Doers – Sunday Message On James 1

Sunday message James 1

This Sunday Message was originally delivered at Bristol United Methodist Church on September 1, 2024. Below the recorded-live video is the sermon text I preached from, if you would like to follow along. Biblical texts for reference: James 1. Read online with https://www.biblegateway.com – a fantastic resource. In his “Table Talks”—basically his conversations with students—Martin … Read more

Even The Sparrow – Sunday Message on Psalm 84

Sunday Message on Psalm 84

This Sunday Message was originally delivered at Weasley Chapel United Methodist Church on August 25, 2024. Below the recorded-live video is the sermon text I preached from, if you would like to follow along. Biblical texts for reference: Psalm 84 and 1 Kings 8:1-30. Read online with https://www.biblegateway.com – a fantastic resource. So, the sons … Read more

“Does This Offend You?” – Sunday Message On John 6 & Jonah 4

"Does This Offend You?" - Sunday Message on John 6 and Jonah 4

This Sunday Message was originally delivered at Weasley Chapel United Methodist Church on August 11, 2024. Below the recorded-live video is the sermon text I preached from, if you would like to follow along. Biblical texts for reference: John 6: 60-69 and Jonah 4. Read online with https://www.biblegateway.com – a fantastic resource.

“This is a hard saying; who can understand it?”

The words that begin our Gospel reading for today. Words by which the Disciples set the tone for today, as they so often do, by just not quite getting it…

And they are hard words. The words of John 6 that we have dealt with over these last two Sundays. Words about eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood… Words about rising from the dead… About “bread of life” that both is and is not the same as the manna in the wilderness… References to the great Hebrew leader Moses that somehow, at the same time, both affirm his significance as the great prophet of Hebrew history and also, somehow, downplay his significance, or the significance that Jews gathered around Jesus right then want to give him.

And then, of course, that whole eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood thing…

I think that’s the thing that’s really lingering in the Disciples’ minds at this moment.

But these are hard things, hard sayings. They are indeed offensive things that cause offense, just like many people are still offended by tales of cannibalism or, worse, undead monsters rising from the grave to subsist on human flesh and blood—and that is an ancient concept, by the way. Cannibalism is certainly ancient, but that other one, too, the idea of creatures—ghosts, ghouls, something of that nature—rising from the grave to consume living flesh and blood—that idea is found in some of the oldest written documents that we have. There’s evidence of a real fear that the dead would come back to life in prehistoric gravesites. And the idea of feeding the dead, sacrificing to the dead, so that they would not return and harm the living, is something that pretty much every culture on earth has believed in at some point. So, in John 6, when Jesus starts making these statements about “raising [his followers] up at the last day”—that is, bringing people back from the dead, all while talking about magical bread from heaven, and then going into this last part about his own body and blood—I’m pretty sure that at least a few minds went there… Vampires and Zombi and death cults… Death cults and sacrificing to the dead being things that the Hebrews and the Jews were always very, very against, by the way. Christianity is too, to be clear.

But then Jesus does say these rather difficult things, that—let’s be honest—do at least skirt up to the edge of cannibalism… So…

So, I think some of people in his audience that day do kind of have to take a step back and wonder: Wait, what have we gotten ourselves involved in, here? I mean, the whole wandering itinerate preacher, bucking authority, reinterpreting Scripture in every which way that doesn’t actually make sense to us, miracles we can’t explain either but, well, they’re not doing any harm, thing—okay, we can accept all that. But… How weird is this gonna get…? Exactly…?

“This is a hard saying; who can understand it?”

To which, Jesus responds: Does this offend you?

Does this offend you?

But not just, does this offend you—Jesus goes on. Just puts a little perspective on the question. Does this offend you? Okay, well, what if I went back where I came from? What if I gave up this body that I just told you to eat? What if I shed the very thing you’re getting so hung up here, put these things into ultimate perspective, did everything possible to illustrate how totally these little details, the vocabulary words like flesh and blood, are just not the point here?

I think what Jesus is saying is not that he could prove his point if he did ascend into heaven right there in front of their eyes. I think Jesus’s point is that even if he did do that, get all glowy and ride a beam of light straight up into the clouds right there and then—maybe send a lightning bolt or two back down for good measure… You know, I think his point is that even if he did that, it still would not prove the point. They still wouldn’t get it. They would still be getting hung up on the details. They would still be saying “Ewe, cannibalism” and “Wait, I didn’t know this was a Vampire cult…” And they would still be offended.

And ultimately, of course, this all proves to be true, Jesus does eventually ride that beam of light back into heaven or—I don’t know what it looked like. But we’re told in the Gospels that after the resurrection, after enough people saw him alive, he did ascend back where he came from. But it doesn’t prove any points. In fact, the only people who are even allowed to see that ascension are the people who have already gotten the point…

It is interesting how often that seems to happen in the bible. And by interesting, I of course mean telling—how often the only people who are let in on the mysteries of faith are the people who have already gotten the point of faith itself. Faith is, by literal definition, an unproveable thing. You either get it or you don’t. You either have it or you don’t. And actually, if you think of it, that’s true of most kinds of knowledge. We tend to think of faith as this unique branch of human knowledge that’s not even actually knowledge—that is unprovable and insupportable and cannot be taught. But the reality is, you can’t really teach anyone anything they don’t want to learn.

In a way, I think that all knowledge actually does begin with faith.

“It is the spirit that gives life. The flesh profits nothing. The words I speak to you are spirit and they are life…”

That’s how Jesus says it in John Chapter 6.

Sometime later, the apostle Paul would refer to himself, and all believers, really, “as ministers of the New Covenant, not of the letter [that is, the literal meaning of the Old Testament law, things like, you must be circumcised, don’t eat pigs, etc.] but of the spirit; for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life…” (2 Cor 3:6)

What are the things in life cause offense? Division? The things we stay up well past midnight arguing about on the internet? What actually provokes these things? Is it the point? Or the detail?

Do we get hung up on the big-picture metaphor about Jesus being the provider of all our needs?

Or do we get hung up on tiny little vocabulary words like flesh and blood?

And these aren’t rhetorical questions, by the way.

These are questions that really need to be answered.

Because sometimes we are not arguing over vocabulary words. Some of our arguments are significant. They do matter. The challenge is not just to avoid all argument. The challenge is to know which arguments are worth having.

The book of Jonah ends with a question that has become one of those guiding questions in my own life. You know, Jonah, the whole getting eaten by a whale thing is only half the story. In the second half of the story, he actually does go to Nineveh. He does preach to them. And against all odds, they actually listen. And Jonah gets all annoyed by that.

And to be fair to Jonah—because I don’t think we always are. But to be fair to Jonah, historically speaking, he actually had good reason, first to run away from Nineveh, and then to be annoyed that they actually listened to him. Because Nineveh was the capital of Assyria. And historically, Assyria was pretty awful. History itself has almost nothing good to say about Assyria—they were essentially the Nazis of their time. And that’s not an exaggeration, so just, think about it—Jonah, a Jewish prophet, has been sent to evangelize the Nazis of his day.

There’s something offensive just in that concept, right?

Like, actually offensive.

And I think—after the whole fish incident, right? After Jonah resigns himself to, “Yeah, I guess I really am going to Nineveh”—jumping straight from the fish’s mouth into the lion’s… I think, at that point, Jonah takes some comfort from the fact that, at least, he is going there to preach Nineveh’s destruction. They might kill him first, but the fire and brimstone is coming.

But then, we know the story, right? The unthinkable happens. Nineveh repents. Thousands of people renounce their evil and turn to God. And so, Jonah storms off, goes and sits on this hill looking down on the city and just waits. He’s in total denial at this point. No, the fire’s still coming. The fire’s still coming. The fire is still coming!

And while he’s out there for a few days, it gets hot. Not fire and brimstone hot, unfortunately, but hot. Sun’s shining straight down on me in the middle of the day, hot. But to Jonah’s relief, this plant grows right behind him, gives him shade, for a day or so. And then the plant dies…

I’ve seen an image—unfortunately, I don’t remember where. But in the image, Jonah is holding this wilted plant like it’s a body. Like it’s his friend who has died. Jonah gets really upset about this plant dying, and not just because it gave him shade, but you get the sense that it had become like a friend to him, his only friend out there on the hill, looking down on Nineveh. And that’s when God asks him a question: This really simple, profound question, that I think can be a guiding light in all kinds of circumstances in all of our lives.

This simple, profound question: Jonah 4:9

Have you any right to be angry?

Does this offend you? Jesus asks, in John 6, centuries later.

And like Jesus in John, at the end of Jonah, God goes on to put the question and the point into perspective. God points out that Jonah’s upset about the death of this plant, a living creature, yes, but without a brain, without feelings, without freewill. Jonah’s upset, even though Jonah had nothing to do with the plant’s creation. Jonah didn’t plant the plant. Jonah didn’t even cultivate the plant.

But down in Nineveh—thousands of people, cattle, children… If the city needed to be destroyed to prevent worse things, then God was ready to do that, but—if there’s even a chance it’s not necessary… If there’s now a chance that those people can change, now that they have indeed committed themselves to change…

Bigger picture, right?

Have you any right to be angry?

It’s such a profound question because it is not rhetorical. Just like I don’t think Jesus’s “are you offended” question from John today is rhetorical. These are actual questions that are meant to provoke honest answers. You know, God doesn’t just yell at Jonah, tell him he has no right to be upset about Nineveh not being destroyed. God waits for Jonah to experience an actual loss—silly as some of us might think it is to mourn a plant, it is an actual loss for Jonah. A friend who made his life better. And God doesn’t call the loss silly, God uses it, for perspective, to illustrate the far greater loss that would be Nineveh’s destruction.

Have you any right to be angry? It’s a profound question because sometimes the answer to that question is going to be yes? Yes, we do have a right to be angry. Yes, we are offended.

Righteousness is not never being offended, or being somehow above being offended by anything. Rather, the righteous is knowing when something is worth being offended at.

That’s the real challenge.  Not to pretend were immune to being offended. Knowing when an issue is big enough to warrant the time and the energy that goes into being truly offended. And to know when some issue or stance is worth the risk of offending other people.

Is this issue worth losing friends over? Unfortunately, in this life, the answer is sometimes going to be yes. But let’s make absolutely sure that when we answer yes, it’s because the answer really is yes.

Are we arguing over real issues, questions of eternity, or justice, or salvation? Or are we arguing over vocabulary words?

And this has been an issue in the church for as long as I can remember. These arguments over things that just don’t matter—you know, there is actually this really handy list. It’s right here, printed in every hymnal in front of you. It’s called the Nicene Creed. It’s been the authoritative statement of faith for the entire Christian church, every denomination, for sixteen hundred years. It was written by not one but three committees—it took them decades to put the final form of this creed together, decades of debates in more than one worldwide church council meeting—and that’s after the first 300 years of Church history in which Christians were already wrestling with these questions. Three centuries and then decades more to dig out the things that are actually fundamental to Christian faith, that really do set our religion apart. Our actual hills to die on…

And turns out—it’s not that long of a list. Which is one of the reasons that it has indeed stood the test of sixteen hundred years and even more church schisms now than can be counted.

This upcoming election season—if I could just bring all this into the here and now for a moment… As utterly absurd as this election season is continuing to be… in all the insanity, there are real issues, big issues, real, serious problems, that do warrant offense, do warrant our concern and our anger.

And then there are all the stupid things that so many of us are taking offense over, the name calling, the game of which politician is more corrupt, the fear-mongering—That’s the one that’s really starting to get to me, I think because, let’s be honest, a lot of it is aimed directly at younger women, right now. And it’s pure distraction from real issues, like impending war, but even more immediate, the fact that eggs now cost four dollars a carton. You know, that’s a real issue that actually affects every person’s life. And meanwhile, distracted by mostly manufactured fears, and a state of righteous anger over which candidate’s personality we detest more, we don’t notice that we’re maxing out credit cards just to pay for groceries.

Bread and circuses, right? Politics is the same in every age. A game of pure distraction.

And our challenge, as citizens of a republic, with a responsibility to other citizens of this republic is to push through the nonsense and find those real issues. Those real hills to die on.

The things we really should be offended by.

The ending of the reading today is, I think, the most important part. Because a lot of people just walk away from Jesus at that point, say nope, this is getting too weird, and leave.

And then Jesus turns to those who stay and asks: Why? Why are you still here?

And their answer is: because you have the words of life.

The answer is: You know, we may not understand everything that you’re saying, Jesus, but we know that it’s true

We know that it’s true.

That ability to just stand firm on what we know to be true – that’s what we should all have. That’s what we all need to have. To follow the words of life wherever they lead no matter how weird it does get.

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“The Saga Of Salem” – Sunday Message On Genesis 14, 2 Samuel 5, And Hebrews

"The Saga of Salem" | Sunday Message on Melchizedek

This Sunday Message was originally delivered at Weasley Chapel United Methodist Church on July 7, 2024. Below the live video is the sermon text I preached from, if you would like to follow along. Biblical texts for reference: Genesis 14:1-24; 2 Samuel 5:1-10; Hebrews 7:1-19; Revelation 21-22 Read online with https://www.biblegateway.com – a fantastic resource. … Read more

I’m Going Fishing – Sunday Message on John 21:1-13 & The Great Commission

Shanna Terese Bude preaches at Bristol/Wesley Chapel United Methodist Churches on April 14th, 2024 on John 21:1-13

Summary: Sometimes, you just have to go fishing… In this passage, John 21, Peter and the other disciples wait for Jesus in Galilee. Unsure of the future or what to do next, Peter decides to be useful, return for the evening to something he knows he can do well, the catching of fish, which will at least feed someone. In times of uncertainty or doubt, there is nothing wrong with just falling back on what we know we can do, no matter how insignificant. Don’t just sit around waiting for God to show up. Do something – any little thing you can – to make this world just a little bit better, to reach people for God one fish, one meal, one soul at a time. Just do it, and see what happens next!

Centering Prayer:

This morning’s Call to Worship is based on Psalm 139

Lord, you have searched us and you know us. You know everywhere we will go, everything we will do. You know us completely. What can separate us, Lord, from your Spirit? What could possibly hide us from you? If we ascend into heaven, you are there. If we lay down among the dead, you are there. Even in the places no one has ever gone, in the depth of the sea or the vast reaches of outer space – even there, you will be our guide and our support, for we are your creation. We will praise you, For marvelous are your works. Search us, O God, and know our hearts, our fears, and our anxieties. Purge us of all wicked things, and lead us in the way everlasting.

Michael Card has a fantastic musical version of this Psalm. Check it out!

Message

Message Text

So after all the Easter hysteria in Jerusalem, all this “Jesus’s body is gone!” and “Oh my goodness, what happened, where’s Jesus?” and then Jesus himself coming and going through locked doors, and walking with people for miles down roads, then vanishing into thin air again, etc… After all of it has settled down, and everyone’s sort of thinking straight again… A group of disciples including Peter head off to Galilee.

And this, like the resurrection story, is a place where the witness of just one Gospel is incomplete. Where you have to put the pieces together from all the Gospels, all the witnesses, to get a full picture of what’s going on. Because not from the Gospel of John, but from other Gospels we know that Jesus or the angel or the two angels—someone on resurrection Sunday mentioned that Jesus was ultimately headed back to Galilee, and the disciples should meet him there. Which makes a certain amount of sense, because from all the Gospels, including John, we know that most of these men are from Galilee—including Jesus himself. Jesus grew up in Nazareth of Galilee, his mother’s hometown. And we also know that most of Jesus’s actual ministry, his traveling around visiting villages and preaching, happened in Galilee. And in fact, a good amount of it centered around this particular body of water, the Lake or Sea of Tiberius as it is called here in John—It is a Lake, to be clear. An inland, freshwater lake—just a large and important one for the people living in the area.

This Sea of Tiberius, or Tiberian Sea, is also known as Lake Genneserat. And also—better—known as the Sea of Galilee.

It is the place where you may remember in various Gospels Jesus first meets these men, in their fishing boats, with their fathers and their families, carrying on the family trade as everyone, themselves included, just assumed they would, forever. It is the place where Jesus first disrupts their lives completely. Turns their entire futures and every expectation they ever had in life upsidedown—“Come follow me, and I will make you fishers of men”—remember that call?

And now, with their lives and all their expectations of life and Jesus so disassembled and confused at this point, to this place, these men return—to the beginning, the origin story. To meet Jesus again.

And at a certain point, probably waiting for Jesus to show up again and not knowing what to do until his does, Peter—who is and kind of always has been the de facto leader of this group—looks up at the other disciples and says, “You know what, I’m just gonna go fishing.”

And the others kind of nod their heads and say, “Yeah, fishing. It’s been a while. Let’s go…”

You know, it’s interesting that at this point, I’ve heard so many sermons and interpretations—heard it literally taught in some of my seminary classes—that this is a passage about Peter et al giving up, just throwing in the towel and going back to their old lives and their old careers—abandoning the call to ministry. And so, then Jesus has to show up later in the passage and set them back on course.

The thing is, that just doesn’t actually make sense.

I think we came up with that interpretation—if I had to guess—I think it’s because we like to see Peter as a mess up. I think it’s somehow comfortable for us, in this day and age, by the wisdom of this age, to see the founder of Christianity—so to speak, at least—the first Bishop of Rome—first Pope, so to speak—as this bumbling buffoon who can never get anything right and constantly has to be shoved back on course—drag into thinking or doing the right thing.

But that’s not who Peter is in the Gospels or in Acts. Peter is the good student. He’s a good disciple and a good leader. He’s the over-eager student sometimes. He puts his foot in his mouth a lot. He’s a human being who makes some—totally understandable—mistakes. But overall, he’s put into the position of leadership for a reason.

And I dwell on this point because it has unfortunately become typical. We do this kind of character warping to more than just Peter. At some point, the Church decided we needed to make the characters in the bible “relatable” to people. And putting aside the questions of what that even means and why we would ever think we even needed to do that in the first place—you know, that’s a whole other question… More problematic, though, is how we went about doing it. Because, at some point, we got it into our heads that relatable means a person who messes up all the time.

And so we started highlighting and really exaggerating the mistakes that these famous bible characters make—then also the famous characters in Christian history after the bible. We started not only highlighting the mistakes, but making sure to present the worst possible version of those mistakes as fact, when really something, yeah, bad but less sinister is probably what happened. We really started dwelling on this, in our Sunday school classes, our youth retreats, our seminaries—my teachers in various church programs growing up and now my generation in the church—we have come to dwell so heavily on these things we have to apologize for as Christians in history, on how all of our leaders since bible times have been either complete idiots—like Peter here—or straight up horrible people. When that, first of all, just isn’t reality and the more you learn about history the more anti-reality it becomes. But also, it defeats the original purpose of it all—to make these people and their stories relatable. I mean, how many of us actually walk through life as screwups, or idiots? How many of us actually aspire to be like that? How many of us actually think stories like that should be the role models for our children? So yeah, of course we started taking the bible out of our churches, and teaching our kids about other things in Sunday school, because once you reduce all the characters in the bible to baffoons and murderers and liars—no, there’s nothing left to want to read about, let alone study. And it’s truly tragic, because these used to be characters what we looked up to, people who weren’t perfect but who tried to be—who inspired us to try to be good. These stories used to be inspiring, and they should be still.

Peter here, in John, is not giving up. He’s not just throwing in the towel and going back to his own life because it’s easy and this call to ministry thing is hard and he just wants to be a simple fisherman again. There’s a few reasons that interpretation doesn’t even make sense.

First, in the Gospel of John, Jesus never does the whole calling the disciples out of their fishing boats thing. That’s not how Jesus meets Peter in the Gospel of John—or any of the disciples. That’s not what they’re doing when they meet Jesus in John. So, aside from the question of who had it right, or how might they all have had it right, just from different angles… What matters right now, is that Peter going back to his old pre-disciple life here probably just is not the message that John had in mind when he wrote this story.

On that same note, the group who goes fishing with Peter here includes Thomas and Nathanael—who are not identified as fishermen in any canonical Gospel. So is this even them returning to their old lives—or were they something else.

And finally, the Gospels that do identify Peter and his brother Andrew and the two sons of Zebedee as fishermen are also the Gospels that tell the disciples to go meet Jesus in Galilee after the resurrection. Which means, the Gospels that might even suggest Peter is just going back to his old life by returning to Galilee and becoming a fisherman—the Gospels that would even suggest that are the Gospels like Mark, which we also read this morning, and which tell us that the disciples are just doing what Jesus told them to do by returning to Galilee. Jesus is the one who told them to go back to the beginning here. They’re only there to meet Jesus.

Peter is not giving up by going fishing this day—he’s doing something that should be inspiring. He’s moving on. Going on. Doing what he can do. He has a choice that afternoon—just sit around after lunch waiting for Jesus to show up… Or do something useful. Something he’s good at. Something that feeds people.

We come full circle in Jesus’s story not just geographically, but thematically, once again. Back to this idea of home and food. This connection between feeding the body and feeding the soul which is so critical to the Gospel story. Jesus’s miracles in the Gospels center around this theme of either healing the body or feeding the body. And like the two on the road to Emmaus—we talked about last week—the disciples today recognize Jesus in the miracle of food, of fish finally being caught. And their time together that day is centered, once again, around a meal.

There is some suggestion, that Communion, Eucharist, this ritual we preserve in our churches to this day, which we partook in again last week, originally included fish along with the bread and the wine. And that idea comes from these miracles involving fish in the New Testament, the use of the fish symbol in early Christianity—Early Christians would draw a fish outside their meeting places, it’s one of the ways they would identify each other. I think there are also some vague references to this in early Christian documents. And then some Early Christian art, which shows a meal including bread, drink, and fish.

Personally, I don’t think the ritual itself ever included fish. Because the ritual of Communion is established quite early in the Gospels as involving bread and wine—and then that ritual does not change in form at all for two thousand years. But it is pretty well established historically that Early Christian meetings, the precursors to our modern worship services, were based around an actual meal, a dinner. And part of that dinner involved this ritual blessing of the bread and wine, but there were other foods at the dinner. And most often, one of those foods was probably fish—because the ancient Mediterranean diet was heavily fish.

So this association that does exist in the Gospels between Jesus and his ministry and miracles and fish—it’s an important symbol, grounded again in this reality of feeding people. A symbol that carries on all through way through to the end of our passage for this morning—Jesus’s final instruction for Peter, the purpose of his ministry on earth, the purpose of the church founded by Peter, this eager student whom we are supposed to look up to. The instruction: Feed my sheep.

That’s what we’re here for. That is and always has been the whole point. To feed the world. To do what we can—even if it’s just going fishing this afternoon—what we can to make the world a better place, and by doing that, bring the world back to God, one fish, one meal, one soul at a time.

That’s what Peter is demonstrating in this whole story—the willingness to do that. The willingness, after everything, to keep trying, to not wait around and just hope something will happen, but to get back in that boat and go do what it is that he can do, even when it seems like going backward, even when it seems so far removed from the ministry that he’s supposed to have—according to someone—and even when, for an entire night, it doesn’t seem to be working. To just keep at it, because there’s nothing more worthwhile to be doing anyway. And the willingness to try something new, to throw the net onto the other side of the boat, when that opportunity or necessity appears.

A lot has been said and written about the last section of the story here—How Jesus asks Peter this question, Do you love me, three times. How Peter has to answer three times. How the word translated “love” here is actually two different words in Greek, one meaning “love,” the other which could be translated as “I am your friend/are you my friend.” How Peter gets annoyed at having to answer three times. How this all harkens back to Peter denying Jesus three times from earlier in the Holy Week/Crufixion story…

Maybe someday I’ll preach a sermon on all that. But for today, to close before we go into our next song in a few minutes here, I just want to highlight the fact that it is three times. Three questions. There answers. A pattern of three.

There’s something about the number three, about saying something three times, putting a point into a three-part pattern… They actually teach this in writing classes, in copywriting—also known as advertising… The basic structure of all ads is: presentation of the problem, amplification of the problem, presentation of the solution. All ads. That’s how they do it. That’s how they get you to buy stuff. And even when you know that’s what they’re doing—it still works. Narratives do the same thing. Every story follows the same basic pattern: Beginning, middle, end—or, fancier terminology—inciting incident, climax, resolution. Every piece of non-fiction writing, every essay, persuasive argument—court case—same pattern: Introduction/opening statement, body/presentation of evidence, conclusion/closing statement. This is world-wide. Every story. Every argument. This is how the human brain works. In patterns of three. Repeating something three times. It really is the magic number. All the evidence draws that conclusion. We drive our points how in patterns of three.

And I guess my point in all that this morning is, when you find patterns of three in the bible—first, they will probably just draw your attention naturally—but if you do notice them consciously, pay extra attention.

Jesus drives this point home, here, in a pattern of three: Love me, take care of my people. Be my friend, take care of my people. That’s what it’s all about. In Matthew today we had the great commission, Go into all the world, preach the Gospel, make disciples (that’s a pattern of three, by the way)… It’s the same thing that Jesus says to Peter here, except his words to Peter are about how we accomplish that great Commission. How do we make disciples? We feed them.

We be examples of what following Jesus means, examples that people can see, examples that inspire as we have been inspired by the stories of those who have gone before, like Peter. People who walk in the light, and just keep moving forward in the light—the type of person we are about to sing of in our next song. You know, the more I read this story at the end of John, the more I see the entire story as a parable illustrating Peter’s answer to Jesus here—the answer that yes, I am your friend, I will follow, I will continue to follow, from the start, back to the start, and beyond: because, yes, “I want to walk as a child of the light,” the title of our next song.

Closing Prayer:

Lord God, you have given to us many gifts: food and home; family and friends; work and rest. In every season of our lives, you have stood beside us, waiting on the shore, our guide and our friend. Continue to guide us now into the future. Bless these gifts that we return to you today as signs of our commitment to continue our work with you in this world, to feed your sheep, as you lead us in the way everlasting. Amen.

The Way of a King | Sunday Worship, September 6, 2020

Instructions: The words and videos below are meant to be read and played in sequence, together forming one complete worship service. Begin by pressing play on the first video. God Bless! When I consider your heavens,     the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars,     which you have set in place, what is mankind … Read more

Radical Love | Sunday Worship, August 30, 2020

Sunday Worship August 30th, 2020 | Radical Love Psalm 107

Instructions: The words and videos below are meant to be read and played in sequence, together forming one complete worship service. Begin by pressing play on the first video. God Bless!   Let the redeemed of the Lord tell their story— ~Psalm 107:2 We are the redeemed, the loved, who come to worship God today. Who have cried … Read more

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