Children s Sermon Romans 14:1-4

Transcription

1 Calvary United Methodist Church Feburary 2, 2014 PERFECT FIT Rev. Dr. S. Ronald Parks Children s Sermon Romans 14:1-4 This day is a gift from God, a gift to celebrate all that He has granted to each of us, regardless of our age and station in life. We welcome the children to the front of this worship space to celebrate God s Good News. In answer to the question that most of the kids are asking, yes, we are still talking about this! This is the fourth Sunday in a row we ve talked about Jenga blocks. Way, way back, four Sundays ago we talked about the different rules that are in place and how it is that we learn how to play such a game. Last week we talked about how to make, for example, a different kind of game by taking one set of blocks and coloring them so that we had something that was different than what it was before. And we talked about that being an example of a big word named segregation. Segregation is when things that are different are kept apart, right? And when you put the things that are different together you have something different and it is called integration. Integration, of course, is when different things are not held apart, but when you bring them together. And when you bring different things together, you have something called diversity.

2 Well, there is another form of Jenga that takes two games and combines them. Some of you ancient folks like me may remember a video game called Tetris. Anyone? Anyone? Of course! Tetris was a game in which different colored blocks came from the top of the screen down to the bottom of the screen and your job was to rotate the blocks as they were falling so they fit into the blocks that were already at the bottom of the screen. And of course the person who was able to think fastest and rotate the blocks so that they all fit together with no openings is the person who won. So, the people who build Jenga and the people who invented Tetris got their heads together and figured yet one more way to squeeze yet another dollar out of the American public and that is what we are all about, of course. Jenga-Tetris is a little bit different. There are 47 blocks in this game instead of 54 and there are six different shapes that make up this tower. Not only are there different shapes, but there are six different colors and as you can imagine when you have that much variety and when you put them all together you have something really cool.

3 The more differences that you bring together, the greater the diversity that you have and the greater the diversity you experience, the closer you come to understanding God. Really, that is a way that we can think of God acting is to make the most diversity imaginable and then bring it all together. Paul shared something about diversity and about what it means to be different when he wrote to his friends in a place called Rome. And this is what he had to say. He said to them: Welcome believers who don t see things the way that you do. Now, believe it or not, if you look around at these people here, they don t all think the same. And if you were to ask them questions, they would disagree on stuff. So, we are not supposed to keep people who disagree with us apart, we are supposed to welcome believers who don t see things the same as we do. Don t jump all over them if they say or do something you don t agree with, which of course never ever happens in a church. Don t pass judgment, something else that never happens in church; don t pass judgment on their faith journey. They experience God their way and you experience God your way. Therefore, let s treat each other gently and with the love that God has shown to us. Think of it like this: if you go over to friendship break after the service today, you will sit down at a table with other people. If you sit down to share a meal with others, you are already experiencing diversity because when you go through the line, you take what you want to eat and you sit down and you eat off of your plate, because that is the stuff you picked that you wanted to eat. But the person sitting next to you, for example, may have skipped right over the cookies and gone right to the carrots. Talk about differences, right? We are all guests at Christ s table. Just like everyone is welcome to go over to friendship break and share in anything that is there and sit with whomever they like, we are all guests at Christ s table. So why should we criticize someone for liking carrots instead of cookies? Why should we criticize one another for the differences that our obvious in our faith? You and I have no right to cross people off of the guest list that God has put together. God invites and welcomes all people into His embrace. If there are changes or corrections to be made, guess who is going to

4 handle it? God is going to handle it and God doesn t need any help from you and me. The greater the diversity, the closer we come to understanding not just the game of Tetris, but God Himself. Now, there is another game that many of you will be participating in some small way later on today. It is called the Super Bowl. Now, who are we rooting for? (Seattle) Seattle. You see, this is the point. One of the teams playing are the Denver Broncos and if you look at the people who root for the Denver Broncos, they are a rather interesting breed, right? The other team in the Super Bowl are Seattle Seahawks. Believe it or not they actually have bizarre looking fans also.

5 The reason that people dress like this to go to a football game, especially one as important as the Super Bowl, is they want you to know that they are all in favor of segregation, at least for sixty minutes in a football game. They want you to know clearly whose side they are on and that is why they wear the outfits that they do. And anybody who watches that game today, and I am not saying the people who watch for the commercials, you guys don t count. The people who watch the game are choosing sides. If you are not going to root for somebody, you probably are not going to watch the game. This is what segregation is all about. But what I want you to do, what I want you to think of when you look at Metlife Stadium in the Meadowlands of New Jersey this evening and you watch the game, think about what it means to put all those people in one place because that is the very definition of diversity, bringing all those different people, even though they kind of line up on two sides, bringing them all together and putting them in one place. That is the nature of diversity. There will be 82,566 different people in Metlife Stadium today, and guess what? They are going to have 82,566 different points of view, because they are all going to sit in different seats. So, if you are going down the row what one person will see is slightly different than what another person will see. And a person sitting in the first row of the 50 yard line who probably paid in excess of $10,000 for that ticket is going to see something different than the person sitting up in the clergy section up in the nosebleed seats, right? 82,566 different points of view and for once in a lifetime and never again will those 82,566 people be in the same place.

6 They are going to be there for the length of the game and then at the end of the game they are going to move on. They are going to go their separate ways and they will never be together again. They may go to every Super Bowl, but they are not going to be with those 82,565 other people that they are going to be with this evening. This place is kind of like the gathering that you will watch on the Super Bowl this evening because this is a place of integration and diversity. In this congregation there are 1107 different people and in this congregation there are 1107 different points of view. And that just counts the people whose names appear on the membership roles of the church. That doesn t count the people who might be visiting or maybe attending here for a long period of time and never officially became part of the congregation. That s fine and this morning we are together one time and one time only. You may have been coming to worship here since the congregation was founded back in the mid-fifties, but the people around you this morning; this is a one and done event, together for once in a lifetime. We are here for worship and then we are going to move on.

7 The important thing for us to remember, as we are here this morning, is that God has invited and welcomed every single one of us, even the carrot lovers. Therefore, let s treat each other gently, let s give them the gift that God has given to us and let God handle all the other differences that tend to separate us. Thanks for sharing in our time this morning. Enjoy the game! Message Mark 4:26-34 Not all of us have had the experience of being at sea when a storm blows up; neither had John Wesley before October 14 of Wesley, along with his brother Charles and two of the members of the Holiness Club from Oxford University had been persuaded to make the trip to America, in particular to a place called Savannah, Georgia. They had been persuaded to go because they were told that there was a vast number of individuals, many of the Native Americans, who had never heard the Word of Christ and so it was in effect a mission, a missionary trip, to go and convert these individuals. So on October 14, the ship, the Simmons, set sail. They were at sea for a number of weeks and periodically storms would crop up that would make the voyage a little bit uncomfortable, but nothing like what happened to them on January 25 of the following year. They were now at sea for virtually three and one-half months and Wesley, writing in his journal, had this to say about the experiences of that day: At noon, our third storm began. By four it was more violent than before and at 7 I went to the Germans. Now, who is Wesley making reference to? In addition to the 80 or so English individuals who were part of the cargo, part of the manifest for that particular trip, there was a group of German Moravians who were there. They were led by a

8 pastor named Augustus Spangenberg. And throughout the course of the trip, the Moravians would gather several times a day to read the scripture, to pray together and to hear the Word proclaimed and Wesley, being an ordained priest in the Anglican Church, was curious about their practices. You see, Wesley had already been identified at Oxford as a bit of a fanatic. He would get his group together and they would practice similar rituals, similar disciples on campus and that is how we got the name Methodists. Their methods were so rigorous and so disciplined that people used the phrase Methodist as an insult, as a mocking, degrading name attached to Wesley and his friends. But there was something Wesley noticed in the conduct of these Moravians that fascinated him and that drew him back to them time after time. He says I have long before observed the great seriousness of their behavior. Not that they were somber individuals but that they took their relationship with God extraordinarily seriously. In the midst of the reading of the Psalm, the sea broke over the side of the boat. It split the main sail in pieces and it covered the ship, pouring water down into the hold. It was as if the great deep had already swallowed us up. A terrible screaming began among the English while the Germans calmly sang on. And I asked one of them afterward, Wesley said, Were you not afraid? And he answered I thank God, no, we are not afraid to die. What drew Wesley to those Moravians was not so much what they had, but what he didn t and for two weeks after that storm he pondered what was wrong with his faith. Why is my faith so weak in the face of adversity? Why am I so anxious about my own mortality? Why am I afraid to die? As people who sit here this morning maybe having had a brush with death or an experience that was in some way reminiscent of what Wesley went through, no doubt this question is not foreign to us? Why is my faith so weak? Did you know that the answer to that question is exactly the same as the answer to the question that sort of formed the basis for this sermon series over the last four weeks: Why do Christians disagree about everything? How can people who have basically the same Good News as part of their identity and who are part of this sprawling organization called the church, how is it that we can t seem to agree on big things and little things? Why is there such differ-

9 ence among us? The answer to that question and the question why does my faith seem so weak? is the answer that Wesley struggled with for the remainder of his life. This is what he came to be, this was his operative idea, that we understand God s Word differently because inside of us there is this shifting matrix or interaction of four factors, of four things that come somehow from outside of us and also arise from within us. And how these things combine in us in any given moment shapes our understanding and our awareness of God s presence in our lives. Wesley, as we talked about three weeks ago, considered himself to be a person of one book. Scripture is primary. It is the resource to understand God s Word. However, even Wesley, who confessed that the written words of the scriptures reveal and are inspired by God s Big Word, God s design, God s plan, God s Word is always greater than the words that we use to explain or to express it. Wesley also held his place in the church, in the Anglican Church initially and then in the body of believers that came to be called Methodists. He appreciated what it meant to be a believer among many believers. And the way in which the tradition of the Christian Church has passed down the great gift of God s Grace. Christian tradition for Wesley is simply the passing on of God s presence and the proclamation of the gift of salvation in Christ and in his disciples as you and I as the Body of Christ become Christ to everybody. It is not only the Word, it is the Word made flesh in Christ and the Word continually being enfleshed in people, even those as imperfect as you and I. And all of these resources in the scripture and all of these resources in tradition, they were important to Wesley but he came to recognize this: that s how the Word is known to others. The stories in the Bible, the letters of Paul, all the writings, that is somebody else s story of faith. And all the people around us, all the people who are here this morning, all of those who have ever lived, who have defined for us doctrine and polity and dogma, all of those people, the understood the Word in their own way. That is the Word as known to others, but what about the Word living in you and in me? You see, owning a Bible and sitting in church doesn t make you a Christian. What makes us believers is the Living Word in

10 us. And because of that, because of the way in which we are as human beings, we may agree on some things in the scripture and we may agree on some things in tradition, but there is something powerful that separates us and that is our individual experience of the Word of God. Experience comes from a Latin root experiencia. It is where the word experiment comes from. It is the act of trying something and in that context; experience is the act of trying or testing something for yourself. We love to do this, don t we? Don t touch the hot stove, sssssssssssst. Don t cross against the traffic (car noise). This is who we are as people. We don t take anybody s word for anything, let alone the written testimony of somebody who lived several thousand years ago about the Almighty God. And all of these people who have come before us wearing these funny wigs, all of these people and their insights? Ok, they ve got some stuff to share, but I want to test it out for myself, I want to know it. I want to be aware of and participate in that event or the process through my direct personal involvement. I want to be on that ship and I want to feel what those Moravians are feeling. I got to test it. I got to try it for myself. Wesley was aware of the Words of God handed to him by others in the scriptures and in tradition, but Wesley had yet to experience the Living Word of God with the capital W. Now, I am not suggesting that Wesley was a godless man and a fake. He was an ordained priest in the Anglican Church at this time. But one of the persons, part of that Moravian tradition, one said to Wesley, Preach faith until you have it and once you have it, then you will preach it. Insightful stuff. Wesley knew the Word, but he hadn t experienced it and the Word comes to us personally in the experiences that God grants us to share in the proclamation of the Gospel. Jesus said God s kingdom is like a seed sown in a field and, Brothers and Sisters, you and I are the field. When the sowing is finished, the farmer walks away. As time passes the seed sprouts and it grows. The seed of faith in your life has taken hold and is growing. How does it happen, you wonder. The sun, the rain, the earth, the seed, they all somehow together work and the farmer just sits back and watches and wonders and

11 when the crop is ready the harvest is taken. God s kingdom is sewn in the smallest of seeds, in the tiniest experience that you will encounter in this day or that maybe has shaped you throughout your faith journey. In the smallest and in the largest of experiences, our faith grows and is shaped and it grows so large that all can find shelter in it and under it if we allow it to continue to be nurtured by grace. Jesus always shared the Word in words and images. That is why he tells so many parables, because he is trying to figure out how to take this enormous truth and reduce it to something that you and I can understand, words and images that fit the experience and mature of those who came to hear. Now I know that most of you listen harder to the Children s Sermon than to what I am saying right now. And all I have to say about that is God is fitting the Word to your maturity and to your experience. And frankly, I like it better too, because I am as immature as the next person. And that is alright. I don t apologize for having more fun doing the Children s Sermon than doing the Adult Sermon because I think if you can t find the Word of God with the eyes of a child, all the words I could string together won t make any difference. And then when Jesus was alone with his disciples, and by the way, this happens after you leave here today, when he was alone with his disciples, he explained everything. That is what prayer is for. That is what meditation is for. That is what being alone is for. Spend some time with Jesus by yourself and let him explain it to you. And then, check that explanation with other believers. Come back together and share and discuss. You see, Wesley was aware of the words of God, but Wesley had difficulty experiencing the Word of God.

12 And so, in answer to the question Why is my faith so weak? two weeks after that storm and three days after the ship landed at Savannah, Georgia, Wesley found Augustus Spangenberg, the pastor of the little group of Moravians, and he asked him exactly that question: Why is my faith so weak?. Spangenberg responded with three questions. I put these questions to all of us because I think they are for most of us the most important questions about our experience of God that we ll ever ask ourselves. The first one is this: Do you know that you are a Child of God? Do you know that God who made the heavens and the earth took time to make you? Wesley s response as written in his journal: I was surprised by the question and I didn t know what to say. Really? Wesley, Oxford scholar, ordained priest, was surprised by the question Are you a Child of the Living God? and didn t know how to respond to it. Yet, Wesley was the greatest proponent of prevenient grace, experiencing the gifts that sustain us from the moment of our birth. Wesley knew that God was always providing, always pouring out and yet in that moment he didn t have the conviction of faith to say, Why, yes, I know I am a Child of God. These words of the Psalmist meant nothing to him: Oh, God, you shape me inside and out. You formed me in my mother s womb. Body and soul I am marvelously made. I worship in adoration for your hand holds all of creation. Like an open book you watch me grow through all the stages of my life. All the days of my life are prepared before I take my first breath. I will never understand your ways, O God. Your wonders are more numerous than grains of sands by the sea; therefore grant me one more gift. Let me rise in the morning and live always in Your love. Do you experience life as a Child of God? Certainly Wesley did, but in that moment, his words failed him and he had to think about whether or not he knew the Word. Do you experience life as a Child of God? Priceless? Unique? Gifted? Forgiven? That was the question Spangenberg asked Wesley first. And then he followed that up, after Wesley stood there with nothing to say, with another one. Do you know that Jesus Christ has saved you?

13 Wesley s response: I know he is the Savior of the World and I hope he died to save me. Oh, man! Wrong answer, but honest, and truthful. I know, somehow that this person is somehow savior of all but I m not sure about me. I hope he is the savior of me. Wesley, once again, understanding the gifts of God s grace and what it means to be justified in that grace, experiencing the gifts that accompany our new birth in Christ. The gift of being forgiven. The gift of becoming a vessel of forgiveness. The gift of embracing people of every particular diverse and difference that you can imagine, that is what it means to justify. Is to not prove ourselves worthy, but allow God to count us as worthy by the Love of Christ. And therefore, when Paul shares these words, it is not just some idea that we walk with out of the building today, it is the commission that defines us. If anyone is in Christ they experience a new creation. Everything old is left behind and all this comes from God. God settled the relationship between us and Him in the gift of His Son and now He calls us to settle our relationships with each other. God has given us the task of telling everyone what God is doing and we re Christ s representative. God uses us to help others set aside their difference and experience, not just learn about, not just talk about, not just open a book and hand it to you so you can read about it, not just dragging you to this place on a Sunday morning, so that you can experience God s reconciling love. In the Name of Christ, Brothers and Sisters, be restored in His grace. Do you experience new life in Christ? Yet, there is one more question. And this is perhaps the one that has occupied the minds of human beings for as long as you could call us a human being: Do you know yourself? You see, we all have different ideas about God and we all have different ways of worshiping and providing rituals and songs and meanings, but do you know yourself? Do you know yourself as a sinner? Do you know yourself as a human being who is limited and impatient and ungraceful? Wesley s response: I do, but as I say the words, I know I am just kidding myself. Swing and a miss. Three strikes. Well, he didn t know what to say. He hoped Christ died for him. I think I am lying when I tell you I know who I am. You see, this is sanctifying Grace, the experience of the gifts of rebirth in faith, hope and love, ongoing, from this moment

14 forward. You see, we all have prevenient grace in our lives from the moment of our birth and we all have come to that moment of justification and the process of being made right with God. That is what has brought you here today. You know Christ; you have experienced Christ as a Savior. You know what it means to have him walk with you, but this is the one that takes us forward into the future. It is not what was; it is what is and what will be; to experience the gifts of rebirth in faith and hope and in love. Do everything readily and cheerfully. Don t argue. Resolve conflict. Shine the light of Divine Grace in the darkness of a hurting world. Notice all these verbs are present and future tense as we go out the door. Show everyone the goodness of a Living God. Help them experience the Good News. You are a living witness. I hope he died for me. Come on! You re a living witness. Believe it! Proof that the work we share changes lives and hearts in the name of the Messiah, Paul writes to his friends in Philippi: Do you experience God working in and through you? The reason these questions matter, do you know yourself as a Child of the Living God? Do you trust in the sacrifice of Christ for us to bring us new birth? Do you experience the sanctifying Grace of God bringing us to perfection? The reason these questions mattered to Wesley is exactly the same reason they matter to us this morning, because when the storms of life come, it doesn t matter who you are with, how much they are praying, how faithfully they are reading the scripture, how at peace they seem to be, is the peace what you experience? May we experience the gift of His peace, not somebody else s version of it? That is fine for them, but you and I, we are one on one with God and God has promised to fit His Grace into your life in a way that you will experience. That is God s promise, not mine.