Haverhill Commons Church

The very first recorded words of Jesus as a child when he was found in the temple were, “Why are you searching for me? Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”

Now, as the son of God, Jesus easily could have reserved the title of Father to refer to God for himself. He invites us to pray to “Our Father”, not just his Father. With just a word, Jesus grants us permission to access the presence of God like never before.

While acknowledging that “Father” might not be the easiest or most comforting title for some of us to use for God, maybe it can actually help us redeem the meaning of the word by giving us a fuller, more perfect picture of what a father should be. It can remind us that God desires to be in relationship with us—to nurture and provide for us, to pour out love to us, to be present with us through the dark moments of our lives.

Praying to our God, who is in heaven, does not mean that He is separated from us. God’s done the opposite in drawing near to us and our broken world, coming to dwell with us in the person of Jesus, and inviting us to partner with God in following the example of humbly giving up power and privilege to make God’s infinite grace and wisdom known to the world. Not to escape the world, but to transform it.

We can experience joy at many times and in many different ways, but often it sneaks up on us when we weren’t quite expecting it. Joy isn’t something we conjure up, hoping if we can just figure out how to escape our sadness, change our situation, or figure out an easier way forward, then we’ll finally grasp joy.  

The key to joy is knowing God.  It’s a deep, fundamental acknowledgement that God is God and I am not, which opens the door to seeing with a different perspective.  It quiets my demands that God do things my way.  And it opens the door for us to look for God, to see God with us, in the midst of difficulty and suffering, instead of putting our whole focus on looking for the way out.  Perhaps so much so that we miss God in the midst of our circumstance.  

In order to really truly experience deep joy, we need to be willing to feel all the other things that we also feel, and to bring them to God.  When we numb ourselves to feeling sadness or grief, we also numb ourselves to experiencing joy.

We can experience joy at many times and in many different ways, but often it sneaks up on us when we weren’t quite expecting it. Joy isn’t something we conjure up, hoping if we can just figure out how to escape our sadness, change our situation, or figure out an easier way forward, then we’ll finally grasp joy.  

The key to joy is knowing God.  It’s a deep, fundamental acknowledgement that God is God and I am not, which opens the door to seeing with a different perspective.  It quiets my demands that God do things my way.  And it opens the door for us to look for God, to see God with us, in the midst of difficulty and suffering, instead of putting our whole focus on looking for the way out.  Perhaps so much so that we miss God in the midst of our circumstance.  

In order to really truly experience deep joy, we need to be willing to feel all the other things that we also feel, and to bring them to God.  When we numb ourselves to feeling sadness or grief, we also numb ourselves to experiencing joy.

Experiencing anxiety and doubt are part of what it means to be human. The Psalms invite us to be honest to God about what we think and feel. Hiding behind showered bodies, shaved faces, and spiritual facades can be a barrier for God to enter and act, and closes the door to meaningful relationships with one another, inhibiting transformative change.

As followers of Christ, a particularly distressing element of anxiety is reconciling our belief that there is a God, a loving Father, and the reality of not seeing God remove the dangers that threaten us. This is the writer’s dilemma in Psalm 77. Where are you God? If you are the great I AM, why aren’t you now? And these questions can lead us to question God’s very existence. What if God isn't?

God is not threatened by these questions. Instead, these questions are the very place where God enters into relationship with us. Relationship inherently implies the trust and giving of one’s self to another. Even in our most intimate human relationships we can never know for certain the heart and mind of the one we love but we abandon ourselves to the other, to trust they will be there. It is no different with God. We determine to let go of the cliff’s edge of certainty on which we hang, not into a black abyss of nothingness but into the unseen arms of the One who says, “I am here to catch you and carry you home”.

This Sunday, Ethan May, Pastor of Community Life and Outreach at Anchor Bay Church, joined us to remind us that God’s love and mercy removes any perceived distance we feel from God. While “confession” isn’t quite a big feeling as much as it’s an act, it’s still an important theme that we see throughout the Psalms. And, the idea of confessing does often bring with it other big feelings or thoughts.

Sometimes we can think of confession as being the thing right before punishment. We confess, then we’re punished. If we think of confession in that way it’s obviously a bad thing in our minds. So then what happens when we hear the Bible say, “Confess your sins to God”? 

It’s easy to think of confession like that, like it’s a big “gotcha!” moment. But what happens when we live like that and avoid it at all costs? When we don’t come to God, we hold it all in. And as time passes, and we feel as if this great abyss forms between us and God. It feels like our sin is keeping us from God.

But there is no abyss—because Christ has already died on the cross, defeating sin once and for all. He doesn’t have to do it again, our sins don’t mean we’re putting him back up on the cross. Christ has already died for us, already risen, and already bridged any gap that we’ve let our sins convince us we’ve created.

The Psalms take us through the fullness of the human experience, from deep, soul aching grief and despair to exuberant joy and thanksgiving. 

This series is an invitation for all of us, each and every one of us, to bring all of us, the fullness of our being, as an offering to God.  To see in the Psalms a model for worship, not just a song sung on Sunday morning, but worship as we see it in Scripture—something that encompasses all of life, all of us, the totality of our being, surrendered to God.  

Thankfully, we’re not the first people in human history to ever feel lonely, forgotten, or disconnected. Psalm 42 is filled the kinds of questions we ask when our world is falling apart.  God, do you see me?  Do you care?  Will I always feel as disconnected and sad and lonely as I do right now?  God, are you here with me? 

Israel was always to be a remembering people and so are we. Remembering the goodness and faithfulness of God gives us a way to become present to both our feelings of grief and to God with us in our grief.  In this Psalm, and in many others, we see a pathway into and through our grief that encompasses past, present, and future, that doesn’t deny anything, but also gives us hope.

When believers hold different convictions, practice different ethics, or believe in different theological convictions, they face a choice: stay together…or go their separate ways. This is what Paul is addressing in these final chapters of his letter to the Roman church.

Our positions matter, they do, but so does our posture: our approach, our attitude, the way we engage and communicate. If our positions are the keys on a piano, the raw notes, our posture is the way we play them: the order and sequence, which ones hit harder and  emphasize.

Despite their shared faith in Christ, the two groups clashed over important issues. What were they allowed to eat? What days were sacred? Who gets to decide?

If we choose to accommodate rather than separate, we’re living into the principle of loving our neighbor, willing their good, building them up. Paul isn’t saying, “think the same things.” Harmony, musically, isn’t possible if everyone sings the same note. Harmony musically, isn’t everyone singing the same note. Harmony is when different notes work together to produce a fuller, richer, more amazing sound.

Most Americans hear “Trump” or “Biden” and run for cover. In fact, when it comes to politics, one of the strongest dividing lines in America is between those who care a lot…and those who don't.

There were also plenty of reasons for the believers at the church in Rome to disconnect from their governing authorities, too. In Romans 13, Paul urges believers not to disconnect, but to engage. In this sermon we present a framework for engaging politically as Christians in America today.

Why difference does theology make? All the difference in the world.

It starts with our minds: upending the destructive patterns of the world and replacing it a pattern that builds up and encourages. A pattern that offers wholeness to our souls as we seek to conquer evil by doing good, and put our trust in God that His righteousness and justice will prevail in every aspect of our lives and in the world around us

In Romans 11, we see Paul wrestling with one of the great tragedies of his life. His people had rejected him and rejected Jesus, but Paul found meaning in that loss.

God was able to use Israel’s transgression, their rejection of Jesus, to bring the rest of the world to faith. It’s almost as if the rest of the nations were watching Israel from the sidelines, and Israel, play after play, kept stumbling, kept going backwards, kept fumbling the ball. And as Israel stumbled, the rest of us were learning.  

Learning that we cannot be perfectly faithful but that God is still faithful. How did we learn this? By watching Israel try and fail, over and over again. Though it broke Paul’s heart, he found meaning in that loss because it led him to tell everyone else about Jesus.

Paul didn’t get stuck in grief, he believed that God would turn tragedy into triumph. We, too, experience grief and the danger is that we’ll get stuck in our grief. If you’ve been in the deep waters of grief, if you’re sinking down or at the bottom even right now, our hope is that we trust that God is present to us as we grieve, that God is moving even in the loss, that God is transforming even the tragedy, and that God can take the ashes and make something beautiful.