"On the Side of Grace;" Sermon for Sunday May 25th, 2014 by Nicole Collins

To err on the side of Grace is a saying that keeps one in line with doing the “Do’s of the Gospel versus the obvious—“don’ts.” Easier said than done is another one, for it is easier to SAY we follow Christ... but just how real have we made him a part of us and our faith journey?  Making it real doesn’t mean claiming yet another phrase: “I’ve arrived,” either—for ours is a journey that last a lifetime.  A lifetime built upon reflection, confession, repentance and renewal—Luther’s daily steps to remembering and growing to affirm your Baptism (the process of sanctification).

The world has our saint/ sinner selves teetering on the edge of falling either on the side of grace or crumbling into the graceless wilderness the Evil One places in our path.  Grace or a graceless wilderness (?), you’d think that would be an easy road/ “choice” to contemplate.  Being willing, accountable and intentional are all aspects of the role we play in the process of sanctification and justification.

These are all Words to describe, to empower and encourage, BUT is their truth being lived creedally in your heart as faith? Christians today have once again steeped themselves further into an identity crisis as well as a crisis of purpose.  This identity crisis is owning up to the truth of whose you are and who you need to strive to BE/ become.  Christians no longer are exampling being “contagious” as the discipleship book by Bill Hybels is titled, more than becoming exclusionary and wound up in everything and anything BUT Christ and his Will for the world!

Everyone has a virtue and a vice to how they live into their call from God to serve.  How much do you realize and say daily that God is my heavenly parent and loves me unconditionally?  I must admit, this one’s a hard one for me.  It has to start with you however... for how could you begin to follow Jesus commandment to love Him and love your neighbor?  You have to own up from that very vulnerable and uncomfortable spiritual place deep within to make it truly REAL—internally then externally lived as faith in action.

Faith in action is that other high wire we barely keep our footing in place upon.  Either the cheap grace police challenge us to stop being “epicurean” Christians with our “comfort-food, pre-packaged agendas” or the legalists have us hardening ourselves into a judgmental universe of “works righteousness.”  To err on the side of Grace—the gauntlet has been cast down: There’s got to be a gracious, somewhere-in-between especially for the sake of the Gospel!

Poor St. Paul isn’t stressed to preach to his wayward Corinthians, but putting on his “top hat and tap shoes” to preach the Gospel to a bunch of “arrived” Athenian intellectuals in the Areopagus in today’s lesson from the Book of Acts:

“Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. ²³For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. ²⁴The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, ²⁵nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. ²⁶From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, ²⁷so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. ²⁸For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ ²⁹Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. ³⁰While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, ³¹because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

To BE/ become a truthful—TRUTH-Filled evangelist for the Gospel (especially today...) demands WITNESS.  Being/ becoming a witness for the Gospel is living it—making it real, being “contagious” for Christ!  I love that, probably wouldn’t make a great name for a church but would make great motivation individually for making disciples.

Being a witness isn’t about you but incorporates you to BE about JESUS.  This is the most difficult reality our current culture can’t and doesn’t want to deal with.  Once the Gospel of Jesus takes a back seat to your wants, needs or “plans...” you risk destruction.  Where there is no ark or life raft to save you or waters to cleanse you but a graceless wilderness... where nothing is sewn nor reaped.

John’s Jesus sounds a lot like a Beatles song once again with lots of I am’s and lots of love to weave together into challenging the simple disciples to live past that conditional IF.  ¹⁵ “If you love me, you will keep my commandments....” The Greek Word for Love here is agape—unconditional.  Jesus starts with a conditional to build the unconditional however—this is that fine line.   

Jesus’ Words are wonderfully re-assuring (something we barely grant each other these days...): “¹⁶And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. ¹⁷This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.”

The Spirit of Truth is the Holy Spirit—our Comforter, Counselor, Helper, Intercessor, Advocate, Strengthener, and Standby. Got to love the Amplified Bible’s “ample” understanding of the Holy Spirit here in an effort to make it real, manifest, revealed to us and hopefully within us.

We are children of Grace—whose we are: God’s.  Who loves us and has given New Life to us through His death and Resurrection?  JESUS. Knowing this as you profess and confess to be Christian should make manifest the Kingdom but we can’t say that we’ve truthfully made this “real” for ourselves yet alone others.

Jesus continues upon this thought in reassuring, directing and refocusing his disciples: ¹⁸ “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. ¹⁹In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. ²⁰On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. ²¹They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

Wherever you are on the journey as a disciple of Christ Jesus you need to do a reality check.  Whose are you?  Where are you (on that road as His Witness!)? And What are you planning to Do?  Whenever or wherever people’s hearts and minds are ruled by God’s Holy Spirit presence—there the fruits of the spirit manifest the reality of the lifestyle of GRACE=the Kingdom of God.

AMEN

Sunday May 25^th, 2014; 6^th Sunday of Easter; Year A; SOLA                    Nicole Collins

Psalm 66:8-20; Acts 17:16-31; 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21

"Sojourning On;" Sermon for May 18th, 2014 by Nicole Collins

Knowing the Way, the truth and the life to live is indeed having Christ at the center of who you are.  It is realizing yourself beyond the unmoving spiritual stone you once were.  It is an ongoing process of formation that is both painful at times and at others, an amazing blessing!

The road there however, to knowing the Way will not have easy sign posts if any at all.  Your very core will be shaken by Satan and his minions’ efforts to move you away from the truth and steep you into death and doubt.  A life to live is not just marked between our parameters of time but God’s time.

For the past month and a half I have worn a necklace designed for Kairos ministries.  Kairos itself, is a Greek word that means in God’s time.  It is one that goes beyond referring to perseverance and suffering for the sake of the Gospel...  It asks you what basically is printed on the back of the cross which is:  “Christ is counting on you.”

Sojourning the journey is introspective and personal, for how can we TRUTHFULLY share the Gospel if we do not authentically share as one human being to another?  What are we afraid of?  Stephen, like John the Baptist, couldn’t keep his mouth shut and incensed people to the point of killing him by the stone.

The same material used for building—stones can be either of progress or of stagnation and death.  There is one stone that is the building block to the life of faith that is Christ, the cornerstone.  He is not only the pillar of strength to your entire structure of faith (a manifestation of Grace) but he is also that stone that guides the structure of your faith to turn that corner.  Is it really turning that corner into the unknown (?) or is it trusting in that corner holding onto the Lord’s hand with grateful tears that you are blessed and set apart to be a blessing to others.

Blessed to being a blessing to others is something I learned on the journey from Pastor Eric.  There will be many people the Lord places in your path to help His efforts in leading and guiding you as you journey to find your place within the priesthood of Christ Jesus.  At the beginning of this “sojourn,” Pastor Bill was the one whom God first used to point me up the road to experience my conversion experience the late summer of 2003.

Grace is an all-caps, Hollywood sign-sized reality etched into the heart of those who truthfully allow God to lead.  There is no other formulation, it is a ‘concrete,’ truth.  It is a concrete truth contrary to the ways of the world... where tears are shed for joy rather than sadness and loss... where heads and hearts are turned sternly and often painfully away from the past to look directly into the new path ahead.

The valley of the Sun is the next leg of the journey.  Perhaps it should be called the valley of the Son since the new life lived will be one realized as Ministry in all caps as the fruit of Grace and perseverance. Living into being/ becoming the hands and feet of Christ in the world as His ardent disciple discipling others to grow and go.

Serendipity is one of the pleasant aspects of sojourning God’s path, formation into His priesthood.  I say this for of all unusual circumstances waiting in a long line to practice processing for our diplomas, this past Friday; I met another Lutheran.  Never saw her around the campus for she was in an entirely different program than I was.  The jokes were:  “And I thought I was the only token Lutheran at TEDS...  Calvinism gives me a headache.”

She by no means had an easy journey, in fact her former pastor was vehemently against her studying at Trinity concerned about doctrinal issues over truthfully more important ones: spiritual.  “Things they don’t teach you in seminary,” has become a staple pet phrase that has become popular enough to even be a face book forum discussion page.  Perhaps this could be renamed as “Things they don’t teach you to truly/ truthfully follow Jesus.”

Stephen unlike Thomas, knew what the issues were and said it like it is via the “honest planet:”  “⁵¹You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. ⁵²Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, and now you have become his betrayers and murderers. ⁵³You are the ones that received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it.”

Well of course as we know, people didn’t like hearing the truth of Stephen’s words and stoned him to death.  Burying the light and life of Christ under impermeable stones—out of sight, out of mind...  Jesus in today’s Gospel had to lay it out in concrete and unbending terms for the disciples to truly know what they indeed needed to hear: “’ ⁶Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

As children of God always learning and growing into following Jesus; everything we do shapes the next leg of the journey.  The way to survival is an unwavering hope.  It may not be fully understood at the moment but necessary to hear.  The disciples of Jesus were ordinary men from all walks of life and gifts.  Many things Jesus said and did were very difficult for them to grasp: ⁷If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.’

⁸ Philip said to him, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.’ ⁹Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”? ¹⁰Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works.”

Being and becoming in union with Christ spiritually is what shapes the discipleship journey.  There are a lot of valleys and deserts one can become stranded in—to be buried in the darkness of contemplation and death... Another friend at my former school and I recently talked about our journeys to serve the Lord.  He is still in the “school of Athens for Jesus,” wound up in doctrinal, political forums and frankly buried alive, spiritually-deprived... where his journey has no guiding light or prospects of serving.  He is merely accepting this unguided valley/ darkened desert and dwindling more dollars and years away as a “professional student” with no human support and very little faith.

This is a lot like Stephen’s words to the crowd of leaders in the temple, they are harsh but what is the gospel if it is not TRUTHFULLY and honestly proclaimed?  If it is not truly, authentically heard?  It becomes doctrinal, pious platitudes—impermeable, indifferent stones crumbling away around the cornerstone of faith: Christ Jesus—our reason to live into the Way, Truth and the Life of GRACE.  Can’t break away from that or bury it in small, visually comfortable letters or expressions, world news and politics... It is the reality of faith.

We are all capable builders.  The raw material is the heart where God’s Holy Spirit first works within us to build a great and glorious faith.  A great and glorious faith that has sojourned through and down all kinds of paths where the Love and Grace of God is the light and life keeping you alive and regenerating you to die to the past and move into the future.  A future lived, continually fed by the spiritual milk of the Gospel, to know and grow into the Way, TRUTH and the Life--JESUS.

AMEN

May 18^th, 2014; 5^th Sunday of Easter; Year A; SOLA Lectionary              Nicole Collins

Psalm 146; Acts 6:1-9, 7:2, 51-60; 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14

"Genesis by Jesus;" Sermon for May 11th, 2014 By: Nicole Collins

Patience wins the race. Perseverance is the cost of discipleship. Tenacity is a virtue.  There are many more things one can say when you own up to Christ Jesus as the center of your life empowering you to humbly live:  “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me!”

We are all called by God and for God—this is the genesis of the journey!  Long before the people-and-the-steeple; there was fellowship, prayer, worship and the study of God’s Word...  We hear about its beginnings in this tiny snippet from the book of Acts.  This is a bird’s eye, third person narration of gathering truly and simply for Christ’s sake to begin both an individual and a corporate spiritual journey of faith.

When the door slams shut by human hands, God gives us the strength and encouragement to pry it open and move forward, Thanks BE truly to God! Amen.  This is the bright light of the Gospel burning in our hearts to turn that blind corner to step out on faith—to walk the talk—LIVE it!  It’s beyond us but built by Christ Jesus as the TRUE center—guiding force in your obedient, accountable life of faith.  A life of faith realized through GRACE.  That 5 letter Word the Old Adam and the Old Eve can’t really understand...

Realizing the resurrection and the power of Jesus in your life is another kind of Genesis.  It’s a new beginning spiritually—it is the reality check for the Christian.  We are propelled and encouraged by, through and with Christ as the Holy Spirit challenging us.  Challenging us in the face of condemnation, negativity, control, persecution and death...  Do we allow Satan’s stumbling blocks to win and push Christ aside? 

Years of study, closed doors, glass ceilings later broken—NO it doesn’t have to be at all!  Whatsoever! The seat of your person is the soul—it is that place where you as your own, unique person is built, shaped and lived from.  It’s not just spiritual warfare we are daily going to battle from within but from human vice from our own frailty, susceptibility to evil!  Even in the Body, we must lance this out of our path and focus upon the goal, center, gate and TRUE prize:  Christ Jesus Himself!

There’s a wonderful statement of faith that a now martyred Zimbabwe pastor composed addressing his perseverance, strength and willingness to suffer for the greater cause: Christ.  Here it is in its entirety—

The Disciple’s Creed  (Based on a young Zimbabwe pastor)

ALL: I'm a part of the fellowship of the unashamed. The die has been cast. I have stepped over the line. The decision has been made. I'm a disciple of His and I won't look back, let up, slow down, back away, or be still. My past is redeemed. My present makes sense. My future is secure. I'm done and finished with low living, sight walking, small planning, smooth knees, colorless dreams, tamed visions, mundane talking, cheap living, and dwarfed goals. I live by faith, lean on His presence, walk by patience, lift by prayer, and labor by Holy Spirit power. My face is set. My gait is fast. My goal is heaven. My road may be narrow, my way rough, my companions few, but my guide is reliable and my mission is clear. I will not be bought, compromised, detoured, lured away, turned back, deluded or delayed. I will not flinch in the face of sacrifice or hesitate in the presence of the adversary. I will not negotiate at the table of the enemy. I won't give up, shut up, or let up until I have stayed up, stored up, prayed up, paid up, and preached up for the cause of Christ.

I am a disciple of Jesus. I must give until I drop, preach until all know, and work until He comes. And when He does come for His own, He'll have no problems recognizing me. My colors will be clear!

The blessing of having had used this on occasion in some bulletins I have created for worship is the response from congregants.  “Wow, this man’s faith was amazing!” “What a powerful statement of commitment!”  And so on... It’s not typical but it IS creedal in another way.  Here is this man’s fully honest, humble realization of what he feels he must DO to truly, TRUTHFULLY follow Christ!  These are by no means softened Words...

But neither are Jesus’ Words to the disciples in today’s Gospel softened by any means!  To paraphrase he’s saying—Ok guys, this is the deal—I AM the way, I AM the gate, I AM the leader period and if you are truly ready to be/ become accountable and obedient to my mission and will for the world you have to follow me.  Maybe however, our sinful side or Old Nature really doesn’t want to hear that, yet alone live into it!

We especially don’t want to hear that when we’ve built a mighty fortress of doctrine, control, worldly power and agenda above and around Christ Jesus... Though we even put these stumbling blocks forth using His Name (In vain!)!  Why some would declare the Good Shepherd to be merely a soft-serve ice cream vendor of pious platitudes, cheap grace and the “warm-fuzzies” of transactional faith! Then Christ died in vain for a bunch of intellectual idolaters and ingrates! What a tragedy of grave proportions indeed!

The author of 1^st Peter addresses the truthful reality of walkin’ the talk TRUTHFULLY: “¹⁹For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. ²⁰If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval. ²¹For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps.”

The author of 1^st Peter needed to encourage a mixed community of persecuted Christians to hold fast to Christ as their strength and guide.  The Greek in all of today’s scriptures is wonderful in how it lends itself for us to hear clearly and deeply that perseverance, tenacity, patience, staying the course, hanging tight is not only worth it but required.

In an age where Satan has successfully circumvented the church of Christ with division, cynicism, politics and agenda... The faithful are encouraged alone by God to have to press on!  The disciple has to press on and forward without the designer labels of a man-made perspective or religion.  They must battle being thrown into the “sorting machine” of finding the “perfected” leader... 

From Luther’s own lips we hear— Trust in God? Or in your own goodness:  “It is the Holy Spirit alone who attains to certainty of faith in Christ without any doubting.  The adherents of the sects always utter some words from which their doubting spirit becomes manifest: “I hope, I’m godly, I hope, I’m righteous...” The (true) Christian, on the other hand says—“I do what I can FOR Christ.”  What I don’t get done the suffering of Christ will pay for me.  I’m saved in Christ.  No body shall take this confidence from me.  Jesus is my Savior.  There is nothing else by which our God and our conscience may be put at rest.  Those who put their trust not in Christ but in their own righteousness are always in doubt.”

If Christ is “not really” our shepherd anymore, yet alone who we truly and TRUTHFULLY are obedient to claiming to be His disciples and servant leaders...  Then who do you follow? What are you leading, where are you going?

Listen to Jesus repeat to his disciples what they could not understand: “, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. ⁸All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. ⁹I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. ¹⁰The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

To be/ become a true Pastor for Christ Jesus is to be able to guard, encourage, and humbly empower the flock to stay the course of the Gospel.  This Gospel is beyond the-steeple-and-the-people creation of faith; it is a Spiritual Genesis of faith lived obediently, TRUTHFULLY starting within the heart—soul—identity of the child of God built by and FOR God alone.  Built by and FOR God alone to love and serve God and neighbor in TRUE unity and shalom.

AMEN

May 11^th, 2014; 4^th Sunday of Easter; Year A; SOLA Lectionary     Nicole Collins

Psalm 23; Acts 2:42-47; 1 Peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10