Locust Hill UMC: Recent Episodes
Austin Meadows
Who is this King on the Cross? Join us as we explore Luke 23: 33-43 and Colossians 1: 11-20 to find out!
What do Isaiah 58: 2-9 and Luke 19: 1-10 have to do with Saints? Join us as we explore these texts together!
If you are like me you probably think that there is one Lord's prayer. The one that goes "Our Father who art in heaven..." This prayer in the past few years has really help shaped and formed my own prayer life. And that is the point.
Many of us pray. But we pray with no form. We just kind of do it. If we are not careful... I know this all to well... our prayer life becomes an exclusive want list for how our personal needs can be met. Or merely about our health or the health of those in our circle.
But when we begin to dive into the prayer life of Jesus it seems to push our prayer life away from ourselves and toward God and God's will for our lives and the world.
It is Jesus' prayer in John 17 prior to him being crucified. We get this crystal clear view of the prayer of life of Jesus.
The prayer was selfless (not that Jesus didn't pray for himself) it was about a yearning for unity. At the heart of Jesus prayer was for his disciples and future believers to experience this amazing bond that the Father and Son share. This same bond God doesn't hoard but extends to his followers.
Here is where this gets sticky. Many of us are not naive to think of the division that exists within our lives. The division in our families, our churches, our communities, our nation. We are well aware of it. We hear about it all the time.
Disunity is icky. And many of us have taken the prayer of Jesus and thrown it in the trash.
I don't know necessarily what to do about the disunity in our lives. But I know for sure what Jesus would do. Pray for it. Yearn for it. And be crazy enough to believe that it is possible for two people of opposing ideals and views to sit at the table together.
These past few weeks we have talked about some of the issues that are literally killing the church. Behaviors and patterns of thinking that hold the church back from fulfilling its mission.
The last week of this series we will be talking about cooperation. This word is key for a church or any organization for that matter to thrive and succeed.
A few years ago I remember someone saying, "we use to agree on everything before we made a decision." Many of us have the expectation for our church to be healthy that translates into everyone agreeing on everything.
Anyone married for more than a day knows that this isn't true. Although we do marry people who share similarities... we also know we marry people that are oftentimes opposite of us. The old adage opposites attract is true.
When God saw Adam was lonely didn't create a clone but instead created a suitable partner. A partner that was different than him.
We sometimes misdefine the word cooperation to mean "agree to disagree" or "coexist." But it is widely different than these phrases. Cooperation is working together with a variety of disagreements and opinions and discovering a way to accomplish the same end. For the church, this is to love God and love others. How we do it varies widely... but all of us... are moving towards this end.
Yet this way is hard. It is why many of us are defensive about how we think the church ought to operate. We tend to gravitate towards the idea of uniformity way more than we do cooperation. We try to get those that think like us on our side and to push our agenda. Because cooperating with a different opinion isn't easy. And yet when the marriage fails to cooperate... divorce becomes inevitable... regardless of the issue. And the mission of Jesus Christ crumbles when people in the Church no longer work together.
"We Have Always Done It That Way" are seven words that will kill any organization. They are words that we use to protect ourselves from change and new ideas. People who say these words aren't mean or bad people. Their motives are often times come from a pure place. They say them because they feel that they are the guards and preservers of past practices and traditions.
Any organization that huddles around these seven words will not thrive and will stumble to their end.
And eventually, lose what they were trying to preserve. While others are taking the often painful journey of change, risking failure by trying new ideas so that their organization will be there for the next generation.
I have very little faith that I could convince people to abandon these seven words. I have seen this transformation in people who hated a change and later appreciated it.
What might it mean for us to instead utilize a better phrase, "I am willing to try"? Instead of we have always done it that way. And when we say this we are also saying that we are "willing to fail." And most new ideas in some way do fail. It is always the one idea that succeeds that everyone talks about... but what we don't realize is that a trail of failures follows the one success.
These aren't just words for our churches. They are words for our workplaces. Words for our families (the family has always gone to Grandma's house for Thanksgiving). We always do such and such dinner during this time of year... and on and on it goes.
We have all at some point bowed down to the voice of our critics and enemies. The people who don't believe in us or what we do. Their voices are the ones we often remember and never forget.
And we've all made our share of mistakes in our lives. Mistakes in our relationships and careers that held us back. All of us have our share of failures to go along with our mistakes. We had an idea, we tried it, and it failed. We sat there with our palm in our face thinking that maybe our critics are right.
And it could be at some point we gave up. We quit a job. We quit a friendship. We distanced ourselves from others.
All of us collectively come to Easter Sunday with a sense of our dignity has been stolen from us. We have trailing behind us a tremendous amount of shame that we bowed down to our critics and failed.
The beauty of this celebratory season of Easter (yes... Easter isn't just a day... it is a season... if Lent gets a season... I think Easter should as well!) is that although life can have some deep valley's... we celebrate together that those valleys aren't the end of us. And they aren't the end of you.
Every one of us... including Jesus... has critics... has enemies... has failures (yes Jesus had some failures...) but the narrative we tell is a narrative that has an unlikely ending. An ending that doesn't end in defeat but in victory. And oddly enough we have to tell ourselves when we are in the thick of the valley that it isn't the end of our story. Just like Jesus' story... and our story... has a beautiful, unlikely ending.
Looking forward to lifting our heads up from Holy Week and celebrating the ways in which God's resurrection power is at work in our own lives.
"Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" these are the words that the crowd spoke in unison as Jesus came by riding on a donkey. The difference between us saying these words and this crowd is that we say them with no real consequence. There is nothing for us to lose when we say these words... but for this crowd, they were risking their lives... more so risking Jesus' life.
If there is anything the powerful abhorred was for a multitude of people to have a unison voice that rallied behind Jesus. So the powerful set to make an example of Jesus. To smolder this crowd they beat, spit, mocked, crucified, and finally killed Jesus.
Many of us would steer clear of this crowd. We wouldn't have anything to do with this Jesus figure. It would be too personal to see someone we cared about killed and secondly to risk our own lives.
We might look at those who are activist as trouble makers. Yet Jesus... yes Jesus... raised up activist. Jesus raised up a united people with a united voice behind a united agenda.
People today still risk their lives to stand up for the people that Jesus stood up for... the vulnerable, the immigrant, the impoverished, the excluded...
No one person can fight for the rights of a vulnerable people... it takes a movement of people united in their cause together.
We continue to be a people who seek to love God and others. And Jesus continues to stretch what this might mean for each of us.
So when we come together on Palm Sunday and we say together, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" know that in saying these words Jesus is calling us into a movement. Jesus is calling us to be activists. Jesus is calling us to be ambassadors to those who have no advocates.
This week we will be retelling the story of the Prodigal son with the spotlight shining on the elder son. The elder son wasn't excited about his younger son's return. He was resentful. He thought that his father was being unfair. It was unfair that his younger brother who threw away all his inheritance money in a foreign country in dissolute living could come home to a party where he was lavished by his father.
It didn't seem fair. Many of us have had our share of moments where we felt we were treated unfairly. Some of us more than others. And those moments of unfairness can turn into years of bitterness, anger, and resentment. Just like the elder son many of us don't realize the cost that resentment brings about in our lives. When we become resentful it paralyzes our ability to see the vastness of God's love and providence at work.
The elder son couldn't see nor comprehend how deep the father's love was for his brother. Nor could he see the father's providence in his own life that unlike his brother he was always with his father.
Resentment can set in at any stage of life. The root of resentment can so often be in an unspoken belief that God loves others more than us.
And it is hard to imagine that God's love is big enough for everyone. And so often we limit the fullness of God's love for us. And this keeps us from seeing and witnessing the beautiful work that was taking place in the younger brothers life, "this brother of yours was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found."
This week we will be retelling the story of the Prodigal son with the spotlight shining on the elder son. The elder son wasn't excited about his younger son's return. He was resentful. He thought that his father was being unfair. It was unfair that his younger brother who threw away all his inheritance money in a foreign country in dissolute living could come home to a party where he was lavished by his father.
It didn't seem fair. Many of us have had our share of moments where we felt we were treated unfairly. Some of us more than others. And those moments of unfairness can turn into years of bitterness, anger, and resentment. Just like the elder son many of us don't realize the cost that resentment brings about in our lives. When we become resentful it paralyzes our ability to see the vastness of God's love and providence at work.
The elder son couldn't see nor comprehend how deep the father's love was for his brother. Nor could he see the father's providence in his own life that unlike his brother he was always with his father.
Resentment can set in at any stage of life. The root of resentment can so often be in an unspoken belief that God loves others more than us.
And it is hard to imagine that God's love is big enough for everyone. And so often we limit the fullness of God's love for us. And this keeps us from seeing and witnessing the beautiful work that was taking place in the younger brothers life, "this brother of yours was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found."