Looking Ahead to May 5, 2024 -- 6th Sunday of Easter, Marking Ascension

As this is the first Sunday of the month we will be celebrating Communion this week.

The Scripture Readings are:

• Luke 24:44-53
• Acts 1:1-11

The Sermon title is Hurry Up and Wait

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Early Thoughts: Easter has come and gone. New life is bubbling in the community. Now what?

Both the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke end with a story of Jesus making a final appearance to his followers and leaving them with an instruction. But the instructions are very different.

In Matthew the Risen Christ meets the disciples in Galilee (on a mountain because everything important in Matthew seems to happen on a mountain) and tells them to go out into the world teaching and baptizing. Seems straightforward enough as we launch from the Gospel into the next phase of the story of God's action in the world. Luke takes a different tack. In Luke the final appearance takes place in and just outside Jerusalem and the disciples are told to wait for a sign that the next phase is going to begin.

SO are we supposed to respond to Easter with action, teaching and preaching and making new disciples? Or are we supposed to wait for God to do something else that will then move us into action?

There is some odd art out there...

The Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts are written by the same person. Luke is writing to his friend Theophilus to tell the story of Jesus and the Early Church. Luke ends the first volume and begins the second with different accounts of the same event. Which makes a nice linkage between volumes, though it does make one wonder what the event really looked like. There is one important piece that stays the same. Before Jesus leaves, before being taken up into heaven, he tells his friends to remain in Jerusalem and wait for God to act. Once God acts and the disciples have been filled with the power of the Holy Spirit then they can act.

Waiting can be hard.

We are so often told that we should "don't just stand there...do something" that it feels wrong to reverse it and hear "don't just do something...stand there". We can so easily see reasons to act that we want to jump in and make things happen. If we are honest, we sometimes (often?) get impatient waiting for things to happen "in God's time". Or maybe we are afraid that if we don't act now it will be too late: the window of opportunity will close or we will be too far behind to catch up.

It can be hard to know when to act and when to wait on God. It can be hard to know which one of those God is calling us to in the moment.

Earlier this year I read this book. It has pushed me to think about how we (both as individuals and as communities) respond to moments of crisis. Generally we are sure we have to act quickly, strategically and (hopefully) decisively to get things back under control. Sometimes that is true, at least as a temporary reaction. But I have to wonder if sometimes the perceived need to act quickly and decisively gets in the way of our need, as people of faith, to listen for God's wisdom and discern what God would have us do/who God would have us be.

In the end it is going to be God's action (remembering that God acts in a variety of ways using a variety of tools) that is going to matter the most. As a community of faith it is God's action that is going to bring us life and hope, not our own. If we read a bit further into Acts we find that the early church actually had trouble knowing that, they also found waiting hard and wanting to get into the action phase. But once God acted, once God filled them with the Power of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, then wonderful things happened.

What might happen if we paused to ponder and listen and wait? (And continue to gather for worship and praise as Luke tells us the disciples did continuously)
--Gord

Looking Ahead to April 28, 2024 -- 5th Sunday of Easter

The Scripture Readings this week are:

• Galatians 5:22-23
• John 15:1-17

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The Sermon title is Fruit of the Vine

Early Thoughts: The first commandment God gives humanity in Scripture is "Be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 1:28). What does it mean to be fruitful?

Or maybe the better question is 'what sort of fruit should we produce?' and then ponder how it compares to what we actually do produce.

Looking at the passages for this week I find myself calling to mind another piece of Scripture, Matthew 7:15-20, which reminds us that trees are known by the fruits they produce. Jesus calls us to see ourselves as branches growing from the True Vine (which is Jesus) rooted, I assume, in God. Paul calls us to strive to produce the fruit of the spirit (with all its multiple flavours) that stands in direct contrast to what Paul, in verse19-21, calls the works of the flesh.

What fruit are we producing?

If we live into our identity as followers of Christ, branches of the True Vine how will people know that to be true? As the folk song goes "They will know we are Christians by our....love". We are called to bear fruits of love (the first flavour Paul lists). Growing from the core of Christ, who has been called Love Incarnate, we bear that fruit first and foremost. John's Gospel even suggests that if we fail to remain connected to the vine, if we fail to bear good fruit the branch may be cut off/pruned/cleansed, it will no longer have the life in abundance that Jesus promises to bring.

We can only be fruitful if we remains connected to the core, drawing strength and nutrition from the vine and the root. We are the branches stretching out into the world, may we be healthy branches, full of good, sweet, fresh, life-giving fruit.

What do you grow?
--Gord

Looking Ahead to April 21, 2024 -- 4th Sunday of Easter

The Scripture Readings this week are:

• John 20:24-29
• Luke 24:36-49

The Sermon title is Touching, Seeing, Believing

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Early Thoughts: What would it take for you to believe? What would make the Resurrection real to you?

Our stories this week come from the first days of the post-Easter community (the Luke story is either the evening of Easter Day or possibly the day after [depending how fast the walkers to Emmaus got back to Jerusalem], the John passage is a bout a week after Easter Day). There are rumours and stories about this remarkable event. Some people have had direct encounters with the Risen Christ and some only have the stories to go by. Some people believe, some are still a little unsure what is going on.

So Jesus shows up and offers proof.

A number of modern folk struggle with the Easter story. One of the areas of struggle is "was it a real body?". Were the appearance stories people seeing the raised body that had been taken off of the cross or were they mystical visions? Certainly the history of Christian theology and mysticism shows that people continue to have visions of the Risen Christ well beyond the time period of Scripture and those are clearly visions, not a visitation by the body that came off the cross. I would argue that Paul's experience of the Risen Christ, the experience that led directly to his conversion, is in that category.

But what about those Easter stories in Matthew, Luke and John?  What were/are they?

The witness of those Gospel writers clearly attest that these appearance stories are not mystical visions but are physical visits by a flesh and blood body. And in the stories we read this week the narrative goes to great lengths to prove this physicality. The Risen Christ eats, can be touched, hears and speaks. This body still carries the wounds of his death (I think this is an important piece, though possibly a whole other sermon). And it is in these signs that belief comes for those early disciples.

What does it take for us to believe Resurrection is real?
--Gord

Looking Ahead to April 14, 2024 -- 3rd Sunday of Easter

The Scripture Readings this week are:

• 2 Corinthians 9:7, 10-15
• John 13:1-5, 34-35

The Sermon title is Gratitude

Early Thoughts: What fills you with gratitude? How does being grateful change who you are and how you act? 

I believe that the foundation of good stewardship discussions is gratitude. Gratitude shapes us into people who are more likely to share our gifts with the world around us. Gratitude shapes us into people who are more able to love our neighbours as we have been loved.

I think gratitude is important in two (at least) ways. First when we have grateful hearts we see the gifts as gifts, we see the abundance we have rather than seeing life in a scarcity mindset. This opens us to the possibility that we have something to share. Second when we tell others how grateful we are for the ways they have shared gifts with us and our community it provides an incentive for them to continue to share.. Gratitude can lead us to share and then it can lead us to share again.

So again I ask. What fills you with gratitude? For what are you most grateful in your life?

How do you live a life based on gratitude and abundance?
--Gord

Looking Ahead to April 7, 2024 -- 2nd Sunday of Easter

This being the first Sunday of the Month we will be celebrating Communion.

The Scripture Readings this week are:

• Acts 4:32-35
• 2 Corinthians 8:1-7

The Sermon title is: Sharing Sharing Sharing

Early Thoughts: It is one of the first life skills we learn. It is a key part of how we get along. Many years ago when Robert Fulghum shared his list of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten the first item on the list was "Share Everything". 

In both Guiding and Scouting the youngest groups are reminded of the importance of sharing at every meeting.  This week's sermon title is the Beaver motto (and has been for decades, I remember learning it when I was a Beaver). The Sparks promise is captured on the t-shirt pictured above -- which used to be the official uniform for Sparks when our girls started in the program.

Turns out it is a Biblical injunction too. Both in this week's reading from Acts 4 and earlier at the end of Acts 2 we are told that the early church survived by sharing what each had for the benefit of the whole community. [If you read the beginning of Acts 5 you will find a tale about a couple who tried to skirt this requirement of being a part of the community.]

Both Christianity and Judaism (from whence Christianity sprung: Jesus, Peter, Paul and many others--all the earliest Christians were Jewish) place a high priority on the communal well-being. I am sure the same is true of many other faith traditions. Jewish law has in it restrictions aimed at ensuring the well-being of the whole community. More than once the Gospels tell of Jesus warning about the dangers of accumulating wealth (in human communities the accumulation of wealth often happens at the cost to other members of the community). We are called to share what we have for the benefit of all.

Some might call that Stewardship. Some might call it love in action. Some might call it ridiculous Marxist thought.

The faith community we call St. Paul's United Church only exists because people have shared. For over 100 years, starting when Alexander Forbes first began to create a Presbyterian church on this site, people have shared what they had with each other and with the larger community of Grande Prairie. For this faith community to continue to exist and move from surviving to thriving we need people to continue to share.

This week I ask you to prayerfully consider what you have to share. What can you put in the common pot? What do you have that can help the community bloom and grow? Yes that includes cash, the bills have to be paid. It also includes all sorts of other gifts. We pool our gifts of talent, time, treasure, prayer and love together and find that the sum is greater than the total of its parts (or at least that is the hope).

Sharing. It's a good thing to do. That is why we teach it to our kids so early in life. (And both when we are young and when we are older it can also be a challenge.)
--Gord