"Testing Grace;" Sermon for February 28th, 2016 by Rev. Nicole A.M. Collins, FODM

Putting Christ to the test is a daily affair for us all.  We do this in our “choices” and our “cares and concerns” not really for the outer world and our neighbor but for ourselves. Who said understanding Grace and the challenges it weighs upon us would ever be easy to manage. We like to test everything but ourselves when it comes to realizing the power of the resurrection needing to rise in our souls.

I have had to learn to be a careful listener not only as a pastor but as a human being truly knowing the reality of the spiritual world and things we still have yet to fully understand or want to understand.  This leads me to share another fold into what I have experienced from the spirit world.  Which means yes, my grandmother’s spirit is once again reaching out to me in this new home.  I don’t consider it a “haunting” but she is there in essence as a guardian and “encourager.”

I have been careful to hear from a place of faith since evil is real and evil occasionally interrupts these moments of my grandmother speaking by saying—“It’s a secret.”  The devil has a lot to hide and would like us to be lured and tempted to find or seek the secret knowledge of things.  This is a lot like life though, when we want what we want, when we want it but don’t really “get” it.

Those uninterrupted moments at all times of the evening and early morning to the lulling sound of the white noise of my sound machine—she reaches out to encourage me.  The past week she has repeated over and over with her Southern Illinois accent saying my name first— “Nicole, God gives you all that you could ever possibly need, as He pleases, Believe in Jesus.”

Other evenings she would repeat and say—“Nicole, you need to have faith in yourself, I know you can do it.”

This past Saturday Phil & I had to put our kitty Sedie down since she went into systemic organ failure—heart, lungs and her intestines were no longer working.  That evening I asked my grandmother, that I hope Sedie is with them and my grandmother said:  “Yes, she is here.”

So what’s the purpose of sharing in essence this “ghost” story with you here this morning?  Grace lived into is all about tapping into the spirit—that seat of the soul, the first church where God works.  We are not mere “meat” held together by science but have a spiritual aspect originating in the heart—where God does His work, first.

When we die, we do leave dust, we leave everything behind and take the most important thing—our soul, our spiritual self to join Jesus and all whom we have loved; family, friends and creatures! We must continue to remember God’s timing is not our sense of timing at all.  It is of many dimensions and holds many a purpose we have yet to realize in our limited, temporal thinking… In some ways as an act of gracious teaching, my grandmother has continued to be a “presence” to help encourage me to not be weak and discouraged.  Which in ministry is pretty easy to fall into!

God uses a lot of messengers to reach out to us daily~ it can be in those moments and experiences we don’t pay too much attention to—in the things we often say and do.  It could be in the social media legal-ease theological wars over anything and everything except what’s more important… Christ!  It could be in life-changing decisions you have come to full circle in making…  Do you know the final outcome? Does it matter at this point? Sometimes you have to go boldly with a blind but powerful faith—to quote Star Trek: “To Boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Having faith in yourself is testing that Grace given—the New Nature planted longing to be reaped… Nearly eight years of Roman Catholic grade school and two years at a Roman Catholic high school didn’t necessarily bring me to Christ.  It took God reaching down to me at that conversion moment 12 something years ago to hear the Spirit of God’s Voice in my heart to take Him seriously! God’s messenger that time was through the voices of Ebenezer Lutheran Church’s choir singing “Spirit, Spirit of Gentleness,” as the closing processional hymn of that service.

Everything at that very moment came together where my heart was restored and my faith challenged to turn that next corner.  If I didn’t turn that corner, where would I be? If I didn’t continue to seek finding God in the church and beyond, who would I have become?  I needed something I couldn’t explain… that only the cross and the Love of Christ Jesus becoming ever so real in my heart… GAVE ME!

If, is that conditional of the Law, it can also be a handy tool for the devil to use to weaken and lure you away from realizing genuine purpose in your life. We can all fall hopelessly into this abyss:  If I chose this path, would I be “happy?” (Remember happiness is that Pandora’s box…) If I dare to be a bold witness; could I handle the consequences?  The cost of discipleship requires a Bold Witness to speak the power of Grace and our need to be truthful with ourselves to take it on! Maybe my story like your own story would raise a lot of red flags to a controlled perspective of the “way things should be…”

Maybe some of us would like to run away from all of it—retreat into the comfort of a loneliness no one can understand or should… but God alone. Do we give up? God sure doesn’t, neither does He want us to!  Even if we are one of those sickly looking trees in the backyard of God’s Kingdom that you’d wish a neighbor would pay mercy upon and cut it down… God never cuts us down, He loves us and guides us in many ways, we have yet to fully understand or want to realize!

We can’t take the reality of God and the reality of the Spirit for granted.  It is when we do that we fail, fall away and wither—dying not to the Old Ways and neither rising into the New.  How can we understand Grace, if we do not open our hearts to God’s loving Spirit—leading us, teaching us, transforming us? Let us not forget that the law is to be but a humbling mirror to the Gospel.  We need to look deeply within ourselves to reap that New Nature seed.

We’re not the best gardeners, or adept at “self-care” when it comes to maturing our faith.  In fact in actual physical gardening, I actually beg people to not buy me a plant… I have a brown thumb.  Our former house’s lawn you could probably have spotted from an airplane… All humor aside, the gardener of the heart is God, and the faith that is reaped is our gracious response.

Coming to the point of responding in Grace is reconciling ourselves with God.  It is reconciling ourselves to not hear Satan lure us into feeling a failure on who we are and where we are.  It is seeing God’s love shining into us resurrecting us from the abyss of sin and its adjoining despair. It doesn’t take that mirror for granted, for we need to gaze into it and beyond it in order to find the Gospel living within our very selves!

How can we carry the Good News, if there is no hope and despair weighs heavily upon our hearts?  I would say that’s where we’re testing Grace which as Saint Paul said is not only dangerous but toxic to the very gift given to us by Christ Jesus the Lord! We have to lift these things up to the Lord in more than prayer but through being, doing!  St. Francis’ more famous quotes resonate here, he says: “If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.”  He continues in another quote to say: “Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

Living into the lifestyle of Grace is not impossible it is just painful and difficult. Your life will need to be shaped, challenged and disciplined by and for God. We may have been given this one solitary earthly life, but the one to come is the Kingdom of God reaped from that New Natured seed.

I would like to close this morning’s message with a nugget of thought from Thomas Moore’s ‘Original Self:’ “The pulse of life is as close as our own throbbing veins, but everything around us conspires to convince us of its nonexistence and unworthiness.  The poet and the artist have no place in a society that has forgotten the soul.  But we can live differently, basking in the exoticism and eccentricity of a life of vision.  The camera of our awakening may be Iris, the messenger of sprite, our own eyes of the imaginal that look at the flat of existence and see the poetry.”

God wants our lives to come alive by Grace through faith for His will and precepts. We are the messengers of the Gospel in spirit and yes, by using those hands and feet.  It doesn’t start in the head though, it begins in the heart, the soul—the mercy seat of Our Crucified Lord and Savior risen and rising as our New Nature is reaped.

Amen.

February 28^th, 2016; 3^rd Sunday of Lent; Year C; SOLA Lectionary

Sermon by Reverend Nicole A.M. Collins, FODM

Psalm 85; Ezekiel 33:7-20; 1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9

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"Standing Firm;" Sermon for February 21st, 2016 by Rev. Nicole A.M. Collins, FODM

Having your feet on the ground but your heart adrift is the pain of the human journey—it is our daily struggle. Compassion giving and receiving is something that you on your discipleship journey must acknowledge is bearing the reality of the cross in your life.

Often however we go out there with anger bubbling in our hearts—strings attached and reject and condemn the messenger.  I thought about this the other day in connecting Jeremiah’s efforts as well as Jesus’ efforts in today’s texts in relation to some social media “arenas” out there where people can often or too easily grab those pyres and spears defending something they feel in the right about.  Truth be told—how do we know?  Shouldn’t we be falling back upon God and His Word for the Truth, and genuine righteousness?

Could where you be standing firm upon, however, be rocky ground or simply, truthfully an allusion solely built for your objective righteousness alone?  This is where the boundaries are blurred and complicated between the Old and the New Natures—the choices God would like to see you make and the ones you make that seem to provide you with vindication—vain righteousness.  This is the bondage of the will truly, which could either lift up the Gospel or kill the Gospel.

Triumphing over this bondage is one built by and through tears—it is not an easy yoke for any of us who take that path into the lifestyle of Grace seriously.  This was definitely true in the case of Jeremiah, what you see is what you get as well as he made it known for his persecutors to hopefully hear—if they condemn him, they are condemning God’s Word which was given to him to reveal. We hear this, “triumph over bondage,” in Paul’s words today as well, when he tells his beloved Philippians the fate of the enemies of the cross: “¹⁹Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.”   

With Jesus you hear something different, he truly grieves for his persecutors, those rejecting His message and His motives and He knew what the ultimate outcome would be.  He knew the cross was imminent. He was more than a prophet however, He was, is God.  God who came to us, for us— not to be reinvented into what we see but as the saying goes: Letting God be God for a greater purpose—salvation, grace, mercy, peace, kindness and so forth.

Walking the talk is seeing the Word, the Cross and Jesus as a living confession within the soul of the believer to open up and share beyond their given capacity through Grace.  I say this for recently I had a very challenging and prayerful exercise given to me by the Franciscan order to contemplate:  What is your sin in regards to forgiveness and needing to heal?  Deeply reflecting upon that became perhaps one of the most prayerful things I had ever sat down to expound upon, share.

One of the things that are perhaps not talked enough about is what a beautiful attitude is.  Jesus of course, exampled the perfection of what beautiful means in spirit and actions.  Beauty is as we know or has become, a Pandora’s box of jumbled meanings from subjective to objective—superficial or transformative.  The devil is always watching us here to see where our hearts are standing firm in.  He did this with Jesus as well, not just in the wilderness but in hoping Jesus would respond in striking down His enemies in one way or another.

The resurrection TV series, “Second Chance,” did it once again in challenging those blurry (by today’s culture) boundaries between good and evil.  Friday night’s episode was about a serial killer obsessed with murdering prostitutes through bodily mutilation “art”…  One of his henchmen became so enamored and spiritually fell prey to this guy’s manifesto of eradicating “beauty,” that by the time he was killed— his face, body, head was turned into a demonic mask of horns, piercing and tattoos etc.  Literally the sickness of evil had completely manifested, and this person was hopelessly lost.

Being hopelessly lost is evil’s victory in the world especially when we deny or can’t see or want to know the cross, Jesus truthfully in our hearts. It is seeing no way out, forward or otherwise.  It is grieving, lamenting in the past without encouragement for the future…. This doesn’t have to be so—for we could embrace that rocky ground to level it, and build upon it a solid foundation of faith, love, hope, peace, compassion and so much more—to stand firm upon now and always!

Standing firm today has removed the cross from the picture and turned the Gospel’s message upside down to be about politics, agenda and everything and anything that caters to the world of the self. The ego has no place in leading the heart to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus. The ego doesn’t have the capacity to forgive yet alone give compassion because it is too concerned for itself. This is why there are no genuine prophets today, prophecy was bound to God’s Word and Will.  Today there are only a lot of Words—doctrine, manifestoes, dogma etcetera that preach anything but the truth.  We can’t and won’t handle the truth however—this is that aspect of spiritual warfare.

Speaking the truth not only through love but with the Cross lifted high within a convicted heart is living into that citizenship—the Kingdom of God. What is a convicted heart?  One that realizes love as that amazing grace given—the very humbling power of the cross born in our lives to bear.

There is one man who writes and manages a very controversial blog.  It is unrelenting and is perhaps like that one string banjo we often have a difficult time keeping focused upon BUT we need to.  The voice that keeps speaking…  much like John the Baptist in never ceasing, this man is bound and determined to keep that voice going whether or not the hatred from others is seething and lashing against him—he, nonetheless stands firm!  I really admire his initiative and truly his motivation for his motivation is nothing but the truth.  Not everyone is going to have that same drive to stand against the flames like he does… but as long as we take a stand, listening closely to God’s Word for guidance and strength, how can we go wrong?

Love given whether brotherly, unconditional or motherly versus the pyres and spears in a graceless wilderness is our painful journey. This is truly the cost of our discipleship in the world but not of it. Upon an abiding hope do we come to truly know where God would like us to stand firm. Standing firm for the Gospel is living into an unpopular witness or even seemingly a silent witness against those who, self-righteously want to control or impede others from answering their calling.

The main reason so many main-stream denominations, churches and societies are struggling today and closing, ending their ministries is because they don’t find relevance or are not up to the challenge of standing firm for the timeless message of the Gospel—they either cater to the world and its temporal culture or become exclusionary legalists limiting not only God’s Word but themselves.  There is no real “progress,” yet alone any kind of truthful “liberation…” but this is where many of us stand.  We are teetering precariously over a chasm of doubt, despair and blurred boundaries!

We objectify, while God merely wants to subject our hearts be accountable and obedient to a greater purpose. So is there a prophetic voice in the world today for the Gospel of Christ Jesus?  Perhaps—what are you passionate about?  Getting back to the basics spiritually as a people of God—children of Grace and promise is “walking the talk.”

Letting God be God is number one—God needs us to all use our creativity in productive, selfless ways not destructive ways.  Destructive ways are laced with politics, the ego and the conditions, controls of the world. The Pharisees in today’s Gospel were not only hypocrites in warning Jesus about Herod but they were more or less hoping to be rid of Him period.  Jesus saw and felt their intentions, these supposed “men of God…”  He embraced the situation most beautifully by lamenting with compassion over those who were rejecting Him.

There’s the reality of the Kingdom of God—following through with a faith having no blurred boundaries but the solid foundation of the cross.  It is to be the never-ending story, the timeless story one that shapes us into New beings—transformed, transfigured for a greater purpose!

Let us Pray—

Heavenly Father,

Help us get on board, be in sync

With Your Will, not ours

Help us to see the freeing power

Of being a humble witness with Your Word

Through Love, Compassion, Hope, peace, kindness, mercy, etc.

Help us to stand firm

Within, for Your Grace

Amen

February 21st 2016; Second Sunday in Lent; SOLA Lectionary

Sermon by Reverend Nicole A.M. Collins, FODM

Psalm 4; Jeremiah 26:8-15; Philippians 3:17—4:1; Luke 13:31-35

Here's a link to it's delivery Sunday February 21st at the Grace Hub Lutheran Orthodox Church's house service at 8am:
https://youtu.be/0SNg0qfzq1g

The Battlefields; Sermon for February 14th, 2016 by Rev. Nicole A.M. Collins, FODM

The reality of evil can almost seem surreal to us especially in contemplating its genuine existence in our daily lives. It is almost as if we see ourselves reading a fiction novel or watching an interesting horror movie about good versus evil.   The C.S. Lewis acclaimed novel of the ‘Screwtape Letters,’ is just as fantastic as hearing today's Gospel text where Jesus is literally duking it out with the devil in the wilderness! In the C.S. Lewis novel we have the devil talking and mentoring to his favorite nephew through a series of letters Lewis’ has us a spectator to…

Speaking of being a “spectator,” once again, the TV networks are coming up with another glamourized series around the Devil and his exploits in the world.  Mind you I watched maybe something like 3 minutes of it because it was typical Hollywood.  Here’s this handsome 20-something year old introducing himself jokingly or almost self-mockingly as “Lucifer…”  The TV show before it, I have been watching which is actually fascinating in concept to someone of faith…  “Second Chance” is the name of the show.  The show is literally about resurrection via scientific progress that is.

In the series, “Second Chance,” a 75 year old man is brought back to life by a group of scientists seeking to find cures for cancer and whatnot.  In the midst of their amiable “resurrection” of this elderly former sheriff, they inadvertently assist him to investigate his murder and pursuit of setting things right with his son who is an FBI agent.  The Hollywood element here beyond the beautiful scientist who restores him, is that he and his estranged son begin tackling investigating several crimes.

At the end of the day, the former “old man,” has to hop into the “life-giving/restorative goo,” that the scientists have formulated to keep him “going.”  Kind of sounds like the human equivalent of those plug-in ports for an electric car…  Wild and amazingly inventive!

Meanwhile in the wilderness of our “junk-food-style” culture, we have political circuses with people talking about anything and everything except the issues of accountability and what really matters.  Meanwhile yet again, a blip on the screen a bomber uses a notebook to slip by security and blow a formidable hole in the side of an airplane.  Thanks be to God, there wasn’t more destruction than it could’ve caused.  And still, meanwhile, in an unassuming Ohio town, a man now suspected to have terrorist roots diabolically attacked people in a restaurant with a machete.

Do you or can you truly see the pattern here?  Do you want to see the pattern?  It isn’t pretty, it isn’t just a matter of circumstance… When Evil genuinely takes the heart—that 1^st church hostage and burns away the work of God in order to do the work of the ruler of this world—Satan… We have a real problem.  It goes beyond justifying our sins to being what a colleague wonderfully phrased as the reality of: “We’ve lost our sense of evil.”  We have lost, sensing evil. We have lost the notion of taking it seriously and being prayerfully accountable to the daily battle!

But perhaps we don’t want to go there…  It’s too much for us to want to make the effort in handling… We’d rather live into a greater sin and victory of evil’s temptation in the world, that is being and becoming indifferent. Being consumed by indifference is the opposite of Grace.  Being graceless supports socialized control, the absence of God and the idolatry of the self. As disciples of Jesus, we have to go there, into that worldly wilderness to truly see and realize what we must do what we are called to do.  For instance we've heard very little about the exploits of ISIS recently and their activities in the world for the media probably feels there's been too much said already.

The media probably feels there's been too much said or has been pressured to not say enough because of purely political reasons when this has nothing to do with politics and has more to do with the reality of evil unchecked and rampant in our world. The reality of evil actively working in one's heart to blacken, turn and hardened away not only from God but to the victory of the Evil One's purposes in the world, which is death.

It is not only the death of the flesh or our eventual earthly death but it is a death of the Spirit to contemplate the good and genuinely live into the good, the gracious, the loving reality of the kingdom of God that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ gave to us!  Our faith is the armor we are to hold together and fight with!

I would love to take a census poll to know out there who can genuinely say they have seen and experienced terrible evil... I know none of us here have experienced anything like what we've seen or what little we have seen accomplished by ISIS as well as with other small movements in the world but this is interesting for us to think about none the less.

I must confess as a Lutheran person I do have great difficulty in wrapping my mind around the concept of “tribulation” I really don't like the word actually. I think we've been in an era of testing for quite some time now. Where we are currently and culturally would say that our fall from grace has become insurmountable... but never say never. Which at this juncture brings us to prayerfully hear St. Paul’s lesson to the Romans today: “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart, (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); ⁹because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.”

It is ironic that today is also Valentine’s day—the day of love and so forth.  True, it is about “Eros” love or romantic love more that the kind of love Our Lord Jesus exampled and gave to us as a New Law—agape love.  Unconditional love that bears the fruit of a life lived in, with and through Grace.  St. Valentine in real time history was horrifically martyred—he was beaten, beheaded and quartered for aiding other martyrs imprisoned for their faith… I highly doubt a historical blip on a box of Valentine’s day chocolates would do too well for sales… but such is the reality of battlefields—spiritual warfare and actual warfare for something prayerfully better…  The reality of living Grace—the Kingdom of God.

We all have the capacity for good and evil as well as we all were commissioned to serve within the priesthood of all believers.  This takes faith, hope and a sense of justice.  Not for the world of the self however, it is not a consumerist “good” to exchange but it is a happy exchange as faith naturally lived in a daily process of believing, receiving, incorporating and sharing.  This process never ends and we are never to feel as if we’ve arrived but are always to know that we are on a prayerful journey.

This past week I was making a prayer cross for a friend and colleague, what was beautiful about reflecting as my fingers were busily beading is praying for this person as I put on each bead.  There was nothing to compel me to DO this but it naturally flowed from the spirit to love my neighbor, love, extend “Philos” Love to my friend (brotherly love in Biblical Greek).  Another natural moment purely fueled once again by the Holy Spirit working through my heart was leading an Ash Wednesday house church service to a prayerful few.

Ash Wednesday services across the board have for a number of years been on the decline.  Not just for one group of Christians versus the other but in general because people don’t want to hear about the suffering of the cross of Our Lord and our inevitable and genuine calling to pick up OURS.  Some of it is perpetuated by the established church to make us merely feel guilt or shame.  The truth to be told, however, is that the time of Lent is so much more hopeful and prayerful than anyone could ever imagine!

When you come to think about it actually, today’s Gospel text comes literally after Jesus’ Baptism by John or technically His ordination into the role He knew He had to take for the sake of the world.  Literally after drying off from the Jordan’s waters, Jesus journeyed into that wilderness…  Satan, in our “hard-to-imagine” minds, came boldly up to Jesus and kept tempting Him over and over.  Would Jesus break & use His Divine powers for me?  How weak is Jesus?  Is He up for my testing?  Jesus obviously shut the devil down in every instance…

Now take in for a moment, or what we must remember as a powerful historical note—Luke was a companion of St. Paul, composing the Gospel and the Book of Acts inspired and instructed by the Holy Spirit to testimony to something he himself did not see with his own eyes in some instances… but saw with the eyes of his heart shaped by Grace through faith!

As a culture or society that now prides itself or centers around the self in thinking that it is intellectually superior and politically in control of “ethics” or rightness…  How could we understand the reality of good and evil if we assume we are in control or have perfected being and doing “good?” Good is understood here as a self-righteous, socialized justice that elevates the self and diminishes the reality of the gift of Christ Jesus and the magnitude of His reality of Grace imparted to the world.

In saying that, have we really “progressed?”  Can we really use the term “liberated?” If love is purely the tool of agenda, propaganda for “the church” and progress is merely the fruit of a life lived out for the self and its preservation alone… I say NO! We are living into Satan’s hands, a victory to his reality’s success in the world… Well, hey if we can now come up with glorified Hollywood TV series with a handsome 20-something year old playing the good-guy version of the devil…. That’s scary!

I’ll leave you with one last story that I can only carefully share of evil, evil I genuinely experienced.  Every time I would journey down to that place, I used to jokingly play the Grateful Dead’s hit” “Friend of the Devil…” on my phone’s MP3 library.  That place which is all I will reveal in calling it, I felt Evil, plain and simple.  The evil became so toxic that after a while I couldn’t take it anymore I left it for good going somewhere else… thanks Be to God!

Not too much longer after I left “that place,” a young man there, fell prey to that place’s toxic imprint and killed himself.  A week or two ago, I received an email from someone who is still attached to that place.  The email was a call to prayer for a horrific event that took place through the hands of another person effected by that place—they murdered their family and killed themselves!

This is the grisly and gory TRUTH of Satan’s work in the world when the heart is turned lose into a wilderness it cannot escape nor wants to escape from.  A wilderness of darkness, all things negative, graceless and bereft of hope! How awful! The ashes of a life destroyed by evil, there is something so much more to live for!  His name is Jesus Christ!  Our Lord and Savior—something to truly live for and die for.  In order for us to live for Christ, love is the most powerful tool the Gospel gives us to use against evil.

This love is a selfless, liberating love that aspires to be given unconditionally and beautifully not only back to Our Loving and Gracious Father in Heaven but to all our neighbors without politics, agendas, strings attached and soul-crushing restraints upon a spirit we have yet to fully understand! If we cannot own up to the truth of the battle; than we fail the gospel and are aspects of the Evil One’s victory in the world.

Lent is supposed to be a time of reflection, going over those lessons taught from the Heart and Cross of Jesus to rebuild us, transform us into the children of Grace and Promise we were born to be and become! Amen

February 14th, 2016; First Sunday in Lent; Year C; SOLA Lectionary

Sermon by Reverend Nicole A.M. Collins, FODM

Psalm 91:1-13; Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13

A video from this morning's delivery at the Grace Hub Lutheran Orthodox Church's house service at 8am: https://youtu.be/P8xTLakecn4