34 min
This is Life! Trinity United Sermons
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- Christianity
Romans 6:1-11
Today is National Indigenous Peoples’ Day, celebrating the original inhabitants of this land of Canada, whose presence here goes back for many 1000s of years. It’s also when we acknowledge the pain and suffering they have faced as a result of their unjust and racist oppression at the hand of privileged settlers. As the Church, instead of always acting with the inclusive and empowering love of the Gospel, we confess and repent of our own complicity in that – both in the past as well as the present – with our prayer and commitment towards healing, and hope, and reconciliation in the future. Dear God, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
It’s also Fathers’ day, when we honor all the Fathers and Father-figures in our lives. One of the most famous fathers in scripture is Joseph, the husband of Mary, and the father of Jesus’ youth. We don’t know too much about him, but I wonder to what extent it was as a result of Joseph’s influence that Jesus was so easily able to call God the very familiar Abba – his daddy?
And so, Dear God, we pray for your steady, healing, comforting, Abba-like presence in all our lives. We pray especially for those who have suffered because of circumstances and attitudes of others beyond their control. We hold up Canada’s Indigenous people O God, and we pray for all of us: giving thanks for the best of our father-influences, and asking for healing and forgiveness when they – and we – get that so wrong. We pray, deeply grateful for your healing presence of life and love which abides with us today and always, in Jesus’ Name, Amen
Will Willimon points out how: When we sign on with Jesus Christ and his mission, something is gained, but something is lost as well. To embrace Christ – to live in Christ – is to die to many of our old habits and infatuations. That’s something of what Paul means when he writes of how “You also should consider yourselves dead to sin but alive for God in Christ Jesus.”
Being a Christ follower is about so much more than simply buying into a particular philosophy or belief system; it’s about our embracing of – or perhaps better, our being embraced by – a whole new way of seeing, being, living. It’s about our acknowledging a whole new reality – a much more real reality than what is always immediately obvious, and then our living into THAT reality. As Mark Malek said, our faith, according to Paul, is not so much about “a philosophical point of view, something for us either to accept or reject …as a reality that now lives in us, with the potential to live through us!
Remember HG Wells’ Country of the Blind which tells of a sighted person’s arrival into a country where no-one has eyes, and his attempts to make them appreciate a reality that is so much greater than the very limited grey and wooden thing they’d created for themselves ina survive in darkness: ‘There’s Sky… Colour… Light…’ Of course they didn’t appreciate having their reality challenged and so tried to ‘fix’ him by make him like them – removing his eyes [i].
WE are so often those people who learn to survive in the darkness we create, with CHRIST as the one who saves by exposing his most real reality – infinitely truer and more beautiful than whatever we could ever create for ourselves in order simply to survive!
That’s the ‘ABUNDANCE’ that Jesus speaks of in Jn.10:10! ‘The thief comes only to steal and destroy (your life), but I have come that you may (discover how you) have life in all its abundance!’ But for some reason we seem to want to stick with the dark opacity that we know!
We are all, always, serving something, following some or other guidance or leading: and that something is either feeding us or killing us! Remember how Bob Dylan sang it back in the late 1970s, how everybody’s gonna have to serve somebody… I can’t imagine a much more tragic circumstance than when we allow the worst of ourselves to lead us in
Romans 6:1-11
Today is National Indigenous Peoples’ Day, celebrating the original inhabitants of this land of Canada, whose presence here goes back for many 1000s of years. It’s also when we acknowledge the pain and suffering they have faced as a result of their unjust and racist oppression at the hand of privileged settlers. As the Church, instead of always acting with the inclusive and empowering love of the Gospel, we confess and repent of our own complicity in that – both in the past as well as the present – with our prayer and commitment towards healing, and hope, and reconciliation in the future. Dear God, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
It’s also Fathers’ day, when we honor all the Fathers and Father-figures in our lives. One of the most famous fathers in scripture is Joseph, the husband of Mary, and the father of Jesus’ youth. We don’t know too much about him, but I wonder to what extent it was as a result of Joseph’s influence that Jesus was so easily able to call God the very familiar Abba – his daddy?
And so, Dear God, we pray for your steady, healing, comforting, Abba-like presence in all our lives. We pray especially for those who have suffered because of circumstances and attitudes of others beyond their control. We hold up Canada’s Indigenous people O God, and we pray for all of us: giving thanks for the best of our father-influences, and asking for healing and forgiveness when they – and we – get that so wrong. We pray, deeply grateful for your healing presence of life and love which abides with us today and always, in Jesus’ Name, Amen
Will Willimon points out how: When we sign on with Jesus Christ and his mission, something is gained, but something is lost as well. To embrace Christ – to live in Christ – is to die to many of our old habits and infatuations. That’s something of what Paul means when he writes of how “You also should consider yourselves dead to sin but alive for God in Christ Jesus.”
Being a Christ follower is about so much more than simply buying into a particular philosophy or belief system; it’s about our embracing of – or perhaps better, our being embraced by – a whole new way of seeing, being, living. It’s about our acknowledging a whole new reality – a much more real reality than what is always immediately obvious, and then our living into THAT reality. As Mark Malek said, our faith, according to Paul, is not so much about “a philosophical point of view, something for us either to accept or reject …as a reality that now lives in us, with the potential to live through us!
Remember HG Wells’ Country of the Blind which tells of a sighted person’s arrival into a country where no-one has eyes, and his attempts to make them appreciate a reality that is so much greater than the very limited grey and wooden thing they’d created for themselves ina survive in darkness: ‘There’s Sky… Colour… Light…’ Of course they didn’t appreciate having their reality challenged and so tried to ‘fix’ him by make him like them – removing his eyes [i].
WE are so often those people who learn to survive in the darkness we create, with CHRIST as the one who saves by exposing his most real reality – infinitely truer and more beautiful than whatever we could ever create for ourselves in order simply to survive!
That’s the ‘ABUNDANCE’ that Jesus speaks of in Jn.10:10! ‘The thief comes only to steal and destroy (your life), but I have come that you may (discover how you) have life in all its abundance!’ But for some reason we seem to want to stick with the dark opacity that we know!
We are all, always, serving something, following some or other guidance or leading: and that something is either feeding us or killing us! Remember how Bob Dylan sang it back in the late 1970s, how everybody’s gonna have to serve somebody… I can’t imagine a much more tragic circumstance than when we allow the worst of ourselves to lead us in
34 min