Category: Blog

In lieu of a typical pastor devotional this morning, I was thinking this week about how we can be salt and light this Thanksgiving weekend to our family and friends. I don’t know all of your stories, and so I don’t know if there is joy and excitement wrapped up in your hopes for this holiday, or fear and anxiety. We all have family that are difficult to be with or draining to spend time around. We all have friends that make everything about themselves and struggle to find the positive in life. And so, in the honestness of that reality, I offer you 10 Ways to Act more like Jesus this Thanksgiving that I hope will make you both laugh and think twice.

10. Know that Jesus loves you just as much as He loves the family member that causes so much drama year after year. You can’t fix people; only Jesus can do that!

9. Wounded people wound others. When we are hurting, or lonely, or broken, we act out of that woundedness, and so extra patience and grace should be shared. Grace upon grace for yourself and others.

8. Bring enough to share. While Jesus is more than capable of feeding 5,000 plus women and children, don’t go in expecting that and buy enough or make enough so that there are extras.

7. Don’t be the one to bring up politics, vaccines, masks or the justice system. By all means speak up and speak into them from a place of humility, but for the love of all that is good in this world, don’t be the instigator.

6. Take pictures. Jesus would want us to remember the moments and mark the memories because life is short.

5. Laugh a lot, sing if you can, and give hugs (if you feel comfortable). We are the light of the world, but sometimes we take ourselves a little seriously. Enjoy life!

4. Slow to Anger. When a friend or family remember says something you completely disagree with, don’t role your eyes and shout, “Get behind me Satan…!” Instead, look deep into their eyes and remember that Jesus died for them too. Then maybe take a walk.

3. Model service and get the kids involved. Followers of Jesus are marked in how they serve others, so get the kids to help lay the table, place the silverware, carry the bread-basket and then let them pray for the meal.

2. The “Urgent Call” Trick. When all else fails, if the conversation turns caustic or if things get uncomfortable, you can always pretend you have an urgent phone call to take by leaving the table with your phone to your ear If not, just say, I need to be excused so I can go to my Father and spend some time in prayer… remember, Jesus did that ALL the time!

1. Remember this week is ultimately about Thankfulness. Write down 2-3 things you are thankful about each immediate family member you will be interacting with this week and pray that you will be given an authentic and natural time to share with them why you are thankful for them.

I hope these tips made you laugh and give you hope. We are in the people business and people are complicated and we are all figuring these things out together. I will be praying that God reveals Godself to you in a new way this Thanksgiving week!

AMEN

As we finish our last week of the Revive sermon series and the five practices that we improve as followers of Jesus, we end with Service. I was not in worship this Sunday, as I was preaching at my home church in Ormond Beach, but I watched worship and Pastor David’s excellent sermon online. The scripture that we look at today was from John 13:1-5 and 12-17. Here is the story once more.

13 Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. ² The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper ³ Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, ⁴ got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. ⁵ Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. 

¹² After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? ¹³ You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. ¹⁴ So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. ¹⁵ For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. ¹⁶ Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. ¹⁷ If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them. John 13:1-5;12-17

I will admit that this is one of my favorite stories of Jesus. When I picture the person of Jesus in my mind’s eye, I often picture him kneeling with a towel wrapped around him washing smelly feet. I grew up in a mission-oriented home and church and so I take great comfort in this version of the Jesus story. Probably unlike most children, I can remember that Christmas in Ormond Beach often had a mixture of smells for me. One vivid memory was the mixture of the smell of cornbread and cigarette smoke. You see, on the cold nights in Ormond Beach, whenever the temperature was at or below 40 degrees, my father would volunteer to drive the 15 passenger van around our area and pick up homeless men and women and drive them to shelters. I would be in the front seat with a pan of my mother’s warm and sweet cornbread to add to the chili at the shelters. And so, when I think of the meaning of the Christmas season, I cannot separate it from these two smells.

In his sermon on Sunday, Pastor David talked about how service blesses us, the servers, in a number of ways. He reminded us that we can’t follow Jesus if we aren’t also in the habit of serving because in order to know Jesus and grow in relationship with him, that happens most tangibly through service. Serving connects us to our purpose, puts us in a front-row seat to witness God’s miracles and helps us know Jesus more deeply. And while I couldn’t agree more with each of these, I would like to add one more for the purpose of our time together. Serving blesses us because it becomes our legacy.

You know that I am a proud mom of Emmaline and Charlie and every day they show me more of God’s grace and love. Two days ago, we were having a picnic with my parents after church and once again Emmaline’s birthday party became the focus of conversation (which it has occasionally since July). We are having an outside tea-party for a few of her friends and she started naming all of the activities, games and party favors she had thought through and talked through many times before. But just as I was about to check out from “Cruise Director Emmaline’s” plans she said something that took my breath away.

She said, “At the end of the party, I want to pack up lunch bags with apples, granola bars and maybe some juice and have my friends and I find hungry people and hand them out.”

Wow. Thank you Emmaline for reminding your family what it means to serve others. And so I would add that one of the blessings of service is that it becomes our legacy. When we are modeling a servant’s heart, we begin to notice that our children and grandchildren are watching us; they are soaking it all in. There have been several times that the kids have been in the car and we come to a stop near a major road and they notice a person with a sign. I don’t usually have cash, but we usually ALWAYS have snacks in our car and the kids love to offer to the hungry person some of their snacks. As long as we are safe and I am the one handing the snack to the stranger, the kids look into their eyes and see firsthand what it means to serve our neighbor.

I tell you this not to brag on my family, but to show how children are watching and how they associate that feeling of service with ease. Making lunch bags was so fun and easy that she wanted to include her friends in it and make it a part of her Birthday Party. And that kind of outlook is more about being open and willing which children always remind us how to embrace. Pastor David ended his sermon with the challenge to see availability as more important than ability. And so we now have a chance to model that for our future generations for those little eyes and little ears that are watching and listening. What a privilege and responsibility that is for us the church to model and I pray that God gives each of us the strength to model Service like Jesus for those in our lives.

The hymn that has been playing over and over again in my head since Sunday has been Blessed Assurance; one of my top five hymns of all times. Each verse is beautiful and deep, and if you happen to have a United Methodist Hymnal on your shelf, you can find it on page #369. My favorite verse speaks of what true witness looks like:

Perfect submission, perfect delight,
Visions of rapture now burst on my sight;
Angels descending bring from above
Echoes of Mercy, Whispers of Love.

This is my Story, this is my song,
Praising my Savior all the day long;
This is my story, this is my song,
Praising my Savior all the day long.

Aside from the jovial melody and easy rhythm to clap to, this song is about our witness and the story we wish to tell the world. Written by the beloved Hymn writer, Fanny Crosby in 1873, it is a song that inspires deep faith. Verse 2 speaks about the witness of that faith. While I can admit that I haven’t always enjoyed the word submission (this word has been used to harm women since the beginning of the recorded Scriptures) what I understand about this verse, in particular, is that through submission to Jesus (for male and female) it leads to perfect delight. That is when we fully submit to Jesus as both the Savior and Lord of our lives, there is joy and contentment despite life’s circumstances. The last part of this verse is probably the most poetic of all: Echoes of Mercy, Whispers of Love. An echo can be heard long after the word is spoken and has a farther reach to the hearer. And a whisper of love is something done in close proximity to someone you have a deep relationship with that shares your level of trust.

When we work out what it means to be faithful witnesses of Jesus in our everyday lives, I hope we can lead with Mercy and Love. I hope that the mercy and compassion we share echoes on long after we have left the building. I hope that the love that is displayed is done through trust and deep relationships. In other words, I hope your witness and my witness to the people in our sphere of influence is led by mercy and communicated with love. We can all think of times when we ourselves displayed less than that in our own Christian witness or had it thrust on us in a way that stripped away our humanity or our belovedness. We have seen it done well and seen it done in ways that embarrass us as followers of Jesus. And so, I encourage you this week to think about a person or persons in your life that have been a faithful witness to you. Someone that shared those echoes of mercy and whispers of love in your faith journey.

While I never met Fred Rogers, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the kind of witness he was. Never pushy, or judgmental, he was never drawing lines in the sands or forcing people to comply through guilt. He moved to a different tempo and flung wide his arms of acceptance. If you haven’t had a chance yet to see the Fred Rogers bronze statue on Rollins campus, I encourage you to go. Below is a picture of it. If you are looking for a new way to practice a spiritual discipline, may I suggest that you make this a part of your prayer life this week. Go for a walk on the campus, take in the beauty of the statue and ask yourself whether or not your witness is one of mercy and love. And then spend that time reflecting on the story you wish to tell with your life; the song that you will play with your witness and how others might come to know this Jesus that you will point them to.

AMEN