Last Wednesday night, we met with our 6th-12th Grade youth to discuss a topic they suggested: What does the Bible say about following Jesus?

The topic is enormous. We started our discussion by admitting that coming away with a definitive answer wasn’t possible. Following God isn’t something you learn about in an instant and recite. It’s more like being born as a baby (or learning how to be a parent). You never get to the end of learning about those subjects. You just keep evolving as you go and hope you’re getting something right. But today’s right thing might not be tomorrow’s right thing. Playing with letter blocks on the floor is right for a three-year-old. The agenda for a thirteen-year-old is a little different. Just repeating the three-year-old thing doesn’t suffice!

We asked our young folks what they had learned—either in church or from our culture—about following God. What makes a good follower? Their answers varied. Some said coming to church, others said doing good things, others said being honest or kind. All of the responses contained truth. Were they the WHOLE truth, though? Could we point to any one of these things and say, “This is the single thing you always do, no matter what, that makes you a follower of God?” For each answer they had given, we found many valid examples of godliness, but also exceptions. Though they were all good ideas, not one of them sufficed, alone, to make us followers.

Then we read Jesus’ words from the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 8:

34 [Jesus] called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel,[i] will save it. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?

Jesus says that anyone who wants to become his follower begins by denying themselves. The commonality to all of our grand ideas about following Jesus is that we’re at the center of them! Everything we can idealize or grasp for ends up being not it. We ended up claiming that, on our own, we’re not capable of following Jesus. Even if we take words directly from the Bible, we end up turning them into our own thing. At best, we end up trying to trade our goodness for God’s salvation. We always want to advance the self, even when we claim we’re denying it.

Ep. 39 - Did Jesus really just say it's OK to cheat??? Ethics, contracts, and greater ideals from the infamous "Dishonest Manager" story in Luke 16.
The Geek and Greek podcast is a show where two reverends talk honestly and clearly about faith, Christianity, scripture, and life. 
Follow us at GeekAndGreek.com!

During the summer, we had several special “theme Sundays”, employing different kinds of music to convey the gospel message. These weren’t gimmicks. We felt the flow of God’s Word for those Sundays and felt it could be translated better if we spoke in a new way. The results were well-received. We were able to find God speaking in our everyday, familiar languages, not just Sunday-church-talk.

We have another such opportunity coming up on November 17th. The readings that day speak of changing times, endings, and holding on through trials. On that Sunday, we’re going to use protest songs to convey that message. Protest songs have a deep history in American culture, from early spirituals through folk music up until today.
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Make your plans to join us on November 17th. If you have any favorite protest songs, email me at pastor@sov-id.org or Director of Music Ministries Paul Wagner at the same address, just substituting “music” for “pastor”.

This past week marked the first chapel services of our 2019-20 preschool year. For those who don’t know, Shepherd of the Valley hosts a preschool with 140 enrolled students, three- and four-year-olds eager to learn about each other, life, and school! Seeing them walk down the halls singing and playing is always a joy! Each month we gather for chapel services, remembering and hearing more about God.

Our Director of Youth and Family Ministries, Sara Manning, and I lead chapel services along with the preschool directors and staff. Figuring out content is always a challenge. We need to share material that’s appropriate for three-year-olds, respectful of their different backgrounds and traditions, but also meaningful and true.

Leading preschool chapel forces us, as leaders, to delve down into our core beliefs. We ask, “What aspects of our relationship with God are foundational and indispensable?” Anything that isn’t absolutely at the center has to be left out. It might not apply to all of our children, or it might be too hard to understand at such a young age.
As we started our year, we wanted to get three simple concepts across:

1. God is good!
2. God loves us.
3. God brings us together not because we’re right or perfect, but so we can share God’s love with each other.

These seem simple, but how many of us lose our way, finding doctrines or beliefs that do not reflect these values? We suspect God is against us, or exists only to judge us. We say God judges us on how right we are or how perfectly we live. So much harm has been done to the world, and to its people, when we forget those three, simple affirmations.

That’s why we wanted to start early, raising a new generation to understand the God who cares about them and about all the people around them. As we trust in this, decisions become easier, ways forward become clearer, and our lives transform.

Does your faith still rest on those affirmations? If not, is whatever you’re trusting in as important and sure as they are? It wouldn’t hurt any of us to remember that God exists for goodness, that God loves us, and that God brings us together to care about each other today.

--Pastor Dave

Earlier this week, we talked about Jesus’ beautiful stories of lost sheep and coins, arguing that it is God’s great delight to love and welcome people despite the boundaries we set up to prevent same.

For some, a single phrase in Jesus’ stories threatens to overturn the apple cart. From Luke 14:

I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

When we read this, our self-justifying, exclusive natures pipe up to say, “Aha! He said, ‘Sinner who repents’. That means anyone outside of my group is, by definition, a sinner! In order to be reconciled, they first have to say they’re wrong and think like me.”

This is handy for us, but it’s not intrinsic to the gospel.

In this story, the designation of “sinner” was not brought up by Jesus, but by religious leaders who were scandalized that Jesus would eat with anyone who is not them. Employing the word himself, Jesus contradicts their point effectively. He refuses to get in an argument about who’s a sinner and who’s not. The story strongly implies that the religious leaders themselves are doing something wrong. Everyone involved could be painted with a sinful brush.

Instead, Jesus goes with their term, turning their expected outcome on its head in the process. It’s as if he’s saying, “Even IF the word, ‘Sinner’ applies as you suggest it does, that does not exclude these people from the love and family of God.”
Modern debates about inclusion, exclusion, and suitability often get bogged down in examining whether something is a sin. This is almost always a waste of time. Even if you get an answer, who among us does not also commit sins? The important question is not who’s a sinner and who’s not, but what God does with people who have fallen short.

Asking, “Is this a sin?” we seek condemnation of our neighbor and absolution for ourselves. It’s no accident that most of the topics we debate in this fashion involve potential “sins” that we do not think we, ourselves, commit. From a perch of safety on high, we debate the fitness and fate of people who are not us, secure that we’ll remain unstained either way.

The seekers in Jesus’ story did not do this. They moved, seeking out people who fall short, rejoicing when they were recovered and carried home. This is the work of God.

But what about that little phrase, “who repents”? Doesn’t that mean it’s up to the lost person to acknowledge, confess, and renounce their shortcomings before they can be reconciled?

That’s the way we’ve defined repentance traditionally. We think of repentance as the act that brings reconciliation with God, much like sticking our card into an Automatic Teller Machine and punching out the correct code to receive forgiveness.

That’s not what happens in these stories. God is not portrayed as a static ATM, waiting for us to think properly, say the right words, and stop sinning before he’ll connect with us.

• The seeker of sheep wanders out into the wilderness, meeting the lost sheep where it is. The woman seeking coins overturns everything in her house in her quest for the missing piece. Neither waits for the thing they lost to do something before acting. It’s enough that the thing is lost.
• That formerly-lost coin didn’t put itself back on the dresser, nor is there any indication that the lost sheep found its own way back. The seeker reconciles, not the lost individual.
• Neither sheep nor coins can change their minds.
• Jesus describes all of heaven rejoicing over reconciliation, not just in the repentance or the one who repents. The reunion of things that were formerly separated is the point of the story. If there’s a change with the sheep and coins, that change goes from separated to reunited, not from wrong to right.

So, then, what’s this repentance thing about? The concept of repentance appears in the languages of Old and New Testament (in Hebrew and Greek), in the Latin to which they were translated, and on into English. In all cases, it carries a sense of turning and/or walking. The Latin translation tends to take this literally, almost “to turn and re-walk”. The Hebrew is more of an internal mind-turning, often with sorrow accompanying. The basic idea is new direction and change.

Ep. 38 - Did Jesus really just say it's OK to cheat??? Ethics, contracts, and greater ideals from the infamous "Dishonest Manager" story in Luke 16.
The Geek and Greek podcast is a show where two reverends talk honestly and clearly about faith, Christianity, scripture, and life. 
Follow us at GeekAndGreek.com!

Listen to more Geek and Greek podcasts here: geekandgreek.com/

The Gospel text for this week comes from Luke, Chapter 15. It contains two parallel parables, beautiful in their simplicity. Take a look:

15 Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. 2 And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
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3 So he told them this parable: 4 “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? 5 When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. 6 And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ 7 Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

8 “Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? 9 When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ 10 Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

The story continues last week’s theme of God changing our direction. Then we talked about outward versus inwards, lines versus circles. These stories highlight the difference between exclusion and inclusion, revealing God’s bias towards the latter.

In this reading, the indoctrinated religious leaders of the time made a motion towards exclusivity. They openly wondered why Jesus was welcoming, and eating with, people who were not in the religious fold, deemed unworthy of joining.

It’s easy for us to cast stones at those leaders, saying, “Thank goodness we’re not them!” This claim does not hold up to scrutiny. How many of us have heard, or used, terms like, “believers and unbelievers” or “church members and non-members”? We’re taught that our identity depends on dividing the world into insider and outsider designations.

We extend these designations to our relationship with God. We define sacredness by location. We call the church, “God’s house” and caution our children to be on their best behavior when they cross that threshold, as if God resided inside and not outside, as if God were in the business of judging whether our behavior conforms to standards. Within “God’s house” stands the altar, considered to be even more sacred, and thus more off-limits to normal people. In the altar area many churches lift statues, representations of God or saints or angels looking down, inaccessible and unapproachable.

Pastor Dave concludes the message with a special surprise for his wife, Careen!

Ep. 37 - The cost of discipleship is steep. Can anyone really pay it? If not, how does that change the view of our relationship with God?
The Geek and Greek podcast is a show where two reverends talk honestly and clearly about faith, Christianity, scripture, and life. 
Follow us at GeekAndGreek.com!

​Listen to more Geek and Greek podcasts here: geekandgreek.com/

Women’s Bible Study has resumed meeting at 10:00 each Thursday morning. The group will study the Book of Exodus this year. If you’d like more information, you can contact the church office or Sylvia Morris in the church directory.

If you’re not available at 10 on Thursdays, never fear! We have far more things going on.