Words To Live By

This past week our family went to Disney for a vacation.

I have been to Disney a bunch of times in my life.

This time I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before.

As you walked around the various Disney parks there were different areas blocked off because they were under construction.

That part I had noticed before, Disney is always changing things, or making things better.

What I noticed this time is that on the wall of all those places under construction were quotes from Walt Disney.

Things like, “You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.”

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”

Or “It's kind of fun to do the impossible.”

All of these quotes caught my eye for some reason.

I was drawn to them.

I began to think of why they had taken the time to put up these signs of Walt Disney quotes all over the parks.

I suspect that it is so that the people building the new attractions or fixing the old ones will remember why they doing it.

It is for people like me who are visiting the parks and will see why they are making changes.

I would like to think that Disney wants to remind people of the principles that drive their mission.

And the way to do that is to go back to the source.

To go back to the words of the man who started it all.

It got me thinking about our congregation and what drives us.

What makes our church run or go?

What makes us choose to do the things we do?

And the reason for us being here together, and the reason we have a church is because we are followers of Jesus Christ.

Jesus is our founder.

And it is Jesus’ words that drive our mission.

So this morning, you might have noticed, I have posted on hot pink paper the words of Jesus Christ.

I hope you might take some time before leaving here this morning to look at some of those words.

I hope you might take time to think about how those words drive our mission together.

How these words shape our life as a congregation and your life as an individual.

These words of Jesus are why we are here today.

They are what we are working towards, because the Church, this church, Concordia Lutheran Church, is always under construction.

It is always imperfect, in need of improvement.

It is always growing into what God wants it to be, needs it to be.

That is true of us as a congregation, and it is also true of us as individuals within this congregation.

We all need some work.

But Jesus didn’t say these things to shame us, but rather to so that we might be encouraged and inspired to live them out as individuals and a community.

And that is what our Gospel from St. John is talking about this morning.

“Those who love me will keep my word.”

To love Jesus is to know what words he spoke.

It is to take those words as our inspiration so that we might live them out in the world.

Jesus left behind these words because he knew that we as a people were an incomplete project.

Jesus knew that we would need the Holy Spirit to guide us in to becoming who we were meant to be.

So if we want to know what it means to be a Christian, to be a person who proclaims Jesus Christ as Lord and savior.

It means to know his words, and to follow them.

I know for me the following is often the hard part.

I seem I know the words, but I have trouble sometimes in doing them.

I know what I am supposed to do, but fail to be everything Jesus asks me to be.

I don’t always love my enemy.

I don’t always love my neighbor as myself.

I don’t always act humbly and serve others.

I struggle with it at times.

But I take solace in the words that Jesus speaks this morning.

I take solace that I am not alone in this construction project that is Jonathan Hopkins, and Concordia Lutheran Church.

First of all I have all of you.

We are on this journey together.

We are trying to figure out how best to live into Jesus’ words together.

And when I fall I count on all of you to help get me back on track.

I count on you all to forgive me, so I might try again.

And all of you need to count on each other for that same kind of support, and encouragement.

That is what a Christian community can do for each other.

Second, I have the Holy Spirit that I feel is always working on me.

The Holy Spirit is calling me again and again to live a more real and fulfilling life.

Not a life of superficial outward appearances.

But a real life filled with all of its contradictions, all of its messiness, and hard choices.

The Holy Spirit is there as a guide for me as I find my way back to the words that I have posted on the walls of the Church this morning.

Because here is the thing about the signs I saw in Disney many people probably didn’t even notice them.

They were just upset that there was no Pocahontas show this year, or that there was construction on the monorail.

That is how it is with the words of Jesus sometimes too.

We don’t see them, or forget them, or are annoyed that they are in our way stopping us from doing what we want to do.

But there were probably other people who were also there who had seen those words of Walt Disney everyday as they went to work.

And maybe they didn’t inspire them, because they were sick of seeing those same words.

Or maybe they just have “more important things” to do then think about some words.

That is how we can be too.

We can take Jesus words for granted because we have heard them so much.

We just brush them aside as we go to work, or get things done.

We don’t think that these words are the bases for our daily work, these words of Jesus are how we are supposed to go about doing our work.

They form the bases of a better life and better work.

You can’t be a good boss without loving and caring for the people who work for you.

You can’t be a good spouse without being a servant to them.

You can’t be a good parent without thinking about how your love will grow in your kids.

These words of Jesus they are meant to inspire us to live out our mission in all those areas of our lives.

And I am aware that we fail at those things often, but that is why we go back to the words.

They remind us of what is really important.

Far from the everyday battles we fight, they remind us of the real mission we are on.

The mission to spread the love we have received in Jesus Christ.

We are on the mission to make this world a better place, a more compassionate place.

A Godlier place, a place filled with God’s love shown to us in Jesus Christ.

Our Church is given that task by Jesus Christ, and we are not perfect in it, but we are called again and again by Jesus’ words.

Our church is a construction zone filled with all of us who are under construction.

We are one our way figuring out life as we move along.

It is helpful along the way to be reminded of the words of our founder.

To be reminded of the words of the person who put the church together so that we might know our mission, so that we might have direction, so that we might be inspired to live under, in, and through these words of Jesus Christ.

Amen

Resurrection Eyes

One of our members Phil Joseph works the night shift at the Red Roof inn on route 106.

Phil will often come into church on Sunday morning with some tale of what happened at the hotel the night before.

And I was thinking of maybe sharing one of these stories with you, but they would not be appropriate for Sunday morning.

Phil will often say to me, “Unfortunately it makes you cynical about people.”

It is true.

I had a member of my last congregation who was a police man for 25 years in New York City who said the same thing.

We all feel this way at times.

Here we are on another Sunday morning after another horrific terrorist bombing.

How can we not be cynical about the world when people will blow themselves up to kill 31 innocent people?

How can we not be afraid of what is going on all around us?

How can we not hate the people that did this?

How do we stop from being cynical when all around us we see the underside of human behavior?

How do we continue to have hope?

I believe the answer lies in shifting our perspective.

The answer is seeing life not through hope in people that they might change or be better, but in seeing life from the lens of the resurrection.

That is what I want us to consider this Easter morning.

What does life look like from this side of the resurrection?

The resurrection can help us to see life differently.

I want to start by saying that the resurrection does not deny the reality of life.

It does not deny the ugliness of it.

The story of the resurrection includes violence, hatred, and vitriol.

It includes all the worse part of who we are as humans.

But the resurrection transcends our human ways.

It takes all of our worst and says that it is not enough to hold back God’s love and grace.

The one who denies Jesus is the one who goes to the tomb, and the one who becomes the leader of the group.

The women, who were initially terrified, become the ambassadress for the truth of the resurrection.

I will admit that seeing life from resurrection is difficult to comprehend.

The story the women tell seems like an idle tale.

Peter is amazed but maybe not convinced of what just happened.

There are no easy answers.

Are we not the same?

This whole resurrection thing is hard to believe, hard to understand.

What is important within the story we hear this morning from Luke is that the women who went to the tomb keep remembering what Jesus told them.

Faith is the act of remembering again and again the things we are told by God.

“You are my beloved”

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

“For God so loved the world.”

“Nothing can separate us from the Love of God in Christ Jesus.”

“The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want.”

But it is also a constant experience that we have with a God who is not dead but alive.

It is God who raises us up to new life.

It is God who changes our hearts, heals our hearts.

We don’t have faith in people, we have faith in God.

That is what helps us to not be cynical but hopeful.

We believe through faith that God’s love will win even if we can’t see it.

That is what happens when we see the life through the lens of the resurrection.

If we can see people through resurrection eyes it can change our perspective on them.

Earlier this week I was at a retreat.

Part of that retreat was some of my colleagues sharing their stories of recovery from alcohol.

I am always amazed at those stories because they really are miracles.

When we see an addict through resurrection eyes we see someone not as an addict but someone who has the possibility of new life.

I was reading this past winter about two women.

Both of them have experienced great tragedies in their lives.

They both share the experience of having someone they love kill other people.

One of them is Sue Klebold.

Her son, Dylan, was one of the people involved in the Columbine Massacre.

Dylan killed 12 people, injured 29 before taking his own life.

As a parent I can’t imagine what it was like to find out that your son had done this horrible thing.

I can’t imagine having to try to understand why her son did this.
I can’t imagine the guilt I would feel.

The hurt for all those people my son hurt.

It must have been the worst thing in the world.

Sue has written a book and has been speaking out about what she went through.

She wrote in a article for OprahMagazine, this paragraph.

“Since the tragedy, I have been through many hours of therapy.

I have enjoyed the devotion and kindness of friends, neighbors, coworkers, family members, and strangers.

I also received an unexpected blessing.

On a few occasions I was contacted by the parents of some of the children killed at the school.

These courageous individuals asked to meet privately so we could talk.

Their compassion helped me survive.”

People who her son did irreparable damage to offered her a moment of grace.

In an interview she gave on television she said this about her son,

“The one thing I have hoped for again and again…That I must see him again.”

Through it all she still holds out hope that on the other side she will see her son who she loves again.

This is what life looks like from the other side of the resurrection.

It sees a killer as a son.

It is neighbors who forgive.

It is hope of resurrection to new life.

It is hope Dylan through it all might be redeemed and loved.

The other story was of the wife of Charlie Roberts, Marie.

Charlie was the man who killed 5 girls and injured 5 others in an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania.

Marie talks about what happened to her the minutes after she found out what her husband had done.

She was standing in her house thinking about all the implications of what had happened.

How would she tell her children?

How would she explain it to the world?

How would she make sense of it herself?

She stood there for a minute in her house staring at her ceiling fan.

This is what she says happens next, “I could choose to believe that everything written about God in the pages of the Word were true, and that he was going to rescue me and my family.

Or I could choose to believe that we were going down like the fastest sinking ship.”

She saw this from the resurrection lens.

She saw what was awful, horrible, and unspeakable and trusted God to transform it into something else.

Many of you know some of what happens next.

The other people in her community gathered around her, they came to the funeral of her husband.

They brought her food.

They told her not to leave the community.

They offered her grace.

She says it best, “God takes the most broken and destroyed situation and brings beauty and life out of it.”

That is how we stop from being cynical.

We turn it over to God.

We trust God will find a way when we cannot.

The disciples could not fathom that God would find a way to make Jesus’ crucifixion a beautiful and wonderful thing.

God does.

God turns addicts into pastors.
God turns victims of shootings into ambassadors of forgiveness.

God turns death into life.

God turns brokenness into beauty.

That is what life looks like from this side of the resurrection.

Truth is that Phil knows this, because he has also told me stories where he has been put in positions by God to help people at the hotel.

But it is not about Phil or you and me, it is not about how we save people, it is about what God does through people and situations.

When we have faith God turns even the worst possible thing we can imagine into something beautiful.

That is why we are here this morning.

That is why we come on Easter morning.

To see life through the prism of the resurrection that helps us to get through life by seeing new possibilities.

To see that God’s love wins.

That God has the victory!

That truth changes how we see life and all the people around us!

Yes…even the people at the Red Roof Inn.

Amen