief and are also made just a bit nervous when Mark tells us that the man doesn’t listen to Jesus but goes off and begins to tell everyone he meets about the amazing thing that Jesus had done for him. At least, we think, we listen to Jesus. Well I hate to break it to you this morning, but we are supposed to be like the man cleansed from leprosy. We are supposed to go out and tell. We are not sure why Jesus told the man not to tell. Maybe Jesus didn’t want to become known solely as the miracle worker from Nazareth. Maybe he didn’t want the crowds to become so large that he would be unable to teach effectively. We are not sure, but if we let the story itself speak to us, we see that Mark offers the healed man as an example of how we are to respond to the wonderful things that God does for us. At this moment I think I can hear your faith-force field generators cranking up. They are whirring out the messages of, “I will never be one of those people who goes up to strangers and asks, ‘Are you saved?’” Nor will I be one who passes out religious tracts on street corners, or who walks around saying things like, “Praise Jesus. Can I tell you about him?” We don’t want to be one of those people who “tells.” Except that is what we are supposed to be. To be God’s people means to be a people who tell. Who tell others about what God has done for us in Jesus. Before your faith-force fields become concrete barriers, let me explain what I don’t mean when I say we are to tell. I don’t mean that we are to tell people what they should or must believe. I don’t mean that we are to stand on street corners and preach, like the guy who stands in front of the Alamo in San Antonio, telling passersby that they are lost if they don’t believe in Jesus. I don’t mean button holing people at work or on the playground to convince them to believe in Jesus. These things are not what the man did. The man simply told people about how good God had been to him through the healing work of Jesus. The man simply told his story to those who needed to hear it. This is what it means to tell. It means to drop our faith-force fields long enough to share our story of what Jesus has done for us with those who drop their faith-force fields as they search for comfort, meaning and purpose. Telling can be as simple as listening to and praying with someone. It can be as simple as inviting someone to church where they can hear how God transforms lives. It can be as simple as sharing a time when your life was changed because of your faith. It can be all of these and more. My challenge to you this morning is this, to ask yourselves, how open am I to telling others what God has done for me in Jesus Christ, that they might find the same can be true for them? Rev. Dr. John Judson
February 4, 2018 Listen Print Version 1 Samuel 6:1-3; Mark 1:29-39 “So, when do we get to do the Jesus stuff?” he asked. “What do you mean?”, the usher asked. “I mean, when do we get to do all of that healing and miracle stuff that Jesus did?” “Oh,” replied the usher, “We don’t. All we have to do is to believe that it happened a long time ago.” This was the conversation that John Wimber had with an usher after his second Sunday in church. Wimber had grown up in a home that had no religious roots. As far back as anyone could remember, no one in his family had ever attended church. As a talented musician, and a founder of the Righteous Brothers, his life had not been lived, as he puts it, quite in the manner that Jesus would have liked. But a friend of his began telling him about Jesus, and so Wimber and his wife, desperate to turn their marriage around began reading scripture. He loved the Jesus he met there. Jesus the healer. Jesus the miracle worker. And so, on that second Sunday, he wanted to know when people were going to quit singing boring music and do the Jesus stuff. So, when do we get to do the Jesus stuff? So, when do we get to do the healing that we read about this morning? The question may be one that makes us both nervous and hopeful. It makes us nervous because we have seen too many television faith healers, who were in it only for the money. I remember one of those “healers” who told people that if they sent him money, a faith pledge, he would heal them. In fact, he said, that he spent so much time laying on and praying over people’s letters that asked for healing, that he got blood poisoning. What was happening however was that he was having his staff open the letters, take out the money and then throw away the prayer requests. It makes us hopeful because we believe that God is still out there…or in here. We believe because we trust that our prayers are heard and that God has compassion on God’s children. We believe that God can, will, and do amazing things. And so we return to Wimber’s question, when do we get to do the Jesus stuff? When do we get to heal? The answer, simply put, is that we get to do it every Sunday. We do it every Sunday when we pray together. We do it when we fill out the prayer slips and let the staff pray over them. We do it when we stop in the hallway and pray for those whose names are on the prayer boards. I realize that this might not seem like doing the Jesus stuff, yet it is, because prayer was at the heart of all that Jesus did. Though he often healed without prayer there were times when he prayed before healing and when he taught his followers that certain healing could only come through prayer. Let me be clear in this moment. Prayer is not a magical incantation that makes God heal. It does not force God to act in the ways we desire. We know this because most of us here have had someone we loved and cared about, whose only healing came not in this world, but when they took their last breath. At the same time, over the course of my time as a pastor, so many people have said to me, “I would not be here without prayers”, or “I could feel the prayers at work when I was being treated.” Those words offer us hope that our healing work of prayer is truly Jesus work. Either way, we are called to do the Jesus stuff of prayer, trusting that God hears and answers in God’s way and God’s time. We do the Jesus stuff every Sunday when we gather as community and share our lives together. I’m not sure if you notice but we live in a hurting and broken world, in which many of us come here with fears and failures, with regrets and recriminations, with loneliness and loss. The gift of this community is that what we do here brings healing. We are healed from our past by confession and forgiveness. We are healed of our loneliness by the friendships and welcome we experience. We are healed of our fears when we find hope and courage in the word of God proclaimed. We are comforted in our loss by those who surround us. We are healed and filled when we come to this table, the table of the communion of the saints, when we are fed and nourished by Christ who is its host. We are healed from feeling inadequate when we are welcomed here not because of what we do or what we have, but because we simply are. The worship we do here, the community we build here, the mission we do from here, is all healing work. It is all Jesus’ stuff. So, what happened to John Wimber? He went on to plant a church called the Vineyard Church in which doing the Jesus’ stuff was not only something in the past, but happens in the present. That church went on to plant many other Vineyard churches where people find healing and wholeness. I think Wimber would like our church because in this place we too do the Jesus’ stuff. In this place we are a healing community. Through Christ we work to heal one another, our city, our nation and our world. Here then is my challenge for you this morning. As you come to the table I challenge you to ask yourselves this question, “How am I being part of Jesus’ healing work in the this place and in the world? How am I doing Jesus stuff right now.” |
Categories
All
Archives
June 2024
|