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<===== Original Message From ordinarylife-owner@yahoogroups.com ===== ORDINARY LIFE - Thoughts and Ideas to Help You Live a Happier Life ====================================== Summary of July 22, 2001 ====================================== Dear Folks - Before I forget it, my beautiful bride wants to know if one of you is responsible for the bird feeder that appeared hanging in one of the trees in our front yard. I'm honoring her request to inquire. Also, I was not going to do this but I've had several requests for the text of the sermon I gave Sunday at St. Paul's. My reluctance in doing this is that sermons, unlike the talks I give in our regular Ordinary Life gathering, are meant to be heard and not read. Sermons are set in a particular liturgical setting and use a language unique to that context. Nonetheless, I'm posting it below. If you don't care for sermons or don't like being "preached to," just delete it. Stay well, Bill Kerley ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ THE BEST NEWS YOU EVER HEARD ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I am so glad you are here today. I've been thinking about you all week. Actually, longer than that. I was hoping you would be here because I have something to say just to you. Before I tell you want it is, let me tell you what I'm shooting for in this sermon. I want you leave here today saying, "That's the best news I've ever heard." Not only that, I want you leave here with an ability to see the world in a new way. So that you can infect others with this good news. Don't misunderstand. I don't want you to leave here feeling smug because your prejudices have been confirmed. I want it to be because a transformation of values and beliefs takes place here so that you can leave this place to lead a new life. You know as well as I do that so many people don't live life at all. They just exist. Getting by from day to day. Some people have trouble just seeing what is. Friends of mine became deeply concerned when their daughter, a straight-A student and who had never offered them a minute of serious difficulty, showed up to introduce her new boy friend. His hair was at least four different vivid colors, he had tattoos over all exposed places on his body, and so many pieces of metal piercing his body that the father wondered, "How does this guy get through a metal detector at the airport?" The parents endured this encounter and when it was over began to try to reason with their daughter that perhaps this young man was not the best choice for a boyfriend. When they said things that implied they questioned his character, the daughter assured them that he was of the highest moral sort. "Really?" said the parents. "How can you be so sure of that?" The daughter said, "Well, if he weren't, why would he be doing 500 hours of community service?" Some people can't see what is. Plus, we can talk ourselves into almost anything we want. I've come to see that very often we do not so much love the truth as we make true what we love. Learning to live the life God wants for us is determined by what we say "yes" to and what we say "no" to. In the gospel text for today Martha is described as being distracted. As one translation has it, "She is concerned about all she has to do." Jesus in commenting on Mary's choice to spend time with him, talking and learning, Jesus says, and this is my translation, "Martha, you worry and fuss about a lot of things, but only a few things are necessary, really only one and that part that Mary has chosen is the most important of all and you must not tear her away from it." Mary has learned what to say "yes" to. That is the secret of life. It is not easy to do. Being able to do it is both a gift of grace and extremely hard work. But it is what makes the difference between living and existing. Our lives, your life, is shaped by what you say "yes" to. Outside the walls of a place like this, there is almost no place or activity that encourages us to say "yes" to real life. We are encouraged at every turn to believe that our happiness is in what we have or what we do. And though this process never really satisfies, we are reluctant to give up on it. The two chief forces of consumer marketing are desire and fear. "Eat this, drink this, do this, drive this, and you will be happy. If you don't, you won't. Take this pill and avoid pain. Don't take it and suffer." The spiritual teachings of the world, however, clearly say that desire and fear are our two biggest barriers to a truly happy life. One of the things saying "yes" to life means is to see life as a demand. That's a problem for us because most of us have grown up buying into the notion that no one should make demands on us. We want to be free. One of our mottoes is: "Don't you dare tell me what to do!" But, make no mistake about it, life is demand. The demand is that you must choose your own life. No one else can do that for you. Not if your living is to be satisfying and significant. That's work you have to do. Most of us live life as if it were a trial run for a second chance; ambling along, meaning to do many things, yet somehow never quite getting around to most of them. And all too suddenly life is gone. There is no time for trial runs in life. Whatever is important in life should be firmly grasped now. Whatever is to be done should receive our best. Whatever dreams we have should be pursued. Whatever joy and beauty we find should be shared and savored. If misfortune finds us, as it surely will, it should be conquered quickly, lest precious days for living be lost forever. Life is fragile and should be handled with care and prayer. Martha got distracted doing what she thought was important. Now there is a certain truth in Martha's position. Jesus was coming for dinner. I saw a line once somewhere that said, "If you are expecting God for breakfast, you don't burn the toast." Certainly we must "do" in life. But Martha's doing had distracted and worried her so much that she couldn't enjoy the party. My word, is that true for our culture! This pace of life sneaks up on us and we get seduced into thinking that just because it's possible, we need to be doing it; that if we don't get with what everyone else is doing, we'll be left behind. Consequently we have created and live in a culture where you have 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three. You chat several times a day with a stranger from South Africa, but you haven't spoken to your next door neighbor yet this year. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn't have the first 20 or 30 years of your life, is a cause for panic and turning around to get it. Cleaning up the dining room means getting the fast food bags out of the back seat of your car. Most of us, like Martha, feel hard pressed to deal with the hundreds of things that compete for our attention daily. Nearly every minute of our daily life revolves around job and mortgage, bills and debts, personal ambitions and family problems, with an occasional expensive, exhausting vacation thrown in for diversion. That's what we call the "good life." We have come to think that we have no alternatives. What used to be called the fast lane has taken over our whole highway. But a spiritual fact is that if we do not make the choice that Mary did, if we do not touch the sacred, we will have done nothing. That wonderful passage in the Old Testament that I'll bet all of you are familiar with doesn't say, "Be loving and know that I am God," or "Be obedient and know that I am God." It says, "Be still and know that I am God." The hectic pace at which we try to live is not, of course, the kind of demand I'm talking about. We don't have life because of what we do. When, like Mary, we choose the one thing needful, and become quiet and still at his feet, we find ourselves doing all sorts of things. Not in order to have life but because we see the wondrous love we have been given and we can't stay still about it. Let me tell you something and, I hope, you hear this as the best news you ever heard: You don't have to earn the right to be here. You don't have to prove your worth. You are born worthy. You don't have to compete for a place in life. There's already a place for you. You don't have to go somewhere else to live. The opportunity for abundant life surrounds you where you are. You don't have to bargain with God or plead with God or manipulate God to get God's favor or attention. You've already got both of these things. Here is some solid Wesleyan Methodist theology: In Jesus Christ God has already said a loud, clear "yes" to you. It took me years to get this message and I can still fall off the path about it. Somewhere along the line I bought the message that my worth depended on what I did. If I did an inadequate job at something, it meant that I was inadequate. If I failed at something, I was a failure. If I did a bad thing, I was bad. I'm not meaning to be hard on myself or others. It's so easy to get this message growing up. A child goes to a parent and says, "What should I wear to the party tonight?" The parent says, "Wear whatever you like." Soon the child emerges dressed for the party and says, "How to do you like this?" "No, no, honey!" the parent says, "Stripes and polka dots don't go together. Go back and change either the shirt or the slacks." One week later the child says, "What should I wear to the party tonight?" "I've told you over and over, wear whatever you like. Why do you always ask me?" Why indeed. You might as well face up to this: There is nothing you can do, learn or buy that can make it possible for you to escape disapproval. If you are living that way, you are living hopelessly, burying chunks of yourself every day. If you can see, right now, how worthy and wonderful you are, you'll not be depressed when approval is withheld as it surely will be. Disappointed maybe, but not depressed. There is a demand in life, never mistake it. That demand comes as a result of our seeing how loved and accepted we are. When his followers went to him and asked, "Lord, how will people know that we belong to you?" his answer was simple and significant. He didn't say, "People will know you are mine by what you believe about the Bible, or the virgin birth or the resurrection." Or any to the other doctrinal matters Christians have their silly disputes over. What he said was, "People will know that you are mine by the way you love one another." That's the demand. And we live it joyfully because we've heard the best news ever in his saying, "You belong to me." Not only is life promise and demand. Life is also freedom and responsibility. Again, it is easy for us to hear only one part of this, the part about freedom. Lord do we ever want to be free. Free to do our own thing. If there is one thing that can make us bristle it is someone else trying to tell us what to do. But, folks, freedom without responsibility is an illusion, a joke, a fraud. Freedom to do what you want when you want is not freedom, it's licence. Authentic freedom in our theology is the power to become what you can become. To be free, really free, is to be responsible; that is, to have the ability to respond to life in such a way as to move toward God's intention for your life. That's freedom. I love this church. I love so much about it. The freedom, the acceptance I've felt from the first. The way it looks and feels. The people. This church is made up of such wonderful people. Well, except for two or three. And, you know who you are. We have the freedom to be church. I've been part of this community of faith for sixteen or seventeen years now. And almost from the beginning I've been tempted to sneak in here at night and change the wording on these signs you see up here. They say, "Enter to Worship" and "Depart to Serve." I think that's backwards. Real church is made possible when we all understand that we "Enter to Serve" and "Depart to Worship." Sure, there are times when, out of our need, we come here to be taken care of in some way. But if we all did that all the time, there would be no church at all. I think one of the things that makes it sometimes so difficult to take in the good news is that we have closed ourselves to serving, to giving, to contributing. All throughout my ministry I've heard people be critical of the church and, God knows, a lot of that criticism we deserve. I wonder what the Jesus I know would say about a lot of the stuff we say and do. I wonder if he wouldn't look at some of our beliefs and behaviors, scratch his head and say, "That's not what I had in mind at all." Be that as it may, this church will be the kind of church for you that you want to the precise degree to which you exercise your freedom to be responsible for seeing to it that we are the kind of church you want. To the degree that church happens here, when we leave this place we are to take our sense of joy and confidence into the world with us. We are to get new eyes in here so that we can see God at work in the world. This is true worship and the test of our rituals here - that we live with reference to a transcendent reality out there whether we feel like it or not. That we don't go unconscious and drift into life as usual. In the Gospel selection Jesus says that Mary chose the better part, that she had hold of something that could not be taken from her. I know you and me well enough to know that that is our heart's desire - to choose that which cannot be taken from us. I also know that we so often look in the wrong places for it. Mary chose to be present to Jesus. That's the trick. To be here, to be present. We get so distracted like Martha, planning for the big someday, that we miss the fact that the future we have been hoping for is right here, right now. This is the only day you have to do your living. Now, don't mishear that. To live with no eye on the future is to live with no meaning in the present. Life that is real and lasting comes from giving yourself to something lasting. That's what Mary chose. Our critical task, it seems to me, is to learn the difference between filling up a day and fulfilling a day. Until we have learned to live for something other than "me now," we have not learned to live for today or tomorrow. That kind of living comes - listen carefully, I'm going to give you the definition of eternal life - that kind of living comes when we learn to penetrate our past with sacred memories, when we learn to accept the future with hopeful expectancy, when we learn to saturate our present with an acceptance of ourselves and each other as people created in the image of God. In that is eternal life. And that this kind of living is available to you and me, that it is possible for you and me, is the best news you could possibly ever hear. I want you to hear the Good News, best news you ever heard: That no matter how far you may think you are away from it; or, on the other hand, how smugly you may think you don't need it, God loves you exactly the way you are. I cannot think of better news than that. Now, go live it. Let this news transform you so that you begin to see the world in an entirely different way. What might that look like? Frederick Buechner says that when you get to the heart of all good theology, all you are left with is a story. Stories like: "A man was journeying from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves. Who do you think was neighbor to him?" Stories like, "A certain man had two sons and one demanded his inheritance." Stories like, "He entered a certain home where a woman named Martha welcomed him." So, let me tell you a story. Years ago in the world of professional golf, before Tiger Woods transformed the game, the sport was very different. Didn't get a lot of publicity. Prizes weren't very big. Golfers usually drove themselves from tournament to tournament. The tournaments themselves weren't played for television audiences with big corporate sponsors but for local communities and the country clubs. The purses were, of course, considerably smaller. A golfer from Australia won a tournament at a club in Georgia. His purse was something like $1500. As he was leaving, after the closing ceremonies and visiting with the others, he went to get in his car. A woman who had been in the gallery confronted him in the parking lot begging for his help. She had come to that part of the country following her golfer husband. Even though he was alcoholic and abusive, she hoped to make her marriage work. Not only had it not but now she was on her on, away from home. No family. No support. Even worse, her baby was very sick, in need of medical help. She had no resources. She was desperate. Her story was so touching to the golfer that he simply endorsed his winning check over to her. That's doing. The next year he returned for the same tournament. The pro at that golf club, knowing what had happened last year, decided to tell the man from Australia that the woman was a con artist. She had, in reality, bilked him out of those winnings. The golfer was stunned at this news. He then responded, "You mean that woman lied to me?" "Yes." "You mean to tell me that I was tricked?" "Yes." "You mean to tell me that there is no sick baby?" "That's right." "That's the best news I ever heard." That's what I want. For you to get the best news you ever heard here - about yourself, about the way life is, so that you and I and you and I together can go out there and live lives where we see the world and ourselves and each other in the way he wants us to see. That we see ourselves and each other in the way he sees us. That we see the world in the way he wants us to. That we see in a way that would cause him to say about us, "You have chosen the one thing that really matters." I am so glad you've been here today. I've been thinking about you all week. Actually, longer than that. I was hoping you would be here because I had something to say just to you. Now I've said it. I hope you've heard it as the best news you ever heard. ====================================== Ordinary Life is a gathering that provides an opportunity to develop an enlightened heart and an awakened mind to the reality of the present moment. The gathering meets on Sunday mornings at 9:45 am in Fondren Hall at St. Paul's UMC - 5501 South Main, Houston, Texas and is taught by Dr. Bill Kerley. If you would like more information - Contact Bill Kerley - E-Mail - Bill@bkspeaks.com Web - www.bkspeaks.com Voice - 713-663-7771 Fax - 713-663-6418 Mail - 6300 West Loop South, Suite 480 Bellaire, TX 77401 ============================== You can access the archives of these newsletters by going to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ordinarylife You can add someone you know would be interested in receiving these on- line newsletters by sending that information to - Bill@bkspeaks.com I'll make sure they are added immediately! Or, they can subscribe themselves by sending an e-mail directly to Ordinarylife-subscribe@yahoogroups.com You can unsubscribe to this newsletter by sending an e-mail to ordinarylife-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com ================================ The material in this on-line newsletter is copyrighted. It may be reproduced and printed elsewhere as long as it is not changed in any way and credit is given to this source. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
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