Highlights from Worship: February 20, 2022

[Music] please stand for the reading of the gospel the gospel reading is luke chapter 6 beginning with the 27th verse but i say to you that here love your enemies do good to those who hate you bless those who curse you pray for those who abuse you to him who strikes you on the cheek offer the other also and from him who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt give to everyone who begs from you and of him who takes away your goods do not ask them again and as you wish that men would do to you do so to them if you love those who love you what credit is that to you for even sinners love those who love them and if you do good to those who do good to you what credit is that to you for even sinners do the same and if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive what credit is that to you even sinners lend to sinners to receive as much again but love your enemies and do good and lend expecting nothing in return and your reward will be great and you will be sons of the most high for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish be merciful even as your father is merciful judge not and you will not be judged condemn not and you will not be condemned forgive and you will be forgiven give and it will be given to you good measure pressed down shaken together running over will be put into your lap for the measure you give will be the measure you get back this is the word of god for the people of god thank you god good measure pressed down shaken together running over i have this uh vague uh but fairly certain memory of uh my grandmother obama howell sitting in a chair she had an apron spread across her lap with a pile of green beans that she had just harvested from her garden behind her home she was snapping and stringing those beans and as she would do so she would take the string and put it in a trash bag over here and then when she finished snapping the beans she would drop them into a metal bowl on the floor in front of her you would hear the beans clatter in there and if she would engage in this activity she would say good measure pressed down shaken together running over i don't know what that was i thought maybe that's directions for how you handle green beans i wasn't sure turns out she was quoting bible i don't want to reflect on this in the light of uh last week in the um at least i get the wall street journal and the new york times in one of them a woman was writing about marriage and she alluded to a book by a guy named gary chapman gary's an old man now he's sort of a friend of my wife's mother's family they are baptists you know but but she upgraded when she got married and became a methodist and they go to calvary baptist up in winston so it's got gary chapman in 1992 wrote a book called the five love languages and this book has sold like james howell's books his sold 10 million copies my book sell 10 copies it sold 10 million copies and it's obvious it's the languages of love it's not just love right people love in different ways and how do you parse what the other person's doing and what you're doing so it has five languages of love they're words of affirmation there is quality time there are gifts there are acts of service and there are touch and as gary points out in the book what goes wrong is people miss it's like i'm giving you acts of service what you want words of affirmation and it's not a matter of demanding what is yours i want this kind of love you're not loving me the way i want do this that's not the point the point is maybe translating what is coming at you oh that's an acts of service i'll take that as a word of affirmation maybe it's a matter of learning some new skills so that you can love more fully what was interesting to me is the woman who was alluding to this book said that that model doesn't always take into account her um her fear said she lives a life that is riddled by fear and anxiety her husband thought about this and responded by saying my entire life is an act of service to you i have reorganized my desires around your fear and that made me wonder what would it be like for our language of love to be my entire life is an act of service to you i have reorganized my desires around you oh god i mean what is the language of love that we offer to god sometimes i think we offer god our niceness you know we say oh god i'm nice i think god just yawns over this one right we say god i i think write politically and god just shudders and shakes his head sounds we come at god with god i feel like i feel guilty i feel like a schmuck and god grieves over us what are the languages we offer to god what is god's language to us of love god offers words of affirmation god says you are beloved you belong god says no matter what you think of your body your body is a temple of the holy spirit wow god doesn't just give quality time god's with us all the time if we could only realize it and live into that god gives gifts all the time the breath that you just took if you had a square meal yesterday or today if somebody's loved you have been kind to you all kinds of gifts all around god's service to us jesus washed the disciples feet he died on the cross god's touch seems a little harder to come by but sometimes it's maybe an invisible hand on the shoulder when you're having a tough time or maybe god touches us through others and the body of christ we're going to hear later about stephen ministers that's one of the way that god touches us what would it mean for us to reorganize our desires around god in the new york times last sunday there was uh an op-ed by a guy named esau mccauley esau has been in our bible study in the past year i rang him and he gave us a bible study on paul's theology it was great he had a piece in uh last sunday's new york times about dreams and marriage one thing he said is that he he came into his marriage he had dreams of being like a brilliant young theologian but his wife was a naval officer and she had dreams of climbing to the top of the navy hierarchy and then they had four children and the question is how in the world do you pursue these two dreams you gotta compromise and i love in his article he said compromise need not mean discontent you kind of get that in society never compromise but compromise need not mean discontent and he said the question for them has not been do i get my dreams fulfilled or does she get her dreams fulfilled but rather can we dream new dreams together that are our dreams what would it mean to dream god's dream jesus has all these commandments uh in the passage that glenda read to us and we when jesus gives commands he's not like an army sergeant barking out orders when jesus gives commandments it's not like tennyson's light brigade theirs is not to reason why theirs is but to do and die that's what jesus is like jesus invites us to dream new dreams to dream better dreams to dream god's dreams and his words show us the way he gives us a list here i'll just run through a few of these jesus says love your enemies which is so counter-cultural we don't even try right we feel entitled to have our enemies those people they're just so wrong i don't like that whatever we hardly even try we forget that uh i love this frederick beekner said among all the seven deadly sins anger is by far the most fun how much fun anger is he said you you lick your lips and then you smack and you're like oh this is just so delicious you know like disliking someone else counting up grievances he said what we forget is that uh in this feast fit for a king uh what we're wolfing down it it what i'm woofing down when i do that is me he said the skeleton at the end of the feast is you like i'll be angry and judgmental but who i'm devouring is me jesus says this is so interesting jesus says do not judge judge not and all partly that ought to be a relief like i don't have to do that it's such a burden having to pass judgment on others all the time i'm no good at it either right i can just leave that to god it should be a great relief judge not judge not i would say this i try hard to be a judge not kind of guy and i'm pretty good at it until it comes to judgmental people and i don't know i see the judgmental people and i just pass judgment on them actually i have harsher judgment than the judgment i have for judgmental people that would be my judgments on me i can judge me all day long sometimes somebody in the church comes to me they level some criticism at me and i want to say you got nothing you can't believe what i've got on myself jesus says don't judge don't judge others don't judge yourself you're no good at it it's not your responsibility jesus says give to everyone who begs i uh years ago i remember my son came out of a little league baseball game we get to the car and there's a bagger there and he asks for money i reach on my wallet i hand him five bucks or whatever and then a policeman comes up i think he's going to arrest me for doing this and the policeman chewed me out he said you know you're not supposed to do that that makes things worse i said i know i know i know i don't know why i did that jesus says give to everyone who begs in church we say maybe you do that through an agency right you do that through the church that's one of the ways that we give to those who beg but what's it really about years ago i was in rio de janeiro on one of our mission trips and we were there with marion way our he was from charleston uh learned portuguese went to brazil had just a beautiful life and career his granddaughter sent me a card recently we're trying to talk about getting together with his wife anyway so were going out one night for a walk in rio and marian said don't give money to the beggars so we walk a little ways and there's a beggar and i do what i think i'm supposed to do i like avert my gaze and i walk over here nowhere near the beggar but i looked back and i saw what marian was doing he wasn't averting his gaze and walking the other way what marian did is he came up to the guy and he knelt down next to him and he took the man's hand and he said what's your name he told him his name and mary and asked how can i pray for you the man told him and they prayed give to everyone who begs give to everyone who begs i wonder if that's what black history month is about we're reading this great book by quint smith swanee grad davidson grad great great guy it's a book about the black history and it maybe maybe other people think about it this way instead of us thinking we got the world all figured out maybe some other people are saying to us they're begging from us could you listen to me could you listen to what my story is how i experience not things not how you think i should experience things or i think about my son at lunch with my son the other day i was thinking give to everyone who begs we had lunch he did not ask for money or anything else but i thought about it as we sat there i thought what is he needing from me we just make it small talk but is there something he needs from me give to everyone who begs jesus says as you wish others would do to you do so to them we like that right that sounds so very american it doesn't sound much like jesus does it as you would want people to do to you you do to them i'll do a business deal for you you do a business deal back for me it's all good very transactional that's not what jesus has in mind jesus is saying try to get into your own gut into the shadows in your own head and then think about what might be going on in that other person's head and what would you want from them it's not really a business deal at the end of the day what you want what you want is a little mercy you want somebody who might actually listen to you so then to that other person can i listen can i have some compassion as you wish others would do to you do so to them jesus says if you do good to those who are good to you what credit is there to you jesus is inviting us into an extraordinary life jesus says lend and expect nothing in return we beautiful exercise this week see how christian our bankers are we could put um we could make that the mission statement of let's pick three wells fargo truist and bank of america and see which one goes bankrupt first lend and expect nothing in return what does that mean what is jesus asking when i was in seminary i worked out at myrtle beach one summer i ran this helping ministry for people that were in crisis and uh this one young woman came to us she was 17. her wife was a it was a catastrophe she'd run away from home it was just it was it was just a disaster so i uh i took her on as a project and i have to share with you you weren't there you can't know but i just have to tell you my work with this woman i was amazing i really i was brilliant with her i did i got her in drug rehab i got her in an employment program i got her a job back home i worked this reconciliation with her parents who weren't speaking to any longer on the phone they were willing to have her come back home it was amazing her wife was coming back together so it was time for her to go home and i took her down to the bus station i had a little care bag that i had prepared to give her and i gave it to her and she just got on the bus i was like i i should get a big hug you should fall on my shoulders and say thank you james you're amazing and she just got on the bus and left i was really miffed about this but i thought surely in a few days her parents will call me she will write me a thank-you note nothing and i was so annoyed and i was saying things to myself like see if i help somebody like that again and then the light came on in my head and i realized i i wasn't really doing that for her was i i was doing that for me so i'd look like some big dog some amazing minister jesus says lend and expect nothing in return and in all of these commandments it's plural jesus doesn't say love your enemies as you all love your enemies it's always y'all jesus expects us to do this with other people jesus express expects us to do this in community with others jesus expects us to do this in institutions now we live in a day where institutions have worked hard to lose people's trust and i'd love to say we are part of an institution we really do a beautiful job here and we're fortunate to be part of such an institution but i know this even though our institution this church does so well we still we disappoint people i hate it when we disappoint people but i know that we disappoint people and that makes me crazy because of a personality flaw that i have jesus his last thing here that i want to talk about jesus says you shall be perfect you shall be perfect i had a clergy colleague years ago you could try to guess who she was after i tell you this we're in a meeting one day with each other and it was getting a little tense and she she got really annoyed with me and she said it's hard to work with you because you're such a perfectionist i said okay this would be the pot calling the kettle black i'm a perfectionist you're a perfectionist what what is perfectionism anyway um reverend kim when you were ordained you were asked the classic methodist question they asked us this it was are you going on to perfection and what did you answer he answered yes and my question to you now after all these years is are you perfect perfection perfection perfection is possible kate bowler in her new devotional book called good enough on the very first page says if you don't think perfection is possible just check your social media feed just check tv ads and what you find there are people that if you just buy the right thing you just have the right experience if you just live in the right place if you just wear the right clothes you will have a perfect life so as you look at the people on social media and the people on tvs and they are beautiful and they're having a fantastic life they're not even trying very hard i'm just perfection it's just right there and so with god we think he jesus wants us to be perfect and it's an english language thing through most of the history the english language perfect did not mean like he got all the answers right and he never made a boo-boo and it was squeaky clean what the word perfect has historically meant is mature mature so my question is are you going on to maturity are you maturing in christ are you more mature than before the pandemic began i don't know what the right question is how do we come to be mature how do we reorganize our desires around god how do we dream god's dreams maybe that's what the maturity is which takes me back to my grandmother he's got those green beans on her lab that she'd harvested out of her own backyard she's snapping them clanging down into the metal bowl and she says good measure press down shaken together running over i'm so moved by that because my grandmother was dirt poor she wasn't doing the beans as a hobby as you or i might do that was the survival of her family she had to grow those beans but what i know from having had countless meals in her home is that a feast was coming and that feast that was coming was not just for us it was for any and everybody as mealtime would approach she would go outside and just say some random cousin would be come on in and join us to be a carpenter working on a house down the street come on in and eat with us and we would come in and there wasn't a lot but there was always room for one more at her table we would sort of scrunch in and you don't quite take as much yourself running over shaken together pressed down good measure it's not an accident you see that as my grandmother was working on the beans she quoted bible she always quoted bible it's how she made sense of her life she had reorganized her desires around god's desires she dreamed god's dreams i've asked people this i've asked cousins her children i've met some neighbors of hers i never heard her judge anybody and none of them ever did either such a modest life and yet running over if i have any tinsel strength if i have some resilience in me some measure of that was instilled by her she had enough she was good enough she was good she was mature she lived an extraordinary life maybe never driving out of the carolinas we're talking about her today thanks be to god my friends thanks be to god [Music]

Channel: Myers Park United Methodist Church

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Id: INIZUTkiZGY

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 20 2022