You are the God who makes extravagant promises.
We relish your great promises
of fidelity
and presence
and solidarity
and we exude in them.
Only to find out, always too late,
that your promise always comes
in the midst of a hard, deep call to obedience.
You are the God who calls people like us,
and the long list of mothers and fathers before us,
who trusted the promise enough to keep the call.
So we give you thanks that you are a calling God,
who calls always to dangerous new places.
We pray enough of your grace and mercy among us
that we may be among those
who believe in your promises enough
to respond to your call.
We pray in the one who embodied your promise
and enacted your call, even Jesus. Amen.
-Walter Brueggeman
I got into the sharing my faith business a little differently than most Christians. I got hired into it as a missionary! We planned and trained to share our faith for a long time. It took years! I even raised money so I could share my faith and still feed my family. It was a long process of packing up all our stuff, moving to
Then I arrived and started the job and realized I had no clue how to do what I was supposed to do. Sharing my faith, evangelizing, preaching, still felt awkward and unwelcomed and ... well, to tell you the truth... not all that fun.
Today we will talk about sharpening the sharing part of our ministry skills. We have talked about prayer and talked about caring and now comes the hardest one of all. Actually speaking to people about our faith.
The problem we have in
Most preachers, at this point, would try and re-convince you that the thing you are selling is the most important thing in the world! There is a lot of truth in that, and the fact we are not all more ambitious about telling our friends is perhaps a commentary on our faith. However, I think the "sharing" part is not something we need to make an effort. It is the result, the product of a life of caring and prayer. If we pray for others and genuinely care for them, then we will share with them as well.
Mark
That day when evening came, [Jesus] said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.” Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”
He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.
Like every kid in
While telling one’s children not to talk to strangers is probably good parenting practice, John gives the church somewhat different advice in his third letter. In fact, he commends them for doing just the opposite: giving support to strangers. You can imagine how this scene might have unfolded. Demetrius shows up in a small town in
After telling this congregation to welcome strangers, John makes another surprising statement. He writes to the congregation that they should imitate what is good, not what is evil. (No surprise there.) He goes on to say that whoever does good is from God (still no surprise), and whoever does evil has not seen God. He does not say whoever does evil is not from God, or whoever does evil is from the Devil, or whoever does evil ought to be kicked out. He simply says whoever does evil has not seen God, implying that what evildoers really need is not to be feared and shunned, but to have an encounter with our God. And what better place exists for that to happen than inside the doors of a church.
Tera
Here’s a great quote from Samuel Wells’s God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics: “When people of the current generation talk about keeping in touch, what they usually mean is email, mobile phones, landlines, or even perhaps a letter. The irony is that none of these involve touching anybody. Eating together is one way, perhaps the most important way, in which people learn to touch one another. In eating together, they become one another’s companions--bread-sharers.”
I know distance makes keeping in touch with others very difficult. I constantly experience the painful feeling of being apart from many people I love. It seems like we can channel this longing for close relationship in several different ways. One way that may not be helpful is relying exclusively upon technology to meet our relational needs. Don’t get me wrong, I think technology is great. I have a blog. I have a Facebook account and enjoy it very much. I’ve even written on how the Internet is a real community. But I have to remind myself that technological communication cannot replace the experience of a face-to-face, bodily meeting with another person. This is really tough to remember in our culture of gadgets. Even the phone call, one of the most basic gadgets around, cannot replace talking with another person face-to-face.
The relentless production of new forms of communication requires us to be very intentional about preserving the practice of making local friendships. This will be especially hard on those accustomed to relying solely on long-distance friendships. It seems easier just to contact the long-distant friends using technology than it does developing an entirely new friendship. We all know finding new friends takes a lot of time. But I don’t think it’s worth the cost of neglecting face-to-face friendship. There’s something deeply real and Christian about a face-to-face encounter, especially over a meal. I think the communion table is a symbol of this deep reality. Genuine relationship is nourished by breaking bread together. Despite the newness and the risk involved, the forming of face-to-face friendships over meals is perhaps one of the most Christian, and counter-cultural things we could do. So, do you know any good places to eat around here? Matt
