Pastor Darren: I have spent the last couple of days over at a Walk to Emmaus.
Pastor Darren: Do we have any Walk to Emmaus crew here?
Pastor Darren: It's kind of a Christian revival movement.
Pastor Darren: Yeah, me and Leroy, any others?
Pastor Darren: Oh okay, Candy's walked to Emmaus.
Pastor Darren: All right, there's a few of you out there, all right, decaloris.
Pastor Darren: So anyway, I'm a little tired, not a lot tired, but a little bit tired.
Pastor Darren: Good experience, though I'm appreciative of my friend Boyd who got me connected to all of it.
Pastor Darren: But I start the journey here.
Pastor Darren: I'll recontinue our journey here.
Pastor Darren: We've been talking about this better life that our vision statement has been talking about Setting a course to a better life.
Pastor Darren: Who and where do we want to be?
Pastor Darren: And we switched a couple weeks back to the front part of the mission statement Setting course.
Pastor Darren: What are we doing to get to the place where we want to be?
Pastor Darren: And we continue here in Luke.
Pastor Darren: This is the Sermon on the Plain.
Pastor Darren: If you remember, last week, we have Sermon on the Mount, Matthew, where he's on the mountain and he's preaching down, coming from God, message delivered from on high, whereas Luke's version he's on the plane.
Pastor Darren: He's, even with those that he is preaching to, trying to make those connections.
Pastor Darren: And so, as we continue that journey through this summary of what Jesus was really trying to teach about how we're supposed to live, how we're supposed to behave.
Pastor Darren: I have to confess, in my journey this week, I landed in a different spot than I thought I was going to land.
Pastor Darren: I got hung up on the very beginning of the passage.
Pastor Darren: Do you remember what it said right at the very beginning?
Pastor Darren: But I say to you that listen.
Pastor Darren: But I say to you that listen, isn't that an interesting way to start?
Pastor Darren: Because to me it sounds just maybe a little bit cynical.
Pastor Darren: Right, I say to you that listen, whatever percentage of you that are actually hearing what I'm saying, this is who I'm talking to at this point.
Pastor Darren: You know to me, in some ways, it makes sense if you know the message that he's delivering at this time.
Pastor Darren: It is a difficult lesson, these are difficult things to be asking of human beings, and so we shouldn't maybe be fully surprised.
Pastor Darren: I think, if the passage was a dialogue instead of a monologue, every other verse would be the phrase yeah, but Right, listen to this, are you ready?
Pastor Darren: But I say to you that listen, right, listen to this, are you ready?
Pastor Darren: But I say to you that listen, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you yeah, but Bless those who curse you.
Pastor Darren: Pray for those who abuse you yeah, but If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.
Pastor Darren: Oh, yeah, but from anyone who takes away your coat, do not withhold even your shirt.
Pastor Darren: Yeah, but give to everyone who begs from you.
Pastor Darren: And if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.
Pastor Darren: Yeah, but do to others as you would have them do to you.
Pastor Darren: Can we say it together?
Pastor Darren: Yeah, but these are rough, these are big asks, these are hard to do.
Pastor Darren: I might even argue that they are counter-instinctual to our very being to do these things that Jesus is asking us to do, instructing us to do.
Pastor Darren: They go against what we're naturally inclined to do.
Pastor Darren: If someone hits you in the face, you don't go.
Pastor Darren: How about this one?
Pastor Darren: That's just not what our beings are given to do, right?
Pastor Darren: If we say to love those who hate us, it feels like we're condoning that, we're enabling that.
Pastor Darren: To love those who hate us, to bless those who curse us, to pray for those who abuse us, it feels like we're saying it's okay to keep doing that to us, even if we aren't saying it to convince ourselves.
Pastor Darren: We feel like we're leaving the door open for the other person to continue to do that.
Pastor Darren: Give them the other cheek.
Pastor Darren: Well, why not my house and my car as well?
Pastor Darren: Thank you for hitting me.
Pastor Darren: Here's all my stuff.
Pastor Darren: Right.
Pastor Darren: Then, luke, he's got to pile on even further.
Pastor Darren: If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?
Pastor Darren: Well, it's easy to love the ones who love you, is it not?
Pastor Darren: Usually?
Pastor Darren: For even sinners love those who love them.
Pastor Darren: If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?
Pastor Darren: Again, that's easy.
Pastor Darren: That's American economics right there.
Pastor Darren: They did good to you.
Pastor Darren: You do good back.
Pastor Darren: Even sinners do that.
Pastor Darren: So Jesus doesn't lighten up on it in any way.
Pastor Darren: I think there's a genuine fear in play here, a fear of opening the door to further damage, further hurt.
Pastor Darren: But I also think there's a power dynamic that's in play there.
Pastor Darren: Why we wrestle with it?
Pastor Darren: Maybe all it is is this power to keep them from doing it again.
Pastor Darren: Still, it's a power thing.
Pastor Darren: Nonetheless, we can't afford to give ground here.
Pastor Darren: It makes us vulnerable.
Pastor Darren: It's a power we want to have hand.
Pastor Darren: Do you remember the Seinfeld episode To have hand?
Pastor Darren: Oh, you don't watch Seinfeld.
Pastor Darren: How do you go to sleep at night.
Pastor Darren: That's the last thing I'm watching every night with seinfeld, george costanza.
Pastor Darren: He's the neurotic friend you know that's in a lot of these sitcoms, right, and?
Pastor Darren: And he's attributing all of his lack of successful relationships.
Pastor Darren: And you know all of this.
Pastor Darren: Not being able to keep a partner is because he doesn't have power.
Pastor Darren: He doesn't have hand.
Pastor Darren: He needs hand.
Pastor Darren: It's about power.
Pastor Darren: In many ways, I wanted to think about this power just a little bit.
Pastor Darren: Anybody watching hockey on Thursday night?
Pastor Darren: Yeah, okay, good, we've got a few of us.
Pastor Darren: A few of us were watching hockey.
Pastor Darren: It was the big.
Pastor Darren: Instead of the National Hockey League All-Star Game, they did a 14-tournament, country against country.
Pastor Darren: The countries who had the most players in the NHL played against each other, and sure enough, because Canada and the US tend to have the most players, it came down to Thursday night best against best, usa versus Canada.
Pastor Darren: Are you ready for my confession?
Pastor Darren: Canada, are you ready for my confession?
Pastor Darren: I was rooting for Canada.
Pastor Darren: All right, I'm not alone.
Pastor Darren: Those Canadians are good people.
Pastor Darren: They're nice folk up there.
Pastor Darren: Am I right?
Pastor Darren: Those Canadians you meet good people?
Pastor Darren: I married a Canadian, a Canadian who didn't know the game was on.
Pastor Darren: Mind you Right?
Pastor Darren: Isn't Nancy Bonds like the nicest person you've ever met.
Pastor Darren: Right, she's a true Canadian and Tim's kind of honorary Canadian, am I right?
Pastor Darren: He's like super nice.
Pastor Darren: I'm a pastor, I'm supposed to be nice, but you're paying me to be nice.
Pastor Darren: He just does it because he's a good guy, right?
Pastor Darren: Canada I'm going to root for Canada here.
Pastor Darren: That know, that was a little bit what was going on.
Pastor Darren: But also in my head I'm like there's some nationalism going on in our country.
Pastor Darren: That gets me a little bit concerned, a little anxious.
Pastor Darren: Do we really need another thing to be overconfident about?
Pastor Darren: I don't know.
Pastor Darren: Sometimes, my Christian brothers and sisters, you know we're wanting to assert our Christian authority over society and I get nervous about that.
Pastor Darren: It feels problematic to me.
Pastor Darren: Right, could we mandate Christian love?
Pastor Darren: God didn't mandate Christian love.
Pastor Darren: God sent Jesus down and tried to persuade, convince, to show what it looked like.
Pastor Darren: That's how God worked.
Pastor Darren: Even God really didn't try to mandate it.
Pastor Darren: I'm not even sure we would all agree all us, the body of faith, would we agree on what Christian love is and what it looks like.
Pastor Darren: It's rough.
Pastor Darren: So when we start trying to assert ourselves into that conversation and mandate it all, it feels like it's a problematic power at its best.
Pastor Darren: I don't know that we want to be in a position where we are deciding how others are going to philosophize, theologize their lives.
Pastor Darren: I think we're in the convincing business.
Pastor Darren: We're in the heart business.
Pastor Darren: They're going to decide because of how we treat them, not because we've mandated it, mandated it.
Pastor Darren: But you can see how this power thing kind of plays out, maybe a little bit.
Pastor Darren: It plays out in the scripture, obviously, when we look at the things that Jesus is instructing us to do.
Pastor Darren: If we were to take the opposite right, it would be giving hate for hate, curse for curse.
Pastor Darren: With those who hate us, we're going to hate them even more and we get into this dynamic.
Pastor Darren: I'm going to presume that enough hate is going to lead to some actions that live out that hate and then there's probably likely some end to that, even a victor of some sort that wins this whole dynamic.
Pastor Darren: Do we have any rap fans in the room today?
Pastor Darren: I'm guessing.
Pastor Darren: All right, steve, all right?
Pastor Darren: Did Kendrick win?
Pastor Darren: I think he won pretty convincingly.
Pastor Darren: Kendrick and Drake this is the big rap battle of the last decade.
Pastor Darren: I think it's been going on a long time.
Pastor Darren: When you get to be in the Super Bowl halftime show and you have done all of your shots at the other guy in front of the world.
Pastor Darren: He won.
Pastor Darren: He wins the war.
Pastor Darren: Drake ought to just quit and move on.
Pastor Darren: Look how relevant I am.
Pastor Darren: Is it relevant when there are only two other people who even know who I'm talking about?
Pastor Darren: I guess relevant is relative, in other words, but yeah, maybe we even get to the point where somebody actually won the battle, maybe you won the battle.
Pastor Darren: Now you get to assert yourself, your will, your view.
Pastor Darren: But what's the nature of that power?
Pastor Darren: It would be hard to call it permanent, right, it's not really a permanent power.
Pastor Darren: You didn't come to some shared agreement about how the future was going to lay out.
Pastor Darren: You just got the other person or people to step back.
Pastor Darren: The power would last, presumably until it was gone, until you didn't win, or maybe somebody else wins and won over the power.
Pastor Darren: In any case, it's just a temporary power that you were able to amass, certainly not a divine power, right?
Pastor Darren: Not anything that was sacred, steeped in the eternal, something that makes things better.
Pastor Darren: See, I think Jesus, he's trying to invite us with this invitation, this instruction that feels so difficult, feels so counterintuitive.
Pastor Darren: He's trying to get us into this new realm of understanding how the world works and I want to reiterate, how this world works, not some other world.
Pastor Darren: God wanted to build the kingdom here and in this there is a deeper power.
Pastor Darren: Not just a power that allows us to feel like we won, feel like we were right, feel like we were the truth.
Pastor Darren: It's actually a real power that comes with healing, that comes with growth, that comes with the capacity to allow everyone to bloom into the creature that God wants each and every one of us to be from our very birth, that God wanted us to be.
Pastor Darren: It's not a power that overpowers or conquers.
Pastor Darren: It's a power that wins over, that builds bridges, that leads to healing.
Pastor Darren: It's not an absolute power that overcomes everybody and mandates everything.
Pastor Darren: Fall in line, you turn that other cheek.
Pastor Darren: There is no guarantee you aren't going to get hit again.
Pastor Darren: Not everybody is open to this different realm that Jesus is inviting us to, but by doing so, in some ways, we've shed a different light, a new way of doing things, onto the situation, onto the conflict.
Pastor Darren: The hope is that something in their heart, something that God put in their heart, might open up a little bit awaken, just a little bit Awaken, just a little bit, but I'm not going to linger there.
Pastor Darren: I sat there thinking, oh, we've been preaching this sermon because it is so difficult for 2,000 years.
Pastor Darren: You've probably heard this sermon many, many times.
Pastor Darren: We've been wrestling with it for forever.
Pastor Darren: Maybe the real question for us is are we going to trust it?
Pastor Darren: Are we going to trust this teaching that Jesus gives to us, this teaching that also appears in Matthew?
Pastor Darren: This teaching we're pretty convinced was a core message that Jesus brought?
Pastor Darren: Are we going to trust it?
Pastor Darren: I told you I was at the walk to Emmaus.
Pastor Darren: It's kind of a faith revitalization weekend kind of thing.
Pastor Darren: It's been really powerful for a lot of people in this world and I was doing the talk on obstacles to grace, things that get in the way of us understanding and believing and living out God's unconditional love for us.
Pastor Darren: And as I got to the end, I ended up asking this very same question.
Pastor Darren: We know that Jesus describes and models for us a new way of living life.
Pastor Darren: Are you going to trust it?
Pastor Darren: Are you going to trust that it leads to something better?
Pastor Darren: Are you going to trust that it leads to an enriching of your relationships?
Pastor Darren: Are you going to trust that it's going to build the body of faith in this world.
Pastor Darren: Are you going to trust that it's something that enables others to fully bloom Bloom into being able to offer all that God is hoping they will offer to this world?
Pastor Darren: Maybe Luke has it right here, opening with Jesus saying to those who will listen, because that group that he's preaching to it often doesn't include us.
Pastor Darren: We don't always believe in this fully, this new way of living, of looking at the world.
Pastor Darren: We make other choices, we don't always trust, we don't always listen.
Pastor Darren: But it's in that, the humility, the humility it takes to do what he's teaching here, that we come to find God's fullness in ourselves.
Pastor Darren: God's abundance in ourselves comes as we are able to live out that sacrificial love for others.
Pastor Darren: When we can redirect ourselves to that sacrificial relationship that Jesus modeled, we get a taste of what Jesus knows to be very, very true about life.
Pastor Darren: We get to know the part of life that is sacred, that is divine, that is full of life's abundance.
Pastor Darren: God calls us to this humility, not that we might defer to the world, but that we might understand the beauty that comes and the strength that comes from that humility.
Pastor Darren: Now I can tell you that sometimes life does humble us.
Pastor Darren: Sometimes life takes us where we really don't want to go, and my guess is, all of you have a story about being in that space, Life leading you to difficulty, to challenge, to questions with no answer.
Pastor Darren: Sometimes life does that for you.
Pastor Darren: To me, the irony of that is it can be a gift in the way it humbles us, in the way it opens us to a new way of understanding the world, a new way of understanding its challenges, its pains.
Pastor Darren: It's a counterintuitive gift of sorts we don't ask for this gift for sure but it can have its value.
Pastor Darren: This is a way that God often works through us.
Pastor Darren: You guys are going to receive a gift this morning.
Pastor Darren: Lois Jackson has walked the journey with this church for a long time.
Pastor Darren: We haven't seen her in a bit, but she has a gift from God that she shares her music and she's going to be singing a song that I think lives into that reality, a song about how, when life can bring a lot of hurt, a lot of pain, it also can bring an awareness of God and awareness of God's love, and I invite you to listen for that message She'll be singing during our offertory, during our offertory.
Pastor Darren: So, with that, I'll invite you to prepare yourself for that and say Amen, amen.