Do Not Despair! Change IS Possible -- even for our nation

This sermon came forth in the wake of the public murder of Charlie Kirk in Utah and the murder of Matthew Silverstone and another teenager at Evergreen High School in Colorado. Yet another week in what has become our America.

It has been a couple years since I placed sermons on this podcast. We have relied on our worship videos to provide the path to hear sermons. But it is time again to make sure God's call to peace, reconciliation, respect, and lovingkindness rings out clearly above the fray and the ugly calls for retaliation and more violence.

So, some key points from this sermon are below. Listen fully.

America's rage addiction is bigger than its porn addiction. So, we have more dead. More blood. And ongoing easy ways to kill. All of this in a hothouse of increasing angry and scornful political rhetoric that we are taking into our own speech and thoughts about the supposed enemy that we now regard as subhuman, and so we hear the threatening calls for civil war. This is what we are becoming now, what we are making ourselves into... 

Do not despair. Change is possible. Turning is possible. Conversion is possible. The lost can be found and brought home. The persecutor and the violent can be redeemed and become beacons of light. The persecuted and the victimized can be strengthened and find new life again, and let light break through...

Love isn’t just all restful sweetness. Love is irritating. It takes so much energy. It takes so much laying aside my own judgements of worthwhileness. It takes so much willful choice to step out in care even with the possibility or likelihood of being taken advantage of or mocked or taken for granted or suspected... Love is like that. It is irritating. It leaves ninety-nine sheep to go and retrieve one lost and wandering sheep. It runs ready to embrace the wayward son who has squandered have the wealth, much to the annoyance of the begrudgingly loyal son. It is annoying in its vivid attentiveness, its readiness to know and learn and embrace, its willingness to share in experience, its utmost patience, its embarrassing loud cry to “Rejoice with me.”

"This is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners" (I Tim. 1:15). So, we seek the Shepherd who seeks us. We turn again home. And we seek others who are lost. And then, at every spark of light dawning, we shout, “Rejoice with me!”

 

Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28              Psalm 14           1 Timothy 1:12-17          Luke 15:1-10