Referred as the "Monday Morning Quarterback," this blog will serve as a way to share some additional information after Sunday mornings. Often there's more to say, additional resources, questions, or thoughts from Pastor Tom, and this is a place to share those.
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Everyone's heard of the Monday Morning Quarterback - the guy at the office who, after the big game, wants to talk about everything the quarterback did and should have done and could have done better. Well, often, I feel like I need to do that myself. The quarterback himself might look back and says, "I wish I would have done this, run that play, or thrown a pass instead of running that play." I do that some Monday mornings (or Sunday nights, usually.) Sometimes, I just plain run out of time. Other times, I have some additional things to share - thoughts that didn't seem appropriate at the time for the sermon, but might be relevant, additional questions or resources, books or articles, or webpages and more ideas for application.
So, the Monday Morning Quarterback is born. Call it a blog, whatever. It'll probably contain more than just the Monday Morning commentary on Sundays sermon, but that's a good place to start.
Here goes...
On Christmas morning, I shared the following poem by Howard Thurman in the message, The Beginning of the Gospel:
When the work of the angels is stilled
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost
To heal the broken
To feed the hungry
To release the prisoner
To rebuild nations
To bring peace among brothers and sisters
To make music in the heart.
I love this poem because it connects the birth narrative of Jesus with his "inaugural" speech in Luke 4:16-22 in which he announces his mission. I find always found it interesting that Jesus was rejected by his own people, the people of his home town, for sharing this message of justice and reconciliation that is a part of what the gospel is about. God invites us into an eternity with him that begins today and includes living within the reign of Jesus Christ over all of creation - our hearts, our lives, our families, our neighborhoods, our towns, our state, our country, and our world. Living within this reign means inviting people into…
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Lists.
Around Christmas, most of us have a lot of lists. Hang the wreath. Swag the garland. Pick up Sally's gift. Make and deliver Christmas cookies. Vacuum. We have to do lists, shoppings lists, Christmas gift lists, and every day lists. Some of us just love to check off those boxes and get through the lists, and then move one to the next one.
There is a list, though, that comes to my mind often during Christmas and it's a hard one for me to just check off. When I was a kid, we would work on this list as a family and as a church, and then when I became a pastor, I focused on this list in Advent, too. It's the 4 Sundays of Advent list, and its a whole different sort of list.
Hope.
Peace.
Joy.
Love.
What an amazing list. These are such short words, and yet they evoke in us something deep down for which we long. Our hearts are restless, longing for these to be checked off in our lives. They're hard ones, though, to check off and that's why we revisit them each year. We revisit them, realizing that their partial fulfillment in our…
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The last three of weeks were meaningful weeks for me, I don't know about you. It was great to hear from Bill & Judy Kuiper and Bob Kol about Burkina Faso and to learn about the project to build a dormitory for about 200 girls there through Christian World Outreach. If you'd like to read their story, click here. The "village of opportunity." I like that name. So many children around the world don't have the kinds of opportunities that you and I have, and its awesome to see girls whose lives were headed to destruction now on a path to a career, to finding a sustainable living, and even more than that - with a newfound love and faith in Jesus Christ. Click here to read a recent update letter from Dina and Alassane Compaore at the Village.
It was also great to hear two weeks ago from Renee Terbeek, Molly Carnes, and Dianne VandeGutche about their work with International Needs Network with the Trokosi women, helping them as well to be freed from sex slavery and also to gain a career, skills, and to find hope in the Lord. You can host a card party to hear about the…
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In the conversation with Justin and Mari following my message on Sunday, I mentioned the growth of the Christian Church in the global south. If you haven't heard of this growth, it's amazing information to understand. For instance, the average Christian today is poor, non-white, and pentecostal.
If you want to read more and understand more about these trends and changes in Global Christianity, the most popular book detailing some of these changes is by Philip Jenkins, called The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South published in 2002. He's recently published a follow up book that is updated and expanded called The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.
Here's a quote from Philip Jenkins in the Atlantic Monthly in 2002 in an article entitled "The Next Christianity":
In the global South (the areas that we often think of primarily as the Third World) huge and growing Christian populations—currently 480 million in Latin America, 360 million in Africa, and 313 million in Asia, compared with 260 million in North America—now make up what the Catholic scholar Walbert Buhlmann has called the Third Church, a form of Christianity as distinct as Protestantism or Orthodoxy, and one that…
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Yesterday we began our new series, Wide Open, by talking about opening our hearts to God and what he might want to do in and through us. I don't know about you, but I was particularly struck in my own life by the Psalm 81:10 verse: "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt; Open wide your mouth and I will fill it." I think so often I limit life and limit the possibilities for God, not seeking to really be fully open to him, and to have him surprise me with his blessings.
We also had the privilege of hearing from Kris & Kate Calderwood and Justin & Mari Hutt about how, when they opened their hearts to God he filled them with beautiful adopted children. Kris & Kate just received their court date, and hope to see Netsanet soon and have her join their family at the beginning of the new year. Justin and Mari shared Mattias with us as well, the new addition to their family this past September. I was speaking with John Winters after the service - who has also adopted in the past - and he…
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We are now on the back end of the Radical Together message series, and you might remember that last year we did another series called Radical Followership. What's the deal with all this radical stuff? I thought that religion meant that you were supposed to be conservative and preservative, not radical and revolutionary. Great question.
I'm actually on vacation this weekend, but didn't do an MMQB this past week, so I thought instead I'd make some comments on the whole series. While on vacation I was reading a book on the arts and culture. The writer was talking about CK Chesterton and how he dislike the word "reform." Well, our church is a Reformed Church, and we believe in the ongoing reforming of our lives, families, cultures, churches, and institutions. But how? Chesterton says that this word, "reform" - and I would say also "radical" - is meaningless and even dangerous unless we understand its literal definition.
More liberal conceptions of reform (and by liberal, I don't mean what news commentators mean by liberal) imagine a gradual evolution away from an older doctrine or practice, so that reform becomes synonymous with words like "progress," and that revolution is a means to start…
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Today's message was about the Bible, the Word, and reading "through" the Bible to encounter Jesus.
There is a long standing debate about placing Jesus "over-against" the text, or to devaluing the scripture in favor of the Jesus we find in Scripture. The question in these debates is often whether we are talking about the Jesus "of" Scripture, or the Jesus who we meet that then stands over-against the Scripture, causing us to reinterpret Scripture through him. Without getting too deeply into the debate, my take on this is that God is always calling us to a constant reinterpretation of ourselves and the Scriptures in light of the dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ and the Father via the Holy Spirit. This is dynamic. It isn't static. It - like any relationship - is constantly growing and morphing and maturing. As Jesus interprets me to myself through the process of the truth-repentance-forgiveness cycle, I am constantly being remade, and his Word (mediated through the Scriptures) becomes alive in a new way to me at this new place in my journey. That makes the relationship between Jesus and the Scripture dynamic, too. The Scripture reveals Jesus to us. Jesus enlightens the Scripture.…
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