SPEAKER_01: Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and blessed be God's family now and forever.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Please join me in saying, All vulnerable God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name through Christ our Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Let us pray.
SPEAKER_01: O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy.
SPEAKER_01: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy, that with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal that we lose not the things eternal.
SPEAKER_01: Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: My friends, please be seated for the lesson.
SPEAKER_02: A reading from Baruch.
SPEAKER_02: A copy of the letter that Jeremiah sent to the women, children, and men who would lead as captives into Babylon by the king of the Babylonians to proclaim them the message that God had commanded him.
SPEAKER_02: Because of the sins that you have sinned before God, you will all be taken to Babylon as captives captives by Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Babylonians.
SPEAKER_02: Thus, when you all go into Babylon, you will remain there for many years and for a long time, up to seven generations.
SPEAKER_02: After that, I will bring you away from there in peace.
SPEAKER_02: Now you all shall see in Babylon gods made of silver and golden and wooden carried upon the shoulders, demonstrating the terror of the nations.
SPEAKER_02: Be careful, therefore, lest you all be made to be like the foreigners, or let fear of these gods seize and come upon you.
SPEAKER_02: When you see the crowd before and behind them, bowing down to worship them, say in yourself, You are the only one to whom we must bow down to and worship sovereign.
SPEAKER_02: For my messenger is with you and is watching over your lives.
SPEAKER_02: The word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_02: Happy are those who preserve justice.
SPEAKER_02: Remember me, faithful one, when showing favor to your people.
SPEAKER_02: That I may see goodness, attend your chosen ones, that I may rejoice in the joy of your nation.
SPEAKER_02: We have sinned along with our mothers and fathers.
SPEAKER_02: She gave them into the hand of the nations.
SPEAKER_02: Many times she delivered them, yet they rebelled through their own design.
SPEAKER_02: And she saw them through their distress.
SPEAKER_02: And for their sake, God remembered her covenant.
SPEAKER_02: She caused them to be viewed tenderly.
SPEAKER_02: Save us, holy shepherd, our God, and gather us from among the nations.
SPEAKER_03: As therefore you all have received the Messiah, Jesus the Godborn, in him continued a journey, having been rooted and built up in him, and having been confirmed in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.
SPEAKER_03: Therefore, see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and worthless deceitfulness, according to human tradition, according to the basic elements of the cosmos, and not according to the Messiah.
SPEAKER_03: Now in the Messiah dwells the whole fullness of divinity, bodily, and you all have in the Messiah come to fullness.
SPEAKER_03: The Messiah Jesus, who is the head of every ruler and authority.
SPEAKER_03: In the Messiah also you were all circumcised without human hands, by putting off the body of the flesh and the circumcision of Christ.
SPEAKER_03: When you were buried with the Messiah and baptism, you were also raised with the Messiah through faith in the power of God, who raised Jesus from the dead.
SPEAKER_03: And when you all were dead in trespasses and uncircumcision of your flesh, God brought you to life together with the Messiah, forgiving us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands.
SPEAKER_03: God set aside set this aside, nailing it to the cross.
SPEAKER_01: And the women, children, and men in Judea must flee on the mountains, and the women, children, and men inside the city must leave it, and the women, children, and men out in the country must not enter the city.
SPEAKER_01: These are days of retribution, as fulfillment of all that is written.
SPEAKER_01: Woe to those who are carrying in their wombs, and to those who are nursing infants in those days, for there shall be great calamity on the earth and wrath against this people, and they shall fall by the edge of the sword and be taken captive into all nations, and Jerusalem shall be trampled on by the nation until the time of the Gentile nations are fulfilled.
SPEAKER_01: There will be signs and sun, moon, and stars, and on the earth distress among nations made anxious.
SPEAKER_01: By the roaring of the sea and the waves, people shall lose heart from fear and expectation of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken, and then they shall see the Son of Woman coming in a cloud with power and great glory.
SPEAKER_01: When these things begin, stand up and keep your heads up, because your redemption is drawing near.
SPEAKER_01: This is the gospel of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Please be seated.
SPEAKER_01: Good morning, everybody.
SPEAKER_01: Believe it or not, when I was thinking about these scriptures this week, I couldn't stop thinking about Buddhism.
SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm not a Buddhist at all.
SPEAKER_01: I'm a little bit of a Zen.
SPEAKER_01: I don't think Zen is really super cool.
SPEAKER_01: But I couldn't stop thinking about this sort of Kohen.
SPEAKER_01: So it's a pithy statement that Buddhists pass down and to describe sort of the universe, right?
SPEAKER_01: Or their ways to understand their faith.
SPEAKER_01: We have those two, right, in our culture and in our tradition, like an apple a day keeps the doctor away, things like that.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's truth to it, right?
SPEAKER_01: And so they have this Kohen that says if you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.
SPEAKER_01: Now, if you know even a little about Buddhism, like your first thought might be, I thought they were pacifists.
SPEAKER_01: And they are.
SPEAKER_01: They are.
SPEAKER_01: But like that's why it's such a powerful Zen Cohen, because it creates this tension that's like, wait a minute, if you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.
SPEAKER_01: And what they're saying is that Buddhism is a way.
SPEAKER_01: If you meet somebody sitting on the road and they're telling you that they're Buddha, they're like, ah, you finally met Buddha, you made it, I'm Buddha, then it's not Buddha.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: It's not Buddha.
SPEAKER_01: And we actually have that in our tradition as well.
SPEAKER_01: So if you go back, you know, and read some of the mystics and the ancients and the patristics and the people of faith who has come before us, you might read something that says, if you understand, it's not God.
SPEAKER_01: Because God is always bigger than we can imagine, it's always more than we can comprehend.
SPEAKER_01: Remember, Jesus doesn't actually say worship me.
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't say worship me.
SPEAKER_01: What does he say?
SPEAKER_01: He says, follow me.
SPEAKER_01: And here in the letter to Colossians, that Paul is saying, as you continue on your journey, so the point is not sort of arriving to the certain truth where we're like, well, I'm here.
SPEAKER_01: It's really nice.
SPEAKER_01: It's really nice to be here.
SPEAKER_01: Now I can teach everybody else what they're doing wrong.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that is not the point of following this Jesus in the world.
SPEAKER_01: C.
SPEAKER_01: S.
SPEAKER_01: Lewis, fans of C.S.
SPEAKER_01: Chronicles of Narnia, anybody?
SPEAKER_01: Great story.
SPEAKER_01: At the end, when they're in the real Narnia, right?
SPEAKER_01: They invite in and they say, well, what's the point?
SPEAKER_01: Well, you just keep going further up and further in.
SPEAKER_01: So C.S.
SPEAKER_01: Lewis's image of heaven, the thing that comes next, is sort of a constant movement of further up and further in.
SPEAKER_01: And this makes sense because our scientists, our physicists, our quantum physicists will tell us that everything is in motion from the very beginning.
SPEAKER_01: It's just been motion.
SPEAKER_01: It's just been movement and relationship.
SPEAKER_01: And as you go down deeper in the layers of physical reality, you just see more and more movement, right?
SPEAKER_01: And if you're like me, then the times in life where you felt the most disconnected has been where you felt stagnant?
SPEAKER_01: Like, I'm not moving.
SPEAKER_01: Not moving?
SPEAKER_01: And so when we come to scripture, when we read the scriptures like this morning, you know, I always wonder, like, what's the movement that I'm being invited to today?
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, in our tradition, we do not hold that the Bible is a book.
SPEAKER_01: Did you know that?
SPEAKER_01: No, it's it's not a book.
SPEAKER_01: It's a library.
SPEAKER_01: It's a library of books that was compiled by people just like us on the way, on the road, trying to understand God and passing down wisdom and stories about how God was making sense to them.
SPEAKER_01: And many of them resonate deeply.
SPEAKER_01: They're eternal stories that help us make sense of God.
SPEAKER_01: So, in my my ordination, you know, I had to sign this document that said, all things necessary for salvation are contained in the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament.
SPEAKER_01: I actually love this.
SPEAKER_01: Because it doesn't say, notice, that all things in it are necessary for salvation.
SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't say that it contains all things.
SPEAKER_01: Because it's a library of wisdom that is being passed down to us.
SPEAKER_01: And of course, there are historical facts that are in there, but there's also all kinds of truth that's in there.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: You get allegory and you get metaphor and you get certain prose and you get stories and you get myth.
SPEAKER_01: It's this beautiful library that as we enter it, it invites us into moving on the way, right, in relationship with Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, I started thinking about that in context of these readings, because these readings are kind of tough.
SPEAKER_01: You know, they were hard for me.
SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm like, wow, where am I on my journey coming to these stories?
SPEAKER_01: Like, like, what am I hearing?
SPEAKER_01: And how is the scripture helping me?
SPEAKER_01: And my first thought was that, you know, Jesus really helps us break the idols of our life.
SPEAKER_01: Like part of being on the way with Jesus and moving down this path are finding the idols that distract us from following God.
SPEAKER_01: You've heard me talk about this before.
SPEAKER_01: You know, you we can call them wealth, we can call them power, we can call them fame, we can call them pleasure, mammon.
SPEAKER_01: There's all kinds of names for the things that we sacrifice ourselves at the altar of, hoping that it's gonna provide us with life and comfort.
SPEAKER_01: But they're false promises.
SPEAKER_01: We know that.
SPEAKER_01: We know we can get a bunch of wealth and a bunch of power and build a big castle and put a moat and put a dragon in it, and maybe a crocodile, and we can light it on fire and have huge walls and be like, I'm safe now.
SPEAKER_01: I've done it.
SPEAKER_01: And then we just find out that we're sitting in that castle and we're drinking too much and we're lonely and we're miserable and we're depressed and we're isolated, and all the things that we thought we could protect ourselves from didn't work.
SPEAKER_01: Anybody sacrificed themselves to that belief before?
SPEAKER_01: So part of what Jesus does is he points out the idols, like scripture, when we engage it, says, where am I putting my energy?
SPEAKER_01: Where am I making sacrifices that aren't leading me to life?
SPEAKER_01: And that's helpful, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: That we share stories about when we kind of get off the path and we're like, that's not helpful, that's not life-giving.
SPEAKER_01: And so I'm grateful.
SPEAKER_01: That was the first thought that I came to mind about what scripture can do for us.
SPEAKER_01: But then I noticed something, right?
SPEAKER_01: I noticed something in both of the readings, right?
SPEAKER_01: Both in Baruch and in the Luke reading.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus is talking about, and in Baruch, they're talking about the destruction of the Jewish temples.
SPEAKER_01: So the first temple and the second temple.
SPEAKER_01: I thought, wow, that's really interesting.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus doesn't only break the idols of our life, Jesus invites us to break the icon.
SPEAKER_01: Of our life.
SPEAKER_01: The name for that is iconoclast.
SPEAKER_01: Iconoclast comes from the word that means image breaker.
SPEAKER_01: See what Jesus is saying is that this thing that at one time in your life was beautiful and holy, and it helped you become a better spouse or parent or child or friend or Christian.
SPEAKER_01: This good thing has ceased to become good.
SPEAKER_01: It no longer is doing the thing that it once did for us.
SPEAKER_01: And I think as we follow Jesus on the way, he's gonna point those out and he's gonna say, maybe it's time to break them.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's time to break them.
SPEAKER_01: And friends, I gotta be honest, as I as I went down this rabbit hole, I thought, this is really hard to do.
SPEAKER_01: This is really hard to do.
SPEAKER_01: I can't be the only one who at one point in his life really liked the black and white universe.
SPEAKER_01: We talk a lot about the Santa Claus God and the transactional God, and sometimes Mike and I can do it a little bit glibly because we can be glib.
SPEAKER_01: That's just, you know.
SPEAKER_01: But the truth is, there was a time in my life that that God really helped me.
SPEAKER_01: If you've ever been through any type of recovery or in recovery communities, you'll find that having black and white world is really helpful when you gotta start digging out of that.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I remember, you know, I wanted the rules, I wanted the law, I wanted to know who was in and who was out and who was good and who was bad, and that helped me make sense of my world.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, Richard Rohr, who I love, he's a Franciscan priest, spiritual director, he makes the case that all of us in our life of faith have to go through that.
SPEAKER_01: Like, there's no going around it.
SPEAKER_01: We all have to go through the black and white, who's in, who's out, right?
SPEAKER_01: Who's good, who's bad, because it gives us like a certainty that we need.
SPEAKER_01: But then it stops being useful.
SPEAKER_01: It stops being useful, and and and that's just one example.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, is anybody like after I preached this sermon at the eight o'clock, I had more responses than I've ever had of people.
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, I'm wondering, like, maybe maybe we're on to something here.
SPEAKER_01: And I had folks come up and and they they said things like, I remember when I was in therapy for like five years.
SPEAKER_01: And like, I was so scared to graduate.
SPEAKER_01: You know, and a good therapist will tell you your time's up, right?
SPEAKER_01: But how difficult and scary it was because this thing that at one point was so good and helpful and beautiful no longer was doing that, and they had to walk away.
SPEAKER_01: They had to break this good thing, they had to move on.
SPEAKER_01: Somebody come up and say, you know, I had a relationship.
SPEAKER_01: I had relationships, and one in particular, that, gosh, at one point it was just so life-giving, and it was so beautiful.
SPEAKER_01: It was this icon that helped me understand who I wanted to be and who God was and what the universe was like, and it was so beautiful, and then it stopped being that.
SPEAKER_01: And it was so hard for me to set those boundaries and step away.
SPEAKER_01: I had somebody say, you know, I was in this other church and for 10 years, and it it like saved me, and then it wasn't anymore, and it became this thing that was really harmful for me and my relationships, and and the process of breaking away that icon, that beautiful thing, out of a respect for what it was, was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my entire life.
SPEAKER_01: What I'm saying, friends, is when we break idols on some level, it's it's just easy.
SPEAKER_01: It's like, yes, I saw that.
SPEAKER_01: But breaking icons is something altogether different.
SPEAKER_01: So I started wondering, like, well, great, Sean, maybe this is true.
SPEAKER_01: So what?
SPEAKER_01: Is there any wisdom out there to help us?
SPEAKER_01: And and I thought of um Marie Kondo.
SPEAKER_01: Anybody read her book or watched her Netflix special?
SPEAKER_01: So, Marie Kondo, I look it up, my family did this a while back, and she has this process by which you go through your entire house and you find things that at one point were useful and meaningful, but they no longer are.
SPEAKER_01: They're actually the weight that is dragging us down.
SPEAKER_01: Remember, we're on the way, we're trying to walk, we're trying to follow Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus, the weight that's dragging us down.
SPEAKER_01: And so she has this whole process, she didn't invent it.
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's part of her Japanese culture, that you go through your house bit by bit, and there's a piece of it where you look at the thing and you say, Thank you for your service.
SPEAKER_01: Gosh, that's so different than I can't believe I used to believe that.
SPEAKER_01: But you know, or what?
SPEAKER_01: It's thank you for your service.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for being the thing that I needed, but you're no longer getting me where I feel like God is calling me to go.
SPEAKER_01: And this works.
SPEAKER_01: It worked for me, it's worked for millions of people.
SPEAKER_01: You know, my kids, they every year they go through their clothes to get new clothes, and every now and then when they're doing that, I'll hear them holding up a shirt and saying, Thank you for your service.
SPEAKER_01: And isn't that beautiful?
SPEAKER_01: Isn't that a beautiful way to talk about things that were once meaningful so that we can let go, that we can move on, we can be part of this transition.
SPEAKER_01: Then I thought about Richard Rohr again, because I like this guy, spoiler alert.
SPEAKER_01: And he's got this concept called the loyal soldier.
SPEAKER_01: This was really helpful for me.
SPEAKER_01: You see, for a long time, I I lived in like a really hyper-vigilant world, like constantly believing that like threats and danger were everywhere.
SPEAKER_01: People weren't really inherently good.
SPEAKER_01: You can't trust anybody, like, always be on the lookout for the boogeyman that is around the corner.
SPEAKER_01: And I gotta be honest, this worldview was actually really helpful for me for a long time.
SPEAKER_01: It really was.
SPEAKER_01: If I look back, it really provided me the comfort and the understanding that I needed and sometimes the motivation.
SPEAKER_01: And and and like it, I look back and I and I needed that for me to get where I was going, and then it stopped being helpful.
SPEAKER_01: Looking at the world that way stopped being helpful.
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't helping me follow Jesus and understand this way of love.
SPEAKER_01: And so Richard Rohr says, and it made sense because remember, I come from a military family, um, it made sense.
SPEAKER_01: He says, we need to give those things an honorable discharge.
SPEAKER_01: Isn't that nice?
SPEAKER_01: Like looking at the thing in our life that maybe protected us, maybe helped us understand relationships and the world, and saying, thank you.
SPEAKER_01: Well done, but you're no longer gonna be the thing that helps me become the person, the father, the mother, the son, the daughter, the Christian, the sibling, the friend that I want to become.
SPEAKER_01: It's weighing me down now.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for your service.
SPEAKER_01: It's time to move on to what's next.
SPEAKER_01: And this is scary, hard work, friends.
SPEAKER_01: And so this morning, I I want to invite you.
SPEAKER_01: I want, I really do, I want to invite you to walk into relationship with Jesus as the iconoclast.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus as the one who gives us permission to like search our life for the thing that once was beautiful and helpful, whether it's a relationship or a belief, an understanding, who knows what it is.
SPEAKER_01: It could be anything.
SPEAKER_01: And then be honest if it's no longer providing that life.
SPEAKER_01: And then recognize that it's going to be scary living in a world without that.
SPEAKER_01: And then asking Jesus for his help and companionship and breaking it so that you can continue your journey and be open to what's next.
SPEAKER_01: It'll be hard.
SPEAKER_01: But I'll do it, yeah.