Today's Sermon

I wung it for the sermon today, no text, so I was a bit shaky and don't have a text to post here on the blog. I first have to apologize to my 8AM crowd, I was so shaky I didn't know what was going on, sorry! I came around for the 10AM service which felt better, but man I was ugly and bad at that 8AM service.

Here is the gist of my sermon from my notes to help guide me through it without going for hours on end, oh, and the texts are below as well:

Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71:1-6
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30

My thought process for the sermon was to go at the Epistle first, about love, Paul writes so well about Love all the time and it is the wedding reading that everyone picks because it is so fluffy and nice, but really its a impossible and crazy hard way to talk about love and what love means to us. Following the Epistle, I got permission to talk about myself a bit and how I grew up as a kid at Ascension with cool folks and families and how amazing families can be and how wonderful it is to have a group of people to identify as your family. Then I talked about the family of Gethsemane and how wonderful folks here are also.

After that, I went to the Gospel and gave a little background and textual whatever about the story, which was the one about throwing Jesus off a cliff. How can we ever doubt this stuff actually happened? Seriously, they wanted to throw Jesus off a cliff! Funny. After that it was time for a little background on the neighborhood that got so mad a t Jesus and how they were a tight nit family with certain expectations around their salvation, and how they would foresee the coming of God's Kingdom. The tight knit family didn't want to think about the greater world around them and therefore rejected Jesus message that God's kingdom was for ALL people, not just for that particular group of people.

Moral of the story, then, how do our actions, and attempts to maintain a sense of family hinder the growth of our community because we are unable to see outside of ourselves and our little community to welcome those who are in need of the same kind of loving community and family that we experience everyday? What will it take to be sure that our desire for family closeness is not exclusive, rather it is inclusive and welcoming and safe and comfortable while being challenging and provocative and profound and excellent?

If you are reading and this and know how we can find some money to buy a new sound system that can then also record my sermons so I can record them and then share them as pod casts or something, let me know. We need to fix what we have so we can broadcast to the world what is happening here!

Thanks, and be well,
A+

Comments

wildknits said…
Aron,

Thanks for posting this!! I find myself struggling daily with these same issues in my work. Trying to see past many things to the person inside. Trying to remain caring and open to each patient no matter what.

Thanks for the reminder about family and community!
7:41 PM
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