I knew a lady who loved Psalm 19.
I would start reading it and she would take up and recite the rest.
Whenever I hear Psalm 19 read or sung I always think of her.
And of the God who we both loved marvelling about.
Vocals by Skye Peterson are an added bonus.
When Life Is Good Again by Dolly Parton.
A song about resumption and renewal.
There are some aspects of life that we are looking forward to returning to.
There are other aspects of life than we don’t have to put on pause or delay.
It’s so important not to get those enduring aspects mixed up with the seasonal ones.
Otherwise you miss out on life while you busy yourself living.
Christian discipleship can never comfortably rest in the general. It has to be applied in the specific.
The more general the repentance, the easier it is to transition from true Gospel dependence on life-giving grace as the response to a reliance on a moralistic determination to do better.
Will Willimon writes about preaching to confront racism in his 2017 book Why Lynched Willie Earle?
A church that no longer knows how to name sin has no need for talk of redemption because we have lost the ability to know that we need redeeming. We have been so wonderfully successful in saving ourselves by ourselves that a monthly drop-in at church for a moral pep talk is sufficient.
Such has always been the faith of people in power, people on top, people who assume that his world, for all its faults, is our world, people whose faith is mostly in ourselves. People on top come to church to stabilise things as they are rather than to dare to live into a new heaven and a new earth in which God “pulled the powerful down” and “lifted up the lowly” as Mary sang in her Magificat (Luke 1:52; see vv. 46-55). Apocalyptic preaching engenders in the congregation the conviction that this is not all there is, that power, goodness, justice, and action exist beyond and above that seen in the presently experienced world. Thereby apocalyptic destabilises a world that is officially sanctioned as ll there is. Advantaged people are always made nervous by eschatalogical language that promises something more that present arrangements and dreams of divine disruption.Will Willimon, Who Lynched Willie Earle?, Abingdon, 2017, pg 68.
This is the video recorded for Mount Gambier Presbyterian Church for the weekend of June 21, 2020.
We’re planning to prerecord one more service, and then transitioning to livestream on July 5th.
Today I preached the sermon for the June 28 prerecord, and am actively thinking more about July 5, even though it’s only June 22.
Naaman’s story reaches what would seem to be a happy ending, if these were stories that were only concerned with happy endings.
But they’re being gathered for people who feared they were the definition of an unhappy ending, and who might have been tempted to think of God as simply the means by which their definition of a happy ending could be achieved.
God is the means to no one’s end.
That was the mistake that got the people to where they were.
God is the end in himself, and the story of Gehazi demonstrates that in graphic power.
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