Where Have We Gone Wrong?

I saw this on Steve Taylor's Blog, and it stirred all sorts of thoughts and feelings.

Seriously, why? For what purpose? If the music is indicative, the church is going to need to be moved again...and again...and again, until it is in a museum.

8-Bit Humor

Anyone remember Nintendo? Zelda, Metroid, Super Mario Brothers, Punch-Out!!!

Here's a great video for all you NES lovers out there!!!

Good Friday Service

Good Friday Service
with Main Street Christian Church

The service was a darker service highlighted by the Scriptures...I give no words from my sermon for I said little, and what I did say pales in comparison to the recorded words of those who knew Jesus best...

Prelude: It Happened on That Fateful Night Sara Peterson
Greeting: Mark Need

A Call to Worship: Ken Rickett
Father God, you did not send your Son so that we could keep on doing life as we always have done. Jesus’ life and death signal to us a new work in our own lives. Help us to see you at work in the Cross where Jesus took upon himself our pain, our guilt, our sin, our shame, even our hatred and violence. As we remember the blood of the Christ flowing down the Cross, God, we ask you to wash us. Make us new. Give us the courage to be crucified with Christ so that we too may have victory over sin and shame in our own lives. Write us into Jesus’ story, Almighty God. Amen.


*Meditation in Music: Old Rugged Cross UMH #504


Luke 22:39-44: Jesus prays alone
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, forgive me for my forgetfulness and the times I take you for granted. Help me to be mindful that in my sinfulness I have offended you and grievously hurt you. Have mercy and forgive my shortcomings.

Matthew 26:47-56: Jesus is arrested
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, so many times have I abandoned your teachings in favor of expediency. I have left behind all that you taught so many times and have neglected my duty to love others as you have loved me. Forgive me and bless me with your strength.


Pastoral Prayer Ken Rickett



Mark 14:61-64: The Sanhedrin tries Jesus
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, sometimes I find myself confronted by unjust accusations from people I considered to be my friends. The pain I felt was so terrible at this betrayal; yet in your case, you forgave them before they did you harm and attempted to defame you. Teach me how to be humble and forgiving, but most of all how to love so completely.

Mark 15:6-19: Pilate sentences Jesus and crown of thorns
Let us pray
Lord Jesus, it was my sins that condemned you to the cross; and I ask you by the merits of this sorrowful journey to assist my soul in its journey toward eternity. Never permit me to separate myself from you again, and help me to grow in my love of God the Father and appreciate your sacrifice for me.

John 19:17: Jesus carries his cross
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, I accept all the tribulations I will have to endure for the rest of my life. I ask you, by the merits of the pain that you endured, to grant me strength to endure and carry my cross through life with patience and resignation. I repent of my sins and ask that you help me keep from separating myself from you ever again.


Meditation in Music Cheryl Owens


Luke 23:33-34: Jesus is crucified
Silent Prayer


Meditation in Video The Cross


Sermon “Look”


*Meditation in Music: When I Survey the Wondrous Cross UMH #298

Luke 23:39-43: Criminals speak to Jesus
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, so many times I have been so selfish in my pain that I forgot how others too feel pain. Sometimes I have forgotten to help out when I could have, and I violated your final commandment that we love one another.

John 19:28-34: Jesus dies on the cross
Let us pray.
My dying, Lord Jesus, I embrace devoutly as I behold the cross you died on for me. My sins have merited for me a miserable death; but by your death, I have hope. Let me die embracing your feet and burning with a love for you.


Meditation in Music Upon a Sinner’s Cross Choir


John 19:38-42: Jesus is laid in the tomb
Silent Prayer

Meditation in Music Jesus by Rich Mullins


Please exit in silence when you are finished praying

Holy Thursday Service

Holy Thursday Service
around Candle-lit tables for "families" to gather

Scripture: John 15:9-17
Sermon: "The Family"

We gather this evening to remember the last night that Jesus spent with his Disciples. Gathered around a meal, they cele-brated Passover with unleavened bread, bitter herbs, wine, and lamb. Leonardo DiVinci’s Last Supper has given us an iconic image of that night. We picture the square table with Jesus in the middle, the feminine John leaning on Jesus, Peter looking intense, with them all sitting on chairs.

Though a masterpiece of art, it doesn’t have much historic resonance. Jesus and his followers would have been reclined on sofa like pillows on the floor around a small table just a few inches off the ground. Though John loved Jesus as a brother, he was also known as one of the “Sons of Thunder”…To me it sounds like Hell’s Angels or something and my guess is that a dude named a Son of Thunder doesn’t look too much like Mary Magdalene, despite the controversies of the Divinci Code!

No on that evening they celebrated the Jewish Passover, a fam-ily ritual of eating a meal and reading the story of the Exodus from Egypt. How God told the Hebrew slaves to kill an un-blemished, perfect lamb and paint the wood above their doors with its blood. They were to gather their family together, and they ate together and prepared for the journey that God was calling them to take. And later that night, the Angel of the Death came and took the sons of Egypt, thus forcing Pharaoh to let God’s people go. It is a story of deliverance…when the Angel of the Death passed over.

And Jews still to this day gather together as families, they eat supper together, they tell the story of God and Moses and the Hebrew slaves…how God humbled the man who would play at god, Pharaoh, and they celebrate God’s blessing of Salvation for their people.

Passover is a big deal, and part of why it has remained a stead-fast part of Jewish faith is that it is based entirely around the family. You eat the Passover with family. It’s a great honor, too, to be invited by a Jewish friend to Passover because it means you are being welcomed as family.

That night, when Jesus ate with his Disciples…It was All about family.

This was written to a website called Adoption.com and is part of a group of parents that discusses trying to find their adopted children. Here is an exerpt:

My search has taken me to many places, some I never want to visit again. There are times that my daughters and I think that perhaps my son just doesn't want to be found. So, here again I go feeling as if I may be dumping salt in an open wound.

From there she takes time to give some specifics about the date, birthplace and adoption agency - in hopes that someone will read it - and help her find her son. She goes on –

All I want is just to know he is fine, and happy. To let him know that he has 4 sisters and a brother, 3 brand new nieces. I may not be on this earth for much longer, I have a brain tumour. I realize that some adoptees don't want to contact their birth families. I don't even need to meet him. Although that would be a dream come true. We just want him to know that every day I think of him. I celebrate his birthday each year. People want to know how many kids I have, I answer 6… Perhaps this may reach him, maybe not, but I just have to keep searching.

It's easy to read the agony in this mother's voice. To know that somewhere in this world there is a son that was born to her, which she desperately wants to meet, and has been trying to contact, but has had no luck…

A man named Mark who lives in a very white city named Springfield MO has three girls of colour. He and Karen traveled to India several years ago to adopt their daughters from an or-phanage. You'd think that cultural divide and the unknown medical history of their girls would be their greatest burden. Not so. Mark and Karen are frequently asked, "are those kids YOURS? We also get a lot of people asking, even when we are out eating as a family, are they sisters? I know what they mean, but it's obvious they are sisters now." When Mark’s daughters were small a woman came up to him in the supermarket and said "you should be ashamed of yourself, having children by so many different mothers." He replied, "It's worse than you think, they all have different fathers, too" and walked off.

When Jesus told his Disciples to gather together and prepare the Passover feast, Jesus made a statement: You are my family. It’s something that Jesus pointed out during his ministry, too. Once, he went so far as to ignore his half-brother, and say, “Those that do what I command are my mother and my sisters and my brothers.” One of the amazing statements of the Bible is that God calls us His adopted children.

Along those lines, Tertullian once said that "Christians are made, not born." In the New Testament baptism is fundamen-tally an adoption by God. An adopted child does not chose her/his parents, they are chosen by their new parents. They are MADE children of the parents. Likewise God choses us…God makes us His! As William Willimon says, "faith is accepting that we are children of God.
You see Jesus instituted a new family. A family by blood. A family by The Blood! By his blood. You and I in faith are brothers and sisters in Christ. Jesus invites us to feast as fam-ily.

Jesus’ command, his only new command, was this: “Love one another, as I have loved you.”

It is the voice of a dying parent, begging the siblings to get along after he is gone. It is the cry of every parent who sees their children fighting and hating each other. It is the very tears of God that today, the Church still fights amongst itself. Crying heresy here! Wrong theology there! Not good enough! Too liberal! Too conservative!

Here in the USofA, I see so many churches interested in com-peting with each other as they try to reshuffle the deck. Not realizing that of the 52 cards in the deck, 40 of them are still on the floor dying to be picked up.

If we are to take anything from this evening. If we are to be-lieve anything about Jesus’ desire for us, his followers, it is this: Love one another.

You and I…We’re family. Sure we may disagree from time to time, but we’re family. Jesus says to love one another. To be one. To have one faith, one baptism, one Spirit, one Lord.

Tonight let’s eat this supper in honor of Jesus, as brothers, sis-ters, family…Loving one another.

15 Years Ago Today...

I remember sitting in health class, hearing for the first time that Kurt Cobain had shot himself. As an avid Nirvana fan, my stomach just dropped.

How sad that a brilliant, yet disturbed mind was taken so young by drugs.

Here's to the musician that brought the world "Blew" and "Drain You"...the two very best Nirvana songs.

Thundercats

I just saw some stuff about the Thundercats, and I got major nostalgia going on! If you're asking what Thundercats are, you need to watch this video!



What a great show! Lion-o was awesome, and Cheetara was hot!

I haven't seen an episode in years...maybe I'll have to do some looking around and change that!

Good Neighbors

Sermon: Good Neighbors
Scripture: Titus 2:1-15

Just Like Jesus
God Loves to Renovate - In his book, Just Like Jesus, Max Lucado speaks of how his wife likes to renovate. She loves changing the curtains, painting walls, rearranging furniture. He says that it’s a passion of hers, and that their house is al-ways changing. He says that once they bought their house, he thought that it was all done...that after the negotiating and moving in, they could just relax...Not so...immediately there were remodeling projects and a concerted effort to make the place better.

And has time has gone on, he’s begun to appreciate this about his wife...he even goes so far as to say that she picks up this trait from her Father...Her Heavenly Father! He says, “God loves to decorate. God HAS to decorate. Let him live long enough in a heart, and that heart will begin to change. Walls of anger will be demolished and shaky, fearful foundations re-stored.

God loves you just the way you are, but he refuses to leave you that way...He wants you to be Just Like Jesus.


Something Better - A father tells the story of a how he and his toddler daughter would go to the park together. They would play, and play. After a while, he would go and buy her an ice-cream cone. One day, he bought the cones like normal, but he noticed that his daughter, who had been asking intently for her ice cream, was now shoving sand into her mouth...

Where he intended delicacy, she was shoving dirt. Did he love her with dirt in her mouth. Of course! Was she any less his daughter? Of course NOT! But, he had to take her over to the water fountain, clean out her mouth, and teach her not to put dirty sand in her mouth...

It’s the same with God. God has taken us to the fountain of His love is washing our lives clean. He says to each of us, “I have something better for you...and so he cleanses us of our filth...of our immorality, our dishonesty, our prejudice, our bitterness, our greed.

And while it may not always feel good, and the renovations might be a bit disheveling, We can rest assured that God has something better for us....much better.

Salvation is Here!
The Cross
New Life - Rabbi Beryl Cohon has been one of the most ex-pressive thinkers in Judaism. Rabbi Cohon used to love to walk down the bank of the Charles River in the Cambridge-Boston area. One day he saw a number of boys sailing toy sailboats. They had seven little boats in the lagoon. Some were moving faster than others; one or two capsized and had to be pulled out and righted; one struck the embankment and had to be pushed off. Some barely had enough wind in their sails to drift along. A few were moving very fast. The same wind, blowing from the same direction, caused some to capsize, some to stall, some to move fast, and some to move in circles. They all were turning in different directions when the same force was playing upon all of them.

The explanation, of course, lies in the set of the sail. As the sail is adjusted, so does the boat travel. If the wind is caught, the skillful sailor can even guide a vessel in the very teeth of the storm.

General Thoughts
Live Wisely – Paul is calling us to live wisely. Jesus said, “Be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves.” Part of the Christian faith, of being a Jesus follower is using our heads. To understand wise living. To make good choices. To under-stand that there are easy ways that fail and hard ways that suc-ceed. For example, too many people want to get rich quick and so they fall into the “5 easy steps to wealth” stuff…or they buy with credit cards to “pay it off later” or they buy homes with variable rate mortgages, not understanding that if rates go up they’ll be unable to afford their home! Instead, God calls us to lives of saving, living within our means, of buying only what we can afford, of earning all we can, saving all we can, and giving all we can.

God calls us to live wisely in all parts of our lives, and unfortu-nately, there’s a part of Christian culture that assumes that brains don’t matter…that using our heads isn’t important. I remember in our college ministry there were students who didn’t care about their grades or about learning, and it always made me mad because our professors saw it as a weakness of our faith…that someone being a Christian encouraged us to not think. On the contrary, we are called to be wise.
Filled with Love - In an age when the word 'love' is greatly abused, it is important to remember that the primary compo-nent of biblical love is not affection but commitment. Warm feelings of gratitude may fill our consciousness as we consider all that God has done for us, but it is not warm feelings that Deut. 6:5 demands of us but rather stubborn, unwavering commitment. Similarly, to love our neighbor, including our enemies, does not mean that we must feel affection for them. To love the neighbor is to imitate God by taking their needs seri-ously. [p. 260]

Integrity – We must live with integrity…To be honest, to be trustworthy, to live at home like we profess at church.

No Slandering (Gossip) – You can’t love your neighbor if you are talking about them behind their back. You can’t love someone if you’re assassinating their character. You can’t for-give or not judge someone if you continue to bring up their mis-takes or their moral failures again and again. Jesus followers don’t gossip. They don’t slander. They encourage and edify and build each other up.

Teaching
1. My mother taught me TO APPRECIATE A JOB WELL DONE. "If you're going to kill each other, do it outside. I just finished cleaning."
2. My mother taught me RELIGION. "You better pray that will come out of the carpet."
3. My mother taught me about TIME TRAVEL. "If you don't straighten up, I'm going to knock you into the middle of next week!"
4. My mother taught me LOGIC. "Because I said so, that's why."
5. My mother taught me MORE LOGIC. "If you fall out of that swing and break your neck, you're not going to the store with me."
6. My mother taught me FORESIGHT. "Make sure you wear clean underwear, in case you're in an accident."
7. My mother taught me IRONY. "Keep crying, and I'll give you something to cry about."
8. My mother taught me about the science of OSMOSIS. "Shut your mouth and eat your supper."
10. My mother taught me about STAMINA. "You'll sit there un-til all that spinach is gone."
11. My mother taught me about WEATHER. "This room of yours looks as if a tornado went through it."
12 My mother taught me about HYPOCRISY. "If I told you once, I've told you a million times. Don't exaggerate!"
14. My mother taught me about BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION. "Stop acting like your father!"
15. My mother taught me about ENVY. "There are millions of less fortunate children in this world who don't have wonderful parents like you do."
16. My mother taught me about ANTICIPATION. "Just wait until we get home."
20. My mother taught me HUMOR. "When that lawn mower cuts off your toes, don't come running to me."
22. My mother taught me GENETICS. "You're just like your father."
25. And my favorite: My mother taught me about JUSTICE. "One day you'll have kids, and I hope they turn out just like you!"

By Life - Deut. 6:4 - I say it alot, but it’s true...the most impor-tant thing we can do is to teach our children when we get up in the morning, when we lie down, when we’re at home or even on a journey, all of life should be spent teaching our children about life and faith. About God and how to love each other. All of life should be an exercise of teaching life. We are called to be teachers, teachers through the way we live.

By Example - We Need People to Teach us what to learn!
A man, returning from a business trip, was met at the airport by his wife. They walked from the gate together and were stand-ing waiting for the baggage to be unloaded. An extremely at-tractive stewardess walked by. Suddenly, the man came to life. Beaming, he said to the stewardess, "I hope we can fly together again, Miss Jones."

On the way home his grew suspicious, "How come you knew the name of that stewardess?" she asked.

The man replied smoothly, "You see, my dear, her name was posted right up front in the plane, under the names of the pilot and co-pilot."

To which the wife replied, "Okay, now give me the names of the pilot and co-pilot."

Sometimes, don’t even know what we need to learn, so we need someone to teach us what to learn. Older adults, we need you. We need your voice in the church. We need you to be active and teaching because you’re experiences and lives can teach us…teach us not to repeat the mistakes of the past and to teach us about what works…about how to slow down and take time for our families…for our faith…for our lives. We need your wisdom and your experience to teach us. And we younger adults need to listen and open our ears to what we might learn.

By Word – God’s word is our authoritative guide of faith. This is why a sermon is such a large portion of worship. As Protestants we believe that in learning from God’s Word, our lives our changed and we allow God’s Spirit to transform our hearts and minds.

But in knowing God’s Word, we also become teachers our-selves. We are ready to help others live the life of faith. We are able to share why we believe what we believe. Why God calls us to lives of purity, etc.

[Apology: I didn't have the ending of my sermon in notes, and I don't remember what I said!]