If we are going to be effective in reaching people for Christ, we are going to have to start showing people that we really care. Evangelism and missions must be
relational in nature. There is no record of Jesus walking up to someone out of the clear blue sky and saying: I am the Messiah and then him beginning to show his care for them. No, he showed his care for them first and then, through his actions and words, he revealed himself to them.

I’ll bet you have heard variations on a story about a man who was on a luxury liner and suddenly he falls overboard. He can’t swim and in desperation he begins calling for help. Now it just so happens that there were several would be rescuers on deck who witnessed the incident. The first man was a Moralist. When he saw the man fall overboard, he immediately reached into his briefcase and pulled out a book on how to swim. He now tossed it to him and he yelled: Now brother, you read that and just follow the instructions and you will be alright.

The man next to him happened to be a Idealist. When he saw the man fall overboard, he immediately jumped into the water and began swimming all around the drowning man saying: Now just watch me swim. Do as I do and you will be alright. The person next to him happened to be a member of the Institutional Church. He looked upon the drowning man’s plight with deep concern. He yelled out: Now, just hold on friend. Help is on the way. We are going to establish a committee and dialogue your problem. And then, if we have come up with the proper financing, we will resolve your dilemma.

The next man on deck happened to be a representative of the school of Positive Thinking. He yelled out to the drowning man: “Friend, this situation is not nearly as bad as you think. Think dry!” The next man on board happened to be a Revivalist. By this time the drowning man was going down for the third time and desperately began waving his arm. Seeing that, the revivalist yelled out: Yes brother, I see that hand, is there another? Is there another? And finally, the last man on deck, was a Realist. He immediately plunged into the water, at the risk of his own life, and pulled the victim to safety.

My friends, the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. We need realist in the church willing plunge into the water and go to work. Who’s with me?

As always, I invite your comments.

Pastor Cory

For the last few weeks in worship, we have been exploring God’s mysterious gift of the Holy Spirit. On the last Sunday in May, the Holy Spirit is identified as a member of the God-Head, the Trinity, and I will once again try to explain the unexplainable.

I am reminded that in the early church, Celtic Christians chose, not the dove, but the wild goose as a symbol representing the Holy Spirit. It sounds strange to us, but it has a long tradition in Ireland.

While the Roman Church imagined the Holy Spirit in the form of a peaceful, graceful dove, the Ancient Celts understood the Holy Spirit to be like a wild goose. When you hear of the Spirit descending like a heavenly dove on you, you hear harps and strings softly playing and get a peaceful feeling. The image of the Holy Spirit as dove has become so familiar and domesticated an image we pay little attention.

The image of a wild goose descending upon you is a different matter altogether. A wild goose is one noisy, bothersome bird. I like this image of the Holy Spirit as a wild goose because it jars us out of our complacency. We need such an image to correct our overly safe and overly sweet image of the Spirit. One preacher friend asked, “How many times can you sing ‘There’s a Sweet, Sweet Spirit in This Place’ without your blood sugar reaching diabetic levels?”

When the Spirit comes in the Bible, it never seems to be sweet or safe. God’s Spirit called the prophets to speak to Israel in words that were bold and sometimes dangerous. Ezekiel saw a vision of God’s Spirit blowing through a valley of dry bones and bringing them to life. John the Baptist dressed in camel’s hair and eating wild locusts proclaimed, “I baptize you with water but he who comes after me will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” Paul gave this advice to young Timothy, “For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline” (2 Timothy 1:6-7).

Neither safe nor tame, the Spirit inspired Paul to proclaim, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28).

It was this wild Goose that Jesus referred to when he preached his first sermon and quoted Isaiah, saying, “For the Spirit of the Lord is upon me for he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of God’s favor” (Luke 4:18).

The Holy Spirit empowers the church to be the agent of change in the world, a counter-cultural entity. The task of the church is to breathe in the Spirit and be inspired by the Spirit to act on behalf of God. But the church has been waiting to exhale far too long. As the Spirit of God flows into us, it also ought to flow from us in the way we treat one another, the way we speak to one another, in the way we treat others in our community, in the way we live out the new life we receive when we accept Jesus Christ as Lord.

When I was pursuing my undergrad degree at Central Missouri State University, in my Philosophy 101 class, we had an assignment: “Prove or disprove the existence of God” in ten pages.  One clever answer used less than a page, and got top marks for the effort.

The student wrote to the effect that the assignment was not possible using the rules of logical proof.  For in using the available conventional starting point, we would only be able to use the things that can be observed and verified by human senses within the known created world.  All one could do, the argument supposed, in that instance is prove that something in the created world was God.  In other words, you could prove that something was God that could not possibly be God.  Any God that could be proven by human reason and logic is not God.

The second part of the argument suggested that in order for such a “proof” to be valid, a student would have to be objective, from the start, about that answer.  A student would need not to care if there was or was not a “God”.  Since everyone has a stake in the answer, one way or another, it was reasoned that such a proof was impossible to attempt.

How would you prove the existence of God?  The point of the exercise was to get the students to think about who or what God is.  The reality of the exercise, at least for the student in question, is that we cannot approach the answer through logical thought, through reason alone.  Now this is not to say that reason and logic do not have their place in the realm of faith.  It is just to say that they alone cannot do the job.

The IS-ness of God is just too different from our experience to be able to fathom.  So the language of the Trinity in the Christian witness may serve mostly to  humble us.  It serves to remind us that God is indeed beyond our complete comprehension.  All the language that we have about God must be metaphor.  Most of the language in the bible is just that, with one notable exception: “God is love.”  Is there anything else we need to know?

As always, I invite your feedback.

Pastor Cory

Read John’s Gospel for the 2nd Sunday of Easter.  This is the story of one man’s doubt and a church struggling.

Check out the church ads on the religion page of the Saturday edition of most big city newspapers and you find some impressive sounding places of worship.  There, with sleek graphics and Madison Avenue phrases, a few select churches boast of their assets — their choirs, their friendliness, their powerful preaching, their singles ministries, their ample parking, their family life centers, their sensitive child care, and their compassionate spirit.  Some churches, it seems, have it all.

Other churches, however, appear by contrast to have nothing, absolutely nothing.  Take, for example, the church depicted in our text for today.  Here, we get our first glimpse of the disciples gathered together after the resurrection, the first glimpse, in other words, of the church in its earliest days, and, all in all, it is not a very pretty picture.

Near the end of his life, Jesus had carefully prepared his disciples to be a devoted and confident fellowship of faith.  They were to be a community of profound love with the gates wide open and the welcome mat always out, but here we find them barricaded in a house with the doors bolted shut.  They were to be the kind of people who stride boldly into the world to bear fruit in Jesus’ name, a people full of the Holy Spirit performing even greater works than Jesus himself (John 14:12), but here we find them cowering in fear, hoping nobody will find out where they are before they get their alibis straight.  In short, we see here the church at its worst — scared, disheartened and defensive.  If this little sealed-off group of Christians were to place one of those cheery church ads in the Saturday newspaper, what could it possibly say?  “The friendly church where all are welcome?”  Hardly, unless one counts locked doors as a sign of hospitality.  “The church with a warm heart and a bold mission?”  Actually, more like the church with sweaty palms and a timid spirit.

Indeed, John’s gospel gives us a snapshot of a church with nothing – no plan, no promise, no program, no perky youth ministry, no powerful preaching, no parking lot, nothing.  In fact, when all is said and done, this terrified little band huddled in the corner of a room with a chair braced against the door has only one thing going for it: the risen Christ.  And that seems to be the main point of this story.  In the final analysis, this is a story about how the risen Christ pushed open the bolted door of a church with nothing, how the risen Christ enters the fearful chambers of every church and fills the place with his own life.

Where is Jesus in our congregation?  How did he enter?  What is Jesus’ role in this place?  What is Jesus’ role in our lives?  These are good questions for us to ponder as we say;

CHRIST IS RISEN!

HE IS RISEN INDEED!

HALLELUJAH!

As always, I invite your comments, Pastor Cory

In our Lenten journey, following Jesus to the cross, perhaps this would be a good prayer to begin each day.

Gracious God, how blessed we are to live and serve as a community of Your people.  Gifted with the beauty of creation surrounding us, lead us into significant relationships that nurture and challenge us, as we experience the promise of life, and are grateful.

Lead us now, O God, as we seek, in this season of Lent, to journey with our eyes fixed on Jesus.

Lead us in righteousness, that our journey might be a journey in which we embrace Christ’s ways of compassion and justice, grace and mercy, hope and right living.

Lead us, God, in peace, as we seek to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.

Fill us with a peace that passes all human understanding, a peace the world cannot give to us, neither can it take away.

But, holy God, let us never be satisfied with personal peace alone.  Lead us into paths of peacemaking and reconciliation.  And God, we pray that You might soften the hearts of those world leaders who are far more inclined to wage war than to seek peace.

God, where there is brokenness, form us into instruments of forgiveness.

Where there is despair, make of us channels of Your hope.

Where there is division, may we be empowered to bring healing and wholeness.

Where darkness abounds, grant us courage to walk in the light, our eyes fixed on Jesus, the light of the world.

God of healing and compassion, We hold before You now those in special need of Your healing touch…

God, make us mindful of those among us this day who silently hold hurts and brokenness within them.  Teach us to look into one another’s eyes and hearts.

We pray for those experiencing pain in their significant relationships, those who are yearning for new beginnings in life.  We pray, O God, for young people facing untold pressures and challenges, and for older persons seeking to come to terms with limitations and losses.  Whatever our life situations, O God, lead us in paths of right living, our eyes fixed on Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we pray.  Amen.

My challenge to you all is to pray this prayer each morning.  Then note how you see the world and your role in it.

As always, I invite your comments.

Pastor Cory

A gentleman wrote into Readers’ Digest and told of this real-life encounter.  “While I was sitting in my parked car on the street one day, a young woman in the car ahead came over and asked me if I had a hammer that she could borrow.  When I said no, she got one from the man in the car in front of hers.  She then proceeded to smash out the vent pane on the side of her car.  After returning the hammer, she opened her door, took out the keys and waved them at us with a triumphant grin.  As she drove away, the fellow who lent her the hammer came over to me and said, ”If only she had told me what she wanted the hammer for I think I could have helped her.  I am a locksmith.”  Oh, the brokenness we bring into our lives when we try to do a self-atonement job and fix our fallen nature.

Coming in to this Season of Lent, let’s offer this prayer:

Gracious God, how blessed we are to live and serve as a community of Your people.  Gifted with the beauty of creation surrounding us, lead us into significant relationships that nurture and challenge us, as we experience the promise of life, and are grateful. 

Lead us now, O God, as we seek, in this season of Lent, to journey with our eyes fixed on Jesus. 

Lead us in righteousness, that our journey might be a journey in which we embrace Christ’s ways of compassion and justice, grace and mercy, hope and right living. 

Lead us, God, in peace, as we seek to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.

Fill us with a peace that passes all human understanding, a peace the world cannot give to us, neither can it take away.

But, holy God, let us never be satisfied with personal peace alone.  Lead us into paths of peacemaking and reconciliation.  And God, we pray that You might soften the hearts of those world leaders who are far more inclined to wage war than to seek peace.

God, where there is brokenness, form us into instruments of forgiveness.

Where there is despair, make of us channels of Your hope.

Where there is division, may we be empowered to bring healing and wholeness.

Where darkness abounds, grant us courage to walk in the light, our eyes fixed on Jesus, the light of the world.

God, make us mindful of those among us this day who silently hold hurts and brokenness within them.  Teach us to look into one another’s eyes and hearts.

We pray for those experiencing pain in their significant relationships, those who are yearning for new beginnings in life.  We pray, O God, for young people facing untold pressures and challenges, and for older persons seeking to come to terms with limitations and losses.  Whatever our life situations, O God, lead us in paths of right living, our eyes fixed on Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we pray.  Amen.

There is a beautiful old tradition about the star in the East.  The story says that when the star had finished its task of directing the wise men to the baby, it fell from the sky and dropped down into the city well of Bethlehem.  According to some legend, that star is there to this day, and can sometimes still be seen by those whose hearts are pure and clean.  It’s a pretty story.  It kind of makes you feel warm inside.

There are other legends about this story of the wise men from the east.  For instance, how many wise men were there?  In the old days in the east, they believed that there were 12 men who made the journey, but now most everyone agrees there were three.  One old legend even tells us the names of the three.  Melchior was the oldest of the group, with a full beard.  He gave the baby the gift of gold.  Balthasar also had a beard, but was not as old as Melchior.  He presented the gift of myrrh.  The youngest of the three was Casper, who had no beard yet, but did present the gift of frankincense to the baby.  Yet another legend goes on to tell us that after seeing the baby, the three continued traveling as far as Spain, telling the world the good news about what they had seen.  These stories bring the wise men a little more to life, and add some color to the meaning of Christmas.  They can also get in the way.

Why do we feel the need to take perfectly wonderful stories like many in our Holy Scriptures, and add to it to?  While all of my personal stories are true, I must admit that I love to embellish some of my own stories to make them more interesting.  I do this to the point where I feel the need to finish a story I have just told that is true and unembellished, to tell everyone that this story is true and unembellished.

You see, that’s the problem with legends.  Sometimes they add color to stories that don’t need any additional color (unlike some of my stories).  In fact, sometimes legends are so colorful, they are unbelievable, and can end up making the entire story (biblical stories) unbelievable as well.  Kind of like that star falling in the well.  It makes you warm inside.  It also makes you wonder.

I am not out to ban legends, but I do think it might be worthwhile to hear the story one more time, the way it was told the first time.  We will read this story of the Wise Men’s visit this Sunday as we celebrate Epiphany Sunday.

God’s word doesn’t need our help.  It is perfectly good, true and unembellished.  As we enter into 2024, perhaps we can take the word of God, and use it how God intended.  That would be a marvelous goal for us this year.

As always, I welcome your feedback.
Blessings, Pastor Cory

As we begin a new year in our liturgical calendar, we enter into Advent hoping to identify who God is and who we are in relation to God.  This is the time to prayerfully consider our relationship with God and everything that God loves.

There is a school run by Catholic nuns in Cleveland, Ohio.  I don’t know the name of their Order, but they have committed their lives to working in the Catholic schools in Cleveland’s inner city.  Day after day after day, they focus their faith and energy on the education of inner-city youngsters, youngsters whose lives are at
risk in so many areas.  One day, out of nowhere, a wonderful gift was given to these nuns.  The gift was to pay for the entire Order to go on a vacation.  Vans were supplied, and all the necessary money for their trip was contributed anonymously.

So, that summer, the nuns closed their Order house and headed to the vacation spot of their choice, the Rocky Mountains.  Most of them had never seen the Rockies, except in their imaginations.  They were awed by the glory of the mountains.  They would stop and ponder and behold and not be able to take their eyes off the majesty they were experiencing.  They noticed, however, that every time they stopped, Sister Margaret, one of the smallest members of their Order, would move to the edge of the group, and then disappear for a while.  She’d return sometime later.  They didn’t know what she was doing.

So, on one particular occasion when they had stopped to behold a majestic view, they decided they would follow her.  She stole away from the group and made her way down into a gully.  They watched her as she walked into the gully.  She bent down and reached under a sizable rock, and then turned the rock upside
down.  She brushed her hands and turned around to walk back up the trail.  When she looked up, the entire Order of nuns was watching her.  “Margaret, what are you doing?” they asked.  “I’m turning over a rock.” she replied.  “Why?” they asked.  “Do you do that every time?”  She answered, “Yes.”  “Why do you do that?”
And she replied: “Because I will never pass this way again, and it’s my intent to have made a difference while I was here.  So, I turn some rocks over so that this place is different because I passed here.”

Now, that nun was dedicated to making a difference.  She saw that as her mission whether at school in her teaching role or alone in the Rockies.  What rocks does a rural church like this one have to turn over in the city of Red Bud for the good of neighborhood?  What rocks do I need to turn over inside of me in order for the Kingdom of God to make its way through all of the barriers that I put up?  I think there needs to be some rock-turning going on inside of me and this church in order that we can, with the help God’s Holy Spirit, maybe taste and smell the real experience of Jesus’ birth – in the interior manger of our lives.

As always, I welcome your comments
Pastor Cory

I found this on Facebook.  A pastor/friend of mine shared it.  This is interesting reading and, in my opinion, so true.

NO, YOU AREN’T TAKING THE BIBLE LITERALLY

No, you are not taking the Bible literally when you judge members of your human family claiming “that’s what the Bible says.”

What you are doing is taking your own understanding of an English translation as if it were the original text in its original context.

Because you do not speak the biblical languages, nor know the historical and cultural contexts of a text, you are taking the broken pieces of your own superficial understanding and arranging them into a mosaic that says more about you than the original text.

The purpose of scripture is not to replace our living hearts and minds with an orthodoxy inherited from the graveyards of the dead.  We do not read ancient texts to return to some earlier and more immature understandings but to learn from the past so we can grow into something even better.

Read without reason scripture will be distorted into memorized and cliched interpretations drawn from our own marginal understanding of a text.

Read without love scripture will become an assault weapon used against those whom we personally disapprove of in our own day.

Read without a sense of personal responsibility scripture means surrendering to the understanding of clergy who may know no more about life’s mysteries than we.

There is a reason that, in the biblical story when the tempter wanted to lure Jesus from the path of truth and love, he (the tempter) brought along a Bible.  Nothing takes one further from the call to universal love than taking ink on paper as if it were the living word.

As always, I look forward to your comments.

Pastor Cory

Churches need to be mission oriented but often fall into maintenance behavior and many times they don’t know they’ve slipped from mission into maintenance.  Let’s look at the following to gauge how much mission vs. maintenance exist in our congregation:

1.  In measuring the effectiveness, the maintenance congregation asks, “How many pastoral visits are being made?  The mission congregation asks, “How many disciples are being made?”

2.  When contemplating some form of change, the maintenance congregation says, “If this proves upsetting to any of our members, we won’t do it.”  The mission congregation says, “If this will help us reach someone on the outside, we will take the risk and do it.”

3.  When thinking about change, the majority of members in a maintenance congregation ask, “How will this affect me?”  The majority of members in the mission congregation ask, “Will this increase our ability to reach those outside?”

4.  When thinking of its vision for ministry, the maintenance congregation says, “We have to be faithful to our past.”  The mission congregation says, “We have to be faithful to our future.”

5.  The pastor in the maintenance congregation says to the newcomer, “I’d like to introduce you to some of our members.”  In the mission congregation the members say, “We’d like to introduce you to our pastor.”

6.  When confronted with a legitimate pastoral concern, the pastor in the maintenance congregation asks, “How can I meet this need?”  The pastor in the mission congregation asks, “How can this need be met?”

7.  The maintenance congregation seeks to avoid conflict at any cost (but rarely succeeds).  The mission congregation understands that conflict is the price of progress, and is willing to pay the price.  It understands that it cannot take everyone with it.  This causes some grief, but it does not keep it from doing what needs to be done.

8.  The maintenance congregation is concerned with their congregation, its organizations and structure, its constitutions and committees.  The mission congregation is concerned with the culture, with understanding how secular people think and what makes them tick.  It tries to determine their needs and their points of accessibility to the Gospel.

9.  When thinking about growth, the maintenance congregations asks, “How many Lutherans live within a twenty-minute drive of this church?”  The mission congregation asks, “How many unchurched people live within a twenty-minute drive of this church?”

10.  The maintenance congregation looks at the community and asks, “How can we get these people to support our congregation?”  The mission congregation asks, “How can the Church support these people?”

11.  The maintenance congregation thinks about how to save their congregation.  The mission congregation thinks about how to reach the world.

I challenge each of us to look at this list and ask ourselves, “How are we doing?”

As always, I look forward to your comments.

Pastor Cory