Sunday’s sermon: Not Just for the Church

Posted on May 29, 2023 by pastorlisaj

My mom posted a video on Facebook earlier this week that I just loved![1]
- Big red circle on the sidewalk – probably 5 ft. or so in diameter
- Small Blutooth speaker on the ground next to the circle
- Big chalked instruction: DANCE HERE
- And the video, which runs just over 5 minutes (the length of two songs) and is actually recorded at two different circles in two different locations, is just a compilation of lots of people stepping into the circle to dance for a little while. → 2 things immediately struck me about this video
  - FIRST: all the beautiful differences displayed in the video
    - People of all different backgrounds, ages, ethnicities chose to step into the circle and dance
    - All sorts of dance abilities – people who could barely find the beat to people who clearly had dance training and everything in between
    - Some people really get into it with big, flashy movements and some danced happily with much smaller, more discreet movements
    - All combinations of people in the circle
      - Lots of individuals dancing by themselves
      - People dancing with friends
      - People dancing with significant others
      - People dancing with kids
      - People dancing with dogs
      - Even a guy dancing with his bicycle!
  - OTHER: how pretty much everyone stopped dancing the moment they stepped outside that red circle again → They were changed. Many were smiling and laughing. A few were looking mildly embarrassed or a little chagrined. A few were still carrying the beat of the music in their bodies somewhere – snapping their fingers, bobbing their heads, and so on. But when they stepped outside that circle, they stopped dancing.
- So all week I was thinking about this video … and about Pentecost … and about Church. See, here’s the thing: very often, we celebrate Pentecost as the birthday of the church – that day literally aflame with the Holy Spirit and the mission of God bursting out all over the place! That day when God sent the disciples out into all parts of the world with all languages in their mouths but the same message on their tongues: salvation in the love and grace of God through Jesus Christ. We say that that was the day the Church was born because God sent the disciples out to the ends of the earth, called to share that message with all who would hear it, called to evangelize and baptize and welcome all who were seeking into the body of Christ, called to gather and nurture and grow communities of praise and prayer and worship and fellowship. It was a nets-flung-wide kind of movement. It was a “y’all come” kind of movement. It was a movement with deliberately wavy and indistinct edges because there is nowhere that the love of God cannot reach.
  - Might be asking, “Okay … but what does this have to do with that dancing video you mentioned?”
    - Video = people finding freedom and joy in dance … but only in that confined red circle → Once they left the circle, the dancing stopped.
    - Here’s my question: On this Pentecost day when we celebrate the wild and flagrant outpouring of the Holy Spirit – a day full of unpredictability and wide-open potential, a day that was all about the incredible everything that God could accomplish … on this Pentecost day, have we as the Church today confined ourselves to a staggeringly smaller circle of what can be?
Want you to hear a different telling of the story, so this is how Eugene Peterson paraphrased it in The Message: When the Feast of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Without warning there was a sound like a strong wind, gale force—no one could tell where it came from. It filled the whole building. Then, like a wildfire, the Holy Spirit spread through their ranks, and they started speaking in a number of different languages as the Spirit prompted them. There were many Jews staying in Jerusalem just then, devout pilgrims from all over the world. When they heard the sound, they came on the run. Then when they heard, one after another, their own mother tongues being spoken, they were blown away. They couldn’t for the life of them figure out what was going on, and kept saying, “Aren’t these all Galileans? How come we’re hearing them talk in our various mother tongues? Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; visitors from Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene; immigrants from Rome, both Jews and proselytes; even Cretans and Arabs! They’re speaking our languages, describing God’s mighty works!” → Now, I know that that’s a pretty large section of difficult-to-pronounce names of places and empires that mostly don’t exist today, so let’s talk about this swath of land covered by all those languages that the Holy Spirit bestowed that day.
- East: all the way to China’s western border (Pakistan, parts of northern India, Afghanistan)
- North: strip of land btwn the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea (Georgia, Azerbaijan) as well as southern coast of the Black Sea (Turkey)
- West: Rome, parts of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia
- South: down into Libya and Egypt and into the Arabian Peninsula
- We’re talking about roughly 3,000,000 sq. mi. of land that these different languages cover! And that’s just the initial “sharing” in that one moment. That doesn’t include all the peoples and tribes and city-states and nomads and travelers and traders who will hear secondhand and thirdhand and twentieth-hand about the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection and about God’s unending love.
  - Evidence that the gospel traveled far and fast
    - In China by 635 CE
    - In the British Isles by the 4^th (300s CE)
    - Expanded out from there as the Church continued to grow and global travel became more and more ambitious
    - Now, we have to say here that the way that Christianity was spread throughout much of the Middle Ages was not good. It was violent. It was unjust. It obliterated indigenous cultures on every continent. And as it was spread, there were horrible, horrible things done and sanctioned by the Church. But I think looking back, we can also say that much of that was done not for the love of the Gospel but for the love of power and wealth and prestige.
- Cycle of misaligned Church priorities led to what the late Phyllis Tickle has called the church’s rummage sales – times of great uncertainty and great “cleaning out” within the history of the Church[3]
  - 500 yrs. ago = Reformation → divided Catholic/Protestant
  - 500 yrs. before that = Great Schism → divided Western/Eastern Orthodox
  - 500 yrs. before that = establishment of monasticism → saved Christian practice and theology through much political and social upheaval (e.g. – the Dark Ages)
  - 500 yrs. before that = Christ
  - Tickle (in The Great Emergence which was published back in 2008): As we shall see over and over again, religious enthusiasms in all holy rummage sales are unfailingly symptomatic or expressive of concomitant political, economic, and social upheavals.[4] → Sound like now, friends? Because in case you hadn’t done the math, here’s your spoiler alert: We are in the midst of another rummage sale. Things in the church world are changing. Rapidly. Uncertainly.
    - Conversations with other pastors right now inevitably always include some variation on the admission that it is hard to do/be Church right now because everything is so up-in-the-air → Things are changing in so many ways and on so many fronts, it feels like the Holy Spirit, that pesky and persistent Divine Disturber, is gusting throughout midst again and shaking up our comfort zones. The Holy Spirit is roaring through out midst with such force that we are being pushed outside those little dance circles that the Church has grown so accustomed to.
      - Scary
      - Uncomfortable
      - Undefined
      - But it’s also a wide open pavement of possibilities! Instead of being restricted to our little dance circle, we have the whole world around us to move and love and share God’s word in new and powerful ways that change everything – change out there … and change in here – change inside our walls and change inside our hearts! But that will only happen if we have the courage to step outside the circle and keep going.
        
        Tickle gives reassurance in the midst of the uncertainty: It is especially important to remember that no standing form of organized Christian faith has ever been destroyed by one of our semi-millennial eruptions. Instead, each simply has lost hegemony or pride of place to the new and not-yet-organized form that was birthing.[5] → Christianity is not going to disappear, friends. But I think we can confidently say that it will not look the same either.
- Bottom line: The message and joy and inspiration and movement of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost was never, ever meant to be something that was contained and orderly and defined by a handy acronym or a bulleted list of approved theologies. It was never meant to be safe. It was never meant to be easy. It was meant to shake things up and change lives. It was meant to completely reorient us with the person and work of Jesus Christ as our new North.
  - Late Rachel Held Evans: But the modern-day church doesn’t like to wander or wait. The modern-day church likes results. Convinced the gospel is a product we’ve got to sell to an increasingly shrinking market, we like our people to function as walking advertisements: happy, put-together, finished—proof that this Jesus stuff WORKS! At its best, such a culture generates pews of Stepford Wife–style robots with painted smiles and programmed moves. At its worst, it creates environments where abuse and corruption get covered up to protect reputations and preserve image. “The world is watching,” Christians like to say, “so let’s be on our best behavior and quickly hide the mess. Let’s throw up some before-and-after shots and roll that flashy footage of our miracle product blanching out every sign of dirt, hiding every sign of disease.” But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn’t offer a cure. It doesn’t offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace. Anything else we try to peddle is snake oil. It’s not the real thing. → Maybe this time, instead of lighting a flicker flame over our heads, God is lighting a fire under our butts to get us out there doing and being and believing and preaching and praying the real thing in the real world with real people who need some good news! Amen.

[3] Phyllis Tickle. The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why. (Grand Rapids: BakerBooks, 2008), 19-31.

[4] Tickle, 21.

[5] Tickle, 27.

Sunday’s sermon: All Things New

Posted on May 22, 2023 by pastorlisaj

Text used – Romans 6:1-11

Y’all … I think we may have finally made it to spring in Minnesota!!! (One week before Memorial Day weekend … what people tend to think of as the unofficial start to Sheesh.)
- Kids had soccer yesterday – their last soccer game of the season – and it was the first game that wasn’t horrible to sit and watch because of the weather
  - Clarification: watching the games themselves has always been fun … the weather we had to endure while watching … not so much
  - Sporting the fruits of that finally-springtime weather in my lovely sunburn right here! → I’m one that’s usually pretty good about making sure I’ve slathered the sunscreen on – on my kids and myself – but clearly I’m out of the habit because it didn’t even cross my mind yesterday.
    - Out of the habit because it’s been SO LONG since we’ve really been able to be out enjoying the beautiful weather!! → Spring has been a long time coming this year. I mean, it felt like we were waiting … and waiting … and waiting for that renewal that comes with green leaves, longer days, and warmer temperatures, right? It felt like things stayed grey and brown and dormant for a long time this year. I felt like we were waiting a long time for that new life to spring forth.
- And it was hard, wasn’t it? As the cold temperatures continued to drag on … as the snow continued to fall … and those steel-grey, wintery clouds that continued to block out the sun … it was hard. It was hard to wait. It was hard to hope. It was hard to remember that such a thing as “spring” even existed.
  - Started to feel a little bit like we were living in C.S. Lewis’ land of Narnia before the defeat of the White Witch – a land in which it is, by Lewis’ own description “always winter. Always winter and never Christmas.”[1]
  - And yet here we are … finally on the warmer … sunnier … greener side of things, surrounded by new life.
Feel the push-and-pull of living with the current reality as well as the desire for new life and what that means in our Scripture reading this morning
- Paul’s explanation of the crucial nature and meaning of Christ’s resurrection to the Christian church in Rome → wraps life and death and resurrection, sin and grace and mission all together in one theological package → As is his norm, Paul packs a lot of theology into a few verses. So let’s unpack it a bit.
  - Question at the beginning of today’s passage feeds in from what comes before it at the end of ch. 5 (section titled “Grace now rules”): Many people were made righteous through the obedience of one person (Jesus Christ), just as many people were made sinners through the disobedience of one person (implication: Adam). The Law stepped in to amplify the failure, but where sin increased, grace multiplied even more. The result is that grace will rule through God’s righteousness, leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord, just as sin ruled in death.[2] → So following this explanation about grace increasing in response to sin – that line about “where sin increased, grace multiplied even more” – Paul then begins our section today with this follow-up question: So what are we going to say? Should we continue sinning so grace will multiply?[3]
    - Makes sense, right? More grace must be good, so if we follow his logic from the previous section, that means more sinning … right? → Paul is not taking any chances with word choice here – makes his point abundantly clear
      - Gr. “continue” = active sort of word – word that carries connotations of persisting toward a goal → Paul isn’t just talking about the uninvolved ways that we wait for things to happen. This is the kind of continuing that is intentional. Should we intentionally continue to sin?
      - Gr. “multiply” = combination of two words, both of which mean many, much, more, etc. → Should we intentionally continue to sin so that there will be more and more and more grace?
  - But of course, Paul answers his own question – text: Absolutely not! All of us died to sin. How can we still live in it?
    - Scholar: The main thrust of chapter 6 is to head off any misunderstandings about the relationship between sin and grace. … Just because the power of grace outstrips the power of sin is no reason to sin. When my son was in preschool, he accidentally spilled an entire cardon of milk on the floor. He was devastated by his mistake. So as I mopped up the floor, I reassured him that everything was going to be just fine. I said, “Look! Now the whole floor is nice and clean!” He turned to me and said brightly, “Hey! Maybe I should spill on the floor more often!” By no means! Just because God in Christ Jesus has the power to make things right is not an invitation to do wrong.[4]
  - So then what does that entail? → Paul continues dialogue about basic tenets of Christian belief
    - Baptized into Christ Jesus
    - Christ died, was buried, and “was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father”[5]
    - Because our baptism binds us to Christ, “we too can walk in newness of life”
      - Expands this idea of “newness of life” → Paul makes it clear that once faith has become a part of who we are, we are changed. – text: This is what we know: the person we used to be was crucified with him in order to get rid of the corpse that had been controlled by sin. That way we wouldn’t be slaves to sin anymore, because a person who has died has been freed from sin’s power.[6] → Whoooooo! That is powerful “The person we used to be was crucified with him in order to get rid of the corpse that had been controlled by sin.” It’s a powerful reminder of where that path of following sin leads us: death. Period. Without Christ, this is a death that is The End. → especially powerful when we think about when this passage is most often read
        
        Reminder: we’ve been following the Narrative Lectionary for the last 4 yrs. → schedule of Scripture passages that starts again every fall and walks us through the whole story of human salvation from creation in Sept. through the life of Israel, the prophets (Advent – leading up to Christmas), the gospels after the birth of Christ, and through some of the epistles following Easter and the resurrection → However, in the Revised Common Lectionary – a different schedule of texts for each Sunday that’s used widely throughout the Church – this passage from Romans 6 is always scheduled for Holy Saturday … for what’s called Easter Vigil … for that liminal space between the horrific death of Good Friday and the resurrection joy of Easter morning. It is into the uncertainty and desolation and darkness of that waiting that we read this text.
        
        Text that brings a glimmer of light into the darkness
        
        Text that reminds us why we must sit with those moments of death before moving on to the new life
        
        Text that, although it never actually uses the word “hope,” is utterly brimming with hope
Hope = theme for the conference that I was at this past week – the Festival of Homiletics: Preaching Hope for a Weary World → And after the last few years that we’ve all had – with COVID and all of the social unrest – one of the threads that kept popping up again and again throughout the various sermons and lectures was the idea of hope anyway.
- Hope … even though we’ve all been through some stuff
- Hope … even though the way ahead is uncertain and unclear
- Hope … even though we are bombarded on every side by negative headline after negative headline
- Hope … even, and especially, when we don’t feel like there’s any hope left
- One of the sermons was by Rev. Dr. Will Willimon (retired bishop in the United Methodist Church, professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke Divinity School, author of over 60 books) → Willimon spoke about the importance of divining false hope vs. true hope
  - Willimon: Hope can be the parent of idolatry because false hope is always easier to live with than true hope. False hope is self-constructed. True hope asks of us, requires of us, expects of us.[7]
- Later that same day, this idea of true hope was expanded on and fleshed out a little more by another preacher – Rev. Dr. Samuel Cruz (Associate Professor of Church and Society at Union Theological Seminary and senior pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Sunset Park in Brooklyn) → Cruz made a distinction btwn abstract hope and concrete hope[8]
  - Abstract hope = what Cruz called “hunky dory hope” → hope that has a far-reaching, sometimes nebulous, “pie in the sky” sort of aim
    - E.g. – world peace
  - Concrete hope = hope for things in the here and now → hope that calls us to act in the here and now
- Both of these preachers – Will Willimon and Samuel Cruz – as well as just about every other preacher that I listened to last week talked about the importance of connecting hope and action. They talked about the way that hope changes us … the way that faith changes us … the way that interacting with Christ, that a relationship with Christ changes us. And that is exactly what Paul is talking about in our passage this morning. Paul makes it clear that through Christ’s death on the cross, a new life is available to us. – text: If we died with Christ, we have faith that we will also live with him. We know that Christ has been raised from the dead and he will never die again. Death no longer has power over him. He died to sin once and for all with his death, but he lives for God with his life. In the same way, you also should consider yourselves dead to sin but alive for God in Christ Jesus.[9] → We cannot help but find hope in this words. We cannot help but find promise in these words. But we also cannot help but find a call to action in these words. Paul makes it clear that this baptism … this faith … this relationship with Christ changes us.
  - Just as we cannot go out into the sun and not be changed (as I so graciously have illustrated for you this morning), we cannot engage in a relationship with the risen Christ and not be changed → The question is how? How will you be changed? How will you let that relationship with Christ change you? How will you take that relationship with Christ and change the world?
    - Exploring the Word Together question this morning: How can we honor this new life we have in Christ? → So indeed, let us be the word of God for one another this morning. Amen.

[1] C.S. Lewis. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1950), 14.

[2] Rom 5:19-21 (insertions added).

[3] Rom 6:1.

[4] Shawnthea Monroe. “Romans 6:1b-11 – Pastoral Perspective” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary – Year A, vol. 3. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 160.

[5] Rom 6:4.

[6] Rom 6:6-7.

[7] Will Willimon. “We Had Hoped” from the Festival of Homiletics, preached at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Minneapolis, MN, 18 May 2023.

[8] Samuel Cruz. “Hope From the Margins” from the Festival of Homiletics, preached at Central Lutheran Church, Minneapolis, MN, 18 May 2023.

[9] Rom 6:8-11.

Sunday’s sermon: The Meaning of Grace

Posted on May 15, 2023 by pastorlisaj

Text used – Romans 3:29-30; 5:1-11

As I was thinking about grace this week, I was thinking about a bunch of those childhood playground games.
- First thought: Red Rover
  - 2 teams stand in lines facing teach other holding hands
  - Team A calls over one person from Team B → that person runs across the space btwn. the lines and tries to break through Team A’s line while Team A tries to keep their line from breaking
    - If person breaks through, they get to take someone from Team A back to their line
    - If person doesn’t break through, they join Team A
- Also thought about Duck Duck Grey Duck (Yes, people … it’s Duck Duck GREY DUCK. None of this “goose” nonsense. Geese don’t play with ducks. That’s ridiculous!)
  - Kids sit in a circle facing inward
  - One kid walks around the outside of the circle tapping people
    - If you’re tapped and the person who’s it just says “duck,” you stay seated
    - If you’re tapped and the person who’s it says “grey duck,” you get up and try to catch them before they can run all the way around the outside of the circle and take your seat
      - If you catch them, they remain “it”
      - If they make it back to your seat, you’re “it”
- Game that we played at Girl Scouts when I was little: Mr. Bear à from a “Girl Scout Games” PDF I found online: One person is Mr. Bear. He is trying to sleep in his den. The other players sneak up to Mr. Bear and whisper, “Mr. Bear, are you awake?” Mr. Bear pretends not to hear them. Then the players yell, “Mr. Bear, are you awake?” This makes Mr. Bear furious! He chases them and tries to catch them before they reach home, which is the safe place. Everyone tagged becomes one of Mr. Bears’ cubs. They go back to the den with Mr. Bear. When the remaining players come back to wake up Mr. Bear, the cubs help Mr. Bear catch them.[1]
- All of these games involve someone being singled out and trying to catch others while those others try not to get caught. And when we really get down to it, I think that’s sometimes the way we end up feeling about grace.
  - One hand: feel like there are things we do that make it impossible for grace to catch us → things that put us beyond the reach of grace
  - Other hand: feel like the ones chasing grace → like if we were just better … faster … more righteous … more Christian, we’d be able to “catch grace”
Probably how some of the early Christians were feeling when it came to grace because of the many divides that had grown up in the early Church
- Theological divides → When we read a passage like this one from Romans this morning, we have to remember that what seems relatively clear and straightforward to us was anything but clear and straightforward for the early Christians.
  - Justo González (acclaimed church historian): The many converts who joined the early church came from a wide variety of backgrounds. This variety enriched the church and gave witness to the universality of its message. But it also resulted in widely differing interpretations of that message, some of which threatened its integrity. The danger was increased by the syncretism of the time, which sought truth, not by adhering to a single system of doctrine, but by taking bits and pieces from various systems. The result was that, while many claimed the name of Christ, some interpreted that name in such a manner that the very core of his message seemed to be obscured or even denied.[2] → We who read this Scripture today have the benefit of 2000 years of theological thought and church doctrine that have laid and strengthened the foundation for our understanding. But in the time that Paul was writing this letter to the Roman church, there were all sorts of beliefs and teachings about who Jesus was and how Jesus was or wasn’t connected to God spreading throughout the ancient world.
    - Gnosticism: belief that a select few followers held a special, mystical knowledge, and that knowledge alone was the key to salvation → spiritual was crucial while the things of this world, especially the body and things related to the body, were to be denied and even reviled
    - Marcionism: god of the First Testament = Jehovah → not the same as the God Jesus spoke of → sought to excise all of the references Jesus made to Hebrew Scriptures from the teachings of the early church
    - Docetism: viewed all matter as inherently evil and so belief that Jesus was never actually incarnated into a physical body → that he was a spirit that only seemed human to us
  - With all of these competing ideologies and budding wayward beliefs spreading like wildfire through the ancient world, it’s no wonder some felt that grace was something they had to chase.
In the midst of this throng, we have the works of Paul who was trying to spread the good news of the gospel – a message of grace and salvation for all through the embodied life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
- Ideologies (or heresies, as they have been labeled by the Church for centuries now) that were beginning to develop as Paul was making his missionaries journeys through southeastern Europe and the Middle East → Paul’s frequent references to “false teachers,” esp. in Gal
- Not just competing theologies but competing backgrounds
  - Last week: mentioned the divide btwn. Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians → Many in the earliest days of the early church believed that, in order to follow Jesus, you also had to follow the Jewish Law as laid out in the book so Moses, including the law pertaining to circumcision.
    - View that Peter began to change with his interaction with Cornelius → vision about the sheet being lowered down full of what were considered unclean animals (unfit for human consumption) according to Jewish law → God to Peter: “Never consider unclean what God has made pure.”[3]
    - View that Paul was working hard to abolish – beginning of today’s text: No, not at all, but through the law of faith. We consider that a person is treated as righteous by faith, apart from what is accomplished under the Law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Isn’t God the God of Gentiles also? Yes, God is also the God of Gentiles. Since God is one, then the one who makes the circumcised righteous by faith will also make the one who isn’t circumcised righteous through faith.[4] → Paul is trying to tear down some of those divides that others within the early church were still trying to keep up.
And once he’s made it clear just how open the gospel is to everyone – Jews and Gentiles alike – Paul gives us this exposition on grace and faith. Truly, these 11 verses are sort of a primer on grace and faith. They are the core of Paul’s belief laid out for us in black and white.
- Central tenet of Christianity: This hope doesn’t put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. While we were still weak, at the right moment, Christ died for ungodly people.[5] → These verses are so crucial, and I want to dive into the Greek here a little bit.[6]
  - First and most important: “love” = agape love → This is that all-encompassing, benevolent, unconditional love that God gives to us … the “love that covers sin,” as the Christian band Casting Crowns puts it in their song “Your Love Is Extravagant”: Your love is extravagant / Spread wide in the arms of Christ is the love that covers sin / No greater love have I ever known You considered me a friend[7] → It is this indescribably incredible love that God has poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

- - Gr. “weak” = encompasses all the ways that we can feel weak – physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually → Remember, Paul himself has experienced all of these things. He was an up-and-comer in the ranks of Jewish religious leaders … until he encountered God on the side of the road – an encounter that left him temporarily blind and spiritually flipped upside-down. Paul’s conversion experience was dramatic and wholly life-altering, and his work since then had him imprisoned, beaten, chased out of homes and towns. It had him weak in every way … and yet, in that weakness, Paul found not self-pity and bitterness but hope and love and grace.
  - Gr. “ungodly” = not quite the judgment/condemnation it sounds like → It’s not just about a lack belief but also about being irreverent – about not showing the appropriate respect or honor to the sacred. These are those moments when we feel like we’re the ones chasing grace … but we just can’t seem to keep up.
But if we return back to that schoolyard games idea for a moment, Paul is saying that grace is less like those single-you-out games and more like a game that my boys have been talking about lately – a game that they learned in gym class.
- Game = blog tag → And yes, it’s basically exactly what it sounds like.
  - Starts with one person who’s “it” → But every time that person tags someone, they become part of the blog, and the blog works to tag other people … to bring other people in. And once someone is in, they get to help bring in more people.
  - Scholar: Having discovered through faith the love that God has for each of us, we have peace and we have hope. We are no longer divided internally with questions of worth or feelings of failure. We are able to accept ourselves as we are because we experience being accepted.[8] → And in turn, feeling that acceptance in ourselves, we are called by the gospel to extend it to others as well … to bring more people into the blob.
- Today’s text: But God shows his love for us, because while we were still sinners Christ died for us. So, now that we have been made righteous by his blood, we can be even more certain that we will be saved from God’s wrath through him. If we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son while we were still enemies, now that we have been reconciled, how much more certain is it that we will be saved by his life? And not only that: we even take pride in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, the one through whom we now have a restored relationship with God.[9] → Grace doesn’t single one person out over another. Grace doesn’t hold fast to hands in an attempt to keep others out – to only let in the selective few who are strong enough … fast enough … good enough to break through. Grace blobs everyone in. Grace grows and shifts and expands each time another one of us finds our way back to God. We don’t have to be strong enough … because God’s grace has already taken us in. We don’t have to be fast enough … because God’s grace has already taken us in. We don’t have to be good enough … because God’s grace has already taken us in. Again and again and again, God’s grace has taken, does take us, and will take us in. Thanks be to God. Amen.

[1] https://www.gsksmo.org/content/dam/girlscouts-gsksmo/documents/tlc-docs/Girl-Scout-Games-2021.pdf.

[2] Justo L. González. The Story of Christianity, vol. 1: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation. (New York: HarperCollins, 1984), 58.

[3] Acts 10:15.

[4] Rom 3:28-30.

[5] Rom 5:5-6.

[6] Exegesis by Rev. Elana Keppel-Levy, https://somuchbible.com/word-studies/annotated-scripture/romans-328-30-51-11/.

[7] Jared Anderson and Peter C. Kipley. “Your Love Is Extravagant” from Casting Crowns. (Brentwood: Capitol CMG Publishing), 2003.

[8] Ward B. Ewing. “Third Sunday in Lent: Romans 5:1-11 – Theological Perspective” from Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary – Year A, vol. 2. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 90.

[9] Rom 5:8-11.

Sunday’s sermon: A Gospel Warm Call

Posted on May 8, 2023 by pastorlisaj

Tell me if this sounds familiar this morning:

Hi [prospect’s name], this is [your name] from [your company name].

I’ve been doing some research on [prospect’s company name] and I’d love to learn more about [challenge you’ve discovered in your research].

At [your company name] we work with people like you to help with [value proposition 1, value proposition 2, and value proposition 3.]

Is this something you think could help with [common challenges/pain points]?

Option 1: Yes, tell me more.

Great! [This is where you’re going to ask them to attend a demo, or continue the conversation with an Account Executive, or take whatever next steps are part of your sales process.]

Option 2: Objection

I understand. Is it ok if I send you a follow-up email to review at your convenience? Then I can follow up with you tomorrow.

If yes, send the email and set a reminder to follow up. If not, thank them for their time and ask if there’s another point of contact they can connect you with. Make sure to include resources that clearly explain what your company does and ask to continue the conversation.[1]

- Cold calls … everyone’s favorite thing, right? Don’t we just love making those calls? Don’t we just love getting those calls? No? If by chance you aren’t familiar with the concept of the “cold call,” let me give you a short description (from same website where I found the script): A cold call is when sales reps reach out to a potential buyer who’s never interacted with them or their company before, with the intent to sell a product or service. Cold calling typically makes use of a sales pitch script to ensure reps sell the product effectively. It’s a common practice in outbound sales. Cold calling is a way to engage prospects one-on-one to move them to the next step in the buying process. In the past, cold calling meant using a “spray and pray” method, spending time making intrusive calls with no prior qualification, hoping that your message would resonate with someone. But that’s no longer the way to do it. Not only does it waste time and energy, but you end up facing more rejections than you normally would, which can quickly lead to burnout. → Now, contrary to that last bit about the “spray and pray” method no longer being “the way we do it,” I think we’re all familiar with the distinctly 21^st century, technology-driven spin that cold calls have taken on in the last 20 yrs. or so: the ever-present, ever-frustrating robo-calls.
  - Calls that are made by a computer → dials multiple numbers at once → often no one on the other end of the line → if you do happen to get “someone” on the other end, it’s more than likely a prerecorded message … something to do with the warranty on your vehicle, your cell phone carrier, or the way you did or didn’t vote in the last election.
- So what is it about cold calls that we find so annoying? Why do they have such a persistent tendency to ratchet up our blood pressure and get under our skin? I think the answer comes most readily in the very beginning of that cold call script that I read: Hi [prospect’s name]. Do me a favor this morning: raise your hand if you’ve ever been the recipient of a cold call … and they pronounced your name incorrectly!
  - Growing up (pre-caller ID): always knew telemarketer was calling when they asked for Mr. or Mrs. PINE-Y (maiden name: Pinney … short i)
  - That greeting – especially when your name is mispronounced – is so There’s no real connecting in it, so it feels disingenuous. I mean, you can’t even pronounce my name correctly … how invested in my life and how your product/company can actually improve my life can you possibly be, right? You don’t know me. You don’t know my life. You’re only trying to sell me a product or a service.
    - Always felt equally annoyed and sorry for people working as telemarketers (anyone here?) → it’s a job, right? … a job that requires callers to make quotas, often a job in which your take-home pay is directly related to how effective you are a “closing the deal” … how effective your cold calls are → I’ll tell y’all right now … I certainly couldn’t do it.
- Started looking into the whole phenomenon of cold calling because of the nature of our Scripture reading this morning → You see, we have lots of Paul’s letters to different churches in different towns and territories. In fact, other than the gospels, Paul’s letters – Paul’s epistles, as they’re often referred to in “church-y speak” – make up the next largest portion of the New Testament.
  - All of Paul’s other letters = to churches and faith communities that he himself had established throughout his extensive mission journeys
  - But the book of Romans is different. Paul himself didn’t establish the Christian community in Rome.
    - Paul = taken to Rome twice during his decades of ministry → both times = as a prisoner → spent 2+ yrs. under house arrest at one point → ended up writing 4 of his 14 epistles while in Rome (Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon)[2] → But he was never a free man in Rome. The Christian community in Rome is one that grew up through the encouragement and organization of others.
- And yet it’s abundantly clear from the very outset of this particular letter – from those very first verses that we just read – that Paul want to get to know these Roman Christians. → makes Paul’s letter less of a gospel cold call than what’s referred to in the business/marketing world as a “warm call”
  - Differences[3]:
    - Cold call: unexpected, early in the sales process, based on general research (if any) – demographics and patterns, interruptive, prioritizes “seller first”
    - Warm call: expected, comes later in the sales process → built on established prior introduction = therefore invited, based on more personalized research, prioritizes “buyer first”
    - In essence, a cold call is exactly as its named – cold because it’s impersonal – whereas a warm call is based on a relationship.
So Paul’s letter to the Romans this morning is a warm call for the good news of the gospel. → Paul makes it clear from the very outset that “relationship” is at the very heart of his correspondence
- Two different kinds of relationships
  - FIRST, relationship with God through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit → This is the paramount relationship for Paul – the genesis of all the rest of our relationships. He spends much of this introduction … much of this whole letter … much of many of his letters extoling the essential nature of a relationship with God and the blessing that such a relationship can be to us.
    - Today’s text starts by giving the basic rundown of the good news of the gospel (Paul’s “elevator speech,” if you will – the good news of who Jesus Christ was and is for us in 5 verses): God promised the good news about his Son ahead of time through his prophets and in the holy scriptures. His Son was descended from David. He was publicly identified as God’s Son with power through his resurrection from the dead, which was based on the Spirit of holiness. This Son is Jesus Christ our Lord. Through him we have received God’s grace and our appointment to be apostles. This was to bring all Gentiles to faithful obedience for his name’s sake. You who are called by Jesus Christ are also included among these Gentiles.[4]
    - Goes on to lift up the ways the truth of that gospel relationship is a blessing to us – scholar: The gospel is a living entity — a power. It is God’s power … and its purpose is salvation. The whole focus and purpose of the power of the gospel is saving, healing, making right. The gospel is not a power that seeks power for itself. Rather, God’s power (the gospel) is entirely directed towards salvation. The goal of the gospel (of God’s power) is salving humanity’s needs and hurts.[5] → It is for this very reason – this salvation, this healing, this making right, this salving of humanity’s needs and hurts – that God poured all of God’s love, all of God’s hope, all of God’s promise into this relationship with humanity through Jesus Christ. This relationship is quite literally The Point. To quote a beloved children’s book, it is all that we hope for and all that we seek.[6]
      - Nurturing that relationship with God = our ultimate “why”
        
        Why we come to church
        
        Why we read Scripture
        
        Why we pray
        
        “Why” that gets us through our day
  - Also the “why” that feeds into the 2^nd type of relationships that Paul emphasizes: our relationships with one another
    - Much of the 2^nd part of passage for this morning = devoted to interpersonal relationships → specifically interpersonal relationships … but even more pointedly interpersonal relationships that are based in and informed by faith.
      - Begins as Paul often does: by assuring the Roman Christians that Paul thanks God for them → I think that we often breeze through that when we’re reading Paul. Maybe it’s because Paul says it to every church in every letter, so we’re too used to seeing it. Maybe it’s because we read it too contextually – like Paul is saying that only to them without taking those words into our own faith lives. But stop and think about that for a minute. Paul is saying to these people who he’s never actually met that “I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you.”[7] How often do you tell the people who are a part of your everyday lives that you thank God for them? Let alone people you’ve never met? Imagine it!
        
        Closest that I think we get nowadays = occasional letters we get at the church from another Session within the bounds of the presbytery → praying their way through the different congregations within the presbytery at each of their meetings → They don’t know who we are – not on a personal level, anyway. They don’t know what particular ministries we’re undertaking or challenges we’re facing. But as siblings in Christ, they took the time at the beginning of their own Session meeting to lift up our congregation in prayer.
        
        Connection through faith in Christ = what makes Paul’s letter not a cold call for the gospel but a warm call → a call based on established commonalities, based on a shared faith, based on relationship
    - Paul also makes it clear in this portion of his letter that this relationship shouldn’t be hindered by all those barriers that we have a tendency to erect between ourselves and others → particular to Paul’s world = different btwn Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians … but his words can be just as applicable to bridging all those differences that separate us as well – text: We can mutually encourage each other while I am with you. We can be encouraged by the faithfulness we find in each other, both your faithfulness and mine. … I have a responsibility both to Greeks and to those who don’t speak Greek, to both the wise and to the foolish.[8]
- Finally, Paul grounds this portion of his letter in the power and purpose and source of faith: I’m not ashamed of the gospel: it is God’s own power for salvation to all who have faith in God, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. God’s righteousness is being revealed in the gospel, from faithfulness for faith, as it is written, The righteous person will live by faith.[9]
  - Scholar: The righteousness of God revealed in the gospel is rooted in God’s astonishing and undeviating faithfulness to God’s creation, including fickle humanity. The righteousness of God is a profoundly loving and faithful revelation to us. The revelation in the gospel can be known only in the way in which it was offered — by faith. … Yet, even our faith is rooted in God’s faithfulness. Our faith is not ‘ours’. … Our faith is sourced in God’s faithfulness to us [“from faithfulness for faith,” as Paul puts it]. Our faith is part of the cosmic and wondrous revelation in the gospel. … Our faith makes us righteous, not because we have been good enough to believe in the gospel, but because the righteousness of God surrounds us as we exercise the faith that God gives us.[10] → And what better way to explore that faith … to experience that faith … to express that faith than to immerse ourselves in our relationship with God and to share it through our relationships with one another? Amen.