Words to Live By

April 26, 2015 Psalm 23 Fourth Sunday Easter – Good Shepherd Sunday Year B Words to Live By Children’s sermon……. Materials: A variety of stuffed animals. Message: Today I brought along a bunch of animals who live at our house. Not real animals this time, but stuffed animals that decorate our beds and sit in various places around the house. I'll bet some of you have stuffed animals as well. Now the easy thing about stuffed animals is that you don't have to do anything to take care of them. They just sit there and look nice. That is not the case with real animals, is it? They demand a lot of care if they are to be healthy and strong. Do any of you have pets at home? What kinds of pets do you have? What types of things do you have to do in order to care for them? You have to feed them. They need water every day. They need to have exercise. They need a bath every now and then. But most important of all, they need to know that we love them and to have us show them that love every day. Just as we take care of our pets and show them love, God tells us that He cares for us every day. The Psalms speak of God as a shepherd. A shepherd is someone whose job is to care for the sheep. He has to watch over them. It is his responsibility to lead them to the pastures where there is enough grass to eat. He also needs to protect them from wolves and lions and other animals who would try to kill the sheep. Just as a shepherd does all of that for his sheep, God is watching over you and me. He is the One who cares for us daily. He protects us from harm. He is watching over every part of our lives each day. When you go home today and care for your pets, I want you to remember that God is also watching over you. He meets the needs of our lives and loves us more than we will ever know. FROM A MUSTARD SEED, Mark A. Hultquist, CSS Publishing Company, 1996, 0-7880-0847-1 Adult sermon…… I know that you all are anxious for me to share about my trip to South Korea. And in time I look forward to doing that. Unlike Thailand, Christianity is huge in South Korea. They told us of how missionary came to South Korea 130 years ago today. And there was a great revival in the country, where everyone started flocking to churches. The movement actually started in North Korea, and eventually many of those people had to flee to South Korea in order to freely practice religion. After only 130 years- there are just as many Christians in South Korea as there are Buddhist. We stayed at Bupyeong Methodist Church in a suburb of Seoul. I have actually been to this church before, and I love it. There are about 3000 people or more who belong to this church. On Sunday’s not only do they have a full choir, they also have a full orchestra that plays with them. As you can imagine, worship is amazing. But the one practice that they say has really worked in growing their churches, is 5am prayer time. The church is open every day including Sunday for prayer at 5am. They come for an hour worship service, where they sing, listen to a sermon, and then spend 30 minutes crying out to God out loud. Now if I started a 5 am prayer service here, I would imagine that I would spend a lot of time all by myself. I might get one other person to show up a couple of times a month to pray with me. But guess what – every member of the church is expected to show up every morning at five am, and guess what – the sanctuary is filled to the brim every morning. South Korean Methodist truly believe that the Holy Spirit has blessed them, because of the commitment of their members to pray together every day. The Methodist are doing well, but the Presbyterians are doing even better. We visited a church in Seoul, which holds 10,000 people at one time. And that sanctuary is filled every Sunday. As our churches are dying, churches in other countries are dying. As a matter of fact,we don’t realize it, but America is no losing its place as the center of culture also. The rest of the world used to look at our teens to see what the latest trends are. That is not the case anymore. Today they are looking to South Korea. Just as they took the model of what was happening in American churches, and adapted it and made it their own. Their young people are taking what they see going on in American popular culture and making it their own. There is this new thing called Kpop. Korean pop. And it is all the rage in the rest of the world. These are boy bands and girl bands which are determining dress, dances and music for hip teens of the world. I tell you that because the world is changing. Just as the center of our churches is changing, so is the center of our churches. The Methodist church is paying much more attention to what is going on in South Korea, in Africa, in South America, because people are flocking to the church in droves. I don’t want to be discouraging. I only tell you that story because I know that you all want to know why would I have to travel all the way to South Korea to learn about church growth. Today’s sermon is actually about being the good shepherd. The 4th Sunday of Easter is always good shepherd Sunday. And today I think it is a good time for us to look at a very familiar scripture – psalm 23. I am actually going to challenge us to look at that familiar scripture line by line and think about it in a different way. But I gave that introduction, because if we are looking on a map, the new center of Christianity is some exotic place on a map. But the real center of Christianity, and what is happening in our lives – Where the holy spirit is working – is not in far away places with people do far away things. The real heart of Christianity – happens in the middle of nowhere, when nothing in particular is happening in our lives. The real heart of Christianity is in the midst of our ordinary lives with our ordinary thoughts. Every where we go and every thing that we do is a place on a map. For most of our lives, we know where to go and we know what to do when we get there. But have you ever noticed that there are some places on the map of your life, when you are not sure where you really are and what you should be doing. Have you ever been in that situation where you did not have all of the answers. You were in unfamiliar territory, and you were not sure of quite where to go and what to do. I am finding that that older I get, the less sure of where I am and what to do I am. Life used to make so much sense, and I had an answer for everything, and today I don’t know anythings. If I were to look at the map of my life, I have reached the point of no return. I may as well be in South Korea, because I don’t speak the language, and I don’t know the customs. It is times like that when I need to remember that the centerof my faith in in Christ. And as long as I am in Christ, I can still be lost, because Christ will come to leadme and guide me. In John 10 Jesus says that I am the good shepherd. I know my sheep and my sheep know me. Jesus says I am the good shepherd, as opposed to the good shepherd. The center of our faith should be in Christ, and Christ is everywhere on the map. When we are lost, the words of Christ are what will find us. The center of our faith, is what we do in our everyday lives. We all know the words of Psalm 23. Its funny that the only time that I really preach on this psalm is at funerals. But if you look at the words, it is not a psalm of death – it is a psalm of life, everday life. Mayor Emmanuel is the mayor, Bruce Rauner is the governer. But the lord is my shepherd. The first words of this psalm is a political statement. That the Lord is the ultimatehead of my life. If the God is truly present in my life then I shall not want. The world spends so much time telling us what we want. We are bombarded with commercials and ads telling us what we want. We get messages everywhere tell us what wewant. But if theLordis my shepherd, then I shall not want- because I already know that he provides for all of my needs. The world constantly expects something from me, constantly expects me to move and do things. But what does the good shepherd do – he leads me beside still waters. He calms my soul and tells me when it is time to rest, take a retreat and to be still. I have a shepherd who thinks more about my life then I do. Because when I would love to stay in retreat and just way where I am, his rod and his staff guides me Most of the time, I preach this psalm at funerals. During the resurrection season we celebrate the fact that Christ overcame death, as if death is the worst thing that could possibly happen to us. When most of the time, death is a relief. Because the darkest times in our life our not death, but life. Everytime I think I have seen the absolute cruelest illness in the world, I hear another story. We have all experienced the dark night of the soul – where we felt that there was no light at the end of the tunnel. Yea thou I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,I will fear no evil, they rod and they staff shall comfort me. In all of our lives, we all know that evil is real. That bad things happen to good people. That there are people in the world who appear not to have a heart, and can do some really cruel things to ourselves and to others. And yet God sets a table before our enemies. If we have to presence and love of God in our hearts, we can become keenly aware of the presence of our enemies. Trouble is never that far behind when love and peace is present. And yet God sets a table before you in the the presence of your enemies, and expects you to be calm enough to eat. And not be worried. If you sit long enough, have you ever noticed that your worst enemy in life, tends to be you. Most of the time, we are our own worst enemy. No one can sabotage our faith the way we do to ourselves. It takes being in the presence of the enemy, to face that enemy and have to courage to move forward. God anoints our head and our cup runneth over, in spite of the bad things going on. We still have plenty to be thankful for. God is a God who always values life, more than death. God is a God who will stick to us no matter what. The word for goodness and mercy is hesed. Hesed is a love that will stick to you through thick and thin. It is alove that will never let you go through life alone. Dwelling in the house of the Lord is not so much about going to heaven, as much as it is an understanding that God is always be with you. There is not a place that you can go, or a think that you can do in life that can separate you from the love of God. God’s hesed, God’s goodness and mercy follows us all of the days of our lives. But what if that was not a statement about what we receive, but about what we give. If God gives us hesed in all places, what it we left goodness and mercy in some way, wherever we went. It followed us all of the days of our lives. We hear the words of psalm23 so often, that we forget that it is a road map for getting through the tough times in life. It is not a psalm about death, it is a psalm about how to live our lives in the trust of Christ. And more importantly, we have to remember that the heart of Christianity is not some exotic place on a map. It is inside of the lives of the faithful people. It is not in the extraordinary things that we do it is in the ordinary way that we choose to live our lives. The key to living a spiritual life, a life in Christ is to be able to simply say – the Lord is my shepherd. And it goes on from there. Amen.