Worship

This year for lent I am using a sermon series on repentance. This series uses many of the texts from the traditional Easter Vigil service. The Easter Vigil texts are selections of stories from the Old Testament where God saves (or acts for the benefit of Man). The stories used in this series are: Creation, the Flood, Abraham and Issac, the Repentance of Nineveh, the Fiery Furnace, and the Crossing of the Red Sea. Each week we will look at repentance through the lens of one of these stories.

Repentance starts with being honest before God and ourselves about who we are. When it comes to sin, everyone has a natural impulse to hide, but repentance means finding the courage to be honest. It also means having faith in the promise of forgiveness. But being honest about faith means recognizing that faith is contested on many sides not only by society, but by our own experiences, and sometimes even by the actions of God himself. Ultimately, repentance means becoming more human, not less. Because our thoughts, desires, and actions are so linked with sin, it is easy to view repentance as fighting against our humanity as if      holiness meant trying to stifle as many of our natural human impulses as possible. But honest repentance recognizes that sin is the thing that stifles our humanity, while repentance results in our natural impulses functioning more as God designed them. God designed us to rely on Him. Honest repentance means doing precisely that.

Pastor Mehl

“And my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away.” – 1 Corinthians 2:4–6

I was looking at the readings for the four Sundays before lent. I noticed that a theme (at least in the epistle lessons) was wisdom. Paul (and Peter in the reading for the transfiguration) do not talk about wisdom as a purely good thing. A distinction is made between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of man. As you would expect, God’s wisdom is superior to man’s wisdom. As Christians, this is as it should be. We expect and want God to be wiser than we are. But it also might cause us to wonder where this line is between God’s wisdom and man’s. We want to be using the right kind of wisdom and we are ourselves, man, not God. I intend to preach on this theme in the Sundays before lent. Some of the topics I aim to explore are what it means to have faith as a foundation or to have reason as a foundation for your salvation. (Jan. 25) I plan to consider where we put our hope. Are we confident about the future because we have determined that Christianity is the most plausible explanation of the world or is our hope placed in God to save us no matter how implausible that may be (and are these two views mutually exclusive)? (Feb.1) I plan to consider what this means for us practically. How does it change what we do when we are running on the wisdom of God versus the wisdom of man? (Feb. 8) And finally I plan to look at the hope the Christian has for the future. As Jesus comes down from the mount of transfiguration and turns His face to the cross, where do we turn our face when our own cleverly devised plans fall through? (Feb. 15)

Most of these questions are parts of the larger question of ‘what does reason have to do with faith?’ This question was famously asked by the church father Tertullian about 200 years after Christ. He put it, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” (Athens, in this case, was a reference to philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Plato.) The church father Augustine, about 350 years after Christ, would conclude that one has “faith that seeks understanding.” By this he meant that reason helps the Christian to understand their faith. Luther, 1500 years after Christ, would put in his explanation to the 1st Article of the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe that God has made me and all creatures; that he has given me my… reason and all my senses, and still takes care of them.” Luther’s position here is that reason is a tool given to us by God, like our senses, that helps us to understand His creation.

In our culture today it seems that a lot of importance is placed on reason. The Christian understands that faith is important when it comes to God and our salvation. Yet it is not always clear where reason comes in. Some Christians have concluded that Christianity is almost exclusively built upon reason, going so far as to simply call it a philosophy. Some go the other way concluding that Christianity is built entirely upon faith and has no use at all for reason. However, the history of Christianity and, more importantly, the Scriptures are a bit more nuanced. When it comes to salvation faith is clearly most important. But reason or wisdom is not absent from God or from man. God has given us reason as a gift; a tool. It is worth thinking about how much we value this tool and how it can serve us as Christians, as members of the Body of Christ who have faith in Jesus for salvation.

Pastor Mehl

There will not be an in person service on January 25th. You can view the service on-line at 9:00 am.

“We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing.”
2 Thessalonians 1:3

When you think of growing, what do you think of? I think about the wisteria in my backyard. I pretty sure that thing can grow one foot in a day, especially when we get the kind of rain that we’ve been having recently. That wisteria is growing on a chain-link fence between my house and my garage. I have to continuously cut it back to keep it from overtaking either. It’s not allowed to grow on to buildings but I let it grow up as much as it wants and out to a point (I want to use all of my driveway).

Reading through Acts, it’s interesting how Paul and Co. are led to go some places but prevented from going others. You get the impression they are willing to go in any direction so that the church will grow but God guides them in particular paths. Wouldn’t that be a nice way to grow in the faith? Wouldn’t it be nice to be willing to grow in your understanding of scripture, in your relationships with other people, in your prayer life, in generosity, in every aspect of your faith and simply let God guide you in the particular paths He would like you to take?

I think we often like to pick the path ourselves. We think that God wants us to pray more and so we try to get better at that. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there are more aspects to the faith than prayer, just like there are more places in the world than the few that Paul visited. There’s something to be said for being open to all different kinds of growth in the faith. You don’t have to excel at all of them. If your gifts are not there, they’re not there, but a broadly growing plant sure is a lot easier to train than a plant that thinks it needs to grow in only one direction.

In what aspects of the faith do you have room for growth? In what ways can you love God and your neighbor more? June begins the time of the church year that is the longest, the “Sundays after Pentecost”. The color of this season is green, for growth. It’s a time to think about how you can grow personally and maybe even think about how we can grow as a church.

Congregations can grow in many different ways. We can grow in our understanding of scripture and theology. We can grow in our worship life and in our prayer life. We can grow in service to our neighbor, both near and far. We can grow in our relationships with each other and with those we have not yet met. Are we going to excel at all of these things? No, but it is worth trying. It is worth being a little bit better at least in all of these categories. And when you’re growing in all directions God may just have an easier time letting us thrive in the direction He intends us to go, personally and as His people.

For Guidance in Our Calling 193

Lord God, You have called Your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending,
by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go but only that Your hand is leading us and Your love supporting us;
through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.