Fairplain Presbyterian Church: Recent Episodes
Fairplain Presbyterian Church
A leader in the local religious institution asks Jesus to bring life to his daughter, but on the way, Jesus has to stop the suffering of a woman who is unable to participate in the life of the community, who has no one to advocate for her, whose life blood is flowing out of her.
In the same way, many Christians are deeply involved in their religious institutions, but those institutions are not bringing life to their children.
It is the same Jesus through whom power flows to stop the bleeding of the woman, who will bring life to the children of the people who upheld the institution.
It's much easier to believe God only works behind the scenes in subtle ways in people's hearts, but every now and again, a shepherd defeats a giant, and every now and then, there's Jesus, standing in a storm and speaking to the wind like it's a petulant child.
"If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation." Is this a one-time thing? You are in Christ, then instantly become a new creation? Or is Paul talking about something else, something more beautiful and slow?
Sometimes we are tempted to compare ourselves to others, who we might think are better people, but Paul's words in II Corinthians 4 teach us that the light of God's love shines through us regular folks, too.
When evil or harm happens, we ask where God is. On the cross Jesus demonstrated forever that God is suffering with the oppressed, with the hurting, with the broken-hearted and angry... God is suffering with us.
We had thought that our sins were in the way, our sins were between us and God and if we just did enough, God would love us, but God already does love us, and showed it in doing for us the thing we thought we were supposed to do for God.
When the Sanhedrin asks Peter and John, "By whose power, or by what authority are you doing these things?" they're not looking for information or understanding. What might they have learned if they had come from a place of holy curiosity?
The Birds and Beaks Facebook post Pastor David references can be found here.
Life throws us curveballs, but this sermon reveals how God can work through the unexpected, using stories like Palm Sunday, Joseph, Mary, and Paul.
With everything going on in the world and in our lives, it can be easy to fall into despair. Rev. David Schell offers a few suggestions on how we might find hope and repent of despair when it's a choice (sometimes it's something like depression and that needs treatment, not repentance).
- Own the despair. Admit that it's real; don't try to hide from it.
- Talk to a trusted friend about your despair. Make a list of people you might reach out to.
- Talk to God about your despair. Pray about it. What a novel idea. In church.
- Get therapy. Find a therapist, if you can. If you have a mental illness, get medication you need, if you can afford it.
- Choose joy. If you're looking for reasons to celebrate, things to bring you joy, things to celebrate, that can help.
And remember that resurrection is built into the fabric of the universe.
God created us for good works, and created good works for us to do. But how to we find them? Maybe we can get a little help from Lego Lord of the Rings.
Link to "As Far As Faith Will Take Me" by The Martins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjVS68L2FMY
The fourth commandment, keeping Sabbath, says to work six days and rest the seventh, but it's so much easier to work than to rest. Rev. David Schell offers some suggestions on how we might make rest happen when we are busy.
What good does it do to gain everything but lose yourself, your soul, your psyche, your heart, in the process?
Two of the temptations Jesus faces in the wilderness start with, "If you are the Son of God, do this thing I think you should do." Which is really fascinating, right, because God LITERALLY JUST SAID "You are my beloved son." The temptation is "If you're REALLY God's beloved, you have to do this and this and this." God didn't say that. The devil said that.
Peter, James, and John are up on a mountain having this amazing, mountain-top experience and seeing Jesus in all of his glory, and the other nine male disciples, plus the women who followed Jesus around everywhere, miss it.
Not only do they miss it, they spend the whole time trying - in vain - to cast out a demon.
"It is what it is" is a thing people often say when a situation is bad but they have decided they are not going to do anything about it. Nowhere in scripture does God ever say "It Is What It Is."
Photo: Pastor David's 1993 Honda Accord.
The person of Jesus Christ is still the word of God who is more powerful than the stories you tell yourself about yourself or the stories others tell about you.
Jonah thinks he's better than other people because of his ethnicity and his religion… but let's be honest; we all have a little bit of Jonah in us.
Deuteronomy says God's laws are for our good, but what do we do when people have stories of things that appear to be laws from God don't do good, but instead cause harm?
People often talk about being "On fire for God," but being on fire usually results in either the thing that is on fire being burned up, or the fire going out. Exodus has an unusual story of Moses encountering a fire that produces heat and light, but does not consume the bush. This past Sunday's sermon is about that fire.
This week our special guest Pastor Chris Britton from the New Heights Christian Community Development Agency shares with us about the exciting work they're doing in our area, and ideas of ways we might partner with them.
When Joseph finally revealed himself to his brothers, he said God had brought him to Egypt to save them. But in the first telling of the story, God does not appear to be involved at all. This sermon is about how God invites us to read our story as part of God's story.
Sometimes when we feel hurt, we lash out in anger, but that anger is misdirected, not to the person causing the harm, but to someone only tangentially connected to the harm. Join us for this week's message from the story of Joseph that gives us some insights on how we might avoid making the mistakes of Joseph's brothers and his father.
The dark night of the soul is where we wrestle with God. Where what we were told about God, about faith, about life, by our church, just isn't working anymore, isn't connecting with our hearts anymore. Where we shuffle off alone into the darkness to take on a figure in the dark. A figure - we're not sure if it's God or the devil or maybe just the embodiment of our own fears. We didn't ask for it, but it can leave us with a blessing... and a spiritual limp.
Mustard seeds are really tiny, but they grow up big. How do they do it? What does that mean for the church?
When Abraham's servant goes to seek a wife for his son Isaac, the servant asks, "What if the woman is unwilling to come back here?" Abraham replies, "Do not take my son back there." What are the places we have been that we do not want future children to ever have to go back to?
When scripture says God told Abraham to offer up his son Isaac as a burnt offering, what are we to do with that story? In what way does that awful, horrifying story function as the word of God for the people of God?
Mission can feel like a big, scary word, evoking all sorts of things that might not necessarily be what God has in mind. In this message, you'll hear a brief, unprofessional history of the idea of mission in the church, and a few ideas that might make the idea of doing mission more accessible.
There can be a nostalgia in the church for Pentecost, but at its best, a wish for a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit is not a wish to go backwards, but rather a wish for change and a future we might not yet even be able to imagine - and one that might offend us.
Plenty of people are afraid of judgment day, but when you look closely at who the judge is, and what God's judgment looks like in scripture, it might prove more hopeful than fearsome.
It is difficult to believe good news, but in the case of the resurrection, and so many other things in our lives, it is, to borrow from Beuchner, simply "too good not to be true."
We're 2000 years removed from the life and death of Jesus. His resurrection is unproven and unprovable. So why do we keep telling this story?
For a transcript of this sermon, including the video of Justin Pearson's speech, click here.
You may have heard that the folks who cheered Jesus on when he came into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday thought he was going to defeat Rome, but what if they weren't wrong because what if that's not what they thought?
What if all they knew were these two things:1. Something is wrong, and2. Jesus can help.
Samuel asks David's father Jesse, "Is this all your sons?" The answer turns out to be "No." What would have happened if Samuel hadn't asked? What happens when we don't ask that question?
Sometimes the help we give or get creates new problems, like when the Israelites escaped Egypt and then realized they didn't have any water. Moses got upset that people were asking for water, but God told Moses to get busy helping them get it.
Immediately after a voice from heaven has declared him God's beloved Son, the devil demands Jesus prove that he's the Son of God by doing what the devil tells him to do. Something focused on himself.
Sometimes people in positions of power demand that people they have hurt and abused "forgive" them even though they haven't done anything to attempt to make it right, or even stopped engaging in the harm they've caused. Is it right to forgive them? Is it even possible?
When we pray, "Give us this day our daily bread," what are we asking for, exactly? It is not just bread; it is everything we need for our lives. And who is "us"? The whole human family. That being the case, can we become part of the answer to our own prayers?
When we pray "Thy Will Be Done," what are we asking for? Will God's will be done no matter what? How does God's will relate to evil? How can we do God's will in our lives?
Our version of the Lord's Prayer this morning is from The Message.
In this second message on the Lord's Prayer, we discuss "Hallowed be thy name."
Holiness is often imagined as something scary, perhaps God killing people for not being appropriately respectful, or sending tornadoes because the Wrong People are being included, but if our understanding of God is to be (rightly) rooted in the person of Jesus Christ, then we must acknowledge God to be "A little more holy than that."
Jesus teaches us to pray "Hallowed be Thy name." What is attributed to God's name has much to do with the behavior, or misbehavior, of Christians. The way we treat others, and the way we speak about God and what God wants in our world, will determine whether we enact our prayer, "Hallowed be Thy name."
In this first sermon in a series on the Lord's Prayer, we consider what it means to call God "our Father" or "our Mother" through our own experiences of having an earthly father or mother, or, for some of us, our own experiences of being a parent.
Note: In the story David tells of the abbot who was told not to imagine anyone human, word has come down from the higher-ups in the church not to do that; David is not suggesting we not do it.
Ruling Elder Marlene Smith preaches about looking forward to a new year with an openness to new paths God may reveal.
Most of us know Isaiah's prophecy, "The virgin shall conceive and bear a son" from Matthew's gospel, but the story of King Ahaz, trapped by two kings who united were more powerful than him, to whom Isaiah's prophecy originally came, is less well-known.
John the Baptist appears on the scene with what seems like a message of wrath, but Romans 15:4 says, "For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope." We explore what it might look like to read John the Baptist through a lens of Hope.
John Lennon imagined a world with no religion. Isaiah envisions a world in which all the world marches to Zion to learn from Israel's God. In Christ, God comes to the world as a baby and learns from the world.
This is how Christ rules - not with a rod of iron, but with a staff of reed, with a crown of thorns on his head. Jesus rules a kingdom of love not from a throne but from a cross.
When Jesus shouts out at the festival of booths, "If anyone is thirsty, let them come to me and drink!" he is insisting (loudly) that the water of life given to Israel as they wandered in the wilderness is not merely a story of the past, but a living reality. Jesus is saying that the rock that followed Israel in the wilderness providing them water pointed toward Jesus, and God is still at work, still pouring out that water through the living Christ today, and through us today.
Jesus says good trees grow good fruit and bad trees go bad fruit. Solzhenitsyn says the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, and that great theologian Batman (perhaps borrowing from Aristotle) says "It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me."
So what is the relationship between what we do and who we are? Pastor David shares stories of a sheep thief turned saint, a "paradise prison" in Norway, John Wesley's "Fake it 'til you make it," and an Amishman asked whether he was a Christian as a way to begin to explore these questions about identity and action.
A sermon about the ways we write people off, and the dangers of that, and of allowing ourselves to be written off, and the way God doesn't write us off.
The Christian church has a long legacy of teaching the faith to children, but Jesus says the Kingdom of God already belongs to children, and whoever does not come as a child will not enter it, so perhaps it is the adults who need to learn the faith from children. Rev. David Schell shares a few sermons taught him by his children.
When you come across a tough passage of scripture, what do you do? Do you...
- Decide to reject the Bible in general and that passage in particular?
- Just skim over it and let it go past?
- Accept that "God said it, I believe it, and that settles it?" or
- Wrestle with it until you find where God might be speaking to us in it?
In this sermon, Rev. David Schell discusses how to wrestle faithfully with a passage in which Jesus assumes his hearers are slaveholders and does not condemn the practice.
Sometimes when we do something first, it empowers and encourages others who see it to do it too.
In our modern culture, we have been taught to listen to our hearts, but it is also very important what we say to our hearts.
Abigail is stuck in a marriage to a surly man who won't listen to anyone. When the leader of a band of rogues comes to try to extort her husband for goods for protection, she takes a leap of faith.
What if that story about David's first wife Michal despising him when he danced the ark into Jerusalem was missing some important context?
A note: One church member pointed out that David does promise the throne to Solomon - but he does so only in Chronicles, which was written centuries after David's reign and often fills in gaps (and removes gaps) and airbrushes David to show him in a more positive light. For more on the difference between Chronicles and Kings, see https://bibleproject.com/blog/chronicles-not-just-repeat/
In Matthew, Jesus says not to take oaths. Why does he say that, and what does it have to do with us today?
The woman who trained an evangelist and maybe, just maybe, wrote Hebrews.
Related Links:
A deeper dive into the theology in Hebrews and the possibility of Prisca as an author: CBE International: The Book of Hebrews Revisited: Is Priscilla the author? And how does this epistle’s theology relate to gender equality?
Ruth Hoppin responding to an argument (really, the only one) that Prisca did not write Hebrews: CBE International | Priscilla and Plausibility: Responding to Questions about Priscilla as Author of Hebrews
Ruth Hoppin's book Priscilla's Letter: Finding the Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews
God promised to send Israel another prophet "like Moses." Peter claims Jesus is like Moses, but Jesus is in so many ways nothing like Moses. What's going on here, and what does it have to do with our church (and the Ship of Theseus)?
When Jesus says "In the age to come, they will not marry or be given in marriage," what does that mean?
A Special Easter Sunday look at Mary Magdalene, the first person to learn the good news that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, and the first to be commissioned to tell it.
There are scary people about, but they're dust, formed by the hand of God, just like we are.
When Paul arrived at Corinth, he didn't come with "lofty words or wisdom," but with "the Spirit and power." What does that mean?
When the child of the widow the prophet Elijah was staying with died, she assumed it was her fault, that Elijah's arrival had pointed a divine spotlight on her, and God was punishing her for some sin she had committed. We consider this question in light of Jesus raising another woman's son from the dead.