It took a while for my body to heal but I am now back to work and all is fine - except that I have a cold, but that will sort itself out in due course :).
Here is last Sunday's sermon. It took a detour in the beginning to talk a bit more about fear, though. I wanted to be clear about how important it is to figure out for yourself whether you are making decisions from a place of fear or from a place of love, which is where God resides.
Last Sunday's reading came from the Gospel of Mark:
So watch out and be ready! You don't know when the time will come. It is like what happens when a man goes away for a while and places his servants in charge of everything. He tells each of them what to do, and he orders the guard to keep alert. So be alert! You don't know when the master of the house will come back. It could be in the evening or at midnight or before dawn or in the morning. But if he comes suddenly, don't let him find you asleep. I tell everyone just what I have told you. Be alert!
“Be alert!” As in be nervous, apprehensive, scared and stressed out?
Well, no, I don’t think so. I think it goes like this; be alert as in: do what has been given for you to do, know that what you do matters greatly, remember that you answer to someone higher than you and remember that you are loved more than you can even understand.
One of the many hard things to learn about living a truly Christian life is that fear does not come from God. This applies not only to the big things in life such as worrying about a loved one’s health and or safety or for ones’ own, for that matter, or about global warming, economical melt down, natural disasters or wars. It also – and equally - applies to the small everyday causes of worry and stress. Fear does not come from God.
When Jesus calls us to be alert He does not imply that if you are not you will be punished although that thought easily comes to mind when reading today’s passage. But I really do not think that is how it is.
I think Jesus calls us to be alert like a – and this may sound a little odd but bear with me – He calls us to be alert like when visiting a museum or an art show or listening to a concert or walking around in a beautiful forest or seaside.
We are called to be alert so that we won’t miss anything: so that we won’t miss any part of the amazing plan God has.
I am not saying that there aren’t very good reasons to be afraid. Neither am I saying that fearing the very many things we fear is a sin. Although, there we run to the question of weather we are talking about emotions or an attitude.
Emotions are exactly what they are, they are neither good or bad. However, what results from them is what determines things. So, to be afraid of darkness or of pain or of the very many other things we can be afraid of is in no way a sin. But I leave it to you to bonder about, is having a distrusting, apprehensive and fearful attitude something that might in fact be against what God wants? A sin, therefore. Is it not trust, faith and courage God calls us to have?
The other side to the story about the servant is that Jesus calls us to be alert so that when we are needed we will realize it, and act. As Christians we are called to bless those around us with both how we are and how we act. We are called to take care of those in need, to help, to protect, to give unconditionally and to serve. We are, simply put, called to love with the love God loves us.
Christian love, God’s love is not a passive kind of love, a fuzzy lovely feeling, but a love that sometimes demands us to raise our voice for those whose voices are not otherwise heard, a love that demands us to set boundaries but also to set free. It is a challenging kind of love; the kind of love that changes the world.
Henry Nouwen wrote this in his book The return of the Prodigal Son:
“People who have come know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it. They claim that the light that shines in the darkness can be trusted more than the darkness itself and that a little bit of light can dispel a lot of darkness.”
He then continues to say that what we as Christians do is to seek that light and share it with one another. To seek God is in my mind quite simply what being alert is all about.
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