The Story - Chapter One

The Story is a 31 chapter narrative that goes through the entire Bible.  This is my sermon from Chapter 1 which was preached on September 9th 2012.  How it is written here and how it was actually delivered differ in many places.  In other words my sermons are never preached word for word.

THE STORY CHAPTER 1 CREATION: THE BEGINNING OF LIFE AS WE KNOW IT


The Adam and Eve transition video has been shown. I walk out on stage. There is an apple on the table. Balls of various sizes are on the floor.

God. Welcome to the story. The main character in our story is God. He is also the script writer. I don’t know about you but I love a good story. As a child of older parents I grew up listening to stories that my parents and their friends would tell. I grew up in Western Montana and my dad and his friends were loggers and construction workers and they knew how to tell a story. A guy said one time that if Garrison Keillor were go into a bar in Montana and listen to the stories he would quit his day job, because he couldn’t compete. And I believe that. My dad, who at age 16 logged in Oregon and then joined the Navy to go to war in the pacific and then came back and was a foreman on road construction crews that built roads in the mountains of Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, was a master story teller. He told what you could call semi-true stories. They were mostly true but also had enough baloney in them to keep you guessing and hanging on every word. My dad had lived through the great depression, World War II and I was fascinated by his stories of those times. I often wondered what it would have been like to live in those times. I would try to place myself mentally in those places and try to imagine my parents as young people. Stories were large part of my growing up. This morning we are going to begin to tell the story, and it is not a semi-true story. It is a completely true story, there is no once upon a time, or this really happened here. No this is a true story. In fact it is the most fascinating, it is the greatest story ever told. And you have a part in that story. God wrote the script and you and I are actors. And if you and I are going to play our part well we need to learn the script. This is what we will be doing. Our script, like most scripts starts at the beginning.



We start first with God. Notice I said we start. God on the other hand doesn’t have a start, a beginning. God is eternal. Eternal doesn’t just mean that he never has an end, but that he never had a beginning either. That is hard for us to conceptualize, because you and I do have a beginning, and so for the sake of understanding, we start at the beginning of creation. Some have referred to it as the big bang; however it happened, it was big and it happened with a bang, but we are not talking about an impersonal accident here; instead we are talking about God acting as a poet and as an artist. Any of you who have hiked through the mountains or in the Grand Canyon are who have witnessed creation in all its beauty know that creation is the work of an artist. In the story we see God painting and writing, and in six days he creates a masterpiece.



Notice that there is an order to how God works. On days one, two and three God creates places. Day one he creates light and darkness. Day two he creates the sky and the waters. Day three he creates land and vegetation. God creates the background on the canvass like a great painter. If you have ever watched someone paint you can appreciate this. They fill in the background with color and then they start adding the detail. That is what God starts doing on day four. If you look at the chart you see the sequences. Day four God puts in the sun and the moon and the stars. As you see I put some balls out there to roughly estimate the planet sizes. (Explain them) Looking at these is truly amazing when you see the size of earth compared to everything else. We are a pretty small planet. As they say sometimes great things come in small packages.



Then on day five he fills the sky with the birds and the waters with sea creatures. Then on day six he fills the land with animals and last of all he creates us, humans. The creation of man is God’s crowning achievement. We hear this in God’s own words, “Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our own likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over living creature that moves on the ground.” Where God had created other animals and things he gave them life, when he created man he gave him his own breath, he created him in his own image. In other words God’s core passion is people because they are made in God’s image. We are, you and I are God’s core passion, we are why everything else was made. Think about that for a second. All the beauties of the creation are secondary to you. You are the most important thing in the universe to God. Talk about self-esteem, we have God esteem. And as we will see in the rest of the story, God’s supreme passion to be with you at all costs.



So here we have this beautiful creation, we have the planets in their orbits, and we have birds in the air, fish in the sea and animal on the ground. We have plants and trees and a garden where man and woman live in perfect harmony with God. Everything is perfect. And it would be nice to conclude this story this morning with and they lived happily ever after. I mean this is the greatest story ever told, so isn’t that how it should end? Adam and Eve continue to have the perfect relationship with God and with each other, they have children and populate the earth, and all their children are perfect too and you and I when we come along well we live in a perfect world as well, but the story this morning doesn’t end that way. Far from it. No this is not the end of the story, this is just the beginning. The story continues with well an apple, or some sort of fruit we really don’t know. It continues with the big bang of the Fall. A bang this is still resounding throughout the world. We are still suffering the consequences of it this morning.



Now some people question why the fall had to happen. Couldn’t God have stopped it from happening? And why of all things that tree? You have heard of the tree right? In the midst of the Garden where God had put Adam and Eve to live He put a tree called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And he also put another tree there, called the tree of life. He told Adam and Eve the garden is yours, take care of it and eat of the fruit of the trees, but don’t eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because if you eat of that tree you shall surely die. Eat of everything else, just not that tree. So why would God do that? Well here is the funny thing about God. Some of you may have grown up with this image of God as some sort of mean judge or enforcer, or someone looking over your shoulder waiting for you to mess up. That may have been an image put there by a parent or a pastor or a grandparent. But that is really not the God that The Story describes. The God in the story is a loving God who wants to have a loving relationship with the people he created. And if you are going to have a loving relationship with someone you have to give them the freedom and power to choose to love you back or to reject you. If there is no ability to walk away to reject the other person that is not really a relationship that is just one person controlling the other, using them, it’s really an abusive relationship. God is not going to force his people to love him. He gave Adam and Eve the choice and he gives you and me the choice still today.



To fully understand what’s going on here we first have to understand Adam and Eve’s nature. You and today because of what happened with this apple have a sinful nature. We will get to that later, but we sin not only in things that we do or don’t do, but in our thoughts and desires as well. In fact we are so filled with sin that we can’t help but sin. We can’t stop ourselves. If we had been Adam and Eve in our current state we would have been doomed from the start, but Adam and Eve were not sinners, they had a perfect nature, they had the ability to not sin. They had the ability to avoid temptation and always do the right thing. They were the perfect creation of God. Therefore their rebellion is a deliberate choice, with forethought. They knew what they were doing and did it anyway. They gave into the temptation to be their own God. Remember Satan’s, the snake’s temptation, God knows that if you eat the fruit you will be like him and Eve took the apple and ate and gave some to Adam who also ate. With this sound (Crunch) Adam and Eve rejected God and died spiritually and became separated from God. And when God found out he threw them out of the garden and told them that they were cursed and that the ground was also cursed because of them. So much for living happily ever after. So much for the nice fairy tale. No this part of the story ends in betrayal, spiritual death and disaster. Adam and Eve had replaced God with themselves.



That’s how the grand story that we are embarking on for the next nine months starts off. It is the basis for the rest of the story. In fact the rest of the story is really about God’s pursuit to get us back. There is a huge transition in the story here. The first three chapters are like part one of the story and then from the middle of Genesis 3 to Revelation 22 is part two. First part thrown out of the garden separated from God, part two God comes after us, trying to find us, trying to bring us home to be with him. The impact of Adam and Eve’s sin was huge. They were not just filled with sin; their spiritual DNA was changed; now sin was part of their life and because of that new spiritual DNA their offspring were born with sin as well. Sinners produced sinners and the world became a completely different place.



As the generations pass and the world population grows it becomes more and more corrupt. The Story says, “The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that ever inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.” God looks at the world he has created and the people he has created and he is greatly dismayed. The perfect thing that he had created had become ruined. He decides it is time to start over and he resolves to wipe out everything but a small portion of people and animals and he looks around he sees a man named Noah. The story says, “Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God.” God decides that he is going to start over with Noah and so he calls him and tells him to build an ark to save his family so that God can do a do over. Here is a strange thing in the story, this shows the difference in the thinking that goes on in God’s upper story compared to the thinking that goes on in our lower story. God in the upper story does something here that he never does again, he actually chooses the best person for the job. As we will see in the rest of the story God chooses people that at times were the least qualified for the job. In our lower story, our day to day lives, God’s actions sometimes don’t make sense. We wouldn’t choose the people that God chooses, but here with Noah we are on the same page. This is the man for the job. God tells Noah build an ark, and he gives him exact instructions on how to build it. He tells him what kind of wood to use and what length it should be and then he tells him to gather two of every kind of animal plus additional animals for food. Sounds like a simple story, but I want you to look outside for a minute. He told Noah to build the ark in a setting much like this. No ocean nearby, no massive waterways that we know of. He is in a desert! There is no indication that there had ever even been rain before, much less something called a flood. On top of that he told Noah, hey when you’re not building the ark, I want you to out and preach to everyone around you that they need to repent or I am going to flood the earth. Now here is the most interesting thing, according to the timeline it took 120 years to do this, it took him that long to build the ark. So Noah I want you to build an ark in the middle of nowhere, you are going to have to find your own gopher wood and no one is going to help you except your sons, who are probably going to think that you are nuts, as is the rest of the community and while you are doing that, and working your day job mind you, I want you to go knock on doors and explain to people that you are building an ark in the middle of the desert because a flood is coming and tell them they need to repent. I am sure this made Noah Mr. popular, more likely the crazy man that lives down the street.



In the face of all of this Noah builds this Ark, most people think it was more of a barge than a ship and he loads all the animals and his family upon it and God closes the door and it begins to rain. And it rains for 40 days and 40 nights. Does that number remind you of anything? Yesterday we finished our 40 days of prayer for The Story. We prayed up a storm that The Story would bring many people back into a relationship with God. God here uses that same 40 days to restore things on earth so that he can continue to have a relationship with mankind. We will find out later in the story that 40 days is always a time of great significance. So for forty days it rained and springs of water came up from the ground and the whole earth was flooded and every living thing on it was destroyed. All the people, all the animals, everything except for Noah and his family and the animals with them in the Ark. Finally the rain stopped and slowly after many months the water receded and dry land appeared and Noah and his family and all the animals were allowed to leave the ark.



The minute they stepped outside they encountered a whole new world. Everything was gone, the earth itself had been deeply changed by the waters and they find themselves alone in this brand new world. It’s now their job to start over. From eight people and the animals left on the ark, they were going to have to repopulate the world. It sounds like something out of a really bad end of the world movie, but this was reality. Imagine that you and your family the only ones left on the planet and it is your responsibility to repopulate it. It is a new beginning, a brave new world. The first thing that Noah does is build an altar to the Lord and he offers God sacrifices upon it to thank him for saving them. The first thing Noah and his family do in this new world is worship God. Sounds like a really good start doesn’t it? So maybe this is the happily ever after ending that we want right? Noah and his family worship God, reproduce and their children worship God and everything is perfect. I mean God had wiped out the evil human race in the flood and now Noah and his family are worshipping him. (Take a bite of the apple) but that sound could still be heard. Yeah, the sinful human race had been wiped out but sin was still around. Noah, though a righteousness man was still a sinner and so were the members of his family. Sin had survived the flood on the ark as well. It had stowed away in Noah’s family during the voyage. Even though this new life started with worship, it wouldn’t be long before sin raised its ugly head. In fact not long after, Noah get’s drunk and falls asleep, the story says, “Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s nakedness.” Ham gets in trouble here because instead of covering his father’s shame he goes and tells others about it. Sin was still around in all its naked evil. So the story continues with man’s sin and God’s pursuit of him. If the story sounds like a mystery novel, well in some ways it is a little. It is a bit of a mystery story and like any good mystery novel the story contains clues. In this morning’s chapter of the story there is a salvation clue even in the midst of the opening big bang. Remember back for a moment after Adam and Eve sinned. One result of their sin is that they become aware of their nakedness. Embarrassed they cover their nakedness with fig leaves. God sees this and takes away the fig leaves and instead covers Adam and Eve with the skins of animals. There is the salvation clue. Nothing had ever died until now. In the perfect world there was no death, because there was no sin. Adam and Eve were vegetarians until after the fall. For the first time Adam Eve saw an animal physically die, they saw blood being shed. And that blood was shed so that their nakedness, their sin could be covered. The clue, for God to restore the vision that human beings are His supreme passion it will require the shedding of blood.



There is an upper story and a lower story in this chapter today. God created the world with the grand vision of dwelling together with us in the world. It is God’s supreme passion to be with you. For that to be a real relationship God gave us freedom of choice. Adam and Eve choose to eat of the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, thus ruining God’s vision of dwelling together with us. Sin was deposited permanently into the nature of Adam and Eve, a deadly virus separating them from a holy God. The rest of the story, the entire Bible in fact, tells us of the relentless pursuit of God and the extent to which he will go in order to get us back. The flood was God’s first attempt. But it doesn’t work because it doesn’t deal with sin. Sin goes into the ark with Noah and it disembarks with him. The point of the story. Well you’re the point of the story. You sitting here in this room this morning. You are the point of the story. From the creation story we discover the value of human beings. God wants to be with you. Think about that. You. God wants to personally be with you. At great cost to God, God has done everything possible to get you back. You are valuable. True, lasting self-esteem begins by believing what God says about you. God loves you. When God replaced Adam and Eve’s fig leaves with garments of skin, he gave us a clue as to how far he would go to fulfill this supreme desire to restore a relationship with us. Even when we are ashamed and feeling vulnerable, he covers us in order to restore our relationship with him, but covering us requires the shedding of blood.



There will be much more shedding of blood before this story is over. All of it will point forward to the ultimate shedding of blood that would happen thousands of years later on a cross in a place called Calvary. But we are getting ahead of ourselves a little. Next week in the story we get another picture of that great clue of the shedding of blood. It’s a picture you won’t soon forget. It’s the picture of a building of a nation; it is a picture of a fulfilling of a promise, a promise that is still ours today. So join us next week when we meet a couple of senior citizens who are told it is time to start a family and build a nation.

TRANSITIONS, SOME PLANNED, SOME NOT

Yesterday my kids went back to school after six and half weeks of summer vacation. They are second graders now and more is expected of them. My daughter was anxious to get back to school to see her friends and to learn more things. She is a good student and athlete and is very popular. The transition back to school was easy for her. I was worried about my son though, because he is one of those people who doesn’t do transitions well. He made it very clear in the days leading up to the new school year that he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. He doesn’t like school, unless you count recess and P.E. In the past getting him to school and dropping him off has been a huge undertaking. He doesn’t like waking up, he doesn’t like getting dressed, he doesn’t like walking from the car to the school, he doesn’t like putting his backpack and lunch away, and he really doesn’t like it when I leave him there. After six and half weeks of freedom I was not looking forward to his first day in second grade. On Monday morning when I got him up he threw a fit, he didn’t want to go. I had to threaten to take him to school in his underwear to get him dressed. A threat, by the way, I hope he never calls me on because I think I would be more embarrassed then he would be. He would probably gleefully throw his hand in the air and say, “Look at me, I’m wearing Batman underwear.” Once I finally got him dressed things seem to change. He calmed down and ate breakfast. When we got to the school I anticipated fireworks, but instead he calmly got out the car and walked to his classroom. In the classroom he did all the unloading he had to do and sat down. And that was it. No fireworks, no pleading. Today I took him to school and it was the same thing. I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop as they say, but he seems to have made a smooth transition to second grade. Part of that may be that it was a planned transition that we had talked to him about long before it happened.



This past week I had a transition that was not planned. In my desire to connect the congregation to the sermon in as many tangible ways as possible I decided to play Noah. The sermon was about how God talks to us and I thought preaching as if I was Noah would make the message more real. I thought of this about four weeks ago and so I didn’t shave the entire time. My plan was to then dye my beard white and find a white wig for my hair. Unfortunately I discovered that it is almost impossible to find a wig anywhere in July that is inexpensive. My next plan was to just wear a headdress and dye my beard. Darla and I went out about bought a hair product to bleach my beard. What happened next I am still trying to figure out. For some insane reason I decided to go ahead and bleach my hair and beard. Well bleaching my beard turned out impossible because of the fumes, but we went ahead with the hair on top of my head. Darla put all the stuff in and I put the cap on for an hour. When we took the cap off my hair was not white, it was yellow. So the next day I led worship and preached as Noah with Yellow hair. Thankfully the members of Family of Christ have a good sense of humor. The real transition came later on. After worship I went home and I shaved off all my facial hair. I have had a mustache for close to 30 years so it was a big change. I have always worn a mustache because without one even in my mid-thirties I looked like I was seventeen. In other words I have always had facial hair to look older. I then went to the barber and pretty much has them shave my head. After I got home I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom and looked at myself. It was shocking to say the least, but in a good way. I looked like I had suddenly become 10 years younger. For someone now in their late forties this was a good thing. The tuff of yellow hair that remained was a little weird but I liked what I saw. Therefore I have decided to keep the look, although I will let the yellow color go. I was so encouraged by the change that I have decided to start working out again, although I will try to avoid buying the sports car and the gold chain. It was an unplanned transition but one I like and think is for the good.



In September Family of Christ is going to go through a transition. We are going to start The Story in both the learning center and the church. The Story is a program that takes you through the Bible in 31 weeks. It covers the main stories of the Bible and reads like a novel. In other words there are no chapters and verses, but it is still the actual NIV text. We will teach it during Sunday worship and also in small groups and in the learning center as part of our regular curriculum. We want to get the parents in our learning center involved as well, doing The Story at home with their children at night. This will be a transition in every part of our ministry. It means a change of material in the learning center, it means a change in the order and presentation of worship on Sunday morning, it means a change in everyone’s devotional life. As with every transition there will be rough spots along the way, but in the end it promises to be a good change for the better.

In life we all face many transitions, school transitions, job transitions, personal transitions and hopefully in some cases transitions in our relationship with God. We invite to you join us in our transition starting September 9th.





Pastor Fred

ADOPTED? SO WHERE ARE YOUR "REAL" PARENTS?

“Does babies have to be born in a belley.” What you have just read was not misspelled, at least by me. My seven year old daughter typed that into the Bing search engine the other day. I discovered it shortly after she got off the computer. I sat there looking at the question for several minutes trying to think of what must be going through her brain. My daughter Jasmine and her twin brother Charlie are adopted. As I sat there I could sense the pain that must have went into that search. Jasmine has expressed that pain a lot lately to us. We took Jasmine and Charlie into our arms when they were just four days old. They were preemies and weighed about three and half pounds each. We knew then that one day these types of questions would be coming. For Jasmine the questions started early, when she was about three and a half. We have always been very open with our children about their adoption, when they have asked questions; we have always answered them to the best of our ability. I say to the best of our ability because we never met or had any contact with their biological mother and father. Ours is a closed and sealed adoption. That was the choice of the biological parents, not us. What we do know we share with them. We knew the questions would come because our children are African-American and we are white. In fact I was curious when the questions would begin. Right after we adopted them I read several books on the history of African-Americans and also books on the psychology of raising children of another race so that I would be prepared for all the stages.

What I didn’t see coming was the cluelessness and sometimes cruelty of other people. Now before I explain that statement let me say first of all that those people are in a very small minority. The vast majority of people have been openingly accepting of both the kids and our mixed race family. Charlie and Jasmine have been the recipients of tons of love and support. In fact I have been overwhelmed at times by the response of people to my kids and to us. So again what I am about to tell you is the result of a very small number of people. What I have learned though, is that a small number of people can cause a lot of damage in a small child’s life. I am amazed for instance at what people feel they have to say. When Jasmine was 3 and half she came home and informed my wife and I that she was black. Now I know that sounds like an obvious statement, because she is. The problem is that most children don’t realize their skin color until age four and when African-American children do they refer to themselves as brown, not black. So I knew she hadn’t come up with this on her own. I knew someone older had pointed that out to her so she would know that she was a different color than her parents. I knew this was my first test. I swallowed hard because what I wanted to do was ask, “Who told you that?” So that I could go track them down and hit them up side the head with a two by four. I did ask her in a very gentle manner, but she wasn’t telling. Several months later you came up to me and said, “Daddy, I’m brown.” I said, “Really.” And she said, “Yeah, and you and mommy are orange.” So for a long period of time we were the brown and orange family. We still laugh about that.

The questions increased in Kindergarten. Jasmine is a very beautiful, smart and athletic girl and so this brought a lot of jealously from three particular girls in the class. The one thing they apparently figured they had on her was that she was adopted, and they brought that up to her all the time. Finally one day she had enough and she turned around and took all three of them out. After they stopped crying they pointed out Jasmine as their attacker. Jasmine was punished as she should have been and we punished her as well at home, but when we approached the teachers about the cause behind it, nothing happened. Thankfully the next year the three girls were put into a different classroom than Jasmine and the problems have decreased.

The other day my wife was sitting in the front room with Charlie and Jasmine and a neighbor kid from down the block that is their age. In the middle of watching TV the kid turned to Jasmine and asked, “So why didn’t you stay with your real family?” My wife interrupted and told him that none of us knew why they had been given up for adoption. The damage had been done though. After I heard about it I spent some time lying in bed with Jasmine as she went to sleep that night. I talked to her again about her adoption and how much we loved her and that I was her daddy no matter what and that I would always be there for her. I know this is a subject that is on her mind a lot.

One night Jasmine said to Darla, “I bet my first mommy really misses me.” Darla told her I am sure that she does. I bet she thinks about you a lot. I have watched my wife time after time through the years defend Jasmine and Charlie’s biological mother, a woman she has never met. People will make statement to us about how they can’t understand why someone would give up their child. Darla points out to them that most mothers don’t want to give up their children, but they realize they can’t afford to raise them on their own, or that if they kept the child he or she wouldn’t be raised in a safe environment. There are many good reasons that women give up their children for adoption. What people need to realize is that adoptive children have a need to believe that their biological parents loved them. When a derogatory statement is made about a biological mother it is unsettling for the adopted child. Charlie spent three weeks in the hospital very sick when he was first born. I remember his biological mother called the hospital to check on him. I have shared that story with him and Jasmine to show them that they have always been loved.

As I sat and looked at Jasmine’s question in the engine search I thought about all these things. I wanted to go into her room and wrap her in a cocoon so that nothing else could hurt her, but I know I can’t protect her from these things. She is going to have to grow in her confidence and face these questions and deal with them. One way that Darla and I try to help her is by reminding her that we are all adopted by God. We are God’s children by faith, adopted through our baptism into Christ’s death on the cross and His resurrection from the dead. So we are all in the same boat. And it’s a good boat to be in. I put another question to the search engine tonight about adoption. As I searched through the responses I found a quote from an unknown source. It says, “Adoption means you grow in your mommy’s heart instead of her tummy.” I’ m going to give that Darla to share with Jasmine tonight.

HANGING OUT AT THE GROCERY STORE

I like hanging out at the grocery store, it is one of my favorite places to be. I usually go there at least once a day. I do that because I like my ingredients as fresh as I can get them. I don’t necessarily spend a lot of money there, but I just like to shop and price things and plan. Yes I know that sounds strange. What is really strange is that in general I don’t like to shop. I make it to the mall maybe twice a year and I can’t stand to walk into a clothing store. When my wife does manage to drag me to the mall, I moan and groan the whole time we are looking at clothes. I hate shopping! I love walking around the grocery store though. All that food, all the possibilities of things that can be cooked with it! My love affair with grocery stores started in college at the University of Idaho. I did most of my own cooking in college and my roommates and I would go shopping at 2 a.m. in the morning. At that hour we had the whole place pretty much to ourselves. It was a fun place to hang out for a few hours before the donut shop opened at 3:30 in the morning. My friend knew the donut shop owner and she would let us in and we frost our own fresh donuts. There is nothing like a warm freshly frosted donut. Then we would all go home and finally sleep.
My love affair with the grocery story increased when I went to Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The seminary required that all unmarried students live on campus and eat at the cafeteria, something I had never done in college. The problem was the cafeteria food was awful. The building was officially called Katherine Lutheran Hall in memory of Martin Luther’s wife. The food was so bad though we called it Kitty Litter Hall. My friend and I detested the food so much that we usually ate out at one of the local restaurants instead. So I was paying money for board and then paying money to eat somewhere else, but at least I didn’t have to eat bad food. I have always believed that life is too short to eat bad food. Another thing my friend and I would do was to go to the grocery stores. We never bought anything mind you, we had no way to cook it, but we window shopped. We would walk down the meat aisle looking at the all the things we could be cooking if they would let us move off campus. The main two grocery stores we would go to were Cubs and Lions Foods, they were superstores. Superstores were new in those days, we liked them because they were huge and had tons of food. We sometimes wondered if we could buy some of this food and then break into the dining hall and cook it while everyone slept. We never did, but just dreaming about it made life a little easier.
I like visiting grocery stores and comparing them to each other. I know that certain stores carry this brand and other stores carry that brand and I am also pretty good at knowing what that brand costs and how it tastes compared to another brand. I always have my ears open to new stuff and new tastes. A good grocery shopper has to know their stuff. For instance with meat, different stores call the same grade or type of meat two different things. Sometimes an ingredient called for in a recipe has a different name at the store. I study to go shopping. It is almost like a sport. If I do it right and get the right ingredients and then I use the right techniques to cook it, well I have had a good day and everyone is happy.
Sometimes I think I am strange because I am fascinated by this stuff, but then I read in Scripture that this seems to be important to God as well. When God wants to point out that something is good, he uses food talk. He tells the Israelites that they are going to receive a land filled with milk and honey, he even gives them recipes. For the Passover they have to cook a lamb and they are given precise instructions on how to do this. When the Israelites are in the desert he sends manna and rains quail down upon them, you could say the grocery store came to them. In the New Testament Jesus is always eating with someone. When the disciples realize that they are in the middle of nowhere with five thousand people they tell Jesus, “Hey dismiss these people so that they can go to the grocery store and buy food.” Jesus instead, again, brings the grocery store them and feeds the people himself. The book of Revelation pictures heaven as a big banquet where God brings out of the storehouses, the grocery stores, the finest of meats and the finest of wines. Many people believe that when we get to heaven we will have jobs to do there. If that is so I call dibs on being the guy that gets to do the shopping, especially since it’s all free.
So is visiting the grocery store a little vision of heaven? Well I wouldn’t go that far, but is a wonderful relaxing place to be most of the time. So much food, so little time. What are you eating tonight?

Pastor Fred

Ho, Ho, Ho, and a Bottle of Rum?

Christmas is over! For some of us that is a statement of relief and for others it is a statement of sadness. For me it is a little bit of both. My favorite songs during Christmas include songs like Joy to the World, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, and White Christmas. I enjoy singing those songs and listening to them. They bring back many childhood memories and several of them are good ways to worship God and remember what Christmas is really all about, the birth of Jesus. My favorite song after Christmas though is Jimmy Buffet’s, “Ho Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum” with the tag line, “Santa’s run off to the Caribbean.” Jimmy Buffet came out with a Christmas album a number of years ago and that was one of the songs on the CD. In my office I even have a little figure of Santa wearing a swimsuit and riding the waves. I love to listen to that song in the car and sing along, but I change the words slightly to the, "Pastor’s run off to the Caribbean.” The Christmas season in the church is exhausting. There are programs, special services, and parties and then you add in family events, baking and shopping, and well as wonderful as it all is, thankful it finally ends. It all happens so fast too. It is like people are trying to shove a whole years worth of celebrating into a few weeks. It is many times too hard to control, in a sense Christmas happens to you and then it’s gone. One minute you find yourself at the fourth Christmas event in as many days and then next thing you know you are watching the ball drop and it’s a new year. That is when I get visions of playing in the sand in the Caribbean. I want a margarita and the sound of steel drums in the background. Although I have never went to Caribbean, I usually do take a few days after Christmas to come down from the chaos, relax, get my bearings and think about what I want to accomplish in the coming year. I need that time every year to get it all back together. We all do.
The time after Christmas is a good opportunity to refocus. Some do that by making New Year’s resolutions. They realize everything didn’t go as well as it could have gone last year and they want to make this next year better. I make resolutions as well. One of my big resolutions this year is to eat breakfast every morning. Now that doesn’t seem ground breaking but as a diabetic who chronically skips breakfast and just drinks coffee and maybe eats a donut, it is a significant one. I know that if I can keep this resolution it will go a long way to keeping my diabetes in check and will also help me eat healthier the rest of the day. It seems like a small thing, but over time I am confident it can lead to much better health. I also believe that this is a resolution I am actually capable of keeping. I like to cook so I plan to make it interesting and maybe during the year I will share some of the fast breakfast recipes I come up with. So resolutions are a good thing. Visions are better.
What do I mean be visions? Am I talking about prophetic visions? Am I talking about hallucinations? Since we just finished Christmas am I talking about visions of sugar plums? Am I just talking about seeing? No I am talking about focus, about what we are really looking at, what we are really concentrating on. I am talking about what is our central theme of life. What causes us to do what we do every day, the reason behind our actions, the object that our decisions are based upon. Resolutions though good tend to be short term and are aimed at fixing what is wrong with us. Visions are long term; they are aimed at how we can be all that God wants us to be. A resolution says I am fat so I need to lose weight. A vision sees an ideal that could be and focuses on the object that can make that ideal a reality. So where am I going with this? How did we get from playing steel drums in the Caribbean to talking about a vision for our life? Well because maybe it’s time to stop dealing with just the symptoms and deal with the problem itself. Instead of focusing on the symptom of being worn out, or being unhealthy or whatever it is that you are dealing with, why don’t we deal with problem behind it all, our disconnect with God. I put to you that if we make God our vision many of the issues we struggle with will be handled as well. That is not to say that everything will be perfect, we are sinners living in a sinful world so nothing is ever going to be perfect, but a strong relationship with God can put everything in its proper perspective so that we don’t end up getting wrung out all the time by the chaos that we live in.
During our worship service on New Year’s Day I based the sermon on an old Irish Poem composed by Dallan Forgaill in the 8th Century. The poem is Be Thou My Vision, and it was a part of the Irish Monastic tradition before it was put to song in 1912. The first few lines of the song say, “Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart, naught be all else to me, save that thou art; Thou my best thought by day or by night, Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.” I used the song because I thought it conveyed a good message for the start of the New Year. This is the type of vision that we need for 2012. We need to keep our eyes, our vision on Jesus this year. It won’t make the chaos go away but it will guide us through the chaos, it will keep us grounded and concentrating on what is really important, our relationship with God. If we put God first then all the other stuff will fall into place. When that happens then instead of being rung out by life, we can embrace life and live the way God wants us to live. So I challenge you to every day get up and let the first words of your prayer that day be, Lord be thou my vision today, and then let God take over. That doesn’t mean you can’t dream of the Caribbean, it just means you will already be focused when you get there.

Pastor Fred