I was thinking about the rich young ruler. We talked about him last week. He asks Jesus how he might inherit eternal life. Jesus gives him a list of rules. He replies, “I’ve followed all of those rules, there has to be something more.
Did you play checkers? The rules are simple. Children play it. I remember as a child growing out of it. I don’t play checkers any more. As I have gotten older, however, I know people (like my mom) who play checkers at a whole different level than I ever thought possible.
I play a game by the rules, but they play the game. They have strategy. I just move pieces around the board. They sacrifice some pieces and by doing so win the game.
They play at a different level. I play like a 5 year old. It is no fun at all for me.
Jesus answered the man, “One thing you lack, go sell everything you have and give it to the poor and come follow me.”
I wonder if Jesus wasn’t giving him the strategy of life. I wonder if this man had played the game of life by all the rules, but was just moving pieces around the board. Jesus said, “Sir, there is a whole different level on which you can play this game—and it is way better.”
I know people who are thoroughly bored with their faith. They pray, read their Bible and go to church, but they have long since lost their passion for the game. Perhaps we need to learn to play this game of faith and life at a whole different level. A level for adults.
Over the last couple months, we have been making video teachings to go with my sermons. It was my first attempt at this kind of thing, but I was pleased with the result.
All of this has been posted before in little bits and pieces, but here it is all together. Each sermon and video together along with the rationale for each one. (Just in case it isn’t obvious from the material.)
The best stuff is at the end. 🙂
Mark 8:27-33
This is the “Who do people say that I am?” passage. I talked about the fact that we often see Jesus the way we want to see Him rather than how He really is.
The Sermon
^–this is the sermon (and you will see them below too…)
For the video, we took a photograph of a pile of items. They were items that might be found at the foot of the cross. Through the video we focused on various parts showing how a narrow view is inadequate to define who the real Jesus is.
Mark 8:34-38
This is Mark 8 Discipleship. This is the pinacle of Mark’s gospel. Everything from here on out is arguably related to this one section. Discipleship is about denying yourself, taking up your cross and following Jesus.
The video was kicked off YouTube because we borrowed (cough, stole) a video from YouTube from an old rock band singing “The Cat’s in the Cradle.” The idea was to get people’s attention with the idea our children are so important we should not discount them, but then turn the whole thing to say, “But they are not the most important.”
It worked really well. The video is hosted here on Spilled Wine. You can watch it here: Big Cats.
Mark 9:1-13
This is the Transfiguration. I called the sermon, “Glimpses of Light” and I looked at the text as an encouragement to the disciples that Jesus really was who He said He was. We all need glimpses of light from time to time.
The video took the direction of moments that lead to other moments. We took a couple stories and talked about them as the touchstones of our lives. We talked about how when we begin, we often have illusions that are not accurate, but life shakes us up and leaves us with something far greater than we had even dreamed of. I called it “Transfiguring Illusions.”
Mark 9:14-29
I called this one “Centers.” The text was about the disciples arguing about why they couldn’t cast a demon out of a boy. The sermon was simple–who is at the center? The disciples thought they belonged there. So do we.
The video was about arguing. Why do we think we have to be right? Do we even care about the people we hurt along the way? This video stirred some great discussion. 🙂
Mark 9:30-37
“Who is the Greatest?” The disciples argued about who was the greatest while they ignored the things that really mattered. I explore in both the sermon and the video what our Default Positions are. What we do when we don’t know what to do. This was my least favorite sermon and video of the series…but, hey, we all have a week like that from time to time.
Well, this one got a reaction! We got to all talk about whether or not we can accept other Christians as partners in the Gospel or not. We are on the same side.
This passage dealt with a disciple of Jesus who was not one of the 12. The disciples wanted to stop him from casting out demons because he was not following them. It is shameful that we do exactly the same thing. When will we learn, it is not about us.
Wow. If the sermon stirred some stuff, wait until you see the video. The idea was to take the teaching about unity and to teach it right in front of church signs. What we ended up doing was talking about the good things various denominations were doing and asking, “Jesus, should we stop them?”
Mark 9:42-50
This passage does a formula over and over–if your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off because it is better to enter life with one hand than Hell with two.”
It comes on the heels of the passage about the man who is preaching Jesus without the disciples’ permission. I think Jesus is telling us how serious He is about NOT trying to play God. Believe me, this brought a lot of conversation.
For the video, we went to the dump. The idea was to illustrate what Hell was and to paint Hell as a place where things go that lose their purpose. It was a ton of fun. It got a lot of talk too.
Pay close attention at the end.
Mark 10:1-12
This is the Divorce and Marriage stuff in Mark. I knew when I began that this was a controversial week. I was right.
For the sermon, I talked about the passage and then I brought up a couple ladies who had gone through divorce to interview them and talk about it. It was a way for us to put skin on the whole issue. It worked very well.
The video was the controversial part of this teaching. I looked at the irony of God making a law (how to divorce) that was contrary to His will (no divorce). I tried to figure out how we juggle deeply difficult things. I was very pleased with what we came up with. It was paradigm shifting for me.
Recently I had our staff read a book by Eugene Peterson called, The Pastor. There was a part where a nun said to him, “You Protestants know everything about sin and nothing about evil.” It has me thinking.
What is the difference? Is there a difference?
Isn’t sin evil? Isn’t evil sin?
I wonder if what she meant was that we tend to focus on all of the things that people do and forget who they are? I wonder if she had heard one too many people say that all sin is the same. That the one who lost his temper at the stoplight is the same as the Bernie Madoffs who systematically steal the retirement of investors to fuel their own lust for power. That the Lindsay Lohen’s shoplifting is on par with Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust.
I wonder if the difference between sin and evil is sin is something you can point your finger to and evil is someone from whom you run. Sin is something you do. Evil is something you are.
Evil is a different substance than sin. Evil comes up scaly and serpentine from the bowels of Hell. Sin is an act of disobedience. Sin is a child who makes a mess. Evil is a man who is a vandal.
The Gospel is this—Sin and Evil find their death and we find our resurrection in Righteousness Himself. We find our hope and our life in the One who for sin and evil died and for new creation rose from the dead.
In the name of the Resurrected Jesus find your freedom from both.
When I was a child, we had a game called, “Password.” One person gives clues to their partner to get them to say a particular word. If the game were invented today, it would have some kind of electronic prompter to reveal the secret word. When I was a child, there were no such devices.
In the box was a stack of cards. Printed on each card was a two-color pattern that if you just glanced at, just looked like gibberish. If you looked harder, you could see what looked like a pattern, but it was hard to figure out what exactly it was.
Also in the box was a cardboard sleeve with a little window cut into it with a piece of transparent red plastic. When you put the cards into the sleeve, it was magically decoded and you could easily read the words on the card. The colored gel was the key to understanding the whole thing.
All of us approach our world with a paradigm. We come with an understanding of how the pieces of the world all fit together. When we see something new, we try to put it in our paradigm as best we can.
All of us, from time to time, come across things that don’t fit. When that happens–when we find square pegs, but only have round holes–we either have to hammer it harder into the a hole into which it does not fit, or we have to reshape the holes. We have to shift our paradigm.
As I have been working through Mark, Jesus has shifted my paradigm. He often does. But this one was huge.
Mark 10 deals with marriage and divorce. I have previously understood it as Jesus forbidding divorce. There is something greater going on here. It is something that radically shifted my paradigm.
This Sunday, I am preaching about marriage, but it will feel like I am talking about divorce. It feels that way because we live in a world where the best things are always polluted with the worst things. Every marriage is sown with the seeds of divorce. Sometimes those seeds come to fruition and sometimes they don’t. When they do, they are always ugly.
I pray my message is heard as grace.
We have far too many fingers pointing at us. We have far too many voices telling us we don’t measure up. We have far too many reminders we are not perfect.
I don’t want to be another.
Wherever you are. Married. Divorced. Remarried. Wherever you are, there is grace. God is not trying to condemn you, He is calling you to follow. And for the places we stumble, He bleeds grace.
Grace is dangerous because there is always the temptation to abuse it—to sin that grace may abound. Some of us run to Law to balance that grace. We want a rule. We want a consequence. We want a punishment. We want a law to balance grace and keep people from abusing.
But the balance of grace is not law. The balance of grace is love. We don’t need more law. We have plenty. What we need to do is fall in love with the One who loves us so much He bled grace. For the love of God, I hate sin. For the love of Christ, I do not want to sin. I don’t want to disappoint God. I don’t want to disappoint you. Not for law, but for love.
As it turns out, grace is love. As it turns out, grace is balanced by love because grace is encompassed by love. May the love of Christ compel you and cover you.
Recently I posted on my Facebook, “Father, may my sin always be greater than my brothers that I might have grace for him.” It sparked a bit of conversation.
I have been having a large number of conversations about grace (part of the hazard of being a pastor). They circle two themes.
The first is, “Have I gone too far? Is there still hope for me?” The second is like it but much more dangerous. “Has so and so gone too far? Is there any hope for him?”
The first theme is a question that comes from someone broken by their sin. The second comes from someone proud of their righteousness. The first is a look in the mirror. The second is a voyeuristic look through binoculars.
My prayer is that I will never stop seeing my own sin for what it is. My prayer is that the sin I have will disgust me precisely because it is mine. My prayer is that I will never take grace given to me so lightly that I am willing to condemn the people around me.
It is possible that my own sin–as horrible as it is–could help me to love my brother more. I am pretty sure that makes me a better Christian.
We are coming up on Christmas faster than I would like to think.
Christmas morning. Imagine a tree with all of the presents under the tree. Everyone has spent time wrapping them up just right. Bows are tied. All the unsightly corners are tucked. Everything is nice and neat.
It is much neater than an hour or so later.
An hour or so later, there are scraps of paper everywhere. Bows are in a box. Ribbons are scattered. Boxes are open and piled up. It looks like a disaster.
Neater is not always better.
While everything is nice and neat, you don’t even know what you have. It is not until everything gets all messy that things get interesting.
I think it is that way following Jesus. Neater is not always better.
This week I have gotten to play Mr. Mom as Wendy has flown home to attend her grandmother’s funeral. I have missed her terribly
A couple weeks ago, I sat down with the Divorce Care class and they told me about being a single parent. I didn’t know I would get a chance to look at it up close and personal so soon.
My hat is off to this group of tireless parents. Wendy is just gone for a week, and I still have her full support in parenting. All I had to do was wrangle schedules and shuffle kids. My hands were full. These one parent families do it all the time.
It is funny how God gives you little glimpses into the lives of other people through your own. He gives us windows that allow us to appreciate the people on the other side. Those windows give us grace.
We have been very busy making videos. We are getting better and better. We will continue to make things more creative. I have to get off this black background!
In this first video, we took a picture of a scene and used it to depict the events of Mark 8. It was a fun use of the editing software and it was challenging.
The next video was rejected by YouTube…I think you will see why. What I most enjoyed about this video was the twist that comes at the end. And…sadly, there is a little technical difficulty that I didn’t take time to fix on the online version. It is not too distracting.
And the final one is the one we had the most fun shooting. We got people in the congregation to star in this one. It deals with the transfiguration as a reminder of the reality of Jesus.
