International Chapel 2019

Many years ago, I heard Jon Bonk tell a story from East Africa. He called it the story of Indegi (the Swahili name for the eagle). I call him “Ukhosi”, the Ndebele word for eagle. Here is the story of Ukhosi and the Old Man. Note that “ukhosi” is like the word used for Lord in “Lord God” – “iNkosi”. Ukhosi is a majestic bird, almost the opposite of inkuku, the chicken.

One day, an old man was walking through the African bush. As the sun was going down, he came to a village and decided to stay there for the night. At the gate of the village, he called out, “Ekuhle.” (Is it good [for me to come in]?) The father of the village replied, “Yebo, umdala. Ngena!” (Come in, old man.) They sat and visited as food was prepared and a bed made ready. As they talked, the old man saw an eagle running around on the ground, pecking for corn with the chickens.

“Baba,” he said, “Why is Ukhosi running on the ground like inkuku?”

“Yes, umdala,” the father replied, “I found him on the ground when he was very small. He must have fallen from the nest. I raised him here with the chickens, and he thinks he is a chicken.”

The old man found this disturbing, such a majestic creature, reduced to pecking corn on the ground with the chickens.” “Baba,” he said, “may I try something.” “Of course, my friend.” The old man got up and went to the eagle. He picked him up and whispered to him, “Ukhosi, you are not a chicken. You are an eagle!” Then he threw him in the air to help him fly. Ukhosi fell to the ground with a thud.

The old man stepped over to him and picked him up again. Climbing into the tree to get some height, he whispered again to the eagle, “Ukhosi, you are not a chicken. You are an eagle!” Then he threw him in the air as high as he could. Ukhosi fell to the ground helpless and winded, then scuttled off to hide.

The old man pursued him and finally caught him. Climbing on top of the highest hut in the village, he repeated his words to the eagle, “Ukhosi, you are not a chicken. You are an eagle!” This time, Ukhosi fell even further and harder and lay on the ground trembling. He didn’t run away. It seemed to him that the old man would just catch him and torment him again.

The old man was discouraged and sat down to his meal with the people from the village, apologizing for his behaviour. Darkness fell, and he went to bed, but he couldn’t sleep. Finally, sometime after midnight, he got up and went searching for the eagle. He found him on a low branch, his head tucked under his wing like the chickens around him.

The old man picked him off the branch before the eagle knew what was happening. Then he started to walk out from the village. They walked across the plain. For hours and hours they walked. Ukhosi wondered where they were going. Then they started climbing. Their path wound higher and higher among the rocks, climbing up a mountainside.

The sun rose above the plain, shining brightly, as they came to the edge of a cliff looking out over the valley. Ukhosi looked down, amazed. He thought he had never been so high. The old man held him up and spoke aloud to him, “Ukhosi, you are not a chicken. You are an eagle!” Then he threw him as far from the cliff as he could, and Ukhosi started to fall. Faster and faster he fell, the wind whistling about his ears. He closed his eyes shut tightly and clamped his wings against his body as hard as he could, but the wind was too strong for him. It ripped a wing out from his body, and to steady himself he put out the other wing. Then the wind stopped, and he cautiously opened his eyes. He found that he was gliding in a big circle above the plain.

He tested one wing and then the other. Soon he was moving his eyes up and down in large gentle beats, and he began to rise still in big circles. He came level with the old man on the cliff edge, and as he turned to fly away for a new start and a new life, he heard the old man call after him, “Remember, Ukhosi, you are not a chicken! You are an eagle!”

1 John 4: 7-12

God’s Love and Ours

⁷ Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹ This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. ¹⁰ This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹ Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

In the passage we heard earlier, John writes simply and directly: “God is love.” John’s letter is an extended riff on this idea – that the centre of the Jewish faith is (as Jesus said) to love God wholeheartedly and to love our neighbour the same way we love ourselves. To this idea, Jesus added the distinctive command: “Love one another as I have loved you.” Such love is the mark of the Christian life, and it derives from God’s nature as perfect love.

All of this leads to the question, “What is love, anyway?” I might say that I love soccer. The statement is true, but it reduces love to a kind of liking, however fanatical. When we say that God is love, we are not reducing God to a kind of super-fan.

Often enough, we think of love as the sort of deep emotion that binds people together. Erotic love binds a couple together. Community love binds a family (biological or otherwise) together. Essential to such love is the sense that I am incomplete without the loved one. If I am left alone when my wife dies, I have part of myself ripped out. Such love is not simply caring for the other; it is almost a synonym for need. “I love you” is close to “I need you.”

God loves us, but God does not need us. God remains fully God, fulfilled within the eternal trinity, even without the universe God has created. So, “God is love” and “God loved the world so much” cannot mean “God needs us and is incomplete without us.” What then does love mean?

A friend of mine once said it this way, “Love means wanting God’s best for the other person.” Whether you are my friend or my enemy, whether I like you or not, saying that I love you means I want God’s best for you. I think that also describes God’s love for us. God made us as God’s images in this world. God made us to represent God in this world. God made us to care for each other and for creation. We fight with each other and destroy our environment, abusing God’s good gifts, but God continues to love us. God wants us to be all that God has made us to be.

Here’s where the story of the old man and the eagle comes in. I am uncomfortable making the old man stand in for God. Dropping the eagle off a cliff was cruel, and God is never cruel. But there is a connection. The old man was distressed that the eagle was satisfied with being a chicken. In the sense I have suggested, the old man loved the eagle. He wanted the eagle to be true to his nature as a majestic bird soaring through the skies.

Whatever we say about being thrown off a cliff, we can say this. God uses all that happens to us in our lives to make us into what God wants us to be. The US Marines have a slogan, “Be all that you can be.” The trouble is that they define what you can be. God wants something more - even more than anything we might want to be. God wants us to be even better than the marines. “Be all that God has made you to be!”

God has made us royalty, to rule with God forever. God is not as easily satisfied as we are and continues to mould us and shape us throughout our lives.Whatever happens in your life, know this: God is at work in you to make you into God’s eagles. As the prophet put it so many years ago, “²⁸ Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. ²⁹ He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. ³⁰ Even youths grow tired and weary, and young people stumble and fall; ³¹ but those who trust in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”

Providence International Chapel

13 Nov 2019

Long-Lasting Forever Love

This is the first Sunday of our series: “You asked for it.” A number of different people have submitted suggestions, and Lee and I have chosen four of them to speak on over the next four Sundays. Some of them may also find their way into future sermons. I can add that if you have other ideas or questions, our doors and ears are always open.

The first of our series is an effort to answer the question, “What should we do when we lose our first love?” The paper submitted to us read: “Losing our first love, Revelation 2:1-4. After a significant commendation (v. 1-3) comes a significant criticism (v. 4). What is the first love? How is it lost? What does coming back look like?” I have reworded this question into the focus statement you have seen: “God calls God’s people to love: to love God and to love each other. We sometimes forget to love.”

I wonder what most of us think when we read this accusation: “You have lost your first love.” I remember a few years ago at Providence we made this a theme of our chapel services. The chapel coordinator and her husband had been working in Asia as missionaries from the church in Korea, and they took several years at Providence to train for further overseas ministry. She said to us, “I feel as though we have lost our first love.” Her concern was that we needed revival; we needed to recover our first love.

I don’t know if the person who wrote this suggestion for our series had the same idea in mind, but they may have. In order to get at the question, we will look at the Scripture passages we read earlier in the service and then come back to our question: How can we regain our first love?

Deuteronomy 6: 4-9

These words stand at the heart of the Jewish identity: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” It is said that an observant Jew wishes to die with these words on his/her lips, remembering their first love and central love.

It places two basic thoughts at the centre of Jewish faith – and of Christian faith. The first is the unity of God: “The Lord our God, the Lord is One.” As Christians, we understand this unity as a trinity of three persons in one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in eternal relationship. A basic aspect of this three-in-one unity is that God is love. Love requires both one who loves and one who is loved. God as a unity has no one to love, until God creates all that is as an object of God’s love. God as a trinity exercises love within the Godhead from all eternity: Each person of the Godhead loving the other.

The second thought picks up on this eternal love flowing between Father and Son and Spirit. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength.” Jesus uses this verse in his own summary of the law, to which he adds a verse from Leviticus: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Love for God and love for the other stand at the centre of our Christian identity. John suggests that love for God naturally expresses itself as love for the other. Hear 1 John 4:

⁷ Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹ This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. ¹⁰ This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹ Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

The point is clear. When we talk about our love for God – “our first love” – we are talking about the way that we live our Christian lives as a whole. The question about our first love deals with the heart of our Christian experience and of the life of our church as a whole.

Revelation 2: 1-7

The book of Revelation was written near the end of the First Century. I am following John Yeatts in the Believers’ Church Bible Commentary Series. Yeatts notes that the time in which Revelation was written to the seven churches of Asia (Ephesus – Smyrna – Pergamum – Thyatira – Sardis – Philadelphia – Laodicea) was a combination of persecution for Christians in particular and prosperity and peace for the Roman Empire as a whole. This setting is remarkably like the setting of the church in contemporary Europe and North America. We have a generally prosperous and peaceful society, but we have been pushed to the sidelines. We are not persecuted actively in the way that First Century Christians were, but we have a sense of unease that tempts us to ally ourselves more closely with our society than with God.

The speaker is Jesus (Rev 1: 16-20), and the description in the first verse makes clear who this Jesus is. He “holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands.” That is, he is the one who controls the universe [the seven stars remind us of the gods who rule the cosmos] and the church [the seven lampstands]. In the surrounding society, Caesar was hailed as Emperor and also called “the Son of God.” When the Romans held public ceremonies, they included a sacrifice on an altar, repeating the words, “Caesar is Lord.” John makes it clear that only one can claim to be Lord and Saviour, and that one is Jesus.

In this situation, Jesus commends the Ephesians for their good deeds, their perseverance, and their faithfulness to sound teaching. He also condemns them for “forsaking their first love” – not just that they had lost it, but that they had forsaken it. Apparently, they have another love that is now first in their affections. He concludes with a final commendation for avoiding the sin of the Nicolaitans [evidently a group within the larger church, who were following “other gods”].

Synthesis

The centre of the Law, then, calls us to worship and love God above anything else in life. God made us. God rules our world. God gives us the opportunity to be God’s co-workers in this life. Anything less than living with God at the centre of our lives is “leaving our first love”. Obedience to God’s ways is good. Teaching and believing “the gospel” is good. Even more important than these things, however, is loving God above all else.

With these thoughts in mind, what does it mean to “lose our first love”? The commentators suggest such possibilities as losing the first enthusiasm people have when they first choose to follow God. I remember the sensation of being a new Christian. I felt like I would never lose my temper at someone again (I was 12 years old), because I knew Jesus loved me and I knew that I loved Jesus. Of course, that enthusiasm faded. It usually does. Does that mean I have lost my first love? I don’t think so.

Remember that the churches of Asia lived in a context in which society elevated Caesar as divine and despised Christians as atheists (because Christians said that Caesar was not God). The great temptation that the Ephesians faced was to buy into the peace of Rome [Pax Romana] – that is, to worship Rome instead of worshipping God. This danger is referred to throughout the book of Revelation, most dramatically in the picture of Revelation 13 of the mark of the Beast. Christians had to choose between the mark of God or the mark of Rome. Would they choose to belong to the Family of God or to the Empire of Rome (Rev 13:17 and 14:1)?

I suggest that the basic problem Jesus names in the life of the Ephesians is a problem of allegiance. The problem is not that they were unenthusiastic. Those of us over 50 would be in trouble if we had to manufacture the enthusiasm of a 20-year old to prove our love for God. Rather than a lack of enthusiasm, Jesus names a lack of clarity in their allegiance.

What Does “First Love” Look Like?

Often, our deepest allegiance will provoke great enthusiasm within us. When we sing “606”, I feel a deep emotion accompanying our declaration of God’s praise. When I celebrated my father’s final birthday with him just before he died, I declared my love for him and felt deep emotion accompanying my declaration of love. These things often go together. Yet we must be careful: People can show great enthusiasm and not actually commit themselves to anything.

I think of a scene from College Football in the United States. My older sister and her husband had season tickets to Penn State games for many years. The stadium is usually filled with more than 100,000 fans. One of their best-known cheers is simple: One half of the stadium shouts, “We Are…” and the other half shouts back, “… Penn State!” My sister and brother in law took their pastor to one game. He was in awe! And quite jealous. He expressed a desire that their congregation could worship with such enthusiasm!

Certainly, American football (like hockey in Canada) can be a kind of religion, but I doubt that everyone in the stadium is really declaring their undying allegiance to Penn State. The fact is that in a crowd anyone can show enthusiasm and remain only lightly committed to the goal the crowd applauds.

Total allegiance is deeper and more vital. Let me tell you a story. Jesse Engle was head of the first missionary party who went for the Brethren in Christ to Zimbabwe. He was born in 1838 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. At 41 years old, he followed the call of the church to move to Kansas with a large group of BIC farm families. He acted as a bishop and leader in the church there. Then, in 1897, he agreed to lead the missionary group to Zimbabwe. They left for Africa in 1898, when he was 60 years old. He died there after less than two years, living in rigorous pioneering conditions.

Here is how Engle described his call to go to Africa:

[I expect to return after a few years, if I do not die there.] The matter, however, is entirely with the Lord; my coming to Africa was no half-concluded step, but enough of clearness in the call to move me forward with an unconditional surrender even unto death; so now I have nothing to choose or dictate. The Lord will doubtless consummate all things well.

One of his co-workers (Frances Davidson) described his death in the following words:

I … found Brother Engle speaking the Zulu language rapidly, seemingly unconscious of our presence. … All night we watched … far from his children, far from the comforts of civilization, with none of his family or relatives, save his devoted wife, by his side. As it became evident that the end was near, that heroic mother, who had been such a worthy companion in all his labors, stooped over and imprinted on his face a kiss for each of their seven sons in far-away America. At 5 P.M., April 3, he breathed his last.

Missionaries are not unique, the only ones who can show total allegiance to God. They are simply witnesses sent by God across cultural boundaries. We are all witnesses to God’s work through Jesus, and all of us are to live with Jesus as our Lord; all of us give our full allegiance to God in Christ. Jesus is our first love. Jesus alone is our Lord.

An Application

There were three questions at the beginning: What is the first love? How is it lost? What does coming back look like?

·         What is our first love? Jesus. Total allegiance to Jesus. Not the feelings that go with such allegiance, nor the enthusiasm with which we worship, but the full commitment of our hearts and lives to Jesus.

·         How is it lost? A good question! One way is by acting as though we have a different allegiance. We can pursue what this means in the Going Deeper class.

·         What does coming back (repentance) look like? I sometimes think that repentance looks like going down to the altar and praying through with many tears. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it looks like a simple re-affirmation of my first allegiance.

A simple re-affirmation: Every morning I pray the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come; your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” You know the prayer. You could summarise it by repeating those first lines in this abbreviated form: “Your name. Your reign. Your will.” I started praying the Lord’s Prayer daily when I was in spiritual crisis. It changed my life. Daily repetition of my own primary allegiance reminds me of my failures to live up to that love and spurs me on to live up to that love. As we close the sermon this morning, I invite you to pray the Lord’s Prayer with me. “Our Father, Who art in Heaven, …”

Texts:

Deuteronomy 6: 4-9

⁴ Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. ⁵ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. ⁶ These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. ⁷ Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. ⁸ Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. ⁹ Write them on the door-frames of your houses and on your gates.

Revelation 2: 1-7

2 To the angel of the church in Ephesus write:

These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands. ² I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not and have found them false. ³ You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.

⁴ Yet I hold this against you: you have forsaken the love you had at first. ⁵ Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. ⁶ But you have this in your favour: you hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

⁷ Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.

Questions

·         Do you ever feel as though your life as a follower of Jesus is hollow? Do you ever wish that you could recapture the confidence of an earlier stage of faith?

·         I offered a definition of love. How would you define “first love” or “our love for God”?

·         How can you (we) tell that you (we) still love God? How can you grow in your love for God?

·         What does it look like in actual practice to love God deeply?

Steinbach Mennonite Church

6 October 2019

Lent One: Into the Wilderness

The date was May 28, 1969. The last day of our sophomore year at Messiah College. Our class was getting together at a cabin in the woods for our last class gathering before we scattered for the summer. We knew that many of our number would transfer or leave school at the end of the semester, so this was one last time together – maybe for the rest of our lives.

We got set up in the cabin, men in one area, women in another. Then, while supper was being prepared, we went for a walk in the woods to see something called Lookout Point, a lovely view across the south-central Pennsylvania forest. I ran on ahead of the others and missed the path to the Point. I realized I was in danger of getting lost, and turned around. I found my classmates just leaving Lookout Point and, encouraged by our class advisor, ran out to the point to look across at the trees between us and the next mountain.

It was lovely indeed, and I turned to follow my classmates back to the cabin. Except that I took the same wrong path again, and this time I was lost. The sun set and darkness came. I had no idea which way to go. I found out later that my classmates came out looking for me, calling my name. I heard nothing. I burrowed down under the leaves to stay warm in the late spring night. I slept lightly, and when I awoke, I saw a light in the distance. I knew that the sun rises in the east and that the highway was east, so I walked towards the light until I realized it was a beacon on the next hill. I burrowed back under the leaves, trying to ignore the night sounds of animals snuffling in the dark.

Surprisingly, I did sleep, and when I awoke, I walked towards the rising sun and found a road out of the woods. A passing motorist picked me up and took me back to Messiah College, where I called our class advisor (who had gone home for the night). He came and took me to the cabin, where I had a long-delayed meal – breakfast with my classmates.

Looking back, it was a frightening episode, but what I remember most clearly is walking towards the rising sun through the forest cathedral of green and gold. Sunrise was incredibly beautiful, lifting my soul even more than the darkness had oppressed me.

Transition

Lent is one of my favourite times of the year. Other church celebrations don’t have as much space for the difficult nature of daily life, but Lent is all about the difficulty of living. Lent is God’s invitation to enter the wilderness of hardship and trouble. Since we so often find ourselves precisely in that place, Lent is our chance to find God’s presence in our troubles.

We have two passages this morning, one from the annual Jewish ceremony for tithes and offerings found in Deuteronomy 26 and the second from Jesus’ encounter with the devil in the wilderness of Judah, at the beginning of his earthly ministry. As part of considering these two passages, we will use a simple ceremony with stones to apply them to our own lives.

Deuteronomy 26

This passage describes the ceremony in which the Children of Israel were to give themselves to God. The action is described as taking place once – when they enter the land of promise [verse 1: as soon as possible after entering]. The passage also assumes a continued repetition of this offering, possibly on an annual basis. The tithe that is described in the next verses was also a regular offering, but one that was made every three years. We can guess, then, that if the first fruits were not offered each year, they were offered every three years.

The very first offering, made as a celebration of ending their travels in the wilderness, was probably done all together as they crossed the Jordan, as soon as they had established themselves. The annual celebration took place at a central place of worship, probably Shechem.

At that celebration, the priest reminded the people of their history: They came from a nomadic ancestor (Jacob), who left his wanderings to settle in Egypt. The book of Genesis tells us that Jacob (renamed Israel) settled in Egypt because he and his family were threatened with extinction in a great famine. God took them and established them in Egypt, but the Egyptians turned on them and enslaved them.

God again reached into their lives with grace and help to set them free. They travelled through the wilderness for 40 years, during which God preserved them and prepared them to occupy the land God had promised them. This celebration remembers God’s preserving grace and commits the people to serve God in return in all that they do.

I am reminded of a prayer that I often pray in the morning: “Lord, teach [us] to know you better, to love you more, and to serve you with our whole hearts.” The Israelites committed themselves to God as God’s servants. Set free from slavery in Egypt, they embraced slavery to God – much as Paul calls himself (and us), “slaves of Christ”.

Luke 4

The temptation of Jesus is a comforting passage in one sense: We see that Jesus faced the hard questions and troubles of life, just as we do. These were real temptations, not something done for effect, but temptations in which the fate of the universe hung in the balance. You notice the way that Satan moved through the full range of human experience – from physical hunger (all the physical needs that we live with) to political power (all of the social-political temptations we might face) to spiritual worship (a rebuke of the health and wealth gospel, which tries to avoid the problems of life). The simple point is that Jesus has faced all that we face, here and in his entire ministry.

You notice that Jesus responds to the temptation by leaning back on his relationship with his father. He quotes Scripture, and when Satan begins to quote Scripture, Jesus shows how close he is to his father in the way that he shows that he knows what God wants.

You notice also that Jesus experiences temptation when he is physically weakest. Such difficulties come to us when we have few reserves and when we are least able to resist. Jesus walked through the darkest times of life, just as we do. In this beginning to his ministry, we see a foretaste of the cross that he carries at the end.

A Synthesis

We often think of wilderness experiences – the hard times of our lives – as bad things to be avoided. The Children of Israel, on the other hand, looked back on their Wilderness Wanderings as a golden period, the time when God was most visibly with them. The pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night was a constant reminder of God’s presence. Perhaps we could write a new beatitude: “Blessed are those who are lost in the wilderness, for they will find God.”

As we enter the season of Lent, we remember the wilderness times of our lives. Don’t get me wrong. We don’t ask for these times. I did not want to get lost in the woods at the end of my sophomore year. It led to one last argument with my then girlfriend. She thought (rightly) that I had acted inconsiderately. My carelessness meant that my classmates had to spend time hunting for me and spend the night worrying about me. This is not good!

But my clearest memory of that night is the green and golden dawn, walking through the forest cathedral. God was there, and I would not have been so aware of God’s presence if I had not been lost. This is the gift of the wilderness: To show us that we rest in God’s strength and care, or we die. Jesus knew that, and all of Satan’s tempting could not move him. Moses knew that, and he called Israel to remember it and memorialize it every year.

The Stones

We know that too. In our congregation’s life and in the personal lives of each one here, we have walked through the wilderness more than once. As you came into the sanctuary this morning, you each took a stone. You have written your name on the stones and you have them with you now. You may have been wondering, “When will he tell us what these stones are for?” The answer is, “Right now!”

Hold your stones in your hand. Think of a time you got lost, a time that you spent in the wilderness, a time that you wondered if God would ever show up. I have to remind you that sometimes God does not show himself clearly even in the wilderness. I, like you, have prayed, seeking God’s presence, only to have the words bounce off the ceiling back at me. Remember these times too. [Take a minute of silence to think and to remember.]

We will spend time throughout Lent remembering the wilderness. We will use our stones in a variety of ways to remember – to remember our hard times and to remember God’s presence and grace. This morning, we want to collect your stones with your names on them. I am asking the ushers to come forward with their baskets and collect the stones. 

[Sing our song, “Here by the waters”, while the ushers gather the stones up and arrange them on the back windowsill.] 

A week from today, when you enter the sanctuary, you can find your stone and take it with you to your place. We will use the stones in different ways throughout Lent to remind us of the wilderness and of God’s grace and goodness to us when we are lost.

These stones are multilayered symbols. Sometimes, they mean you and me – the people who meet together in this congregation. Sometimes, they mean the burdens that we carry, just as sometimes we feel as though we are nothing but our problems. Sometimes, they become an altar to God, just as God comes to us through our experiences of the wilderness.

Another Story

At our leadership retreat just before the AGM of MC Manitoba, we had a resource person who led us to think of some problem in our lives, something that was destroying our sense of self, and to write about it on a piece of blank paper. Then, she asked us to turn the paper over and write a letter from Jesus to ourselves about that problem. I thought of a responsibility at school that has left me feeling drained and frustrated. I won't say more about it, but here’s the letter that I wrote for Jesus. That was hard to do – I can’t speak for Jesus. At the same time, I think I know what Jesus was saying to me. A word of explanation to make sense of what I wrote: Eleven years ago, at this time of year, I was in a dark space in my life. It felt a lot like depression, although I think it was something else called “acedia”. The darkness weighed most heavily in the early morning. I would wake up at 2 AM with a deep heaviness pressing me down. Then, one morning during my morning prayers, I heard Jesus’ voice saying, “That weight is all the stuff that has been between us, pressed out of you. I want nothing between us.” I remember clearly my immediate internal response, “Neither do I.” I knew that my relationship with Jesus was the one thing in a hard world that was intact and stable, the centre of my life. So, the letter from Jesus, which I wrote to myself.

Letter from Jesus:

Dear Daryl,

I have been working on you for almost 69 years. You have made some blunders. You have pleased me greatly. You may or may not succeed [in the thing that I wrote about]. It doesn’t matter. Not really. Because you belong to me, and you know it.

Remember that morning I said to you, “I want nothing between us”? I remember your immediate response, “Neither do I.” That’s what matters. You might say, that’s all that matters.

I love you – I always have; always will. “Daryl, son of David, do you love me?” Keep following, my friend.

Jesus

Lent One: March 10

Leader:

Focus Statement: When we enter the wilderness of wandering and temptation, God’s hand delivers us. We confess our trust in a saving God.

Texts

Deut 26: 1-10

Firstfruits

26 When you have entered the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance and have taken possession of it and settled in it, ² take some of the firstfruits of all that you produce from the soil of the land that the Lord your God is giving you and put them in a basket. Then go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his Name ³ and say to the priest in office at the time, “I declare today to the Lord your God that I have come to the land the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.” ⁴ The priest shall take the basket from your hands and set it down in front of the altar of the Lord your God.

⁵ Then you shall declare before the Lord your God: “My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. ⁶ But the Egyptians ill-treated us and made us suffer, subjecting us to harsh labour. ⁷ Then we cried out to the Lord, the God of our ancestors, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our misery, toil, and oppression. ⁸ So the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with signs and wonders. ⁹ He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; ¹⁰ and now I bring the firstfruits of the soil that you, Lord, have given me.” Place the basket before the Lord your God and bow down before him.

Luke 4: 1-13

Jesus is tested in the wilderness

4 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, ² where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry. ³ The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” ⁴ Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.’”

⁵ The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. ⁶ And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendour; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. ⁷ If you worship me, it will all be yours.” ⁸ Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’”

⁹ The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down from here. ¹⁰ For it is written: ‘He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; ¹¹ they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’” ¹² Jesus answered, “It is said: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

¹³ When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.

Steinbach Mennonite Church

10 March 2019

Deut 26: 1-10; Luke 4: 1-13