For this sermon, Steve began by reading Corey and the Seventh Story, by Brian McLaren and Gareth Higgins in its entirety. This children's book can be found here if you wish to purchase it.

Steve's additional comments follow:

Domination. Revolution. Isolation. Purification. Victimization. Accumulation.

Being the boss of others.

Getting revenge on those who bossed you around.

Running away afraid.

Turning on those who look different.

Giving up in helplessness.

Taking pride in having more than others.

So much of the time, these are the stories we live by. Our families. Our friends. Our companies. Our churches. Our nations. 

And they don’t end well. They don’t heal us, or the earth, or one another. They don’t make for flourishing. 

But Jesus has a story too - a story of liberation, a story of reconciliation. And it’s not just a story for Jesus. It’s for all of us. 

Between his birth and death and resurrection, Jesus lived a life, as we do. He liked to tell stories himself. And he lived a great story, one that many of us believe shows us the way to God and the way back to one another and even back to ourselves. 

For six weeks, we hope to share about the Jesus story - largely from the Bible’s book of Luke - while exposing these other six stories we’ve been telling, and listening to, and following for too long. 

Today, very briefly, domination.

You’d think that if someone were to be a prophet - to try to speak for God to us, and if people would claim that same person was actually God among us as well, then you’d think they’d claim the right to be in charge, that they would demand attention, and insist they’d be listened to.

And if that person were to leave a movement, and that movement were to become a religion, you’d think the founder would want to build a winning team, that would be more and more and more powerful and victorious.

But Jesus wasn’t like that at all. 

Listen to Jesus’ big coming out party, as he announces his life mission to his hometown.

Luke 4:14-30  (CEB)

16 Jesus went to Nazareth, where he had been raised. On the Sabbath he went to the synagogue as he normally did and stood up to read. 17 The synagogue assistant gave him the scroll from the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

    because the Lord has anointed me.

He has sent me to preach good news to the poor,

    to proclaim release to the prisoners

    and recovery of sight to the blind,

    to liberate the oppressed,

19 and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

20 He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the synagogue assistant, and sat down. Every eye in the synagogue was fixed on him. 21 He began to explain to them, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled just as you heard it.”

22 Everyone was raving about Jesus, so impressed were they by the gracious words flowing from his lips.

Quoting from the prophet Isaiah, Jesus says he is here for people’s freedom - to show God’s favor, to bring liberation, to create wholeness in our lives and communities. He even edits one of the two scriptures he quotes - that passage originally announces the year of God’s favor and a year of God’s vengeance - when God will win, when God will punish God’s enemies. But Jesus says: that prophecy was only half right. It’s just the year of God’s favor. 

God doesn’t need to dominate or punish or take vengeance, just heal, release, and free. 

And people are like YEAH! This is so good. 

But then some people are like - hey,

So in many ways the project of Reservoir Church - or at least the preaching of Reservoir - is to communicate profound spiritual perspective and truth and stories in practical language that’s at home in our culture. We used to have a little marketing tagline - Practical. Spiritual. Fun. And we used to belong to a group of churches in this country that liked to use the phrase “naturally supernatural.” Connected to the divine, experiencing God and transcendence and the mystical and all that without being freakishly out of this world or something. This church makes a promise to our members and our community to be resolutely Jesus-centered and spiritually vibrant in ways that are really accessible to our not very churchgoing, not very religious city. And this means a lot of things, including not using super-preachy, old school religious language in our teaching. Even for those of us like me that have been churchgoers now for decades, this has been fresh and helpful. And we plan on keeping up with this habit.

The thing is, though, to be spiritual, to try to connect more and more with an unseen God is these days a little weird. And to talk about that experience sometimes requires ideas and words we don’t use a lot anymore. The journalist Jonathan Merritt published a book about this a couple of years ago. It’s called Learning to Speak God from Scratch. It’s about how a lot of religious language in the Christian tradition has become out of date or even kind of toxic. So a word like “gospel” is kind of unknown culturally and other words like “sin” are laden with a lot of distracting and frankly off-putting associations. And Merritt wonders, like I do, what words need keeping and what ideas can find expression in new words. Another author I like, sadly dead now, tried this out a bit. His name was Frederick Beuchner, and in the 70s, he wrote a book where he muses on important, old words to do with God and the spiritual life. He wrote: “All the great religious words point to ways in which we variously experience the Holy - such as faith and grace - or hold it at arms’ length - such as sin. These words ... have grown musty and shopworn over the centuries, but the experiences to which they point are as basic to the human condition as they ever were.”

I like that. And in that spirit, I want today to end our Christmas season talking about an experience that is basic to the human condition - how we find and remain in a sense of God in the world, a sense of God with us. And to help us out today, I’m going to do that by talking about two very religious words in our tradition that we don’t use a lot these days. Those words being “covenant” and “sacrament.” 

Next week we’ll go back to normal, using our everyday language to get at deep and important things. I’ll start a winter series where we’ll look at six of the not so great stories we use to organize our lives and world and thinking and with each, ask how Jesus’ story of reconciliation and liberation can be really good news. But today, we’ll look at these two old-school religious words that I think are worth saving. 

We’ll be in the beginning and end of the New Testament’s first book, the good news of Jesus according to Matthew. And these two words - covenant and sacrament - help us understand some of what’s going on in this little book, and some of how it can help us connect with and experience a living God. 

Matthew starts with a family history, a genealogy. Which is pretty boring for most of us, except when it isn’t, like here. It starts:

Matthew 1:1, 5-6  (CEB)

1 A record of the ancestors of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham:

And then in the middle of the list, there’s this really important and surprising bit:

5 Salmon was the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab.

Boaz was the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth.

Kids say the darndest things. My first Christmas as a youth pastor, I had a kid say in our group time, “You know Christmas was stolen from a pagan holiday.” As they do. And there it unraveled the myths of christmas and our Bible study debunked in the face of good education and intelligent self thinking kids.

Turns out, she was right. Jesus’ birthday, known as Christmas, on December 25th is not in the Bible. Turns out, there has been celebration of hope and light in the midst of the darkest of winter solstice, in various cultures and time in history before Jesus, where they cut evergreen trees and bring it inside or have big extravagant parties to celebrate the sun god. These stories, these histories, these myths - what are we to do with them? And in light of them, then, what is the significance of the Christmas story? How do we unpack the religiosity and the politics that wrap the story of the birth of Jesus by co-opting other traditions with their power? If Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th, what are we even celebrating? Are these all just lies? 

That’s what my youth group kids were alluding to when they asserted their knowledge. And my kids, oh they loved seeing me try to make sense of it and do cartwheels around their smarts. And I didn’t want just smooth over them. I wanted to engage them. It’s not like I could only tell the Christian tradition and not expect them to be challenged with other traditions. In fact, in a pluralistic world as today, we can’t be ignorantly covering our ears and belly gazing our own well known story of Jesus. It is, and it must be comparable with the respect and dignity of other traditions. It should be investigated and humbly engaged with BOTH the miraculousness and as some would claim the ridiculousness of the story. Otherwise this wouldn’t be a church, it would be a cult, where questions or critical thinking are not welcome. The Christmas story also must come to terms with the colonized history that retells the story, knowing that the story does not come to us in a vacuum. It comes within the confines of certain theologies. Certain worldviews. Certain perspectives. Stories come in containers. You’ve heard “medium is the message.” And if we know that, we must be sophisticated enough to pull apart the medium from the message. 

Why bother? Why bother thinking about the context of the biblical writers? The Bible says it, so I believe it? Why bother considering the cultural context of the tradition that’s been passed down to us? Because I believe that the message behind the medium, is at core, the message of Good News. A message of promise. What is the promise? I’ll get to that in a few minutes. 

Here’s what I mean. 

One of my favorite movies is "Big Fish." It’s a Tim Burton film with Ewan McGregor. It’s a telling of the story of the father’s life, but in a fantastical beautiful exaggerated way, as it says, “the way he told me”. The movie is definitely a very much like a fairy tale with witches, giants, siamese twins and all. The son, Will decides to try to get to the truth of the stories, traveling back to their hometown. Now, Will’s disappointment in his father and frustration of having been lied to about the details of his life, takes the backseat when he realizes the beauty and the actual capturing of its grandeur of the “truth” behind the story. Sorry for the spoiler. It’s still worth checking out if you haven’t seen it, as Tim Burton does capture it magically. In fact, isn’t it sometimes that poetry is closer to truth than facts. Fiction brings about real human experiences alive and makes us enter the story and feel, embody, with empathy through our imagination. Myths include more meat than mere historical accounts. Well, I mean even historical accounts are…. Well, just an account. 

Theologian Frederick Buechner in his book called Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale,

Members received a real treat on the last Sunday of the year. We heard from all three pastors, and reflected on the past year and our hopes for the new.

Thomas said to him,

"Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way?"

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

-John 14

Well, did you all like the first snow of the year this past week? 

I have a lot of reasons to not like the snow. I’m the main shoveller where we live, and it’s heavy. Our church has a big property here, and we pay for plowing and I wonder if all the snow melt is going to seep into our buildings somewhere. I mainly get around by bicycle throughout the year, and the snowy, icy season is by far the trickiest time for that. 

But still, there’s something that happens in me with that first real snow of the year. I was running home from our members meeting last Sunday afternoon with my daughter, and we saw just a few flakes in air, here and there, and my eyes widened just a little bit, as we ran, and I huffed and puffed. My daughter’s not so easy to keep up with any more.

And then later, at home, I looked out the window, and there it was - snow falling from the sky, piling up white on the trees and sidewalk and streets, just falling and falling and falling. Something in me just kept expanding, as time stopped for  a moment, with me starting out the window, transfixed, thinking nothing at all really except: This is so beautiful. 

That experience of being stopped in our tracks, surprised by beauty, arrested by something so new or unexpected or stunning or larger than ourselves, we call that wonder. Sometimes we think of wonder as childlike because kids are frankly best at it - they experience wonder most often, maybe most deeply.

Sometimes when we think we understand more, we are overjoyed and mystified by less. Sometimes when we’ve experienced more, there’s less that still arrests us. 

But the first snow of the year is one experience that always still does it for me and helps me remember that wonder is not just the stuff of children, it’s some of the more important stuff of life. 

The great Jewish thinker Abraham Heschel had a lot to say about wonder. Heschel was a scholar and a mystic. He was born in Poland, became a rabbi and a professor. He barely escaped the Nazi invasion and the Holocaust, and spent the rest of his years in this country, where he wrote, taught, was active with King and others in the Civil Rights and anti-war movments. And he happened to die less than a year before I was born. 

In his book God in Search of Man, Heschel wrote: “The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living . What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.” Wonder for Heschel was foundational to a good life, a joyful life, and it was also bound up with the possibility of encountering God. 

So Heschel also wrote: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” 

Christmas used to do this for me. Partly it was the presents. My parents didn’t have much cash, but they went broke at Christmastime, and one set of my grandparents piled on as well. So I knew that every year, our Christmas tree would be piled with mounds of stuff that would at least for a while surprise and delight me. 

It wasn’t just that, though. It had to do with school vacation, and first snows, and Christmas music, and chocolate appearing everywhere - it seemed - and family seeming a little more present, a little more happy than normal. So much that gave me wonder as a kid this time of year. 

I said last week that Advent - this season of waiting and expectancy before Christmas - is a time making for room, a time for shifting our attention, from turning away from what chokes out joy. Similarly, Advent can be a great time to lift up our gaze, to be surprised and delighted again, and to start growing a life of wonder. 

So the other week, I go to the doctor’s office with one of my kids for their annual physical. And before the exam, the doctor makes small talk for a while, as he does, to talk about a healthy life and all that. And he asks my kid what he does after school. And my kid, being a normal and honest kid, starts saying stuff like: I like to hang out with my friends and play video games. And then the doctor interrupts him. He leans forward, sticks his finger up in the air, and says: Hold on, you’re going to this amazing high school, with hundreds and hundreds of activities. When colleges look at you, I can guarantee they don’t want to know how much time you spent playing video games or hanging out with your friends. 

I was thinking: what is happening here? And I interrupt him back now and say, you know you interrupted him, he wasn’t finished. And my kid, realizing what the man wants to hear, tells his doctor/inquisitor about his more adult-approved, official, you can put them on a college application-someday activities. And the doctor lightens up after this, sends him into the other room to take off some of his clothes, and proceeds to give him his physical, which I guess goes better from there. 

But the more I thought about this moment, the more incensed I became. Because I wondered when did every interaction my teenagers have with an adult turn into a precursor for a college acceptance interview, years away from that being an actual possibility? Who decided that this interrogation should be part of the assessment of my child’s health? When did childhood become a race toward the achievement of a goal that somebody else sets for you? A goal that may or may not be part of your best life.

To me, this moment in the doctor’s office for my child was not a weird, outlying experience, but a symptom of the world as it is, but not as it is meant to be. I think all times and places and cultures have their own plusses and minuses. But here in our 21st century, urban, blue state, university-town America, I think we have some of our own frankly weird habits and dysfunctions that choke out the best of what we want in life in general, and maybe in the holiday season in particular. 

Today of course is the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and it’s also in the church world the first Sunday of the Christmas season called Advent. Advent is a season of remembering the birth of Jesus, and the longings and hopes and expectations associated with his life. And it’s a time to long for Jesus to come again, to be centered more fully both in our lives and in history, and to do God’s good work there. 

In this year’s Advent season, we’re thinking about pilgrimage, walks people make, journeys we take, that have something to do with the Christmas story and the movement Jesus provokes. 

At its best, the holiday season can be a time for gratitude, wonder, joy, and connection. But to welcome something good, we need to make room for it. So today, on this first week of our Christmas season, I want to take a moment to notice some of the stress and other issues that can choke out our joy, and look at some ways we might need to walk away from things to make room for the gifts of Jesus. 

The first of the Bible’s biographies of Jesus opens with a lot of comings and goings, people - including Jesus - on pilgrimage. Let me read you one little bit. 

Matthew 2:13-15  (CEB)

13 When the magi had departed, an angel from the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up. Take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod will soon search for the child in order to kill him.” 14 Joseph got up and, during the night, took the child and his mother to Egypt. 15 He stayed there until Herod died. This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: I have called my son out of Egypt.

I had this really interesting moment of shame the other week. And I want to tell you about it. 

It happened at a high school sporting event. Now I’ve been watching high school sports for a while - as a teacher, as a principal, now as a parent. And I’ve noticed that certain sports more than others tend to draw out the crazy parent fan behavior. You know: shouting at refs, complaining to coaches, getting overly involved in the game outcome. One sport, though, that doesn’t draw this crazy parent stuff out is cross country running. 

First off, like no one goes to these races. They are not popular spectator events. Secondly, you can’t see your kid run very much. These races are three miles long, across fields, through woods, and you only see your kid run by three, maybe four times. And a lot of kids have ordered their parents not to say anything at races when they run by - silence, please! -- so the few parents that go to these meets tend to stand around for a long time doing nothing, and then sort of politely clap for a few seconds as their kid and their teammates run by. 

Not me, though. I’m kind of a crazy cross country parent. I like the sport. I appreciate watching a running race. And I still run a bit myself, so I can run around to different parts of the course and and see a lot of moments in the action. And the other week, at one of my daughter’s cross country meets, I was a little crazier than usual. 

The course was all through the woods, so the only way to get around and see different parts of the race was to run on the same trail the athletes were using. So there was this moment when my daughter had run by me, and she was running fast, and I was kind of excited to keep cheering her on, and there was no one right behind her. So I started running on the trail. I tried to keep my distance behind her, so Julianna wouldn’t think I was trying to chase her down or anything. 

But there I was, chugging along through the woods, and I round a corner, and there’s the boys’ team head coach, who eyeballs me with this horrified look, like: Steve, what the hell are you doing? Get off the course - do not try to chase your kid. 

And I was mortified - I saw myself through someone else’s eyes for a moment, and I was like: my God, I look I’m this middle aged guy trying to enter the teenage girls’ race. Or that parent crazily chasing my kid down telling her to go faster. 

I was actually too mortified to stop and say anything, so I kept running around the corner, away from the coach - like oh, this is normal, just out for a jog in the woods. During the race. And I got out of sight of the coach, and started walking off the trail. 

I was flushing with embarrassment. And for hours afterwards, I thought what am I going to say when I see that coach again. I looked so ridiculous. What was my way out of this? 

What do you do with an experience of shame?

Well, it turns out my way through that problem, was the same as my way through many others, and it was to know that I am a person. And that a person is less like a machine, and less like a god, and more like a tree.

We began this series four weeks ago with me talking about trees and imperfection and flourishing, and we’re going to end in that same place. 

Our first of today’s two scriptures is from the old Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, who said: 

Jeremiah 17:7-8 (CEB)

Happy are those who trust in the Lord,

    who rely on the Lord.

8 They will be like trees planted by the streams,

    whose roots reach down to the water.

They won’t fear drought when it comes;

    their leaves will remain green.

They won’t be stressed in the time of drought

    or fail to bear fruit.

To be a person,

Good Morning!

Today, I’d love to continue with insights we’ve been sharing in this sermon series, called Your Faith Journey at Reservoir.   We’ve been highlighting our five core values -  that make way for an open, Jesus-centered approach to your faith journey. These values; Connection, Action, Everyone, Freedom and Humility form the ethos of Reservoir - who we are and why/how we think about faith the way we do. We’ve realized that it’s worthwhile to be intentional each year to communicate this in a clear way -  that doesn’t leave anyone wondering - if there is some “catch” attached or trade-off that’s required - to belong in this community.

Today we’ll take a closer look  at the value of freedom.  I’m eager to talk about freedom - not as a stand alone value, that we exercise to engage and showcase our own individualism  - but one that orchestrates our deep connection to one another in community.   I think freedom - at its most beautiful expression in a faith community - is not seen in us traveling down our own very distinct freedom paths - (what I believe, experience or know of God) - that never intersect with one another.  I think freedom is what calls our paths to intersect - to collaborate - to learn from one another and move forward in this world together. 

Our individual freedom is necessary to a vibrant and healthy experience of faith  - but it benefits from being situated in relationship with others, even if the freedom expressed by others is strikingly different than our own… 

….and the only way to do this is to be anchored in a unifying, divine source of love - which we find in Jesus.  

I’ve come to believe that Jesus alone is perfect theology (hat tip to Brad Jersack)- Period.  The way I think about and approach the Bible, or prayer, or community - all flow from Jesus. I’m being reverent here.  As a pastor of this community - I hope to communicate that at a baseline - life with Jesus at the center is really, really good news.  It’s why we’ve taken time to define our values the way we do - and why we define freedom here at Reservoir as: “honest exploration of faith over conformity of belief or behavior, trusting that the Holy Spirit reveals truth to all who seek God.”

Freedom is a value that we encourage here at Reservoir NOT ONLY  because it allows us movement toward Jesus - BUT because it also CALLS us to be an active participant in keeping ACCESS to JESUS, FREE AND CLEAR FOR ALL without hindrance - and this means that even our freedom can’t overtake someone else’s view of Jesus. 

Over the last month or so we’ve queried our community groups - to give voice to where and how they’ve found Jesus to be good and real in their lives.... And how Reservoir has helped facilitate the experience of the love of Jesus.  And out of this process has come deep, deep insight and wisdom, the greatest theme being that people experience the love of Jesus …..through BAGELS… (I’m not joking). Sesame bagels, everything bagels, chocolate chip bagels - they are all mentioned...many, many times.  

And second to the holy wonder of bagels were themes that hit at all of the 5 core values we’ve been talking about. And the table that I sat at expressed their thoughts by saying, 

"What we feel is that Reservoir seems committed to the struggle of keeping the widest most open doors possible. Our church is willing to sit in risk and vulnerability and open belief statements such as 'we don't know,' or 'what do you think?' All of this leads to a room full of FREE, diverse people where love thrives in the multiplicity of human beings and all they bring to the community.”  

I think, “Oh my goodness that’s so beautiful” … and simultaneously, “Aaah, Here is where freedom gets real and messy and gritty - as we actually live it out alongside one another…" Here is where freedom shows the prowess of its value...

I think we’re learning with increasing clarity that institutions and ideas that aren’t good for everyone aren’t really good for anyone.

Last week The Globe published a devastating write-up of challenges along these lines that a major institution in our city is facing. The headline read: MIT president acknowledges women, minorities on campus feel belittled, excluded. And it talked about women’s experience on campus of being insulted, people of color and LGBTQ people being marginalized, lower prestige staff being bullied by star professors. 

This was MIT, but it could have been a lot of other places too. I think more and more we’re seeing in government, in business, in education, in churches ways that communities aren’t equitable. Ways that promises of welcome have had all kinds of asterisks and hidden footnotes attached to them. Ways that so many communities and institutions need to dramatically change to really include and honor all people. 

So it’s fun to hear stories where this is happening. I heard one recently on a podcast episode called Liberte, Egailite, and French Fries. It was about a McDonalds restaurant, of all places, this one located in the French town of Marseille. In a poor, immigrant neighborhood in a coastal city, the local McDonalds  has the motto, “Come as you are.” And people take it seriously. The community eats there, gathers there. The restaurant employs members from the community, and actually practices decent job training and advancement for folks from the neighborhood. 

And there’s this teenager named Kamel. He’s 16, he’s a high school dropout. He’s got significant dyslexia which wasn’t ever addressed, which means he can’t fill out a job application. Home life is unstable, he lives half the time on the streets, and he’s starting occasional “work” as a carjacker and small time drug dealer. 

What’s happening at that same moment, though, is that he meets Ronald McDonald at a community event. Outside companies, corporate events never came to his neighborhood. And here’s an actor playing Ronald McDonald doing a magic show. And he’s got one of those big orange McDonalds coolers that he can’t carry back with him when the show ends. 

So Kamel, who’s there, says I’ll do it. I’ll bring your cooler back to your McDonalds tomorrow. And the manager who was with the actor says: sure, thank you. And Kamel does it; he lugs the cooler on his scooter the next day, turns it back in, and asks for a job. 

Something about being trusted as he was made him want to work there. And something about how reliable he’d been made the manager want to hire him.

The story from there is fun - Kamel rises through the ranks, he’s eventually a great employee, he becomes a manager, through that position, a significant community leader. 

This branch of McDonalds takes its “come as you are” motto seriously. Be being for everyone, good things happen. 

But the story is bumpy too. McDonalds isn’t a charity - they’re doing their “everyone” thing because they think it’s good for business. And sometimes it is. But in Kamel’s first few years of employment, he’s not a great employee yet. They really need to walk the distance with him. And then later, when he’s a great manager for the community - and a labor leader, really - it’s unclear if McDonalds would rather have this “Come As You Are” success story, or if they’d rather get rid of him, not really be for everyone, and increase their profit margins.

“Come as you are.” Everyone is included without exception. This is a beautiful way to be in the world. I’m preaching today that I think it’s God way in the world and God’s way for us to be in the world. 

But it takes work. It gets complicated. It sounds beautiful, but it’s not always what we want. 

When Grace and I were first married,

We’re talking about Reservoir’s Core Values these days. And I’m so excited to talk about them because I really like these values. Like, this is who we are and what we care about, and how we think it best informs and shapes our faith journeys. Check it out. Here’s what our website says:

CORE VALUES

Jesus captures our hearts, transforms our lives, and makes all things possible. We want to move closer to Jesus in all aspects of our lives. As we do so, our community is animated by these five core values that guide our pursuit of vibrant, inclusive, healthy faith:

Connection: We value life-giving connections and are committed to pursuing God’s wholeness, love, and leading in every moment of our lives, transcending distinctions between sacred and secular.

Everyone: We seek to welcome people in all their diversity, without condition or exception, to embrace a life connected to Jesus and others.

Action: Love for Jesus compels us to act—to seek justice, show compassion, work for reconciliation, and hope for transformation in joyful engagement with the world.

Freedom: We encourage honest exploration of faith over conformity of belief or behavior, trusting that the Holy Spirit reveals truth to all who seek God.

Humility: We are wholeheartedly committed to pursuing the truth of Jesus through multiple sources, including the Bible, reason, culture, and experience, and we take the posture of learners, recognizing that our understanding of God’s truth continues to unfold.

Y'all, this is so good. For a church to have such words. “transcending distinctions between sacred and secular,” you mean even “worldly” things? Yes it’s all God’s. “Diversity, without condition or exception” For real? Even…? Yes, no matter what. “Trusting the Holy Spirit reveals truth to all who seek God.” Whaaaaat. To all? And “recognizing that our understanding of God’s truth continues to unfold?” WHAAAAAT you mean, we didn’t have it all figured out in 1791?  Can you tell, I’m so excited to be unpacking these values together for 5 weeks. 

At the center, the starting point is Jesus. Jesus captures our hearts. Jesus transforms our lives. JESUS, makes all things possible. Steve kicked us off in the series last week with Connection. Today, I’m talking about Action. I thought about how l’d talk about action. And I was like wait, This is about ACTION. Not, let’s sit here and listen and talk about action. So, I have a gift for you all today. I am going to preach a very short sermon! Praise God! And hopefully give us some time, a chance to take action in whatever way you might need and feel lead today at the end of service. So short sermon, we’ll end early, and I’ll point you to a few ways that you can use that time to open yourself up to even a small action today. 

So let me share just 2 Bible stories and what moved them to Action. 

The reality is that the love of Jesus does not compel us all the same. So here are two ways, two different women reacting to the love of Jesus. Listen

Luke 8:42-48 (NIV)

As Jesus was on his way, the crowds almost crushed him. 43 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, but no one could heal her. 44 She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.

45 “Who touched me?” Jesus asked.

When they all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.”

46 But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.”

47 Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed. 48 Then he said to her, “Daughter,