Season: Things Jesus Never Said

Speaker: Ben White

Location: 3800 Marlton Pike

About Talk: God knows who you are. You are God’s beloved. You are God’s child. God knows that you will be like Jesus when he appears. God knows your heart and is pulling you by its righteousness and purity. God has your hope by the hand and will not let go. When we live from that abundance we move toward perfection and sinning no more (like Jesus’ call to be perfect in Matthew 5 and his call to the woman in John 8 after not condemning her). Love the sinner, hate the sin takes us by our hate and tries to drag us somewhere, but even if it’s toward God, it’s not very transformative. It is much better to follow your desire for God than your disgust for yourself.

Season: Things Jesus Never Said

Speaker: Rachel Sensenig

Location: 2212 S. Broad St.

About Talk: Lots of people who try to help themselves are still really struggling. Does God not care about them? We need a better theology than self-reliance and privilege. And even with all the privileges, self-reliance doesn’t work that well. All of us need help beyond ourselves. And Jesus seems to prefer hanging out with the people who know they need help versus those who think they have it all figured out (Matthew 9). Jesus calls us to care for those who can’t help themselves very well. That is why the Church exists: to care for each other and the world. “Love each other as I have loved you.”

Season: Things Jesus Never Said

Speaker: Ben White

Location: 3800 Marlton Pike

About Talk: Benjamin Franklin said “God helps those who help themselves.” If we are honest we can come up with some reasons why we are attracted to this wisdom. It would be so nice to not need God. But Christ has become for us wisdom of God. His way is self-giving love and self-sacrifice. Our way is not different if we choose to follow him. We humbly accept that we have nothing that we did not receive. We need help and we help each other be helped by the one who has the power to do what we cannot do by ourselves.

Speaker: Rod White

Location: 29 West Tulpehocken St.

About Talk: We all have the Spirit of God given to us and we all have so much opportunity! We all need to build something to feel our true selves in action. It is not good enough to think faith or feel faith we need to do faith to be a human who lives by faith. We are God’s co-worker. We are God’s field, God’s building. Now that grace is at work in us, we also create. We build with care.

Season: Things Jesus Never Said

Speaker: Jonny Rashid

Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.

About Talk: So can we take the good from this bad saying? You can help yourself. You have the stuff it takes to do positive, life-giving things. But you aren’t alone. God helps too, the community around you helps too. You aren’t entitled to help, but you are freely given it, so freely give it away. Own your power: know you have it and you aren’t anonymous or weak, but you can co-collaborate with God to do good now.

God is the author of goodness, and we help spread God’s love by sharing in that goodness. We should then expressively and conspicuously do the good work we do for ourselves and for others because it is a reflection of God. People might meet God through our good works, but they also might just be blessed. That would be great.

Season: Things Jesus Never Said

Speaker: Rachel Sensenig

Location: 2212 S. Broad St.

About Talk: The world tells us to be good to maintain the status quo. Fall in line, don’t rock the boat too much. Jesus calls us to something much deeper and bigger and better: freedom to know our value and wholeness in God! Knowing that we are already loved and that God has already made us good can free us to love and serve and give extravagantly. Don’t worry about being good, be in love.

Season: Things Jesus Never Said

Speaker: Gwen White

Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.

About Talk: Teaching Pastor, Gwen White, ponders what it means to be good, and that we need the sustaining and transformative power of Jesus who offers us wholeness and oneness with God. God offers a love that surpasses the need to be good in order to be loved, that love comes without simply doing the right things. It's a gift we can accept freely. Additionally, she recounts her trip to the Ukraine and the work that the Mennonite Central Committee is doing there, and how the love of Jesus inspires us to do great things.

Season: Things Jesus Never Said

Speaker: Casey Bien-Aime

Location: 3800 Marlton Pike

About Talk: Casey Bien-Aime answers the dominant culture’s wisdom about morality. Do we really have to fight so hard to be a good person or can we be with goodness and bring forth the goodness that is bubbling up in us from God? She brought her story about her need for control in preparation for her maternity leave. God’s goodness is the source of our goodness. Jesus’ invitation is to be with him.

Season: Things Jesus Never Said

Speaker: Rachel Sensenig

Location: 2212 S. Broad St.

About Talk: Sometimes this phrase gets used to rationalize or minimize terribly difficult circumstances. The illusion is that God is controlling everything, so we should be able to control and “handle” everything too. Yet nothing could be further from the truth in Jesus, who comes in to a hurting world to be killed by the powers instead of winning in a worldly kind of way. If we want to follow God, the invitation is to feel more than control, and to relate to God in our suffering and ask for help, as Jesus did. It is about holding God’s hand more than holding a handle or a tool that provides easy answers. We are invited into a great mystery through Christ—the mystery of victory over the world through suffering love.

Season: Things Jesus Never Said

Speaker: Julie Hoke

Location: 29 West Tulpehocken

About Talk: When we believe God gives us only what we can handle we are assuming that God wants us to handle things. But our hands are very small and anything we can handle isn't enough. God certainly wants us to handle more than we can fit in our own hands or our own capacity. We have more capacity with God than on our own; more capacity than we can even imagine. How do we cultivate the trust that leads to our increased capacity in times of trouble?