The story of the Garden of Eden is about shame, but not so much about sin, at least not in the sense of explaining the cosmic origins of sin. Rather, it's a description of the way that our shame instincts of hiding and blame cut us off from healing and push us into distrust.  Healing comes from the willingness to be vulnerable and accept forgiveness.

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Sin Story, Sitcom, or Something More Important?

Sermons about the Trinity can be the hardest to preach and to listen to, because... why does it matter? We will never be able to understand the unknowable mystery, and trying is likely to make faith feel less relevant to our lives, not more. But what if we explore the Trinity not as a theological puzzle to solve and instead as an invitation to enter in to God's way of being?  

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Invited In

Human societies, and even religions, often cling to binaries (good/bad; insider/outsider; right/wrong) as a way to project an illusion of safety. But creation is made up of much more complicated realities, and Jesus calls us not to safety but to love. If we are to truly witness to the good that God has done for us, we cannot cling to binaries that make us feel safe. 

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Growth Beyond Binaries

The Christian practice of the remembrance of saints tends to focus on the actions, faithfulness, or martyrdom that sets the saints apart from ordinary people. But such veneration makes their stories less accessible, and thus less meaningful for our daily practice of faith. Perhaps it is more fruitful to explore their fallibility and the way that Jesus meets them in their need and calls them anyhow. 

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Compassion, Confession, and Commissioning

Peace has a lot of meanings spanning the mere absence of conflict to the active establishment of justice, but it is rarely thought of as an entity that takes up space. When Jesus sends his disciples on a preparatory mission, however, he sends them with no resources other than peace... and that peace is enough. It is a powerful gift to settle on those who welcome them and something that will return to them if offered to those who reject its value. How might it transform our experiences of being called to share in the work of God to believe that God's peace is a real and transformative asset?

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Abiding and Returning Peace

Sometimes the enemy of the good is not the perfect, or even the bad, but merely the mindless. It is far too easy to fall into patterns of thought or behavior that lead us away from what we actually value without ever being aware of this shift. All of the necessary activities of life, and the natural worries that occupy space in our brains can be much more dangerous to our focus on what really matters than more direct moral challenges. In the familiar story, Martha's error is not that she was engaging in bad actions, but that she had not chosen what really mattered. We can make the same mistake without even noticing it. But that also means that if we pay attention we can make the better choice. 
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Choosing What Really Matters

When Jesus teaches us to pray, the pronouns matter. He teaches us to pray as community: to pray for our daily bread, for the forgiveness of our sins, for our protection. Prayer in this model is not about private faith, but rather about collective need in which prayer draws us together. It can be a challenging perspective shift for those of us raised in the individualism of American Christianity, but it is also an incredible resource for teaching us how to engage with a hurting world. We are all in this together. 

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Learning to Pray as a Plural You

One of the most pernicious dangers for people of faith is assuming that Jesus's moral instincts match our own. Sometimes this looks like assuming that God hates the same people we hate (nope - God loves them, the same as God loves us). Other times that looks like assuming our moral justifications would earn God's sign-off (nope - God is perfectly ready to challenge us to do better). In both instances, our challenge is to remember that while we always see only in part, God sees the whole. And much as this challenges our biases and self-justifications, this reality is actually really good news. Because it means that even when God is rebuking us, this correction is a message of love. It is an invitation to expect more from God and from ourselves. 

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Not Putting God (Or Ourselves) In A Box

Humanity tends to be drawn to the simplicity of binary categories: yes/no, right/wrong, allowed/prohibited. It can be easy to apply this kind of thinking to Jesus' rejection of legalistic readings of the sabbath laws in his interactions with pharisees in the gospels. But in other places Jesus makes it clear that he has not come to overthrow God's laws, much less one of the "big ten." Jesus simply wants to law to serve the purpose for which is was intended, which is always the practice of love and freedom. To impose modern categories to this ancient story, he understands that sabbath-keeping is about healthy boundaries, rather than legalistic bondage. Which means that even if we reject binary thinking we have any easy way to honor sabbath-keeping law. We just need to ask if our sabbath-keeping serves the needs of love and freedom for all. 

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Boundaries, Not Bondage

Grace is a freely given gift - something we do not need to earn or deserve. Discipleship is different. It is a life of commitment to the way of Jesus that will radically change us. It can also mean steep sacrifices and a reorientation of our priorities. So, if such commitment is not the prerequisite to salvation, why would anyone choose discipleship? Because it is a choice to the fullness of life, a transformation that helps to heal the world. 

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WHY Would We Choose Discipleship?

A church festival that focuses on the cross might seem like an awkward Sunday to baptize a sweet baby. A week marked by gun violence and the remembrance of 9/11 might seem like a difficult Sunday to preach a message of hope. John 3:16 might seem like a verse on which it is difficult to say anything that feels new or transformative. And sometimes things are not what they seem. If can let go of our expectations and let the power of story and metaphor call us into learning, we can find the power of looking full in the face of all that is wrong with the world and finding that this kind of honesty is exactly where healing and hope begin. 

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Lifted Up

Welcome to the sermon feed for Abiding Peace Lutheran Church: Journey of Faith. We would love to have you with us for worship, but if you can't join us on Sunday mornings, we hope these messages bring the challenge and grace of the gospel to your life.