Sermon 9/2/12

Scripture James 1:17-27

The style of James seems like a collection of wisdom saying which makes his message seem a little disjointed.  Today I’d like to unpack some of them in our current context of Labor Day weekend marking the end of our summer and the time that children return to school and when we celebrate the economic and social contribution of workers with a long weekend, picnics, and maybe one last summer road trip. 

It is a turning point in the calendar that points toward fall, and it does seem like fall is early this year.  Yet even though the days grow shorter as fall approaches, and a new academic year begins James reminds us that God does not change as the seasons do. 

There is a call and response in the African American church where one person says, “God is good,” and another responds with, “All the time.”  James writes, “every good gift and every perfect present comes from heaven; it comes down from God” (1:17).

God’s very nature is good, so it impossible for God to do anything but good we can be sure that everything that is truly good has its root in God. 

Yet because we are finite we cannot fully grasp God’s infinite goodness.  And so God accommodates us by revealing his love for the world in bits and pieces so that we gradually come to understand him but because God is always beyond our understanding God planted the word in us: faith in Jesus Christ. 

James challenges us to not just hear the word and believe the word, but to also do the word putting it into practice.  To let the faith planted in us grow and bear fruit in our lives.  Just as Jesus is God’s word in action, we too are called to be both hearers and doers of faith as we practice our religion.  And this is hard to do.  The world works to make us forget what we are to do as God’s doers of God’s word.

Often times our work lives, our Monday through Saturday lives, seem so separate from church.  At a preaching workshop I attended this spring the presenter shared with us a drawing that illustrates this separateness.  Some church members had drawn it to express the struggle they felt as part of a Sunday school lesson. 

The drawing shows a church building on one side of the paper and a city with skyscrapers on the other.  Between them is a person straddling a deep ravine. The person’s hands are in an outreached position with one hand touching one of the tall buildings and the other reaching out towards the church. 

This image shows how these people feel torn between their obligations to work, family, school, sports, and church.  And how they feel as if they are more connected to that which seems concrete and tangible rather than that which is mysterious and holy. 

In an ideal world all these would mesh and fit together like gears in a machine.  Our Christian values would shape our lives outside the church.  But they don’t.  First of all we do not live in an ideal world, God’s ideal will not be realized until the new heaven and new earth. 

Second, we are people corrupted by personal and corporate sin, this keeps us from integrating our lives, causing us to forget the way that God has called us to live when we are faced with the stress and pressure of competing obligations. 

Causing us to forget that every good gift is from above.  Causing us to forget that goodness and faithfulness are not confined to Sunday but are available to all of us in our homes, work, schools, volunteering, and community. 

Work is stressful: there are expectations for us to perform, some of them are realistic and others are not.  We have deadlines and quotas to meet.  And today there is no guarantee that a job will remain secure. 

Vocations like farming that rely on the weather seem especially stressful.  If it is too dry the crops won’t grow, if it is too wet the farmers can’t get the hay or the wheat in.

At school, teachers and students are under pressure to perform to pass tests, play sports, and keep up with their peers.

All of this: deadlines, layoffs, worry about the weather, and the pressure to perform causes anxiety.  And when people get anxious they start to get impatient and impatience often leads to anger. 

The challenge is to not just think faith but to do it in all these stressful situations where people are watching and expecting us to go along with what we are told to do even if we do not agree with it.   

And when under stress it is so easy to be slow to listen, quick to speak and quick to anger.  James is right; the results do not bring about the righteous life that God desires for us.  So he urges us to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.

He writes about not just accepting but acting upon the word that is planted in us.  This word is similar to finding the artist’s signature on a piece of artwork that tells us who did it.  But with all great artists you often tell who did the painting, sculpture, musical score, even how a musical piece is played because it bears their imprint, their style on it. 

This is how it is with us being created by God, our actions should be such that it shows that God created us and planted his word in us just as we can tell that a Monet painting was indeed painted by Monet instead of Picasso.  Or we can tell the difference between a Beatles tune and a jazz selection by Louis Armstrong.

Our lives should reflect God who created us and it is so easy for us to forget that especially when we are angry or in a hurry. 

All of us have said things or done things in anger or frustration that we regret.  This regret is a gift.  Hopefully the regret is enough to make us try to reconcile the wrong we have done or the hurt we have caused, in order to try restoring the relationship.  

This is seeking forgiveness.  We do this in our prayer of confession because even though we are forgiven we continue to sin, because of our human condition.

So let’s go back to the image of the person standing over the chasm between church and culture or our Monday through Saturday lives.  I am thankful for this person, I am thankful for you because despite the pressures of anxiety and stress you are reaching out, seeking something that you know that the world cannot provide.  Thankful and excited that you are reaching out in God’s direction as we live in a world that is full of brokenness and sin, the abuse of power. 

But this image makes the assumption that God is limited here at the church on this side of the chasm.  However God is everywhere.  God is in your home, your workplace, your school, God is present before you get there and will grant you peace if you seek it. 

The church can be a refuge or a place where we seek guidance as we try to orient our lives toward God’s word.  It can help us to gain ways stand up for the vulnerable out there in the world.  For it is here that we gain perspective for dealing with the injustice of the world and reconnecting with what is Holy, that which is good. 

As the new school year begins and schedules become busier than they were in the summer, remember that God is with you always ready to catch you when you stumble.  So that when we realize that we have not been as patient as we would have liked we can seek forgiveness and try again to listen a little more quickly and slower to speak so that we can act in love and in doing so reflect God’s imprint on us so that people will know that it is God who planted his good word in us.  

Rev. Michael Fry preaching

at East Bethany PC

September 2, 2012

Events & Prayers @ EBPC for the Week of 8/27-9/2

This WEEK at East Bethany Presbyterian Church 

Tuesday 10am Christian Education Meeting

Sunday 10:30am Worship 

The PSALM for last week was #84

How lovely is your dwelling place, 

 O LORD, of hosts! 

My soul longs, indeed it faints

 for the courts of the LORD; 

my heart and my flesh sing for joy

  to the living God!  

Please keep in Prayer

 - The Young Adult Volunteers in mission, who are beginning their year of service. (Today they are traveling from Newark International Airport to their site placements in Kenya, Northern Ireland, Guatemala, Nashville, Atlanta, Tucson, San Antonio, Hollywood, Denver, and Chicago). 

 - The Christian Education committee as we meet Tuesday. 

 - Lisa B. a friend of Norma Bower's, just moved to Texas and contracted the West Nile Virus. 

 - Those who are traveling - Aggie and Mike's cousin Sheila heads back to Northern Ireland this week. 

 - Our Congregation. 

A PRAYER for your week

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.

 - Thomas Merton, "Thoughts in Solitude" 

Scripture for this Sunday: Song of Solomon 2:8-13; Psalm 45:1-2, 6-9; James 1:17-27, Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21,23.  

 

Yesterday we had 26 worship participants. 

God's Peace, Rev. Fry 

Sermon from 8/26/2012

Scripture Psalm 84 and Mark 14:3-9

Laura, Alex, and I had the privilege of spending the week with forty Young Adult Volunteers.  These people are between the ages of nineteen and thirty-one, they have agreed to serve in mission for a year, and are traveling tomorrow to their new city or village.

They are headed to far away places like Kenya, Guatemala, Northern Ireland and closer to home places like Tucson, Hollywood, San Antonio, Atlanta, and Denver.  Some are heading across the world while others are moving to another part of the same city. 

They will work with food banks, the homeless, afterschool programs, orphanages, and refugees. 

In some people’s eyes these young people are foolish for doing something like this with student loans to pay and car payments that are due.  It does not seem as useful as getting a job to start paying for expenses.  Yet serving God in this way is important enough to them that they are willing to commit a year of their lives to do this – to put their own plans on hold to see and serve the larger world. 

Others criticize their length of service by asking, “What can possibly be accomplished in a year?” 

To these people it seems like it is a waste of time, a waste of a year of work, and perhaps thinking that their first job out of school is so important that spending a year in service will leave them at a disadvantage when they do enter the job market that they will never catch up with their peers. 

Isn’t it striking that this woman’s gift anointing Jesus was worth about a year’s worth of work.  And those who saw this lavish gift criticized her for the way she spent or wasted her money – the way that she decided to honor Jesus her king, by offering him a essentially a year of her life, a year’s worth of work. 

Indeed it is a costly gift, given that the average household income in the United States is $40,000, this is an extravagant act of generosity. 

Whether they realize it or not these young people are offering a costly gift to honor Jesus with a year of service. 

The ministry they are engaging in is relational rather than task oriented, while they will have jobs and volunteer work to do, much of what they do is not easily measured.  For they will be building relationships with people they are working with and serving. 

Where they are headed, Relationships are going to be their only currency.  It is the relationships they build that may help protect them from the rough neighborhoods and placements they find themselves in. 

As an example, one former volunteer shared that a nun he worked with was in the process of being mugged and the perpetrator was stopped not by the police but by the nun’s neighbor who happened to be a drug dealer. 

From my experience as a volunteer I discovered the importance of learning the stories of where I was and sharing them with other people to raise awareness. 

In Miami I learned how halfway houses worked.  How they provided both structure and freedom to enable a person to overcome addiction by providing a safe environment and stability needed to work and save money for a deposit for an apartment and make a new start. 

I learned how similar I was to the guests of the program I was serving – I learned that we all have addictive tendencies.   But that some addictions are more socially acceptable than others – addictions like consuming information, TV, video games, or shopping are often times less destructive than alcohol and drugs. 

In my time there I realized that I was only a few decisions or circumstances away from their place in life.   I was only making $200 a month yet I had a social safety net in place to support me while most of their relationships and social support had been destroyed because of their addiction. 

Some of us are only one car accident, one fire, job termination or few bad decisions or events away from being homeless.  And this is scary.  Money is helpful and even necessary but it is the relationships we build that sustain us. 

This is because we are relational people, Descartes was wrong when he said, “I think therefore I Am.”  When he came up with his famous revelation he was snowbound in a cabin by himself, trying to figure out how he could know that he actually existed. 

If we accept his words as truth we set ourselves apart isolating ourselves from one another.  We should correct Descartes by saying, “I relate therefore I am.” 

God created us to be in relationship. 

First, we are created to be in relationship with God.  Our primary purpose in life is to serve and give praise to GOD our creator through our thoughts, words, and actions.  

Second, we are in relationship with our SELF.  We all have inherent worth and dignity because we are created in the image of God and being made in God’s image, we are called to reflect God’s being. 

Third, OTHERS.  We are created to live in loving relationships; we are to know, love, and encourage one another, to use our gifts from God to fulfill our calling.

Fourth, we were created to live in relation to God’s CREATION.  We are called to be Stewards of the earth, to protect, understand, and manage the world.[1] 

BUT because of SIN all of these relationships are broken causing discord and injustice.  The reason that the poor will always be among us is because of sin – not necessarily their sin but the sin of our world. 

Despite our sin we are still called to live following the example of Jesus Christ. 

As Presbyterians we are part of a relational church, because the Presbyterian Church(USA) is a connectional denomination.  And because of this we are connected to those leaving tomorrow for their year of service. 

Our mission giving to the presbytery and larger church goes to support programs like this.  So by contributing to our weekly offering you all are participating in this ministry in this mission work.  As your pastor I spent the week supporting them and helping them prepare for service: this creates a direct link between our church and mission taking place across the world and right here in the United States. 

In other words our church has a relationship with mission going on out in the world. 

The slogan of the Young Adult Volunteer Program is, “A year of service, for a lifetime of change.” 

This program changes lives.  People are exposed to different worlds, neighborhoods that you don’t see on vacations to foreign countries or even in a bigger city like Nashville or Denver – they are faced with victims of poverty and violence who suffer as the result of the systemic sin of our world.  It is truly an eye opening experience. 

Ten years ago I began my journey as one of these volunteers.  At the end of August I loaded up my white Geo Metro with everything I thought I would need for the year and headed to Tucson.  This led me to a year in Miami, then a year in Louisville helping lead the program, which took me to seminary in Chicago, and ultimately here to East Bethany. 

Ten years ago I could not have imagined that I would be living in Western New York, married to a woman I met as a young adult volunteer, but here we are with Alex and a dog.

Here I am.  Here we are in relationship with one another, in ministry together. 

Praise God that we have been brought together in this time and in this place! 

Rev. Michael Fry preaching

at East Bethany PC

August 26, 2012

---

[1] This list of relationships is taken from the book When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, Moody Publishers 2012.  Page 55.  This is an excellent book on doing and being mission in ways that empower the community and people we engage in mission work instead of fostering dependency and curbing paternalistic tendencies.  

Book Club News

The next book chosen by the Book Club is The Four Agreements:  A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book) by Don Miguel Ruiz.  The book club will be meeting next on Saturday, September 19th at 9:30 AM at Coffee Culture in Batavia.  Everyone is invited to join us!  For more information contact Megan Logdson at 356-9438.

From Amazon.com:
Sit at the foot of a native elder and listen as great wisdom of days long past is passed down. In The Four Agreements shamanic teacher and healer Don Miguel Ruiz exposes self-limiting beliefs and presents a simple yet effective code of personal conduct learned from his Toltec ancestors. Full of grace and simple truth, this handsomely designed book makes a lovely gift for anyone making an elementary change in life, and it reads in a voice that you would expect from an indigenous shaman. The four agreements are these: Be impeccable with your word. Don't take anything personally. Don't make assumptions. Always do your best. It's the how and why one should do these things that make The Four Agreements worth reading and remembering. --P. Randall Cohan

New Members Class

The next meeting of the New Members Class will be September 16th following the worship service.  The class is open to everyone, even current members who just want to learn more about the history of East Bethany Presbyterian and what it means to be a Presbyterian.  For more information see Reverend Fry or contact the church office.

Nursery position available/Manse for Rent

In case any of you are interested or know of someone who might be:

The Personnel Commitee is hiring for a Nursery Attendant position.  The position will be each Sunday morning from 10:15-11:45.  Anyone from the congregation who is interested may call Carissa Carlsen at 356-4853 by September 10th.

The manse next door has been remodeled and the inside has been painted throughout.  It is now ready to be rented.  If you know of someone that is looking for a rental situation please have them request and fill out a rental application.  Rental applications can be obtained from Susan Boyle (344-2931) or Sharon Boyle (343-0448).  The rent is $850/month and does not include utilities.

Sermon from 8/12/12

Scripture John 6: 35-51

Rev. Michael Fry preaching

at East Bethany PC

August 12, 2012

“…whoever believes has eternal life” (47). 

Note: present tense, has eternal life:

It is easy to overlook this detail.  Our minds jump to the future – to eternal life after our death, to heaven.  But there is a tension between the future and the present as Jesus says that right here and now “…whoever believes has eternal life.” 

One little word and yet it expresses a profound truth about our identity as Christians.  Eternal life is now.  What does that mean for us?  How might believing that change how we live, how we see ourselves, how we see God?

Eternal life is a life with God.  God is not distant but close by and involved.  This proximity brings joy to our lives because God seeks us out drawing us into relationship with him even though we are sinful.  And our reconciliation to God through Jesus Christ gives us peace that we are indeed forgiven despite our sin.

This gift of God gracing our present is abundant life.  We know God by knowing Jesus, because Jesus reveals God to us. 

This promised abundance is apparent in the miraculous signs Jesus performed at the Wedding at Canna, turning water into vats filled with high quality wine for the wedding guests and how he took two fish and five loaves of bread and fed a crowd of 5,000 – our Lord is about providing an abundance of goodness.  Jesus says, “I have come that you may have life in all its fullness (John 10:10)

But there is no wasted excess, because after the 5,000 are fed Jesus instructs the disciples to gather the fragments of the leftovers, “so that none may be lost” (12). 

Like the fragments of bread left over from that meal Jesus is concerned that we not be left out, cast aside, or be lost.  He is the shepherd who seeks out his sheep.  In both the present and the future, Jesus is intent that none who come to him will be lost. 

Often times we think of God as a celestial being far away, but here is the thing God came to us, sought us out making the ordinary extraordinary, and God seeks us out today drawing us toward him in ordinary ways. 

Grace and abundant life is offered to us in the here and now. It is the perspective given to us as a gift from Jesus that makes it available to us.  This is important because often times we think only of the future or dwell on the past and this keeps us stuck right where we are. 

The difficulty we have is that God is incarnate in Jesus a man who looks like you and me and chooses to be represented in an ordinary everyday food staple.  God the divine on earth walking among people.  Last week I said that we realize that Jesus is not just talking about physical bread.  He is talking about things that sustain us – Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit (the Trinity) are what sustain us, they give us life. 

Sometimes we overlook the extraordinary qualities in our ordinary lives, because they are, well, ordinary.  And we fail to see the holy in our midst – the smell of fresh baked bread, a meal time prayer, the laughter of a child, the companionship of a friend, the embrace of a loved one. 

But how do we express this extraordinary God life here in the ordinary world.  Jesus uses this bread of life imagery saying that whoever comes to him will no longer hunger or thirst. 

Think about bread, not Wonder Bread wrapped up in plastic, but that fresh baked bread smell that fills the house or a bakery, except it’s not a smell, but an aroma that hangs in the air.  We begin to enjoy the bread before we taste it.  It is pleasing to our eyes and our nose.  It has a nice irregular texture so that as you pull the bread apart or slice it you see the air pockets inside and feel the warm escape.  As we eat it we are satisfied with it in a way that plain old sandwich bread can’t compare to. 

And once we’ve experienced this bread of life it is the like song Shirley Jones and Robert Preston sing in The Music Man – “there were bells all around but I never heard them ringing, no I never heard them ringing at all till there was you.”  God turns everyday occurrences like bells ringing and birds winging into events that transforms an ordinary bell ringing or bird singing into an extraordinary song of praise.

This is how it is with God.  We look all over seeking God searching for the answers to our questions that seem to have no answers and somehow miss that God has been with us all along making the ordinary extraordinary. 

Sometimes I wonder what it is that keeps us from seeing God where we are. 

Is it because like Jesus’ neighbors we think we know who God is and where God can be found? 

We have these expectations of God and are surprised when those expectations do not match up with the reality of God descending to earth incarnate in Jesus who appears, to his neighbors, to just be Mary and Joseph’s son. 

With all the violence and injustice in our world it is hard to see how God could really be doing the miraculous things he has promised.  Isn’t it easier for us to say God will act in the future, not in the present?

Some bystanders see Jesus as an ordinary man doing extraordinary things turning water into wine, feeding thousands, and healing people – they see Jesus as a good compassionate man – someone like Tom Golissano, building first rate children’s hospitals. 

Yet Jesus is not an ordinary man, he is not a wealthy man, he is not an extraordinary man, he is God. 

What is it that makes some people reject Jesus as God, preferring to see him as a compassionate man or a good moral teacher with some good ideas, while others see Jesus as God who is to be worshipped and served? 

Maybe it is like bread, some people prefer Wonder Bread while others savor fresh baked bread provided by God that satisfies more than our hunger but our eyes, our noses, and nourishes our spirits. 

The big question is, once we have tasted this fresh bread, how can we be content with what has passed for bread before? 

O, taste and see that the LORD is good;

happy are those who take refuge in him.

Psalm 34:8