Autoplay - Read or listen to Sunday's sermon here

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A sermon on Mark 1:29-39, preached on February 4 at First United Methodist Church

A sermon on Mark 1:29-39, preached on February 4 at First United Methodist Church

It was about 1:30 in the morning when I woke up in a room full of smoke. I rolled over in my bottom bunk and saw a charred black hole in my mattress, and immediately I got out of the bed, grabbed my two-year-old brother from his crib in the bedroom we shared and went to my parents’ bedroom. I shook my dad, and his eyes opened, and I said “My bed is on fire,” and he said “Ok” and he remained asleep. I went to the other side of the bed and shook my mom and told her “My bed is on fire” and her eyes went very wide, and she said “What did you say?” and I said “My bed is on fire,” and she turned over and shook my dad fully awake, and before long, Dad was dragging the mattress out of the house and into our driveway, where it was raining as hard that night as it is this morning. Even in the downpour, the mattress continued to smolder so that when I went to school, 6 hours later, it was still smoking in the rain. 
It turns out that the source of the fire was my reading lamp. That lamp had two outstanding features that made it perfect for my bunk bed. First, the lamp had a bendable gooseneck, so that I could point it in any direction. First, instead of having a wide heavy base, the lamp had an oversized and tightly sprung clip - like a giant clip you would use on a chip bag. This meant I could clip the lamp to the headboard of my bunk. However, after years of use, the spring in the clip had worn out, and so it wouldn’t stay put that well, and on this particular night, I had decided to stay up reading wayyyyy past my bedtime. I was reading the best book, and I had to know how it ended. I never quite got to the ending, however. I fell asleep with the book on my chest and at the lamp resting on the mattress beside me burned its way into my mattress. 
What I’m trying to say is that I’ve never been very good at knowing when to quit, and this has occasionally caused me a bit of trouble. When I discover something good, I want more of it. I confess, these days, I find it harder to stay up quite so late reading - I fall asleep much earlier in the book than I used to, but thankfully I use LED bulbs for my reading lamp, and I keep it safely on a bedside table. But I can still lose just as much time as ever to a television. There’s just something about an electronic screen that is perfectly calibrated to keep us just awake enough to know that we really should be going to bed. And in the present age, where cable networks schedule their late night programming in marathons, and internet channels are built for binge-watching, it is easier than ever to become lost in a really good story even after we have learned all too well the consequences of lost sleep. Whether its food, or entertainment, or social networks, or even our favorite complaints - we are wired to take something good and ride with it until we are totally burned out. We’re all about that momentum. 
We can even treat Jesus this way. For a couple weeks now, we’ve been in the first chapter of Mark, watching as Jesus begins his ministry, and we’ve seen the momentum building. It began when Jesus came calling his disciples, and as soon he calls a couple of them, they respond immediately. Then he immediately calls a couple more, and things are moving along nicely. Then Jesus heads right into the synagogue, and as soon as he shows up the evil spirits that have been hiding in plain sight begin to scream and shake, and then Jesus immediately casts them out. 
Today, it seems his ministry is on auto-play. Jesus leaves the synagogue and immediately the residents of the house tell him about the sick woman. Immediately he heals her. In no time at all, the whole town is outside his door, bringing their ailments and their demons. They line up down the street, and Jesus is on a roll. Bringing ‘em in, and casting ‘em out. 
But Jesus knows the difference between what is good and what is best. And so Jesus, while the crowds are still forming, while the momentum is still rising, Jesus ducks out the back. Jesus skips town, and when his disciples find him hours later, he doesn’t say “Ok. I’m rested, let’s jump back in there.” No, even as his disciples are telling him about everyone who is looking for him Jesus is packing his bags and moving on. He tells the disciples “Let’s head in the other direction, to the nearby villages, so that I can preach there too. That’s why I’ve come.” 

How did Jesus know the time was right? Well, for one thing, he didn’t wait until he had no other options to go to God in prayer. You know, it’s a curious thing, I think many of us come to God looking for a sign, looking for some sort of skywriting or blinding light to show us the way, and we forget that most of the time in the Bible, God sends the great big flashing, blinding signs to people who are really, really headed the wrong direction. Moses was on the lam, running from a murder charge when he saw the burning bush. Balaam’s donkey started talking to him when Balaam was about to curse God’s people for money. A man named Saul was headed to Damascus to arrest and kill Christians in the name of God when God stepped in and said: “You are not honoring me, you are persecuting me you dummy.” — that’s a paraphrase. 
Too often, we turn to God once we have exhausted all our other options — either when we’ve hit rock bottom, or else when we are tired of all the other good things that we wanted to do first. Jesus shares the nature of God completely, and so nothing - not even the thrill of healing and liberating and blessing the crowd will stop him from seeking the Father’s will, and remembering why he is here. 
While we often try to worship and honor a God of the gaps, the God who fills in all the boring moments, and all the things we can’t do for ourselves, Jesus tells us to seek the kingdom first, and promises that all the other stuff is not the point, it’s the by-product.

We can’t go around trying to add the presence of God, the will of God, and the mission of God to the good stuff we are doing. No, unless we begin with the presence of God, we might find that we settle for something so much less than we were made for. 
That’s one reason why in our church we say that the first commitment of any member is to pray, and when we talk about prayer we say that we are committed to cultivating a habit of prayer that is based on scripture. We believe that God hears all our prayers, even the prayers we offer to the God of the gaps - the prayers we offer when we are burnt out, overtired, lost and confused. God hears all those prayers. 

But we hear God best when aren’t just asking God to take care of our needs and our desires. We hear God best when we are taking the time, regularly, in the middle of all the other good things we could be doing, to read the scriptures, so that the Holy Spirit can use them to teach us how to pray. 

In his autobiography, Just as I Am, Billy Graham said that if he had his ministry to do over again, one of the changes he would make would be to “

spend more time in spiritual nurture, seeking to grow closer to God so I could become more like Christ. I would spend more time in prayer, not just for myself but for others. I would spend more time studying the Bible and meditating on its truth, not only for sermon preparation but to apply its message to my life

For a Christian, these two gifts — prayer, and the reading of scripture — are absolutely inseparable. The only way we have of knowing who God is by knowing what God has done, and the scriptures are the true and sufficient revelation of God’s saving work. If we do not take the time to be astonished, surprised, and taught by God then, then we will only ever pray to our idea of God. And likewise, if we study the scriptures, if we know them inside and out; if we know not only the text but the context and all the rich meaning and depth of the scriptures, but if all that knowledge never compels us to pray, then all that knowledge has become just another entertainment, another way to binge on a good thing so that it no longer gives us life. 
But if we will decide that prayer, inspired by scripture, is the one automatic commitment in our lives, then and only then are we truly capable of discerning God’s best, and God’s purpose in a world full of good things. When we have our eyes fixed on our creator, redeemer, and sustainer then we don’t just say “this is good,” but we know what every good gift is good for. 

A couple of days after the fire… I realized I had a burn on my arm. Curiously enough, it was in more or less the shape of the Texas Longhorn logo, which I tried to convince my mom — a Texas fan — was a sign of some sort. As best as I could tell, it was the burn that woke me up that night, so I was grateful for it. But I didn’t want another one, and I’d rather not need a scar to wake me up. 

Maybe right now you feel as if you are on a treadmill that never stops; maybe you are hoping for the day when you crash and burn because then you’ll have the excuse you’re looking for to stop and seek God. Or maybe you’re riding high; you’re planning to check in with God as soon as you’ve exhausted the good stuff right in front of you. 

Don’t wait. Don’t forget what you were made for, what you are being called for; don’t forget that a relationship with you is what Jesus came for. Make your time with God the one automatic in your life, and you’ll find it’s the one thing you can’t overdo. 

United Methodist Men Mon, February 12

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The regular meeting of the United Methodist Men’s Fellowship will be held Monday night February 12th at 6:00PM.  We will have about 15 minutes of singing followed by a good meal.  Dr. Lee Thigpen will speak to us about his duties and experiences as a “Hospitalist”.

All men who attend First United Methodist Church are members of the United Methodist Men’s Fellowship. A donation is requested to help with the cost of our meal (No more than $10.00 please.  Your first meeting is on us). Let’s have a good turnout.

Silence - Read or listen to Sunday's sermon here

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Here’s a good rule of thumb I’ve picked up along the way: “Any man who must say ‘I am king,’ is no true king at all.”

Somebody oughta tell that to Pilate. 

When Pilate asked the question of Jesus — “Are you the king?” he certainly knew what answer he expected to hear. He expected a denial. He expected Jesus to know that if Jesus claimed to be king then it would be an automatic death sentence. Pilate’s entire purpose in Jerusalem was to ensure that the only person that anyone called king was Herod - and to make sure that Herod that the king’s only Lord was Caesar. Pilate knew that Jesus knew Pilate’s reputation - he had viciously suppressed rebels and revolutionaries in the past. If Jesus claimed to be king, he’d have to fight for it. And if he had planned to fight, he would have brought an army. If Jesus cared at all for his life, and for whatever religious movement he was starting, the only sensible answer was no. 

But Jesus did not deny it. And he did not argue. He only said “You have said so,” as if Pilate was a witness, or as if Jesus couldn’t be bothered with the charge, and then Jesus went silent. 

The apostle John, when he describes the scene, shares another detail to show Pilate’s amazement. 

Do you refuse to speak to me?” Pilate said. “Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?

Jesus is silent, and Pilate is amazed. And for the first time, Pilate suspects that any man who must say “I’m in charge” is not as in charge as it seems. 

When the people of God have listened for the heart of God, they have often heard a kind of silence. It is not a dark silence that leaves us lost and directionless, it can be a silence that is too deep for words, the silence that is made possible by light, the kind of silence that makes watching a sunrise or sunset more powerful and not less. 

Maybe you’ve heard the story of the great prophet Elijah who was running from the threats and curses that Queen Jezebel was shouting against him. Elijah ran into the desert, he ran all the way to a lonely mountain where he hid in a cave, and it was there in the cave that Elijah felt brave enough to shout to God “My heart has burned for you, and I begged your people to be faithful. But they’ve destroyed everything and now they want to destroy me!” 

And God said, “come out, for I am going to bring my glory to this mountain.” And then a strong wind blew outside the cave, and then an earthquake shook the cave, and then a fire raged outside the cave. But Elijah, for all that he didn’t know, he knew that God was not in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire. it was only after… Oh, I love how the Common English Bible translates it:

“After the fire, there was a sound. Thin. Quiet. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his coat. He went out, and stood at the cave’s entrance.”

The bible is full of examples of faithful people who discovered the heart of God when they listened in the thin, quietude of their own silence - Job, Zechariah, Gamaliel, Jesus’ own mother Mary. In the book of Revelation John the Visionary tell us that after he saw the trials of this world, and after he saw the triumph of the saints, and after he saw the worship of the courts of heaven — then he saw the Lamb open a seventh and final scroll of promise and he saw it bring… thirty minutes of silence. The great victory of Jesus passed through the silence of the grave, and the final victory of the new creation will pass through its own silence as heaven and earth pass away, and a new day dawn. 

Richard Foster, one of the last century’s greatest teachers in prayer says that silence lies at the heart of every spiritual discipline. Silence is a kind of fasting - a fasting from the need to prove ourselves to God or others, a fasting from the words we use to fill our ears with emptiness rather than the presence of God. And indeed, if you want to experience the heart of God, you can start looking almost anywhere. 

And you can bring silence with you in almost everything. Practicing a fast from words does not mean going through life entirely mute — when Jesus stood before Pilate, he spoke before going silent. And before the Sanhedrin, Jesus was silent before speaking. 

There are many ways to practice silence. 

You can practice silence by fasting from having the last word. For one day, could it be enough for you to share your heart, and then be silent as someone else shares their own?

Silence matters just as much at your beginnings as it does at your endings. Michael Hyatt, once the publisher of Billy Graham, Max Lucado, and Charles Stanley - says he begins every day with 20 minutes of silence - he climbs out of bed, sits in a chair that is just straight enough he won’t fall asleep, and sits in silence for 20 minutes before he opens his bible to read and to pray. 

Silence can even be a cooperative gift right in the middle of things. One of the most grace-full meals I ever experienced was in the middle of a 24-hour silent retreat I took at the beginning of my ministry. We were all sitting around a family-style supper, and it turns out you have to pay closer attention to one another when your neighbor can’t interrupt you to ask for more potatoes. You have to be aware of one another, you have to look out for one another. It was not a long meal, but the memory of it has lasted 13 years. 

Silence is like salt and it is like light; if you make even a tiny space for it, it can change everything. It lies at the heart of all the ways we walk with God.

Mother Teresa was once asked what she prayed when she prayed to God; she said “I listen.” Then she was asked what God says to her; she replied, “He listens. I can’t explain it to you better than that.” If you know much of Mother Teresa’s testimony you know that she experienced long periods of spiritual dryness and difficulty - and yet the universal testimony of those who knew her is that her presence helped them trust the presence of God. Her knowledge of the silence of God brought God's light to others.  Chuck Swindoll, reflecting on her prayers of silence once wrote: “I do not believe anyone can become a deep person and intimate with God without stillness and silence.

And yet we live in an age that wars against silence. I suspect every age has resisted silence, but every day the conflict escalates as the forces of noise continue an arms race that is even more profitable and sophisticated than the wildest dreams of Lockheed-Martin. It’s not only that we find it hard to turn off the background noise — of music, radio, television, streaming video and podcasts — it’s that even when we tune out all the audible messages, we find that that the visual world has become noisy too. Even when it’s silent, the world is trying to get our ear. Between billboards, clothing slogans, car decals and labels, and the branded packaging that surrounds us in every story, marketing agencies consistently find that we are exposed - by a conservative estimate - to 5,000 impersonal messages a day. That’s before we consider how many words are shouted, whispered, or subliminally slipped into our minds by the people we actually know in real life or our second lives on Facebook, Insta, Twitter, and Snap. 

Even so, I believe underneath all that is a quiet, thin sound, still calling us to know the presence of God. Even as words have multiplied and piled on each other until they are all reduced to noise, we have also been learning that sometimes an image can say so much more than words. How many text messages have I sent that could have been better summed up with a single emoji? Some images are even more powerful than a message.  

And, as it turns out, the Bible says that we are made in God’s image. And the gospel says that Christ became like us, and in Him the “Word became flesh, and we have seen his glory,” and then it says that “no one has ever seen God, but Jesus Christ has made him known.”

So as I close this sermon today, we are going to do something a little different. I am going to read just a bit of the scripture that we have already heard. And this time, I am going to ask you to close your eyes. I’m going to ask you not to listen to the scripture, but to see it. See Jesus, standing there.

And when I’m done, we will just keep watching, with our eyes closed, for two minutes, in silence. Keep your heart fixed on Jesus. Don’t even ask what lesson you should take, or what message he has for you. His message is himself. He is offering you himself. There may be nothing for you to do but marvel.

And that’s ok. It would have been nice if Pilate had marveled a little longer. He spoke too quickly; he was afraid of the presence of Jesus and afraid of the silence. We can sympathize, for we are often afraid of silence, most especially because it is too much like death. But if we will learn to fix our eyes on Jesus, we can have this promise: even in the silence of death, Christ stands with you. His presence is enough to see you through with confidence if you will only look to him. 

When we see him truly, without excuses, without evasions, without demands, we discover what our words are good for. In heaven, they are not silent. In heaven, every word from every tongue proclaims what Jesus will not say for himself. “You are king! You are Lord!” 

Let us marvel in silence, so that we may praise Him in truth.

 

The Upside Down - Read or listen to Sunday's sermon here

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A sermon based on Mark 1:21-28

A sermon based on Mark 1:21-28

I can’t be the only one who has noticed that the more we seem to control the world, the more we want to escape it. We will go to almost any lengths to visit another world - even if that world terrifies us - just so long as that world provides us a moment to be astonished. 


Some of you saw the sermon title and you already know that I’m pulling us into the world of Stranger Things, the science fiction-horror-fantasy-nostalgia trip television show that took everything that has taken anyone ever liked about Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and John Carpenter and stuffed it into two seasons of pure money-making gold for Netflix. In Stranger Things, as in so many of our modern myths, the central question is what happens to young children who love to imagine a different world, but then discover that there is such a world when one of the boys slips from this world to the Upside Down While the little boys loved ones are trying to enter the alternate world to bring him back, all of the monstrous evil of the Upside Down is trying to enter our own world. And of course, there are some bad guys - scientists, of course - who are aiding and abetting the Upside Down, trying to tear down the buffers and the barriers that separate the Upside Down and the real world.


I don’t know about you, but this seems like a perfectly sensible strategy for dealing with evil and mysterious forces - keep them somewhere on the other side of a nice, wide demilitarized zone. It makes me think that today’s gospel lesson should never have happened. If the synagogue had had better security, there never would have been a demon-possessed man in that place. I don’t know how you picture this scene - but I am pretty sure that my own imagination of it comes from a bible miniseries I saw on TV as a child. In my mind, I can still see the shrieking, raving man running in from outside, messing up a well-planned worship service. Everything is calm, and then suddenly, immediately the doors are flung open and everything is turned upside down.  That’s the danger of allowing the Bible to become too familiar, of reading too quickly through it. You may find that you are not reading the scripture itself, but just casually remembering what you heard in it last time. 


Because Mark does not tell us that the man suddenly he appeared. The interruption was sudden, but the man had been there. The Greek verb “to be” in Mark 1:24 is in a tense called the imperfect, which refers to an ongoing action that is in the past - this man was being in that synagogue. He didn’t come bursting in the door; he was there in the congregation. For all that we know, he was one of the regulars. And maybe he had addressed other preachers like this before - but Mark says that this happened “euthys” suddenly, immediately. Most likely, the spirit that troubled this man had been quiet, unobtrusive - hiding in plain sight. 


Jesus has a way of drawing out what is hidden. From the moment Jesus steps into the pulpit, the people realize that his teaching is different. He teaches with “authority.” You know what authority is, don’t you? It’s a word that makes something happen. When a duly vested authority says to two people “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” it’s done. When a judge looks at the defendant and says “guilty” or “innocent” it becomes legally true the moment the words pass their lips. When a group of soldiers sits around talking about what we oughta do, it’s just an idea. When their commander walks in and says “here’s what we are gonna do,” it’s an order. Authority is a word that makes something happen. 


In that synagogue, in Capernaum, the people had the word, but no authority.  They synagogue system in Jesus’ day was not meant to reconcile the people with the wild, and living God. In the local synagogue, there were no sacrifices, no rituals of flesh and blood where the glory of God would shine on the people and judge them with a refining fire that purified what was precious and consumed what was false. 


And it turned out to be an ideal place for that torturing spirit to hide, sitting silent under all the right words spoken in all the right order. But when Jesus comes teaching, he brings more than the memories of long ago stories, more than the memories of how it used to be, and how it could have been. Jesus teaching came with the authority to say and to be what God is doing right now. Jesus came with an authority that unsettled everything that had been so perfectly arranged, an authority that speaks into every silence and shines a light in every shadow. Jesus took all the hiding places away. 


When Jesus spoke with authority, the spirit screamed, the man convulsed, and the people themselves were shaken. They turned to themselves and said, “that’s not what I came here for.” They said “what is this new teaching?” and “how is this going to change everything we had going on?” The evidence was right in front of them, but it wasn’t a great comfort. It turns out it was a little scary to discover the power of God, right in the middle of them. 


I can’t help thinking this morning of Rachael Denhollander. If you haven’t seen her name, Denhollander was the first former gymnast to give witness to the horrific abuse inflicted on over 150 patients of one man, who hid in plain sight, protected by the systematic silence and deflection of a host of coaches, administrators, and other colleagues. Denhollander first went public in 2016, and she says nothing could have prepared her for the price she would pay. About a year ago, in an interview with her hometown newspaper, she said:

“Everyone says they support what I'm doing. But when I start talking about their community, "Well, that's different." I've been told to shut up when talking about Joe Paterno. I've been told all kinds of things when talking about the Catholic Church or evangelical cover-ups. Everyone is willing to talk about it when it's their political opponent, but not when it’s their candidate.” In another article she wrote herself this week, the said that her work on behalf of victims had cost her friends, her privacy, and even her church. 


When you speak with authority you’ll find someone saying,  “You are the Holy One, you speak the truth. Have you come to destroy us?”


But last week, at the sentencing of her abuser, Rachael Denhollander also spoke a word that astonished and amazed, and caused more than a few people to say “What is this she is saying?” 


After years of preparation, she stood before her abuser and said:

"Should you ever reach the point of truly facing what you have done, the guilt will be crushing. And that is what makes the gospel of Christ so sweet. Because it extends grace and hope and mercy where none should be found. And it will be there for you.
I pray you experience the soul-crushing weight of guilt so you may someday experience true repentance and true forgiveness from God, which you need far more than forgiveness from me -- though I extend that to you as well.
Larry, I can call what you did evil and wicked because it was. And I can call it evil because I know what goodness is.”

I can call it evil because I know what goodness is. 


A word with authority is when the overwhelming light of Jesus Christ shows us the things that have been hiding, that have been secret, that have been minimized and treated as just the way things are.  and the greatest threat to us is not to be found “out there,” but it is often to be found in the things we have tried to manage or hide within us. A word with authority shows us that “the way things are is upside down”


And when God gives you authority over all the spirits that would possess your mind and soul, you may find yourself shaking. You may find old friends saying “Hey, this is more than we asked for." You may find yourself wondering whatever possessed you. But do not fear. The tremors are nothing but the death throes of the spirits that must be come out. They are the aftershocks of a world that must be turned over in order to be made right-side up. If you have glimpsed the goodness of God, then you go on and speak. And speak it with authority. 

 

Lenten Lunch Schedule Beginning Thursday, Feb 22

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It's that time of year again to gather with our sister churches in the area and come together for fellowship and devotions for the Lenten season!

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This years schedule is as follows:

February 22        New Bethel UMC hosting                Msgr Michael Tugwell speaking

March 1              First UMC hosting                            Rev. Darryl Hooks speaking

March 8             First Presbyterian hosting               Rev. Michael Precht speaking

March 15           Our Lady of Victory hosting            Rev. Gary Jones speaking

March 22           Mount Zion AME hosting                Rev. Mark Broadhead speaking

No Buffer — Read or listen to Sunday's sermon here

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A sermon from Mark 1:14-20, preached on January 21, 2018. 

[Note: due to audio issues with the original recording, this recording is not from a live worship service]

It was 1986 when my parents moved into the house where we would spend the rest of my childhood and teenage years. It was new construction, and the kitchen was built to accommodate the very latest technological advances. For example, the cabinets had a special cut out in them, right above the oven, and that space was specially designed for the installation of a transformational device—the microwave oven. 

I looked this up. In 1986, only about 25% of American homes had microwave ovens. Which is to say, my generation was the first one that can’t really remember a time before microwave ovens. And that, of course, is what is wrong with me. 

I heard it all the time, growing up. “We have a microwave society now, everybody wants instant gratification. Nobody has any patience anymore; we just want to push a button and ‘zap’ it’s done for us.” Microwaves were blamed for all kinds of social ills—short attention spans, bad grades, greed. 

Fast forward a few decades and the tone of the complaints are the same, even if the objects are different. The internet is so fast that nobody bothers to learn basic facts anymore; communication is so fast and so effortless that it interrupts everything; rather than being doled out week by week, more and more television shows are being released as an entire season, all at once. Which is great if you have an entire day with nothing to do but binge watch, but there is a special kind of dread that comes when you are afraid someone will spoil 10 hours worth of entertainment for you, only two hours after it was released. The same goes for movies. Jennifer and I both love the Star Wars series, but this last December we couldn’t make it to the movie theater for almost 3 weeks after the movie came out. Every morning I’d do my quick scroll thru Facebook just to see what is going on in my friends' lives, and I'd have one eye closed and a hand over my face so that no one could give anything away. 

With every single day, our cultural conversation moves faster, so fast that it’s hard to keep up. We take it for granted that there is this ever-present possibility that our technologies may become, or may already be, too fast. 

But the truth is, in many ways, the more pressing problem is that they are too slow.

This last Wednesday morning, I woke up wondering how cold it really was. I could have grabbed my phone, checked my weather app, waited a few seconds for it to load. I could have seen that number in the twenties, and I could have compared that with the day before and with the previous night to give myself a sense of the temperature. But instead, I opened my door and stepped outside and instantly a million temperature sensors all over my body came screaming back with all the information I needed: it was too cold. If I was more patient, I could have looked up more accurate or precise information, but I am from the microwave generation. I need instant feedback. That blast of air to my face was so much faster, and it told me all I needed. 

A smartphone company recently announced that their computer chips can recognize faces by processing 30,000 points of light in just a couple seconds. Which sound really impressive, until you realize that even before an image hits your brain it has passed through your retina, which has 100 million neurons processing every single thing that it sees. Your eye can process 10 images, each of them with a million points of light, in a single second. 

I don’t care how fluent you are on you emoji keyboard, I promise I can say more with one eyebrow raise, and I can say it faster. 

And let’s pause just a moment to think about the phenomenon we call “video on demand” which is all well and good until it becomes “video-on-hold-every-time-you push a button, and wait…. push a button… wait. buffering, buffering… buffering…” you can waste 10 seconds or more that way. 

In the stone age, when we used VCRs, every single interaction gave you instant feedback. You picked up the box and knew instantly if the tape was in it, you could tell by the weight and the sound. You shoved the tape in the machine and instantly you heard “ka-chunk” if it went in properly, or you felt a too-soon bump if a child had left their peanut butter and jelly in the player again. When you needed to rewind, you pushed a button that actually moved underneath your finger, you felt every micrometer of resistance letting you know the button had been pushed, and then you heard the whine of the rewinder getting higher and higher as it drew near the beginning. Every single moment of the experience gave you instant feedback. You never wondered whether the issue was in your own wiring, or in the neighborhood, or down at some server in another state. You never just sat around waiting, wondering, hoping something would happen. 

The gospel of Mark has no time for waiting. We’ve just come out of the season of Advent and Christmas… that time when we build the anticipation of the birth of Jesus. We slow down; we dream; we wonder what it will be like this time.
 
Mark ain’t got time for that. There is no Christmas story in Mark - he skips right over Mary and Joseph and little baby Jesus. He drops us right in the middle of the action. And one of his favorite words is “eutheos” —“immediately”- some translations will say “at once” or “right away. The word is used about 80 times in the new testament - half of them are in the gospel of Mark. It shows up 9 times just in the first chapter. 

Jesus calls to Simon and Andrew and “immediately” the left their nets. Jesus sees James and John and “immediately” he calls them. 

Today’s passage begins with a summary of the gospel that Jesus preached. As Mark describes it, this is Jesus' stump speech: “The time has come, the kingdom of God is near you, repent and believe the gospel.” The King James version says “The time is fulfilled”; Eugene Peterson's translation puts it this way: “Time’s up!”

If all the promises of Christmas are true — if Jesus really is “God with us” — then there is some sense in which we are done waiting, and it’s time to follow. 

Maybe that’s what you want. Maybe you woke up this morning saying “I want to follow Jesus,” and then maybe you’ve heard where Jesus wants you to go, what Jesus wants you to do, who Jesus wants you to hang out with and you began looking at your calendar for a more convenient day to follow. "You go on, Jesus. I'll catch up. I'm almost done mending these nets, just a few more squares and I'll be done. Then, of course, I need to fold them and put them neatly on the shelf for the person who comes after me. Don't worry, I'll catch up, hopefully, tomorrow."

There is someone here today who has heard Jesus calling them out of an old and death-dealing way of life. Calling you out of destructive relationships, calling you out of habits and secrets that you’ve gotten so good at hiding. "Jesus, I'll catch up just as soon as I make sure these secrets are good and buried." But Jesus says, "Let the dead bury the dead, come and follow me."

There is someone else here who has heard Jesus calling them out of a life that is cozy and familiar and incredibly comfortable. Jesus is calling you to do things that you know you won’t do well, to follow him on trails that are a bit beyond your fitness; Jesus is calling you to love some unlovely people.

And in response we say, “Sure thing Jesus, just give me some time to really understand my neighbor and then I’ll love them.” And Jesus says “the time is at hand.” Stop trying to understand and just go love ‘em.

We ask “Jesus, where are you headed with all this?” And Jesus says, “That’s not the point. The point is that today I am here. And the point is that wherever I go tomorrow if you follow you will be with me.” 

We ask, “Jesus, but will everything that happened yesterday be wasted?” and Jesus says, only if it keeps you from me today.” If everything that has gone before has prepared you to say yes to Jesus today, then the time is fulfilled and nothing is wasted. But if all that has gone before is your reason for letting Jesus go by, then not only will your past be wasted, but also the eternal life that Jesus is offering to you. 

We say “I want to make sure I’m doing it for the right reasons, I want to feel it in my heart” And he says, "the right reason is that I said it. Trust my heart, and I’ll take care of yours."

And the more we talk to Jesus, the more we discover that our plans, our expectations, our timetables and even our precious patience can become a buffer that we use to keep Jesus at a safe distance, where he can’t ask too much. 

There comes a time when the only way we are going to learn the way of Jesus, the love of Jesus, the power of Jesus - is if we walk so closely that we have 24-hour continuous and instant feedback that comes from touching the people he told us to embrace, and listening to the unfiltered word of God that challenges us and comforts us in equal measure. There comes a time when we say that we are waiting for Jesus, but he’s already come by and already told us to follow, and he’s gone on ahead, and the longer we wait the less we’ll be ready. 

Sometimes, it turns out that waiting until we feel it in our heart is just another buffer. 

Sometimes, we just gotta follow. Immediately.

Office Closure Wednesday, Jan 17

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Due to inclement freezing weather, our church will be closed Wednesday, Jan 17.

All scheduled activities including prayer groups, study groups, choirs, youth, and children activities are cancelled.

Benevolence appointments have been rescheduled for Wednesday, Jan 24, at the same times.

***UPS, FedEX, and postman!*** Please redeliver packages on Thursday, Jan 18.

We apologize for any inconvenience.