Word of Life Church Podcast

Faith Life Weekend 2015 Session 3

A Moveable Feast is best known as the memoir by Ernest Hemingway. But the term actually comes from the liturgical calendar. A moveable feast is a feast day without a fixed date, like Easter. In this sermon A Moveable Feast is used to describe the ministry of Jesus. In the Gospels Jesus moves from meal to meal, feast to feast, announcing and enacting the kingdom of God. Jesus ministry truly was and is a moveable feast!

Faith Life Weekend 2015 Session 2

As a child Mephibosheth was let down by a loved one; as a result he was crippled for life. But the story finds beauty when Mephibosheth was called out of the wastelands and seated at the king's table. Have you ever been let down by a loved one and it left its mark on you? Have you ever been hurt by those who were supposed to help you? Did it crippled you? Do you limp through life, still suffering from old wounds? There is hope! This is the story Mephibosheth -- a broken man called to the king's table.

Session 1 of Faith Life Weekend 2015

The Jewish Passover and Christian Communion are both feasts of liberation. The Jewish Passover and Christian Communion are both meals of memory. At both meals—Passover and Communion—a story is told. Exodus and Good Friday. We are the stories we tell. We are what we remember. Our feasts shape our identity. To be Jewish is to remember the Exodus. To be Christian is to remember Good Friday. Jesus establishes his liberating kingdom in the heart of domination systems and undoes them from the inside out.

In the New Testament we’re not given just one Gospel witness to Jesus, but four. Each of the four Gospels introduce Jesus’ public ministry in a different way and from a different location.

Matthew: Reissuing the Torah as the Sermon on the Mount.
Mark: Casting out a demon in the synagogue in Capernaum.
Luke: Announcing the Lord’s favor in the synagogue in Nazareth.
John: Turning water to wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee.

In each case this establishes a particular emphasis of that Gospel.

Matthew: It's time for a New Torah.
Mark: It's time for the overthrow of Satan's kingdom.
Luke: It's time for God's favor upon the world.
John: It's time for the everlasting feast to begin.

Jesus’ whole ministry consisted in announcing and enacting the kingdom of God. In his three year ministry Jesus never said or did anything that was not toward the end of announcing and enacting the kingdom of God. He did this by preaching, giving parables, healing the sick, casting out demons, forgiving sinners, and by performing a table practice of radical hospitality. During these three years Jesus was training twelve disciples to be the core of a new kind of community he was forming around himself; he called this community his church. The church is the community of baptized Jesus followers who seek to live the kingdom of God, by which we mean the reign and rule of God over the nations through Jesus Christ.

We are hurled into life without warning. First we are not...then suddenly we are! Waiting in the wings a script is thrust into our hands and we're shoved onto the stage of life. It's a script of family, nation, language, culture, and religion. We have no say in the matter. We are simply handed the script. In our fourscore sojourn we are expected to stick to the script...and then die.

But there is a great secret. There is an alternative. There is a counter-script.

We speak of Peter as making the first formal confession that Jesus is the Messiah, and it’s appropriate that we do so; it’s our tradition and Peter was pre-eminent among the disciples. But… A year and a half before Peter’s confession (and upon just meeting Jesus) Nathanael calls Jesus the “Son of God” and the “King of Israel." Both are titles for Messiah. And Nathanael does this all because Jesus saw him under the fig tree. What’s going on? I suspect it’s more than just Jesus’ minor miracle of a word of knowledge about Nathanael’s whereabouts. It’s not just that Jesus knew where Nathanael was when Philip found him, but what Nathanael was doing when he was under the fig tree in Bethsaida.

We all want to be loved and feel like we belong. This is a common human experience. Those who experience love and belonging are those with a sense of worthiness which is connected to how a person responds to the love of God. If we respond to the love of God with open-armed acceptance, we experience the life of God. If we respond to the love of God with rejection, we experience what could be called the "wrath of God." God loves and is love. He invites us to respond to his love with love and find ourselves becoming people of cruciform love.