SCRIPTURE: 1 Peter 4:1-14, 5:8-11
TEXT: 10And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. THEME: The Resurrected Jesus is seen in those who do good. INTRODUCTION The resurrected Jesus is not found in empty tombs, but among the living. Today from 1 Peter we will see the resurrected Jesus in the lives of those who are engaged in Good trouble. The world is good but not perfect. The world has come to be the way that it is because some have figured to that this is the way that it should be. Sometimes it is good for a few at the expense of the many. The recent stories in corporate America have been about how CEO’s have recorded huge bonuses, while the income of the average worker has hardly changed. The distribution of wealth between the few rich and many poor is disproportionate and so workers at Kaiser, coal mines and the winters at movie studios have struck for their fair share of the profits. SCRIPTURE Peter’s addresses the church as they are going through fiery ordeals, cultural conflicts, moral dilemmas and financial hardships. The community of faith acts contrary to the communities they are in for the good of all. They do not worship the prevailing gods and could jeopardize their good favor with Rome. The second part of this passage are the supports for those who follow Christ and find themselves acting counter to the culture. Be humble, cast your cares upon Jesus, be alert those who are evil and are out to get you. Know that there are Christians in other places doing the same kinds of thing you are doing and are suffering the same things. Through it all, God will restore, support, strengthen and establish you. APPLICATION How can the church be a place where burdens are cast, we find restoration, support, strength, and are established? College was a struggle, new people, new place to live, strangers all around. I was displaced, away from home. Across the street from the dorms was Holy Cross Church, one of our UCC churches. I attended services there, volunteered at the youth group and met some pretty amazing people. It was about this time that someone shared 1 Peter 5:8 with me, 8Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour.” I felt my Christian life being attacked. This passage helped me realize that the devil, evil, active forces out there were out to get me, but I could be alert, be disciplined and not get eaten. I went to another of our UCC churches and these people practically adopted me. I volunteered with their Youth Group, they invited me to dinners. I helped prepare food for their moon festival that is the first time I saw someone use the bottom of a bowl as a stone to sharpen a knife. I showed up on Saturday to help them paint the preschool. I’ve never seen someone get so much paint out of a paint brush. They were a community of faith that let me be apart of them. I then was hired by another church to help with their youth group. These three churches were all very different from each other. The people they gathered were all from the same community, no more than a few miles apart from each other but very different demographics. Each church did the work of restore, support, strengthen and establish in their own way and I am appreciative of their ministry to me while I was at each. This has been my experience at every church I have been with since. Verse 10 says Christ himself will; restore, support strengthen and establish. And Christ has, with the works of salvation, love and grace. We are products of that, and Christ in us (the resurrected Christ) has us doing the same through the community of the church. CONCLUSION We may not be the ones lining the roads in protest, but we have people in our church who are (or know someone who is). During the Mental Health Professionals who struck there were many from the church who prayed in support of them. I didn’t know that there was an Artificial Intelligence (AI) app that could take what you have written and make it “better”. It rewords sentences, fixes grammar and spelling. I was asked to write an article for our Conference's newsletter on our church’s use of the Mission Grounds with the Affordable Housing Project. I sent my draft to a friend who ran it through an AI app and sent it back to me. Smooth. It made it much easier and clearer to read but it also left out some of the quirky way I put words together. This is one of the reasons they writers in Hollywood are striking. They are afraid that they may be replaced by ‘AI’ apps. They want protection for their jobs and be compensated for their intellectual property 9the quirky way they put words together and develop characters and themes). One of the writers on strike is from Hawaii, He said that his job is safe for now because he writes for comedy and ‘AI’ can’t do comedy. I sent a prayer out for the writers, their provision during these lean times and soften hearts of the few, that would share profits with the many. Christ uses the church to restore support strengthen and establish those who are engaged in Good Trouble to make a good world better. One last note. It was when I attended one of these churches in my college days that God sharpened my call to ministry. Sitting in the congregation I thought “Small membership churches need good pastors” maybe this is what God want me to be, a good pastor to a small membership congregation. I struggled to graduate from college. I did the same in seminary, and after about 20 years I decided I must be doing what God wants me to be doing. Now I am trying to figure out if God might be saying, “stop what you have been doing, let someone else have a change and move on to the next thing.” I might have to spend more time sitting in the loving arms of a good church to find out.
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