"The Joy in Hope;" Sermon for June 28th, 2015 by Rev. Nicole A.M. Collins

The use of the word Joy throughout today’s texts speak to a beautiful thought that we need to wrap our hearts around for a while. With the concept of Joy, God’s Living Word is teaching us that Joy itself is an aspect of being and becoming aware of God’s Grace active in your life.  This awareness is realized in developing the heart’s knowledge to compassion which is a gift harbored through humbly walking with God.

God with us is yet again a theme as we see Jesus out and about being this Living & life-giving, affirming fount of compassion and mercy to all who seek Him.  I found it an interesting fact that both the age of the young girl and the years of suffering for the woman in today’s Gospel was that missional number 12.  I am sure that the Gospel writer’s heart was more than shaped by God to speak to the 12 tribes of Israel to truly HEAR and be LED by that binding commonality—We are a people of God.

We are a people of God, but more importantly children of the King, children of Grace and promise.  Promise is that aspect of perseverance, an overarching hope for things to come.  We are always a people in waiting and our human nature allows us at times to feel the suffering, anxiety and literal pain of this all too temporal world. We are not to be a world unto ourselves however, but that is what we’ve allowed to take place in some form or fashion.  We are stripping the miraculous away from Jesus as well as our everyday lives to be centered around the self and its graceless temptations to fall prey to greed, indifference and darkness.

For the victories and seeming miracles that are centered around the self or truly said the unholy Trinity of I, Me and Mine are shallow victories at best. These are Satan’s victories or empty promises—For a temporal and fading purpose does not seek a God with us for it can’t open itself to even really and truthfully understand Grace.  The Psalmist again struggles with understanding evil and why things happen, he says: “⁹ ‘What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the Pit?”

Truth truly being told, we can’t understand evil especially when we unknowingly are both blind to it as well as fall into temptation from it.  The graceless wilderness or better said the reality of Hell is one where we don’t traverse that valley of suffering with a grace-filled, humble accountability to KNOW that there is always hope!  That whether the storms of life are too deep and too dark, we have a God with us, a God of true compassion, mercy, love and Grace—Jesus!

This past week I formed a petition through change.org.  An interesting title for a ministry of political petitions to address issues in this worldly culture, society.  Many of the petitions I have signed for them were to care for animals that were tortured and abused for the sake of making money.  Other petitions ranged from failing cultural ethics to ethical accountability.  There’s that big secularized, overly-politicized concept of being responsible: ethical accountability.

It is more than a sad reality that the Body of Christ today has been straightjacketed to political ideologies and agendas as well as reconstructing the TRUTH of the Gospel of Jesus to strip Him down to not really being any kind of voice reaching and TRUTHFULLY shaping the hearts of humanity.  My petition posted was addressing the concern for sky-rocketing rents and the new burden and suffering it will cause working class families and of course the poor! Not the poor in Spirit but the worldly poor, outcast by greed and indifference, plain and simple!

As with most petition-type ministries such as Change.org; they post to social media sites in order to grow the petition in awareness and in signage.  Facebook literally lives up to its name in the sense that people get a surface impression of who you are, what you do and where you are on the journey of your life.  Being in the midst of a current, judgmental, “intellectually-arrived” culture; makes it more than easy to label, categorize and condemn through “self-righteous” indignation.

This one acquaintance essentially labelled and condemned my petition because of my husband being in politics.  The hypocrisy of it, as well, was a sad addition to truly acting out of graceless behavior since they consider themselves active in their church! Just hop into the shoes for a moment of the poor, suffering woman who was condemned for her illness by being labeled unclean.  She had to walk those streets with a Scarlet letter upon her head created by indifference and heartless law.

Yes, she needed a miracle, she needed to find compassion which she found in Jesus! Saving Grace is more than the reality of the gift of the Cross…  It is harboring a beautiful hope that grows love, that resurrects the soul to service for God and neighbor!  Her gratitude and gracious response to the love, compassion and mercy Jesus imparted to her came through her falling at His feet and confessing that she was the one to touch His cloak.  What faith!  What a beautiful sense of commitment, honesty and humility!

If this acquaintance would’ve removed the lens of judgment, political polarization and self-righteous condemnation; they would’ve perhaps even opened their hearts to the problem and plight of greedy landlords, indifferent politics put in place to act as a “band-aid” to really solving the problem of housing.  The person instead chose to publically shame me and blame my husband and friends simply based on their surface labels of political agenda.

Being an Evangelical Christian are labels I live into in the Biblical, NON-POLITICAL sense of the words.  As a member of the priesthood of all believers and now a called and ordained pastor to the Church of Christ, I am spiritually accountable in all humility and formation to preach, teach and spread the Living Words of Christ to a weary and struggling world!  My life is but temporal here on this floating rock amongst billions of things the Good Lord has created…  I willingly choose to serve Christ, His Gospel imperative to love Him and neighbor as my gracious response to all He continually showers me with daily that I do not truly deserve!

The moment we all come to the realization of the TRUTH at the center of the Living Words of God—we will suffer to battle against the growing graceless wilderness that surrounds us in reality and in our thoughts tempted and blinded by Satan’s efforts to tear us away from continuing that walk with Christ.  We can’t live in a graceless wilderness, we will only die there.  We will only die there bereft of hope, joy, mercy and compassion.  We will be in bondage to evil, lawlessness and purposelessness—for we can’t survive in a world centered and catering to the self.

Perhaps blocking and unfriending someone on Facebook isn’t really the answer.  It was a simple solution to not grow further a graceless debate with someone who didn’t want to even listen.  We have to pick our battles.  Jesus could’ve simply chosen not to heal Jarius’ daughter for political reasons, and judgmentalism but He didn’t at all.  The same for the woman, perhaps like the Old Testament God, He would’ve shown anger towards her daring move to seek healing but He didn’t.  Jesus is our example of beautiful, New Natured behavior.  As a God who came down to us to save us in more ways than one—Christ Jesus’ love, mercy, compassion and Grace are the glory, joy and hope of the Kingdom of God!

Picking our battles as a freely, responsible child of Grace, child of promise needs to be about Christ alone, faith alone, through Grace alone and by Word alone if we are to triumph the Gospel beyond ourselves, into the coming century.  I am not a warrior for political agendas, ideologies.  I am not a warrior for denominational polity or for the preservation of the institutional church.  I am not warrior for the world and the culture of the self.  I am a servant, I am a disciple of Jesus, called and commissioned to live by, through and for the Gospel.  The battleground is the turf war between the Evil One and God for the transformation of your soul to BE compassion for neighbor, to BECOME a beacon of hope and promise to others—therefore releasing Joy, the fruit of Grace.

Amen

June 28th, 2015; Fifth Sunday after Pentecost; Year B; Proper 8; SOLA Lectionary

Sermon by Reverend Nicole A.M. Collins

Psalm 30; Lamentations 3:22-33; 2 Corinthians 8:1-9, 13-15; Mark 5:21-43

https://youtu.be/0IAWY_7VbzU

"A Prevailing Peace;" Sermon for June 21st, 2015 by Rev. Nicole A.M. Collins

The contrast between Job’s conversation with God and the disciples conversation with Jesus, in today’s Gospel, is an important one to note. As we know with the entire story of Job & his suffering questions seem to still be unanswered about the problem of evil as well as two things are made clear.  The first thing that seems to be confusing in God’s conversation with Job is that God basically tells Job I’m the boss and essentially these are the way things are, period.

Well I don’t know about you, but it kind of sounds like God is being mean here?  Why would God allow these things to happen to Job?  This text in particular is hard for us to wrap our minds around but we must remember that for the Old Testament’s understanding of God and His relationship to His people was that of a punishing parent.

God is most definitely still our Divine Parent, Our Father but through the price paid at the Cross and the triumph of the resurrection through Jesus; we truly have “God with us; Immanuel.”  Immanuel is what we will sing in a few months in the Advent season of the church calendar to celebrate Christ Jesus coming into the world.  But in regards to today’s Gospel from Mark—God with Us, as Jesus, is the Theology of the Cross.

Martin Luther saw this through many of St. Paul’s writings about our relationship with God.  We understand truly what a Gracious and Loving God is through Jesus who is Our Crucified Lord.  He did suffer, He commissioned us all as the priesthood of all believers to take up our crosses and follow Him.  No one ever said that the Christian journey was to be an easy path to sojourn.  In fact today more than anything we are seeing the fruits of evil seemingly triumph in persecution, horror and death.

It is hard to not be taken down into the world news these days…  As we just experienced this past week with two horrible events:  the first being the murder of 9 innocent people in a church service and the second being the arson terrorist hit causing the destruction of the Roman Catholic church in Jerusalem that stood over the original site of Jesus’ miracle of the loaves and fishes.

Just take that in for a moment; over the spot where Jesus light shined brightly feeding thousands of people… the place of sanctuary, the place of peace was destroyed by evil working its success in the hearts of men! The fire may have been put out but the ashes remain as we cry out to God—Why did this come to happen!?

Our brothers and sisters in Christ met a similar horror in Emanuel AME church in South Carolina; where a man came into their study sat with them for over an hour and killed them in cold blood—in their sanctuary… place of peace! The circumstances leading to why this evil ever took place is beyond our understanding but one thing is profoundly clear—this person chose to engage whole heartedly in evil, plain and simple! Like Job we are probably all feeling in one way or another—why is God allowing this to happen?

This is the problem of evil where we must be careful as children of God, children of Grace to not cast judgment against neighbor as well as feeling we have the right to question God.  We are in a broken world where the ruler of this world is the Evil One but we must also remember, as well, that we have been called and commissioned by God to live in the world but NOT be of it. There’s that taking up the cross motif again. 

We hear this as well in St. Paul’s words to his wayward Corinthians: “¹As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain.”  Paul continues to say to them that we are in a sense suffering like “Job” but now we have Christ, he says: “’See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!”  In essence he is saying the Lord Jesus presence is with us, he walks with us spiritually as we are His witnesses in the midst of this hurting and often evil world.  Evil can only be defeated by Grace in action which is our faith and our freedom.

Satan throws a lot of obstacles in our way daily, we must never forget that. It is spiritual warfare, plain and simple.  We must also realize that we fall prey to the temptation to do evil.  There’s no real rhyme or reason available for why we allow Satan success through us.  We could spend an inordinate amount of time rationalizing through our limited human understanding OR we can stay focused on our mission in the world.

Our mission in the world goes beyond a Sunday only frame of mind but to become an everyday reality as we go forth with that timeless Good News—the Gospel imperative of Jesus Christ to follow Him and spread His Gospel light to a weary world!  This sanctuary is our gathering place to share God’s peace but we must remember where the first church is.  This is the heart.  The heart is the sanctuary of the Holy Spirit.  It is the place where God seeks to transform us as a people of God into the children of Grace.

Being a child of Grace is that wonderful internal sanctuary where we grow to know deeply how Jesus not only saved us from sin, death and the power of the devil but that we are accountable to living into this lifestyle of Grace with the fruit of our lives lived in Hope, confidence and assurance.  This is a prevailing peace that only a “God with us” can bring!

You’re probably asking yourself, how do I do this?  Or what can I really do? The Christian walk is a combination of things, it is uniquely and importantly your journey with God and how He has helped to shape your heart to choose not only the Good but to strive for that storm brewing around us to be stifled and still by our faith in action.  Our faith is not only active in that first church being our hearts but it is carried out in gracious response, through our hands and feet.

Evil could break down those doors to that sanctuary of your heart and cause you to be a party to engaging and justifying sin…  But we must realize that this is what causes us to suffer and this is what Satan’s real victory is in the world.  Especially in context to recent dark headlines in the news; we can start blaming and judging others through politics or we can see those fingers truthfully pointing as three pointing back to us & our thumb pointing up to God.

The young man who killed those nine church members along with their pastor—evil brewed in his heart for quite sometime even his roommate was an indifferent party to his evil plans.  The individuals who destroyed with fire the Roman Catholic Church; the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish; were also planning and driven by what they felt was a justified act—but truly and truthfully was profoundly evil.

St. Paul had to admonish the struggling Corinthians to remain vigilant in their faith, he also had to remind them that they are still children.  We are all, still children who will always be growing and struggling in our faith journey.  There will be many things in this one life to shake that foundation, where we will struggle to know peace, where we will doubt instead of DO.

Being and becoming is that life time process that we have to spiritually stop questioning and humble ourselves to the task at hand. Jesus in today’s Gospel proved to His disciples that He was not only God by calming the storm, but that He also comes to us to calm the storm in our hearts to reshape them by and through Grace for the glory of God the Father. God the Father our loving and gracious parent, creator of the universe and its prevailing peace.

Our earthly parents gave us what they could to find our way in the world but our heavenly parent gave us something to grow beyond this world—the Kingdom of God and all its blessedness.

Let us Pray:

Heavenly Father

You are the prince of Peace

Our crucified Lord—God with Us

Continue to shape our hearts to live in Grace

And be Grace to our neighbor

So that through Your Holy Spirit’s work within our hearts

We will as Your children—trample sin, death and evil under our feet

As we grow in loving and gracious service, in Your Most Holy and Precious Name—

AMEN

June 21^st, 2015; 4^th Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 7; Year B; SOLA Lectionary

Sermon by Reverend Nicole A.M. Collins

Psalm 124; Job 38:1-11; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13 & Mark 4:35-41

https://youtu.be/0CKsAEqbaTc

"Jewel of Faith;" Sermon for June 14th, 2015 by Reverend Nicole A.M. Collins

I don’t know how many remember the first movie of ‘Men in Black;’ but there’s a funny scene in it that reminded me of one of our texts this morning.  Basically it is the scene where Tommy Lee Jones’ character goes to interrogate “Frank, the pug.”  Apparently the alien resides in the dog and in being pressured to reveal where the galaxy is being kept, he blirts out: “You humans… when are you going to learn that size doesn’t matter?”

The talking alien/ dog mentions this to a flabbergasted Will Smith who can’t fathom a galaxy being held in something the size of a marble…  Well the same could be said for us in imagining an extremely tiny seed creating a giant tree! Being the parable of the Mustard Seed Jesus uses today in talking to his disciples. The potential factor is hard for us to grapple with since we tend to be very limited and limiting people.

As the film continues, we find out that the galaxy being held inside this tiny marble is being guarded and worn around the collar of a common house cat named Orion.  Crazy circumstances of course but who is to say that we can really see or judge just what potential people do in fact carry with them?  What I am talking about is the seed of the New Creation planted by Christ waiting to be reaped within us!

That tiny little seed of faith barely being protected within the walls of the heart awaiting for us to crack open the shell & burst forth into New Life! Why would Jesus try to teach His simple-natured disciples through such a complex parable? For that matter why do Christians today try so hard to mold a human concept of being faithful over a Godly concept?  Just what kind of a world are we creating? 

There are galaxies of churches out there spreading across America either bound to politics as a form of exclusion and indoctrination or churches that exclude, supposedly according to the Bible, women to truly serve as pastoral leaders.  What matters to some people is trivial in the eyes of God and diminishes the truth of the Gospel and its role in “urging us onward…” as a people of faith! Their efforts in essence remain small, alienating and produce no real fruit except for the ego and for the vitae.

A piece of paper cannot capture who someone truly is and their potential for greater things in the life of their discipleship but this is where we are in the American frontier facing secularism, graceless survivalism of the institutional church and human blindness to the Truth! Truth be told how can we claim to be the judge and jury to someone’s efforts to grow and live into that New Nature? We can’t but are indifferent to allowing people to grow where God is calling them to GO!  Painting that perfect picture is something we can never achieve when our motives and intentions are in opposition to both God and neighbor and centered around the very narrow world of the self.

Culture goes on the wayside of ideology where that New Nature planted within us is being fertilized against God’s will with doctrinal correctness and specific human interests that keep the growth, potential of that mighty tree of faith from fully or ever really blooming. What does it matter? says some people when all we know is this one solitary life on this floating rock in space called earth!  Why “try?” It becomes harder and harder to live into DOING and BEING for the Gospel of Grace and the glory of God when we allow the world to rule our potential!

We need to grow into the world of the Kingdom of God, where we don’t really know where the Good Lord will have us land but live expansively if not explosively into a Gospel, Grace-shaped life.  If we did this, even a mustard-seed-sized-effort… can you imagine that world we would create?  As New Adams and New Eves the world as we know it would resurrect into a New Eden dedicated to God and that forest of Grace, would be grand beyond our imagination!

The Spirit is willing but our flesh is weak.  There is more truth in those few words than we first thought.  St. Paul realized this in hearing through his very powerful faith of Jesus’ mission for our lives.  Living into the lifestyle of Grace is living by our true nature which is spiritual.  What we thought we’ve known about the world as God sees it, is not nearly grand enough!  We’ve become creators of capsules, encasements of what living towards the Kingdom of God should mean to us, for us.

In some senses just like that first image of the galaxy inside the marble; we’ve created and maintained that hardened case of glass surrounding a whole, brave, New world, a resurrected world—the Kingdom of God! How do we go forward? Not by trying but by DOING, and BEING truthfully shaped by Grace in all we are for the love of Him who gave us that seed, potential in the first place—Jesus.

The mysterious ways God works is amazing.  What the Good Lord chooses to reveal at just the right times in your life are, can be miraculous to urging you onward.  Just this morning, I saw that crazy house or shack out in the middle of the far western Californian desert had sold for $49k.  This was the ridiculously large home with an endless kitchen and backyard with an in ground pool.  I remember having fun joking about the reasons for it being so cheap.  Maybe there were people murdered there, its haunted and so on. Well obviously someone saw potential in the major cleaning and work most likely needed to make it livable…

I originally was looking at that home in hopes to have a job out west there which has not obviously happened.  You can’t be discouraged from dreaming big, however, for who’s to say if you will be living in that reality somewhere down the road of that great journey the Lord places us upon? Think about people like Leonardo Da Vinci, I still greatly admire how that man lived into his potential, lived into his convictions.  He was not someone limited by the world at all but someone free to be a scientist, mathematician, artist, inventor, philosopher… and so on.  He was definitely a “Renaissance man.”

The former art history teacher in me knows quite well what not only the word Renaissance means but what it was as a movement in “time” for the world going forward but still lacking spiritual understanding to some extent. Even there, we were limited or limiting ourselves in what we could DO and BECOME for God and neighbor.  As the French would say—C’est La Vie or such is life!

Such is a specification not a total reality, for the reality of the Kingdom of God is infinite, eternal, ever growing—ever flowing as a fount of endless, timeless Grace.  We must return to being the children of God in all humility to always be growing towards bigger and brighter things that the Lord wants for us to realize.  When those leaves of doubt and despair fall away from our struggling branches ever reaching upward towards God the Father… we will bud again and grow even stronger.  Growing even stronger weathering the winds and currents of a troubled world lashing out upon our fragile growing frame.

We will be a part of that great garden, restored, renewed and full of GRACE as only the Kingdom of God can be. The wickedness and evil we have stirred up around us will be trampled underfoot by the true and final victory Christ will have for the Jewel of our heart—soul to be won for His Gospel’s galaxy to break free!

In closing, let us hear St. Paul illumine this victory: “¹⁴For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. ¹⁵And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.  ¹⁶From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. ¹⁷So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”

Amen

June 14th, 2015; 3rd Sunday after Pentecost; Year B; Proper 6; SOLA Lectionary

Sermon by Reverend Nicole A.M. Collins

Psalm 1; Ezekiel 17:22-24; 2 Corinthians 5:1-17 & Mark 4:26-34

https://youtu.be/PLqq5k_sk8I