All Series

Rerouting
2/22 - 4/9/2023
Jesus is the King of Kings and the Servant of Humankind; the Alpha and Omega, and the Lion and the Lamb. He goes by a multitude of names, each one of them allowing a glimpse into the picture of Christ’s redemptive work for humanity. The Christological discourse serves as the underpinning for the work of the church and the past two millennia of human history at a macro level. Yet, the microlevel requirements for the daily interactions of a modern person feel elusive and confusing. Knowing that Jesus is the Beginning and the End, the Word of God revealed to Humanity is essential to our faith, but we are left wondering what are the basic teachings for our kids and ourselves. What are we to do with our faith? In all of his conversations and relationships, the venerated titles that Christ held were rarely of proclamations of his own. He made it clear that he was God, but did not seek active worship from the people of his time. His directive was, “Follow me.” The vocabulary implications of this simple request was that Jesus would be walking towards some end goal. We are to accompany him on that journey, or in so many other ways, he would be accompanying us in that journey. Our faith calls us to walk with Jesus. In the season of Lent, we are faced with the reality of the where Jesus’s journey would take him. The cross, the heart wrenching penultimate act of his ministry, is where the road would take him, and at no point does he look at his followers and ask them to not go further with him. The followers were called to be with him in every step until the end. In trying to understand what the personhood of Jesus means for our daily lives, the teachings we must rely on are the fundamentals he outlined from his earliest ministry day and continued to reiterate until those final moments.
More Than Conquerors
5/14 - 6/19/2022
In the early first century, culturally speaking, everything was positioned around the idea that a nation ought to expand and conquer to accumulate power and influence. In this way, the movement that began with Jesus was positioned well to be a religion that was focused on going out in the world, spreading its message to new nations, and converting others to this system of beliefs. The world was primed for a religious movement that would respond to the great commission, and in effect, go forth and conquer. Yet, the church was not about conquering. It did not hope to extinguish and assimilate every other person and culture. Instead, the early church grew on the basis that it had the ability to universally speak to the human condition of brokenness and offer hope and promise in the wake of that very condition. The church would be more than the conquerors. Everyone was coming to believe in the promise of God. The Gospel reached into different cultures, differently idioms and languages altogether. In this message, they preached and believed that Jesus would return again, and would return again sooner rather than later. Nobody could have fathomed the idea that 2000 years into the future, we would still be waiting on this return. They were teaching each other lessons and lifting each other up in the hopes that they would be alive to see the grand return. However, those lessons taught have a practicality that transcends any time period. In growing over this time, the church moved beyond the disciples. What was once an effort of individuals and leaders who had all had direct connections to, and conversations with, the risen Lord now transitioned to a movement of different ages, nations, and races of converted believers who had simply heard the Good News of the Gospel. They would lean on their own spiritual experiences of the divine rather than tangible interactions with God Incarnate. What will leadership look like in this new Church? Who can be a part of this faith movement? What will be required to participate? Most importantly, how do those messages speak to us today?
Appeared
4/23 - 5/8/2022
Easter has come, Christ has been resurrected. We have enjoyed the big celebrations, the Easter egg hunts, and the family meals, but we forget that there was more than an empty tomb after Christ was resurrected. There were more visits than the brief encounter of the women in the garden. A fully resurrected Christ is a free Christ. Jesus could have gone anywhere and done anything after the resurrection, and yet he chose to search for the disciples. Jesus sought out the ones who abandoned and failed him more than anyone else. The ones who swore loyalty disappeared. The ones who followed in his footsteps for three years turned their backs on the suffering Savior. The ones who pledged to help transform the world abandoned the mission in fear and shame. Yet the story of the cross and resurrection is true for each of us through the power of God’s grace: we are more than our worst moments. The worst thing is never the last thing. What might those disciples have been feeling after the cross? Can you imagine the deep silence between them? The shared knowledge of their failures? The unrelenting question: “What now?” Brene Brown defines shame as “an intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.” It is not hard to imagine the deep shame of these disciples, one that each of them knew intimately and yet did not want to name. Shame assigns identity based on our worst moments. It thrives on secrecy. It is “the fear that something we’ve done or failed to do, an ideal we’ve not lived up to, or a goal we’ve not accomplished makes us unworthy of connection” (Brene Brown, Atlas of the Heart, 137). We see over and over again in the Gospels and Acts scenes of redemption and healing through God’s grace. Jesus could have chosen to abandon the ones who left him at the cross, who pretended they did not even know him, to start from scratch with better disciples. Yet in God’s infinite grace and unrelenting love, the disciples were chosen for connection, relationship, and entrusted with the mission of Christ. Jesus confronts their failures head on. This is the Christian story: our deepest shame is redeemed and we are transformed into world-changing disciples