Texts: Scripture: Matthew 5:43-48; Romans 12:14 &17-20

Speaker: Julie Hart

I realized I was in serious trouble one summer working with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Israel and the West Bank when I began to look at every Israeli Settler I saw as an irrational, fanatic, out to get me.  Certainly, there was some basis to my fear.  Day after day patrolling the streets of Hebron I would greet each person I passed with acknowledgment and a hello in the appropriate language.  And each time I passed an Israeli settler, I got a similar response.  The most common response was a cold stare cutting right through me as if I were either a non-person or an evil one.  The bolder youth and men responded with such phrases as, “Go home Nazi” or “Christian Bitch save your own people.”  The young men, when walking in groups would often monopolize the entire street and refuse to move despite my presence.  It was a scary situation for me.  I never knew how they might respond by what appeared to be such hatred. 

But even more frightening than their behavior was my mental response.  I was building the blocks of enemy formation.   Not that this was the first time that I allowed myself to hate.  Back in the 1980’s, I worked with Kate at a College in Ohio.  We both taught health promotion and fitness courses at the college.  Kate was the most self-centered person I had ever known.  We worked as a team with seven others as part of a Community Health Education Center and over our 5 years together, Kate’s needs always came first.  Once when we were traveling together to an exercise training workshop, I felt the need to arrive early the second day in order to attend a remedial session.  Kate wasn’t struggling as…

https://joelssermons.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/20190908sermon.mp3

Texts: Exodus 20:8-11; Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:11-27

Our fourth commitment is a big one: “Share our time and resources, discerning our call to both work and rest.”

It’s big because our time and resources cover the full span of how we order our lives.  It’s big because in Jesus’ teachings, finances and resource sharing are inseparable from expressions of the kingdom of God.  It’s big because discerning our call to both work and rest is counter-cultural.  Sabbath rest, the enjoyment of life for its own sake, doesn’t pay well.  It gets all the more complicated for folks for whom work doesn’t pay well either.

This is big because in order to talk honestly about time, resources, work, and rest, we must keep in mind the very big impersonal economic powers persistently imposing their will on us, for good or for ill, and the very personal spiritual gifts of gratitude and generosity re-shaping our will – to keep both of these in view at all times.

So what better way to survey the landscape than through a parable of Jesus that has been applied to both of these levels, from the earliest memory of the church.

The parable of the ten pounds – as the header in my NRSV Bible calls it – in Luke 19, also shows up in Matthew’s gospel, with some minor differences and one very major difference.  Matthew records this as a parable with talents, although not the kind we’re looking forward to Saturday evening of fall retreat.  Not too late to sign up, by the way.  A talent was a massive sum of money, 15 or even 20 year’s worth of wages.  Five was a lifetime of wages, all one would ever need.  A man going away on a journey divvies out five, two, and one talent to his household…

https://joelssermons.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/20190901sermon.mp3

Texts: Ecclesiastes 3:1-8; Luke 2:21-40      

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born, and a time to die;

a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

a time to kill, and a time to heal;

a time to break down, and a time to build up;

a time to weep, and a time to laugh;

a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

a time to seek, and a time to lose;

a time to keep, and a time to throw away;

a time to tear, and a time to sew;

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

a time to love, and a time to hate;

a time for war, and a time for peace.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

We needed 28 readers for that.  I’m guessing that’s a record for a scripture reading at Columbus Mennonite Church, although I’m glad to be corrected.  28 different happenings, seasons of life, arranged as 14 pairs.  Seven is the biblical number of completeness, so these pairs are seven twice over, double completeness.  A representative sample of everything.  “For everything there is a season.”

Our third commitment calls on us to “honor all seasons of life, caring for one another through joys and hardships.”

Those of us who live in Ohio, and similar latitudes, know a thing or two, or four about seasons.  It’s one of my favorite features of this place I’ve called home for most of my life.  Four distinct seasons.  With cold winters, blooming springs, hot summers, and the cooling air and colorful leaves of fall that do eventually fall as…

Jeremiah 1:4-10; 1 Timothy 4:12-16

Speaker: Mark Rupp

“We commit to: Learn from one another, allowing the wisdom of all ages to teach us”

A few weeks ago, on the Friday evening of our Peace Camp, I made a very exciting announcement.  I told the group that I had recently been elected mayor of the new town of Peaceburg.  Much like the similarly named Pittsburgh, Peaceburg was a city tri-sected by two rivers coming together to form a third river, leaving the city split into three large neighborhood sections. 

But, unlike most cities, my city, Peaceburg, was almost completely a blank slate with lots of resources and lots of room for new development in each of the three neighborhoods created by the rivers.  As the mayor, I needed help figuring out how to design my new city, what to put in it, where things should go, and, perhaps most importantly, how to do all this in a way that helped Peaceburg live up to its name and become a city where everyone could experience and practice peace. 

Lucky for me, I just happened to have access to a group of energetic young people who had just spent some time learning about what it means to be peacemakers and who also happened to be split into three small groups.  It’s almost like someone planned it out that way…

I will spare you all the finer details, but the short version is that in order to prepare the kids to help design Peaceburg, we first spent some time talking about what kinds of different spaces are part of a city, narrowing it down to five different zones represented by five different colors of construction paper: residential in blue, industrial in brown, commercial in yellow, institutional in orange, and public spaces in green.  I told them they could build…

https://joelssermons.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/20190818sermon.mp3

Texts: Daniel 3:1-18; Luke 22:14-30

This is Part 1 of a 7 week series on our Membership Commitment statement.

The August edition of Sojourners magazine features short letters written to the American church – that’s us – from Christian leaders around the world.  The feature is called “Dear brothers and sisters in Christ.”

These letters come from places like El Progreso, Honduras; Taize, France; New Delhi,, India, Johannesburg, South Africa; The Wakka Wakka nation, located within land now called Australia.

As you might imagine, the letters address us as Christians living within a global superpower.

One letter comes from Ruth Padilla Deborst.  She’s the director of a World Vision program in Santa Domingo, Costa Rica.

She begins: “I write to you as a sister from Latin America who yearns to see peace and justice embrace on this suffering planet that is humanity’s home.  I write you in hopes that you will ponder these questions in the spirit they are offered, that of a shared prayer that God’s good will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

She then asks three questions.

I’ll read just the first one.  Here it is:

“First, might worship of God, the creator and sustainer of all life, to whom the whole earth belongs, not be more faithfully embodied in responsible care of all that God created than in elaborate Sunday services while energy, creativity, and imagination the rest of the week are concentrated on consumption and accumulation without a thought for their ecological impact or the effects of privileged lifestyles on the great majorities both inside and beyond the borders or your nation-state?”

It’s a leading question, and one impressively long sentence.

Otherwise, what caught my attention about this question is how our sister Ruth presents her concern as a matter of worship.  Worship of God, she is suggesting, has to do…