On Thursday, many of us gathered with friends and family to celebrate Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a great holiday, but being thankful is meant to be more than just a once-a-year event.Sometimes it is awfully easy to forget that. Life can get busy. Often it is our blessings - family, friends, work - that keep us so busy that we forget to stop and give thanks. But we’re better off being grateful every day. A grateful life is a more satisfied life. It's a more abundant life. We see this in Luke 17, when Jesus heals ten lepers but only one returns to give thanks. The one who returns gets more than just a healing.

Have you ever considered if there is ANYTHING that can separate you from God's love? Have you ever thought that another person couldn't be a Christian because of the presence of something in their lives? The Apostle Paul had the same question and so did the members of the churches to which he wrote. Join us for worship on Sunday at 9 or 11 am as we consider what, if anything, can separate us from the love of God and what it means to be "in Christ."

There used to be a TV show that came on when I was a kid called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. When I was older there was something similar called Cribs on MTV. The idea here is that regular people get a glimpse into how the rich live. We watch it because we like to imagine what it might be like to live like that. But is it actually better to live like that? Is there any evidence that the rich and famous are happier than the rest of us, or even as happy? And if not- if we're not shooting for rich and famous- what are we shooting for?We're looking at a passage from Mark 12 this week where Jesus talks about a couple of people and how they handle their money. But he's talking about more than just money, he's talking about purpose and identity and what life can be

There are six holes in the wall by the stairs in my house. The reason we have holes in the wall is that we once tried to put up a baby gate to act as a barrier between Banks and the stairs. Banks. was. not. having. it. So he ripped the gate out of the wall. So I put it back up with bigger screws. And he ripped it out again. So I put it back up with those plastic wall anchor things and even longer screws. And he ripped it out again. So we gave up on the baby gate thing. Some walls weren't meant to last forever.This Sunday we celebrate All Saints Day. We call it a celebration because it is, but it's also sad. It's sad to be separated from people that mean so much to us. Death is like a wall between us and the people we love, but some walls weren't meant to last forever. This week we're moving from the chronological end of the Old Testament in Nehemiah to the end of suffering,painand death in Revelation. John shows us a vision of eternity where the wall of separation falls and we are reunited with God and each other forever. It's a powerful vision of hope for the future.

Preparing for the last week of this sermon series on Nehemiah has been a little sad. I feel like I’ve been in engrossed in fifth century bc Jerusalem for a good long while. It’s starting to feel familiar. This last look at Nehemiah feels all too familiar. There are parts of the restoration story that read like a Hollywood script, but the ending is all real life.

Every Sunday we gather for worship and as a part of that, we read a passage from the Bible together. Reading scripture is an integral part of what the church does week in and week out. Reading scripture is one of the things that makes the church the church. We hear the stories of what God has done through Israel, in the life of Jesus and in the early church. Scripture is one of the things that we build our community around. In our passage from Nehemiah this week, we’ll see the people of Jerusalem begin a new pattern of centering their community around God’s Word.

When we left Nehemiah this past Sunday, the community was together and the construction had begun. Things were going well. I enjoy that time in a project; when the work begins and even though I know there's a long way to go, at least the neglect is over. But every big project hits a snag sometimes. And when it's something really big that God wants you to do, you can just about count on there being some adversity that will creep up and try to sabotage it. We can learn a lot from looking at how Nehemiah's enemies try to sabotage him and how Nehemiah responds to the adversity.

When I decided to do a series of Nehemiah and the restoration of Jerusalem, it never occurred to me that we would be in the center of so much physical restoration in Wilmington. I was just shooting for a good metaphor! But nonetheless, here we are. Homes are underwater. Trees are down everywhere. There’s a lot to be rebuilt. This week, we’re tackling two chapters from Nehemiah, 2 and 3. This is when the hands-on work begins.

It's easy to skip Nehemiah. It's not going to come up often in a devotional reading. It almost never comes up in the lectionary, so you don't hear a lot of sermons preached on it. It has some lists of hard-to-pronounce names. But Nehemiah is an important part of God's salvation history. It's the chronological end of the Old Testament, the story of the earliest beginnings of the society that Jesus is born into. It's also a reminder that God likes to breathe new life into his people.

 

The book of Nehemiah tells a remarkable story of the city of Jerusalem, which lay in waste for years, being rebuilt in weeks. It's a story of a man with no qualifications other than a willingness to follow God's direction, spearheading a campaign of restoration that will set the stage for the birth of Jesus several centuries later. It's an important story, an interesting story and one from which we can learn much. It is ground breaking. It starts this week and it starts with prayer.