We The Ephesians
As you may have noticed over the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus as our focus scripture in worship at my church.
I won’t be posting my entire sermon this week, simply because I didn’t have the opportunity to write it out completely. So instead I will just share some reflections on what I’ve been experiencing and noticing over the last 6 weeks as we focused on this book.
I don’t think I need to tell anyone that what Paul writes here applies to all of us. Paul, in his letter to the church, tells us the importance of knowing who we are in Christ. He says over and over again that we need to know the salvation offered to us in him. He also reminds us how fragile a relationship this can be if we give in to the temptations of the world around us, if we let the evil of the world get to us.
Chapter 6 carries the final instructions that really drive home his message.
Paul reminds us that the Christian life is a war. He reminds us it is not ourselves we are doing battle with, but rather with the evil in the world; ruler, authorities, the devil himself, and I would add to that list the battles we now face today, the greed of business and governments around the world.
So we need to prepare for the battle. We need to seek to protect ourselves from the attacks we will face when we stand up for what we learn from the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ which means standing up to those opposing forces.
Our world is increasingly secularized, pushing God out of all corners. In the church, we know God reigns, and we know He reigns beyond our walls. This world is God’s creation, He is still the ruler of it all, but it seems as though the world has forgotten this. The world claims it can handle things itself. The world has shown it is wrong.
The #occupy movements, the people standing up for the basic human rights in Libya, Egypt, Syria and beyond show us that the world is not as it should be.
There are people suffering. There are people losing their lives. All because we have forgotten how to love our neighbour.
So let us pick up our shield of faith, a faith grounded in our Lord Jesus Christ which no enemy can break. Let us pick up our sword, the Word of God, to speak the truth into the hearts of those who preach lies to the masses.
Let us show the world that Jesus Christ died for our sins so we may know the love of God for us and for our neighbours. Let’s show the world what it means when we say these things. Let’s show the world what it can look like when we let God show us the way.
Church Future – fail or flourish!
Statistics are helpful tools. They show us trends, we learn from them, they help us plan. They also show us the realities in which we live.
For the church, the statistics are grim.
Aging and rapidly declining membership, no new families, dwindling finances in the face of mounting building maintenance costs.
Last night at our monthly Presbytery meeting we began a discussion on how brave we are as a court of the United Church of Canada to enforce and act with the authority we have in the organization of the churches which serve within our bounds.
The discussion was lively, it was fruitful, it was also the beginning.
Many of our churches are trying to figure out how they are going to get out of the hole in which they are now finding themselves, and they are beginning to ask for help and direction from the presbytery and the conference.
How shall we respond?
It is my hope we respond honestly, respectfully and pastorally, in helping them discern the realities of the church and the communities in which they find themselves to help them make the very difficult decisions which face them in the very near future. Decisions we hope will help invigorate their ministries in new and exciting ways.
There are already a number of different conversations being initiated around our presbytery, and this will prove, without a doubt, to be an exciting, stressful, sometime painful, yet hopefully joyful, Spirit led time for all of our churches.
We cannot wait much longer. We must act in some way. Choosing not to act is still an act.
This truly is a time, I believe, where we can fail or flourish. We can only fail if we choose not to engage in conversation and open ourselves to the movement of the Holy Spirit within our churches and communities.
Prayers are more than welcome and appreciated.
The Gift of Children
This weekend has been one of those weekends where it felt like at some point last week the wheels fell off.
I spent Friday in two different funeral homes dealing with two different families in two very different types of grief. In between seeing the families, I spent the rest of the day working on the two services, all while knowing I had another funeral coming up today.
Saturday was spent in churches and at gravesides. By Saturday night, keeping my eyes focused on anything was proving to be very difficult. I managed to get the slides put together for Sunday morning with only a few typos and then entered into a vegetative state in front of the television before heading to bed.
But Sunday morning was a blessing.
Thankfully after a very hectic week I did not have to preach because it was our first, of what will become regularly scheduled, service where the children lead us in worship.
The children had been learning about the story of creation from Genesis 1&2 in Sunday School, and they came to teach us what they had learned. It was simply amazing to feel the energy in the church before the service as the children very excitedly did their final preparations and practices.
Not only that, there was also the joy on the faces of the adults as they left the church after the service. The best part wasn’t that they were saying, “Oh how cute they were!”, but rather, “Wasn’t that wonderful what they taught us!”
Mission accomplished.
Children are not our entertainment in church. I don’t believe in setting the children up to amuse the adults. We want to engage our children, to help them learn, to help them to grow into leaders in our community who have a strong faith foundation, and to encourage them on their way.
Yesterday I think we saw it’s working. The children have shown us they are learning because we learned from them. I know myself, that I needed to sit and hear of the love of God, shown to us in creation and through his son Jesus Christ. Thank you children, you are a gift to us all.
How does your church interact with your children? What are they teaching you about our amazing God?
I, and the rest of the church, cannot wait to see what they will teach us next month when they come back to lead us in the story of Abraham.
Passion
Img via http://goo.gl/TF5z8
It’s fun to sift through my Twitter feed, the news sites, the Youtube video, the stuff that’s gone viral this week… it’s really neat to see what has caught people’s attention. What is it that they think is really cool and show some interest in. You have to agree, there are some seriously talented people out there who do some really cool stuff with their imagination and skills.
Notice how the ones that go really viral are the ones where the creators passion just spills out into their chosen media.
As much as I’d like to display an example for you right here, I won’t, because today’s viral video is gone tomorrow. Someone else’s passion will move into the limelight for another day.
But when something you encounter some of these passionate expressions, how does it make you feel? Some will make you feel awe, others happiness, compassion, love, shame, hurt, all sorts of emotions. Some may even move you to action where you’ve just witnessed something that causes you to want to help in some way.
There was a time when the church had that affect on people. A time where people used to be feel all those emotions when they saw what the church was up to. A time when the church lived out its passions in the streets and made a difference in people’s lives and in the world.
I feel like we’ve lost that passion.
I feel like we don’t know what it is we stand for anymore as we become ultra-institutionalized as we try and protect ourselves from what might happen. As if living in a litigious society has scared us into playing it safe and protecting our assets and our people.
Never did the church express more passion in the first century AD. A time when it was persecuted to the fullest for expressing it’s belief in Jesus Christ and taking that passion head-first out into the streets of the world, moved to change the cultural systems which have created a great divide in their society. Separating nations, classes and sexes from each other.
As a society, our passion is not gone. There are thousands, nay hundreds of thousands of people across this world standing up and fighting for what they believe in. There’s Occupy Wall Street where people are seeking fair distribution of wealth and blame for the recent crisis in the United States and around the world. There are people standing up for their rights in Europe and the Middle East, in Africa and South America, and right here in my town as the youth stand up against bullying in our schools by taking to our streets and raising awareness.
There is a revolution starting to take over our world, and the church needs to be involved. The church must stand up for the weak and the vulnerable. The rich can take care of themselves, that is abundantly clear. But who will stand with the outcasts, the forgotten and the neglected?
Jesus commanded us to love God first and to love our neighbours as ourselves.
“Who are our neighbours?” Jesus was asked.
They are the ones we see in our communities. They are the ones we see on the news. They are the ones we hear about in these viral media blitzes.
Yes, the church cannot be all things to all people. But find you passion, find what it is that breaks your heart and moves you to action. Find this and you can be one thing to many people.
It’s a start.
Playing With The Focus
“Playing With The Focus”
Ephesians 5
Ephesians 5 is full of wonderful wisdom. The problem is verse 22. “Wives, be subject to your husbands…” and we’re lost. A lot of damage has been done in family situations when this small piece of scripture has been improperly used. It’s caused women to stay in abusive relationships. It’s allowed men to hold power over their wives.
That’s the problem when we narrow our focus too tightly. We miss out on some of the other wisdom which might help us.
In our reading today, Paul forces us to play with our focus. We learn that if we look too broadly, we’ll miss the point. We also learn that if we look too narrowly, we’ll miss the bigger picture.
So, what do we do? read more…