1 Corinthians 12:12-26

Revelation 6:1-8

[Text of the sermon is unavailable, but audio is available above.]

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Text: Jonah chapters 3 and 4  

The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.

The first time the word of the Lord came to Jonah it said, “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.”  Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria, the empire that ravaged the northern kingdom of Israel, Jonah’s home.  They were ruthless, cutthroat, and showed no mercy to captive peoples.  They were Israel’s bitter enemy.

When Jonah is first commanded to go at once and preach to them, he does go at once, in the opposite direction.  Rather than head east, toward Nineveh, he boards the first ship he can find heading west, to Tarshish.  If Jonah lived in Columbus and was commanded to go preach in Washington, DC, he would have jumped on the next flight to LA.

This does not work out well for Jonah, or his ship mates.  A storm arises, and their ship experiences heavy turbulence.  Jonah takes the blame for the storm.  They throw him overboard.  The sea goes calm, and peace is restored.  Except for Jonah, who is sinking like a stone.  But the Lord sends a big fish, which swallows Jonah whole, giving him a three day retreat in the belly of this beast to ponder the meaning of life.  Unable to digest this wayward prophet, the big fish barfs him up onto dry ground, and heads on its way.

And the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.

It’s the same word as the first.  To get on his way to Nineveh, that great city, and call for their repentance.  And so we pick up the story from today’s lectionary reading.  The second, less familiar, half of the book of Jonah.

And so Jonah heads on…

“Where do we go from here?”

Speaker: Kyle Kerley

Text: 1 John 3:11-18

For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. And we ought to lay down our lives for our family. If anyone has material possessions and see someone in  need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Let us NOT love with words, but with actions.

My name is Kyle Kerley. I’m honored that Joel asked me to speak today. There’s plenty of you that I don’t know, so I figured the reverse is also true – that some of you don’t know who I am – and I’ll start with an introduction. 

1) I am a nurse at a free clinic – very interested in the collisions of health and wealth and for that matter poverty and sickness. I’m also not too terribly interested in diagnosing a president so much as I am diagnosing a society that produced such a president.
2) I am a follower of Jesus – and where that meaning of that phrase is sometimes illusive, I am continually haunted by his name and his message.
3) And I’m an activist – a revolutionary socialist – believing as Martin Luther King did that what is required is – and I’ll quote from a speech I’ll talk about later – what is required is “restructuring the whole of American society”… He says later “America must be born again” It’s not simply that our system is broken and needs a bit of tweaking to be up-to-date. More so that our system is working just the way it is intended and any reform that comes through is an admission of guilt.

To paraphrase (The Other) Martin Luther:
“Here I am, God help me, I can do no other.”

I started coming…

Reading: Isaiah 60:1-6

Arise, shine; for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
2 For darkness shall cover the earth,
and thick darkness the peoples;
but the Lord will arise upon you,
and his glory will appear over you.
3 Nations shall come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

4 Lift up your eyes and look around;
they all gather together, they come to you;
your sons shall come from far away,
and your daughters shall be carried on their nurses’ arms.
5 Then you shall see and be radiant;
your heart shall thrill and rejoice,[a]
because the abundance of the sea shall be brought to you,
the wealth of the nations shall come to you.
6 A multitude of camels shall cover you,
the young camels of Midian and Ephah;
all those from Sheba shall come.
They shall bring gold and frankincense,
and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.

Reflection

The Advent/Christmas/Epiphany season starts in darkness and ends in light.  This follows the cycle of the natural world in the northern hemisphere.

It’s in the darkness that the living are renewed through rest and fresh possibilities.  The darkness is where we are awake to the quiet.  The darkness is the womb of Mary, where Christ grows.

Advent waits patiently for nativity.

And Jesus is born… into a world where emperors make decrees about census counts.  A world of people on the move, back and forth to ancestral lands, making pilgrimage to temples, visiting far off relatives, fleeing violence.  It’s a world of agriculture.  Wild grasses have become wheat and barley, wild beasts have become herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, foraging people have settled down and claimed lands to build, to farm, to accumulate wealth, to defend.   Jesus is born into a swirl of animals and angels, people hungry for food and kings hungry for power.

Nativity widens into Epiphany.

The prophet Isaiah lived well before Jesus, but the times weren’t…

Luke 2:22-40
Isaiah 61:11 – 62:3

It has finally happened.  I have finally reached the magical ministry milestone that has been four years in the making.  Some of  you might not realize that the lectionary, which is a cycle of readings assigned to every Sunday and other Holy Days throughout the year used by congregations across the world, is a three year cycle.  Thus, now that I am in my fourth year of ministry here at Columbus Mennonite, that cycle has finally started to repeat itself.   

For pastors who preach regularly from the lectionary, this fourth year milestone can be a big deal.  I’m not saying sermons get reused word for word, but being able to read old sermons can be a big help.  All the study that went into understanding the texts and digging into word meanings and doing the hard work of exegeting a passage can certainly be borrowed these three, six, nine years later.  There will always be more to learn, but with texts that are thousands of years old, surely some of that work can be reused.

Since I only preach about every other month, the chances that I would be preaching on a Sunday when I already preached are pretty slim.  BUT, this week just happens to be one of the weeks when those planets aligned perfectly.  Which, I found out, might not be that surprising because I recently heard someone refer to the Sundays after Christmas and Easter as “Associate Pastor Sundays.” 

We all hope Joel and his family enjoy their much deserved vacation. 

But, you really don’t have to worry that I’ll ever try to pull one over on you and reuse a sermon word for word.  Some of the study I originally did might be helpful, but any sermon worth its salt will speak to the context of…