This sermon, based on Romans 12:19-21, was preached in weekly chapel at Grand View University on August 30, 2011, by Pastor Ken Jones.
In the reading from Romans today, Paul gives us a pretty great list of ways to behave if you’re going to live around other people. It’s good to be diligent, to be honorable toward others, to be patient when bad stuff happens. Who doesn’t want to be around someone who’s humble, peaceable and hospitable?
For my money, this passage is a pretty good description of what we want the ministry at Grand View to be about. When you attend events, engage in a Bible study and show up at chapel, this is what you ought to expect: People who are authentic, loving and welcoming. A Word that is preached honestly and without hubris. And work done well and with diligence. You ought to expect an intermission from the incessant demands of the world around you. You ought to expect to be able to settle into warmth and welcome. You ought to expect us to recognize all the places you’re already being judged in your life and, in return, to call you into God’s grace and mercy.
All the signs we put together for our Walk to Worship today are designed to give you a clue about what you can expect. For wherever the small, faithful Body of Christ gathers, you’re going to get hypocrites trying to get it right. You’re going to get guys with ripped abs and fellows like me. You’re going to get people willing to give of themselves to you. You’re going to encounter folks whom God has pulled kicking and screaming into a relationship. You’re going to meet up with fellow sinners who’ve fallen and can’t get up, people who need a safety net, people who know the outrageous love of the one who’s caught them.
Here’s the catch, though. What Paul hoped for in the group of believers in Rome and what we hope for in ministry at Grand View isn’t going to happen the way we hope it will. It won’t happen because of some decision or commitment on our part. That’s because every one of us involved is broken. Each of us knows sin. Each of us spends our days focused on ourselves. We do persecute. We do curse. We’re haughty and think we know it all. We keep score. We give up. We see to our own needs first. Our decisions are forgotten and our commitments fall to the wayside. That’s what sin does in us. It mis-shapes us and turns us in on ourselves.
But it’s also not the end of the story. Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead, is the end of the story – the limit and the goal. God has come to us in Christ Jesus, God’s Son. And Christ has seen fit to take you on, to take me one, to grab hold of all of us, and bring us into his community, his gathering, his body. Sometimes it happens with us going kicking and screaming. Sometimes we can’t help ourselves, because he not only the best option for us, he’s the only option and hope – an irresistible hottie of divine and eternal love. Sometimes we just wake up and find ourselves right there at Christ’s mercy seat because our friends have carried us in.
And once Jesus has you, he’s going to make something of you. Paul’s list of behaviors isn’t just a set of suggestions. It’s a description of what people begin to look like when they see their own helplessness and experience the fullness of God’s love in Christ Jesus. People who are honest about their own brokenness start changing when they’re flooded with what Christ comes to give. The proud become humble. Mean girls in your hallway become kind and open. Jocks who are tools begin to lift their weight for others. People who see themselves as sorry nothings begin to regard themselves as valuable children of God. And all those burdens and tasks of life start to look like callings and vocations – divine magnets pulling you away from yourself and into lives of meaning and service.
So here’s my promise to you this semester: I’m going to mess up. Angie Larson is going to take a swing and a miss. The Ministry Team is going go bonkers with all their responsibilities. And you? You’re heading down the same path with us. But this will always be a place and a time where the hoped-for community of Christ and the grace, mercy and steadfast love of God will show up. It will be an intermission – a time in between, a grace space, God showing up, maybe just when you need him most. Amen.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Welcome Worship: The Red Thread
This is a sermon by Pastor Ken Jones. It was preached at the Welcome Worship during New Student Days on Sunday, August 28, 2011.
In the beginning, when your college years were still a formless void, the Spirit of God was moving over the face of all that who-knows-what, and God said, “Let there be you.” And there was you. And God saw what he had made. And, behold, God saw that you were good.
It’s good you’re here. It’s good that you are about to experience four years of cafeteria food, roommate ups and downs, and relationship ups and downs. It’s good that you’re going to come up against professors who assign far too much reading, blank pages on your laptop screen and an even scarier blank mind that doesn’t have a clue what to type. It’s good that you’re going work hard to perform your best for the sake of your Viking teammates and that you’re going to turn out to support your teams. It’s good that you’ll get busy in clubs and orgs. It’s good that, as President Henning said on Friday, that you might just meet your future spouse. And it’s good that you’re going to experience four years of growing pains as you leave behind what was and get ready for even wilder unknowns in the full, rich independence and responsibility of life after college.
Right now you stand on the brink. Everything’s new – even if you’ve been on campus a little longer because of team practices. I suspect that you feel a little apprehensive over all that’s new, but that you’re also feeling pretty confident. After all, you made it through to this point. You did graduate from high school. You survived a summer of waiting and getting ready for this move. And that’s all good, too.
In the midst of all of this, and your past and future, too, God has made a promise to you. As God says to the prophet Jeremiah, I will be your God. You see, God has made a promise to you that you won’t have to cobble together your own life and that you won’t have to create your own future. God is the alpha and the omega. Those are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, so God has decided to be the beginning and ending of everything – including you.
That’s the kind of God we have. That’s a God who isn’t going to sit around on his divine backside playing divine Xbox Connect up in heaven. You have a God who is intrusive and pushy, a God who has decided to make himself known in your life. God is like a mother coyote roaming the prairies of my native South Dakota, howling after her young, searching after you, making sure you’re secure and safe. And just like in the beginning when God said “Let there be light,” and there was light, what God determines to do happens.
God has stitched himself into everything that exists, including your life, like a red thread in a piece of white linen. His promise to be your God runs through the genetic hook-up that created you. The red thread of God’s promise runs through your every breath. Its stitches hold together relationships and molecules. This red thread of promise pulls together people in communities like this one, so that in every space and every time God is there saying, “Mine” and “Good.”
But this business of being God is a tricky thing. Being God means having your human creatures know you and trust you. But they don’t. They can’t see you or hear you. And worse, they often don’t want to. They get caught up in their own existence. They begin to think they’re the masters of their own futures. Instead of looking to you or enjoying and serving in the world around them, they turn in on themselves and cover over the red thread by focusing on their wants, their hopes, their needs. I’d think it would be enough to make you want to quit your godding business and take a vacation to Tahiti.
So God takes that in hand, every bit as much as God did in creating everything. God doesn’t leave you alone, because God does want you to know him. So God speaks to us human creatures throughout history by using people to speak and write that wide variety of things that got collected in the Bible. The red thread emerges in before our eyes and in our ears. What’s more, God doesn’t leave you wondering if he’s actually there. God takes on flesh and bone in the person of Jesus – and he takes on the worst that we human beings can dole out when we execute him. The red thread hangs on the cross. And God doesn’t leave us to our cruelty and rejection, so Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, is raised from the dead. The red thread thrives and weaves itself both in life and beyond the grave. And God sends physical things into your life – things like Baptism and the Lord’s Supper and preachers – so the red thread of God’s divine promise to you can be something you know is actually for you.
I kind of like having a God who is so full of care and is impatient to make himself known. But it’s mighty easy to like that God at this point in my semester – when all the grading I’m going to have to do is still a hypothetical thing in the future, when my school loans are being paid off, when my wife looks kindly on me, when my students write nice things about me on their course evaluations, when I have a chili pepper on RateMyProfessors.com because I’m a hottie. But how am I going to trust God, know God and see the red thread when the bottom drops out and disaster hits, when change becomes my tormentor, and when my future is dim at best.
Six years ago, my wife Mary and I bought our first house. We’d lived in church parsonages or student housing our whole married life. On August 17th that year, my son Sam and I were at our old apartment in West Des Moines with the movers to haul the big furniture to our new house on North Walnut Creek Drive. My cell phone rang, and it was my nephew Nick. I was happy to hear from him, but a little annoyed too, because he was interrupting the moving and packing. But what he said hit me like a 2x4 to the temple: “Uncle Kenny, I just found my mom in her bed, and she’s dead.” With those words, the illusion of my control and my happy future was wiped out. Sam crawled into the back of his bedroom closet and sobbed. I had to call Mary to tell her that her sister had died. I had to call her parents to tell them their little girl Randi was completely lost to them.
And then there was the house and the move. Two guys and a truck waiting. Another Budget rental truck full of stuff standing in our driveway. A decade and a half of boxed life waiting to be unpacked. No beds set up. Who knew where the dishes were, let alone the toilet brush or dryer sheets? And the red thread? All we could see was the shredded fabric of our lives.
I would be so glad if I could tell you that’s the only time in my life when I felt that way. But we’ve had miscarriages and major illnesses. We’ve lost other loved ones. My parents got divorced when I was in college, and I had a semester where I had a 0.8 grade point average. Change keeps coming. Losses pile up. Disaster is unloosed. Red thread? No thread.
But every single time that I couldn’t be the hero of my own story, God has shown up. God has inserted himself, sewn his gracious being into my story, so I could finally see. God set himself as a strong red lifeline I could cling to. When my sister-in-law died so suddenly and tragically, God showed up. Our pastor was at our house even before Mary could get home from work. A passel of folks from church and from school here pulled up and started unpacking boxes. By the end of the afternoon, beds were up and made. Dishes were in the kitchen cupboards. Books were on the shelves. And Grand View’s academic dean had installed a tie rack in my bedroom closet and hung my beloved bow ties.
Yes, death didn’t go away. But the promise God gave to Jeremiah thousands of years ago hung true. God had stitched a red circle of loving people around us. And when we were alone in our house, the three of us, God did one thing more. God used the mouth of an 8th grade kid to say, “Mom and Dad, we need to pray.” And he let loose with words of such light and hope and faith, it was red thread tumbling forth from God himself.
So here you are: all ready to start a year of college life at Grand View University on the east side of Des Moines. It’s good. But I promise you, as Bob Marley says in “I Shot the Sheriff,” “One day the bottom a-go drop out.” Where will the red thread be for you? Where will you find God acting for you? How can you know then of Christ’s love for you? I pray that you have that red stitching around already in the people who’ve seen you to this place. But God gives you a place where, no matter what is going on in your life, you can count on seeing red. No, I don’t mean the Viking Brigade. No, God is present and accounted for here. The reason we have a University Ministry, is so you have a place to go where you can be sure to get God’s promise. God shows up here, so you can feel welcome. God speaks here, so you can have guidance in living and mercy when you fail. God gives you someone like Angie Larson over there, so you have an actual person who’ll wrap you up in God’s love.
It’s good to have a God who begins it all and who wraps it all up. It’s good to have a God who isn’t afraid of you at your worst. It’s good to have a God, who threads and winds and stitches and sews his own eternal good will into your life, into your breath, into your future, into your now, right now. Amen.
In the beginning, when your college years were still a formless void, the Spirit of God was moving over the face of all that who-knows-what, and God said, “Let there be you.” And there was you. And God saw what he had made. And, behold, God saw that you were good.
It’s good you’re here. It’s good that you are about to experience four years of cafeteria food, roommate ups and downs, and relationship ups and downs. It’s good that you’re going to come up against professors who assign far too much reading, blank pages on your laptop screen and an even scarier blank mind that doesn’t have a clue what to type. It’s good that you’re going work hard to perform your best for the sake of your Viking teammates and that you’re going to turn out to support your teams. It’s good that you’ll get busy in clubs and orgs. It’s good that, as President Henning said on Friday, that you might just meet your future spouse. And it’s good that you’re going to experience four years of growing pains as you leave behind what was and get ready for even wilder unknowns in the full, rich independence and responsibility of life after college.
Right now you stand on the brink. Everything’s new – even if you’ve been on campus a little longer because of team practices. I suspect that you feel a little apprehensive over all that’s new, but that you’re also feeling pretty confident. After all, you made it through to this point. You did graduate from high school. You survived a summer of waiting and getting ready for this move. And that’s all good, too.
In the midst of all of this, and your past and future, too, God has made a promise to you. As God says to the prophet Jeremiah, I will be your God. You see, God has made a promise to you that you won’t have to cobble together your own life and that you won’t have to create your own future. God is the alpha and the omega. Those are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, so God has decided to be the beginning and ending of everything – including you.
That’s the kind of God we have. That’s a God who isn’t going to sit around on his divine backside playing divine Xbox Connect up in heaven. You have a God who is intrusive and pushy, a God who has decided to make himself known in your life. God is like a mother coyote roaming the prairies of my native South Dakota, howling after her young, searching after you, making sure you’re secure and safe. And just like in the beginning when God said “Let there be light,” and there was light, what God determines to do happens.
God has stitched himself into everything that exists, including your life, like a red thread in a piece of white linen. His promise to be your God runs through the genetic hook-up that created you. The red thread of God’s promise runs through your every breath. Its stitches hold together relationships and molecules. This red thread of promise pulls together people in communities like this one, so that in every space and every time God is there saying, “Mine” and “Good.”
But this business of being God is a tricky thing. Being God means having your human creatures know you and trust you. But they don’t. They can’t see you or hear you. And worse, they often don’t want to. They get caught up in their own existence. They begin to think they’re the masters of their own futures. Instead of looking to you or enjoying and serving in the world around them, they turn in on themselves and cover over the red thread by focusing on their wants, their hopes, their needs. I’d think it would be enough to make you want to quit your godding business and take a vacation to Tahiti.
So God takes that in hand, every bit as much as God did in creating everything. God doesn’t leave you alone, because God does want you to know him. So God speaks to us human creatures throughout history by using people to speak and write that wide variety of things that got collected in the Bible. The red thread emerges in before our eyes and in our ears. What’s more, God doesn’t leave you wondering if he’s actually there. God takes on flesh and bone in the person of Jesus – and he takes on the worst that we human beings can dole out when we execute him. The red thread hangs on the cross. And God doesn’t leave us to our cruelty and rejection, so Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, is raised from the dead. The red thread thrives and weaves itself both in life and beyond the grave. And God sends physical things into your life – things like Baptism and the Lord’s Supper and preachers – so the red thread of God’s divine promise to you can be something you know is actually for you.
I kind of like having a God who is so full of care and is impatient to make himself known. But it’s mighty easy to like that God at this point in my semester – when all the grading I’m going to have to do is still a hypothetical thing in the future, when my school loans are being paid off, when my wife looks kindly on me, when my students write nice things about me on their course evaluations, when I have a chili pepper on RateMyProfessors.com because I’m a hottie. But how am I going to trust God, know God and see the red thread when the bottom drops out and disaster hits, when change becomes my tormentor, and when my future is dim at best.
Six years ago, my wife Mary and I bought our first house. We’d lived in church parsonages or student housing our whole married life. On August 17th that year, my son Sam and I were at our old apartment in West Des Moines with the movers to haul the big furniture to our new house on North Walnut Creek Drive. My cell phone rang, and it was my nephew Nick. I was happy to hear from him, but a little annoyed too, because he was interrupting the moving and packing. But what he said hit me like a 2x4 to the temple: “Uncle Kenny, I just found my mom in her bed, and she’s dead.” With those words, the illusion of my control and my happy future was wiped out. Sam crawled into the back of his bedroom closet and sobbed. I had to call Mary to tell her that her sister had died. I had to call her parents to tell them their little girl Randi was completely lost to them.
And then there was the house and the move. Two guys and a truck waiting. Another Budget rental truck full of stuff standing in our driveway. A decade and a half of boxed life waiting to be unpacked. No beds set up. Who knew where the dishes were, let alone the toilet brush or dryer sheets? And the red thread? All we could see was the shredded fabric of our lives.
I would be so glad if I could tell you that’s the only time in my life when I felt that way. But we’ve had miscarriages and major illnesses. We’ve lost other loved ones. My parents got divorced when I was in college, and I had a semester where I had a 0.8 grade point average. Change keeps coming. Losses pile up. Disaster is unloosed. Red thread? No thread.
But every single time that I couldn’t be the hero of my own story, God has shown up. God has inserted himself, sewn his gracious being into my story, so I could finally see. God set himself as a strong red lifeline I could cling to. When my sister-in-law died so suddenly and tragically, God showed up. Our pastor was at our house even before Mary could get home from work. A passel of folks from church and from school here pulled up and started unpacking boxes. By the end of the afternoon, beds were up and made. Dishes were in the kitchen cupboards. Books were on the shelves. And Grand View’s academic dean had installed a tie rack in my bedroom closet and hung my beloved bow ties.
Yes, death didn’t go away. But the promise God gave to Jeremiah thousands of years ago hung true. God had stitched a red circle of loving people around us. And when we were alone in our house, the three of us, God did one thing more. God used the mouth of an 8th grade kid to say, “Mom and Dad, we need to pray.” And he let loose with words of such light and hope and faith, it was red thread tumbling forth from God himself.
So here you are: all ready to start a year of college life at Grand View University on the east side of Des Moines. It’s good. But I promise you, as Bob Marley says in “I Shot the Sheriff,” “One day the bottom a-go drop out.” Where will the red thread be for you? Where will you find God acting for you? How can you know then of Christ’s love for you? I pray that you have that red stitching around already in the people who’ve seen you to this place. But God gives you a place where, no matter what is going on in your life, you can count on seeing red. No, I don’t mean the Viking Brigade. No, God is present and accounted for here. The reason we have a University Ministry, is so you have a place to go where you can be sure to get God’s promise. God shows up here, so you can feel welcome. God speaks here, so you can have guidance in living and mercy when you fail. God gives you someone like Angie Larson over there, so you have an actual person who’ll wrap you up in God’s love.
It’s good to have a God who begins it all and who wraps it all up. It’s good to have a God who isn’t afraid of you at your worst. It’s good to have a God, who threads and winds and stitches and sews his own eternal good will into your life, into your breath, into your future, into your now, right now. Amen.
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