Good morning Church, on this third Sunday of Easter, our resurrection story pertains to being found. Have you ever been lost? Like really lost? I know I look young, but I recall navigating roads before GPS. How many of you recall breaking out the old trusty Rand McNally Atlas before a road trip? I recall adding up the mileage between stops to ensure I’d have enough gas in the tank to make it. Of course, gas was just over $1 back then, at least in some states that I drove through. On one momentous occasion 15 years ago, I recall driving up to Boston in our Volvo wagon. My wife, Yuliana, was the navigator, using our trusty Rand McNally Atlas, and it worked like a charm, that is, until we hit the streets of Beantown. With Rand McNally, one could easily navigate the avenues of Manhattan, but the twisting and winding roads of Boston would prove too much for our road atlas. Exiting Route 9 into the outer edges of the Hub of the Universe, we became truly lost. We needed a more detailed guide in order to make it to Holy Hill, once home to Andover Newton Theological School. And so, as night was fast approaching, we finally found a gas station with a city map, which helped us find our way to our then soon-to-be home.
Oftentimes when we’re lost along our journey, we attempt to go at it alone. Now, I could have made the decision to try and navigate with what we had, and perhaps we would have arrived by trial and error, and then again, perhaps much later. Being vulnerable, however, and stopping to ask for help avoided a lot of headache and spent gas on a tight budget. Of course today, we simply say, “Hey Siri,” and she plots out our routes. But when we find ourselves lost outside of road trips, things get more complicated.
We are fortunate that Denise Cuevas and Javier Orea and their families have joined us for worship and fellowship today, so that we can share in their joy, offer our prayers for God’s blessing on their life together, and congratulate them in person on this happy occasion.
Javier and Denise were married in a small family wedding ceremony at a winery to the north of us about two and one-half weeks ago. Stephanie and I were pleased to make the guest list, and I was honored to preside over their vows.
As I said to Denise and Javier during their wedding, “It’s not every couple who’s had the same boss much less asked the boss to marry them.” People have choices. I don’t take theirs for granted.
It was a blessing to be part of their wedding ceremony and wedding reception. I’ve attended quite a few weddings over the years. There are many similarities, but no two are the same. One of the nuances for me about the Orea’s wedding was watching them play a game to test their knowledge of each other.
The bride and groom were instructed to take off their shoes, sit back to back and hold one shoe of their own in one hand, and one of their partner’s shoes in the other. Javier’s favorite sister Andrea served as quiz master. The point of the game, ostensibly, was to see whether they knew each well enough to be getting married. Fortunately they passed. In fact, they both nearly got 100% of the questions correct. They better. They were high school sweethearts.
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Most of you know about my rural upbringing and that most of my relatives have been and still are engaged in agriculture. But what you may not know is that most of the women in my family have been teachers. And, much to the surprise of many of our contemporaries, some of us women have become elders and preachers in the church. True story.
My grandmother taught country school even though she only obtained an eighth grade education. My mother taught second grade before she was married to my father, even though she only completed two years of higher education. And she started teaching preschool when my sister and I were in high school, even though she did not have schooling in early childhood development.
Two of my aunts were teachers. One has been the go-to substitute teacher for the Garwin, Iowa school district. Another taught English at Iowa State University for the country version of students featured in “Welcome Back, Kotter.”
My twin sister went to college to become a high school science teacher. Her first teaching job was for the Tahlequah Nation in rural Oklahoma. Soon after, her children were born and she stepped out of the public school teaching for several years. When she went back, she switched from teaching the natural sciences to teaching English Language Learners. Now in “causi-retirement,” Professor Schwerin teaches ELL theory and methodologies to undergraduates and master’s degree candidates at a private university in Northwest Arkansas.
The classroom settings and the subject matters that my people have taught have varied, but all of them agree--and I concur--that reading and repeating stories to our children, from infancy to adulthood, is fundamental to brain development, language learning, and faith formation.
If we do not read to our children, they will never reach their full potential. They will have a much more difficult time learning to speak, and they may never fully come to know Jesus or the power or importance of the Easter message.
I know that I am not only “preaching to the choir,” this Easter Sunday, but I am also blessed to be preaching to a large number of people who have given their lives to the education of others. So I don’t have to wonder where there is agreement about the importance of reading and repeating stories to our younger ones. I trust that I’m getting an “Amen” on that. Amen?
Peace of Christ, Church. It is a glorious day. Amen? I’m so happy that you are here with us this morning. I’m going to do something a little different today, and I want to make sure all can hear me, even the young folks that we have in the sanctuary this morning. Every time I say the word “hosanna,” you say hosanna. Okay? A little call and response. You think you can do that? Let’s practice, I say hosanna, you say hosanna, “HOSANNA!” Oh come on, we can be a little louder, can’t we? Let’s make sure the folks at home can hear us. HOSANNA! There we go.
Alright, so what does HOSANNA mean? In Hebrew, hôši’â and nāʾ are two words that together mean “please save” or “deliver now,” as in Ps 118:25, “Save us, we beseech you, O Lord!” Now, Jesus’ own name, Yeshua, which is from the same root as hôši’â, means “He saves,” quite the word play for the supplication “please save.” However, probably during the time in-between the testaments, HOSANNA also developed into a familiar expression of jubilation, similar to “Hail to the king.” Which you might imagine how this expression then would have ruffled the Emperor’s feathers.
If the North American Christian Church ever goes extinct—and I’m not saying it will, but just bear with me for a moment—it won’t be because of the rise of secularization or falling birthrates, or any of the other reasons scholars offer for its demise. No. If the church dies, it will be because of coffee creamer. The Reverend Erica MacCreaigh, a Presbyterian minister from Iowa, tells the story of the bitterest dispute she ever witnessed, which began over coffee and which might be apocryphal, but is certainly familiar. Reverend MacCreaigh recalls that, in a certain unnamed church, someone suggested to the pastor that the church should be buying fair-trade coffee for their after worship coffee hour and fellowship time. The pastor of this church, who was apparently too busy preaching the gospel and visiting the sick, didn’t really realize that the church had a veritable traditionalist “Coffee Mafia” in charge of coffee hour, nor did she ponder the consequences that would happen if someone went against them. The pastor thought the idea of fair-trade coffee sounded good and so she gave the change her blessing.
Without delay, a dozen pounds of fair-trade coffee arrived at the church and were placed prominently next to the Coffee Mafia’s two giant coffee urns in the fellowship hall kitchen. But, to the great disappointment of some hopeful coffee drinkers that Sunday, the Coffee Mafia refused to try out the new coffee. Later that week in the pastor’s office, the members of the Coffee Mafia complained with righteous indignation that, A) it was unfair that they had not been consulted about the change and B), the new coffee was extravagantly more expensive than the ordinary canned coffee they frugally purchased from the warehouse store. Soothing ruffled feathers, the pastor assured them that no offense had been intended by the fair-trade coffee lovers. Eager for the parties to have a Jesus-inspired teaching moment, she suggested that the group meet with those fair-trade coffe-loving “Carafe Crashers,” to work out their differences.
We talk a lot about being linguistically and culturally competent around Eden Church, and the Eden Area.
These conversations are important—not only in dynamic international situations and within immigrant communities—they are also important within cultures and churches and families. Examples follow.
When my sister’s girls—both of whom are pushing 40—like Pastor Marvin and Yuliana—were learning to talk, I experienced a great awakening, not unlike our forebears in the faith who were part of the “camp meeting” style of worship that forged the Methodist, Disciples of Christ, and Christian tradition (within the UCC).
For the churches, the great awakening—particularly the second great awakening—had to do with the realization that God could be experienced in the flesh—by the unschooled, around a campfire, and the out of doors—and not just in the academy, from reading books (especially the Bible), or the institutional church, which had become quite institutionalized and all cozy with the establishment.
My first and second great awakenings with my nieces, Susie and Chrisie, were a little different, and on a microscale compared with frontier religion in the US, but no less riveting and transforming for me. My awakenings had to do with the fact that I now—almost 40 years ago—had to embrace the fact that there were at least two people in my family who spoke “Southern.”
This may shock you, given all of the Southerners who now count as “family” for me—and you hear about me if you show up for more than one sermon here—but it was quite a revelation back in the early 1990s.
While I was preparing for my sermon this week, a memory floated up from nearly the bottom of my memory pool to the surface about a job that I had in college that I hadn’t thought about in years. Now, I’m not exactly sure why I remembered this college job this week. It might be because I have been pondering the faith journey of Peter this lent, but it’s probably more likely because this week Macy’s announced that they were closing 150 stores across the country, including the iconic anchor location at Union Square in San Francisco. During college, some 40-ish years ago, I worked for one summer as a part-time, floating sales associate at a department store. It wasn’t Macy’s, because we didn’t have Macy’s where I grew up in San Diego. I worked at the Southern California department store chain, called May Company. I was about 20, and I had no real interest in or aptitude for retail sales, but it was a job, and I needed some summer employment in between college semesters.
At some point during the summer I met another young woman about my age, whose name I cannot now remember. One slow afternoon in the junior clothing department, my young work colleague discovered that I was a Christian. Now, knowing who she was, I think she probably asked me if I was a Christian. When I said that I was, she asked me the next question, which was, “are you born again?” You don’t hear this term much today, but in the 80s, it was the way for an Evangelical Christian to find out if they were talking to another Evangelical or if they needed to evangelize the person they were talking to. I admitted that I was not “born again,” which gave her an opportunity to convince me that I needed to be. She insisted that in order to be a real Christian, a true follower of Jesus, I needed to be born again.
The events described in today’s gospel lesson bring to mind the American disaster movie, “The Perfect Storm,” which was directed by Wolfgang Petersen, and opened in theaters in 2000. The main differences between Matthew’s version and Wolfgang’s perfect storm is that in Matthew’s version, everyone is rescued from danger, and in Wolfgang’s version, everyone dies. That’s a big difference.
Interestingly, the setting for the movie is the Massachusetts Bay shoreline, not far from the community where our very own Dave Wallace grew up, and where his father and sister still reside.
The film is not a documentary, and like a lot of “fish tales,” this one is a whopper and some parts are exaggerated for various reasons, and some parts are “spot on” true.
Matthew’s account had other purposes, and it may have included a little exaggeration here and there to make a point. Regardless, here’s the deal. Mathew’s purpose was primarily to pass on the good news that Jesus was the messiah--the real rescuer--who would take hold of his open hand.
I’m blessed to be wandering with you this Lenten season. Now you know, we hear a lot about the Hawkeye state from the pulpit, so today I’ll share with you a little about where I come from.
I grew up not in tornado alley, but tornado lane, and in a trailer at my beginning, in the foothills of Appalachia, the borderlands of Tennessee and Alabama. I grew up on a very small farm with a few head of beef cattle and on a sawmill in the hollows of Coldwater Creek outside of Fayetteville, Tennessee, nestled in-between the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan (Pulaski, TN) and the home of Jack Daniel’s Distillery (Lynchburg, TN). The statute of the first Grand Wizard of the KKK still greets all persons coming to do business with county administrative offices at the town square. In the same building, I attended Bible studies within the chambers of one of the county judges. Fayetteville, is famous for its slawburgers, Civil War reenactments, and for sending John Neely Bryan to found Dallas, TX in 1841. You can see a replica of his log cabin in downtown Dallas today.
Our scripture text this morning, from the first chapter of Mark’s gospel, happens immediately after the passage that we heard last week, when Pastor Arlene preached about Jesus casting out demons while he preached at the synagogue. And that text happened immediately after the text from Chapter 1 two weeks ago when Pastor Marvin preached about Jesus calling his disciples. In fact, if you had to pick a word that characterizes Chapter 1 of Mark’s gospel, it may very well be the word “immediately.” As Pastor Marvin pointed out, the word “immediately” or the phrases “at once” or “without delay” are used at least 12 times in Chapter 1 alone and at least 40 times in the entire Gospel According to Mark.
Mark is, most scholars agree, the earliest of the four canonical gospels, and it’s also the shortest. As I’ve been pondering Mark’s gospel this week in preparation for this sermon, I came to think of it as the gospel answer to the other TL;DR gospels. For those of you not hip to texting lingo, TL;DR stands for “too long; didn’t read.” If you want to get through the gospel story quickly, read the Gospel of Mark. If you want more meat on the bones, read John, the second shortest gospel, or Matthew, the third shortest gospel, or Luke, who, in 24 chapters has the highest word count of any of the gospels and is in the top twelve of all the biblical books for length.
As we near the end of Chapter 1 in Mark’s gospel, we have already had Jesus’s baptism, his 40 days in the desert, which takes only two sentences to cover, his calling of the disciples, his preaching in the synagogue for the first time, and the casting out of demons and healing of many people, and the beginnings of his ministry throughout the area of Galilee. All in one chapter. It takes Luke five chapters to get to the calling of the disciples, and it takes Matthew eight chapters to tell us about the healing of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law.
The gospel lesson today explores the question of authority, specifically, it explores the question of who has the authority to speak, to lead, and to heal. Jesus answered that question by healing a man with an unclean spirit.
The way that Mark tells the story, Jesus went to Capernaum, and on the Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and taught (v. 21).
Synagogues were (and are) places where Jews have gathered for centuries to pray and study Torah. Capernaum was a town on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee, which was the center of Jesus’ Galilean ministry.
The people in the synagogue were astounded at Jesus' teaching, because he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes, who were fluent in Hebrew law.
To build his case about Jesus’ authority, Mark went on in Chapter 1 describing a whole series of healing miracles that Jesus performed, beginning with this healing account of the man with an unclean spirit at the Capernaum synagogue.
Mark explained that the man was disrupting worship and upsetting the congregants who were trying to pray. The man just would not settle down, even when the greeters politely tried to shush him and tried to shoo him away.
The more people tried to calm down the demon possessed man the more aggravated he became, until finally he said in a loud voice, “What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?” (v. 25)
Jesus did not respond directly to the man’s rant. Instead, he spoke to the illness that was consuming him. Jesus ordered it to be quiet and come out of him. Much to the surprise of the congregation, the unclean spirit did just that. It convulsed and cried some more, and finally, it came out of him (vs. 26-27).
According to Mark, everyone in the synagogue kept asking, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority! Jesus commanded even the unclean spirits, and they obeyed him.”
This morning’s gospel passage comes from the Gospel according to Mark. Most agree that it was the earliest accounting of the Jesus story among our four evangelists that made the cut into the New Testament.
There’s a lot going on in Mark, there’s typically crashing waves, big crowds, demons, exorcists, a lot of special effects. And it’s super fast paced too. It may not seem so, when you compare it to a 4k movie with 120 hertz refresh rate, but did you notice just in our snippet this morning we heard, “immediately,” “at once,” “without delay.” It’s almost comical how fast Mark portrays things moving, at break-neck speeds. The word Mark uses for these adverbs is εὐθὺς. I counted Mark using this word more than 40 times to hurry things along, nearly a dozen times in the first chapter alone. Now, if you’re going to use the same adverb 40 times in a paper, for me, you’re gonna get some red ink. Who are my teachers out there? Right?
We go from John preparing the way, to the Baptism of Jesus, from Jesus’s wilderness journey to John being imprisoned, to finally Jesus proclaiming the Good News–in just 14 verses. Of course there’s a lot of blanks here to fill in and other gospels inside and outside the New Testament do that for us.
Están sucediendo muchas cosas en el Evangelio según Marcos, hay olas del mar rompiendo, grandes multitudes, demonios, exorcismos y muchos efectos especiales. Y además tiene un ritmo súper rápido. ¿Notaste que en nuestro pasaje de esta mañana escuchamos “inmediatamente”, “de inmediato”, “sin demora”. Conté que Marcos usó estas palabras más de 40 veces para acelerar las cosas, casi una docena de veces solo en el primer capítulo. Pasamos desde Juan preparando el camino, hasta el bautismo de Jesús, desde el viaje de Jesús por el desierto hasta el encarcelamiento de su primo Juan y, finalmente, Jesús proclamando las Buenas Nuevas, en sólo 14 versículos.
The first Sunday after Epiphany has traditionally been reserved for celebrating the Baptism of Jesus. Originally, the baptism of Christ would be celebrated along with the arrival of the magi on Epiphany. At some point, the Catholic Church created a new feast day to focus solely on the baptism, and the Anglican and Lutheran denominations generally followed along. While we are not super “high church,” here at Eden, observing a traditional feast day gives us an opportunity to ponder the meaning of our faith practices, along with other Christians all over the world. Whether we were baptized as infants or as youth or as adults, whether we were baptized with a little water or a lot, or whether we have not yet been baptized at all, considering the history and practice of baptism helps us answer our own questions about what baptism is and why it matters.
That one of the primary rituals of our faith tradition involves water is not a surprise. As an element vital to the creation and sustaining of all life on earth, water was often seen by ancient peoples as divine, or having divine properties, and most ancient cultures explained the creation of life on earth as beginning in the water. And so water was vital in many early religious rituals.
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Happy Epiphany! Espero que les haya pasado un feliz día de los Reyes Magos ayer. In recognition of today’s special feast day, today’s sermon will be a bilingual one, and so I beseech your linguistic hospitality.
We’ve had a few newborns recently in the congregation, and had a baby shower, sprinkle or two, but I bet we didn’t see any gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh–although, I did meet a wiseman from the east last Sunday, but that was a grandpa.
Now, these gifts of the wise magi each had their own special meaning, but come on, you can tell they weren’t gifts from wise women, right? If so, they’d have in tow diapers, food, and wine-I mean formula, like las Compañeras.
Si fueron las reinas magas en vez de los reyes magos, no hubieron traído regalos de obsequios de oro, incienso y mirra, sino pañales y comida, ¿verdad? Como el evento que tuvimos ayer celebrando su llegada al niño Jesús, con tamales y pañales.
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My twin sister Marlene and I had a rather charmed relationship with our mother’s parents, Mary and Alfred Thomsen.
Perhaps it was because we were twins and multiple births require more family support in the early years to insure the survival of infants and the sanity of adults. Perhaps it was because we were our grandparents’ first and only grandchildren for eleven years. Or perhaps it was for all of these reasons and more that my sister and I enjoyed such a special relationship with our grandparents. Regardless of the cause, the effect was all good
One facet of Marlene’s and my relationship with our grandparents was that they had a knack for bringing out our better angels. They tended to give us the benefit of the doubt in ambiguous situations. They encouraged the best in us, and as a result, we put our best efforts forward for them. We did not want to disappoint.
Our world is SO secular. Churches can’t compete with the pull of the secular world. We’ve lost ground every year since about 1960. Church memberships continue to drop. Doors close. Congregations fold tent. And, the trend continues to worsen and at warp speed since the pandemic unfurled.
I’ve served as the pastor of this church for over 21 years. This is my 22nd Christmas at Eden. In the good old days, we experienced our highest worship attendance during the month of December. Not anymore. People have a lot going on this time of year: shopping, parties, vacations, and more. Church seems to get in the way of Christmas for many celebrants.
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The season of Advent and Christmas is the one time in the church year when we Protestants are, if not exactly enthusiastic, at least not too uncomfortable with talking about Mary, the mother of Jesus. Ever since Luther—or most likely Calvin—Protestants have had a problem with the Catholic devotion to Mary as the intercessor between sinners and God, choosing to see it as veneration bordering on idolatry, which takes away the proper focus on Christ. So we Protestants tend to keep her in a box for most of the year, taking her out like a favorite sparkly Christmas ornament at Advent and forgetting about her the rest of the time.
For centuries, Mary has been a favorite subject of artists, who have added to the image of sparkly Christmas-ornament Mary, or, as theologian Alyce McKenzie puts it, Mary as a “figure in a snow dome, silent, immobile, gazing at the manger.” The moment of God’s revelation to her that she would bear Jesus, called the Annunciation, has been of particular interest for painters. And there was a particular symbolism that grew up around her that artists used to communicate that this was a painting of the annunciation, particularly in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance paintings.
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No sermon today, just a sweet pageant with the children and a fun puppet play with a Christmas message. Watch the video!
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