Metanoia and OTHER SERMONS , livre ebook

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Metanoia and Other Sermons
Published by Gatekeeper Press
2167 Stringtown Rd, Suite 109
Columbus, OH 43123-2989
www.GatekeeperPress.com
Copyright 2021 by Ruskin Falls
All rights reserved. Neither this book, nor any parts within it may be sold or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020952735
ISBN (hardcover): 9781662907999
ISBN (paperback): 9781662907647
eISBN: 9781662907654
Table of Contents
Prelude
(1) Mark 1:14-15 Metanoia .
(2) Luke 9:28b-45 Even the best of disciples.
(3) Hebrews 13:1-6 Words to a weary church.
(4) John 11:17-48 Troubled and sad but not afraid.
(5) Mark 8:27-35 Do something brave!
(6) John 12:12-15, 20-25 What to hate, what to love, what to do.
(7) Luke 23:50-24:12 Looking for the living.
(8) Jeremiah 17:5-8 Desert stream.
(9) Romans 8:28 How the world looks to those who love God.
(10) Hosea 1:9b-10; 2:14-15 Our infinitely good task.
(11) Jeremiah 31:31-34 On the eve of destruction.
(12) Hebrews 1:1-3a; 4:12-13 How the light gets in.
(13) 1 st Peter 3:13-18a By gracious powers.
(14) 2 nd Corinthians 13:11-13 Holy kiss, triune God, and peace.
(15) Revelation 4:1-11 Why worship God?
(16) Jeremiah 6:10, 13-15a The way forward.
(17) Matthew 19:1-6 Whom God has joined.
(18) Psalm 145:1-21 Kum ba Yah.
(19) Ephesians 4:17-24 The new self.
(20) 1 st John 4:7-16 The love God is.
(21) Philippians 2:1-5 The love we can become.
(22) Romans 13:8-10 as you love yourself.
(23) Revelation 1:9-2:7 Love letters from Jesus.
Prelude
What follows is a collection of sermons from the weeks preceding and the first five months following our church s shift to online-only worship in March 2020 due to the pandemic outbreak of the new coronavirus, COVID-19. Each sermon is prefaced-and thereby situated in the congregation-by that Sunday s greeting and, after we went online-only, by the day s announcements. Readers outside the congregation may find the announcements, particularly the identifying of each week s worship leaders, unnecessarily repetitive. This book, however, isn t merely about the sermons. It s about how our small, electronically challenged church with its borderline Luddite minister pulled together during the first half-year of the pandemic, to keep on keeping on. This isn t just a collection of sermons. It s also a collection of services.
Pulaski Heights Presbyterian Church is a congregation small in number, most of whose members are elderly. The congregation is kind, gracious, persevering, and largely appreciative of serious sermonic wrestling with theological truth. My stated aim as preacher there is to work with sensitivity, insight, and perseverance at learning to proclaim God s word in human words that will invite understanding and renewal in the church, that will encourage among worshipers an honest, attentive, responsible, and forthright witness of faith and hope and love, and that will embolden worshipers to do God s goodness justice.
The sermons are intended as exercises in openness for the truth of God s word. Traditionalist Christians may find them doctrinally unsatisfying, not biblical enough, and less than edifying. Progressivist Christians may find them overly theological, not contemporary enough, and short on concrete social-issue engagement. In any event, a central concern throughout-a concern perhaps stated most explicitly at the end of sermon eleven-is this: the church is so like the world that it is hard for the church to hear otherworldly God s own word loving us, judging us, redeeming us, and challenging us to swim (or at the very least to paddle!) against the many worldly streams that, left and right, hold us back from the world that God intends. The church is ever on the verge of losing touch with-ever on the verge of needing to learn anew what it means to hear and heed-God s word. These sermons attempt to stand there on the verge and encourage Christian daring. They are neither feel-good nor finger-pointing. They are neither prosperity-promoting nor therapeutically oriented. They are not even an attempt to make the church sound relevant to the issues of the day. Rather, they simply aim at openness to the truth that sets us free for and in and through the faith and courage that Christ came bringing.
My preaching style is, I believe, more irenic than competitive in spirit. If, though, there is homiletic competition going on in what I am doing here, it is with preachers (and with myself when I number among them) who are bent as preachers on being conservative or evangelical or liberal or progressive or idiosyncratic or entertaining or otherwise situated above the word that we as preachers must strive to submit to and serve .
Other than that, I am not aware that I preach with an eye or ear to a particular homiletic style. I can, though, identify five books that are of particular importance to me regarding preaching: Karl Barth s Homiletics , Angela Dienhart Hancock s Karl Barth s Emergency Homiletic 1932-1933 , Charles L. Campbell s The Word Before the Powers: An Ethic of Preaching , Thomas Long s Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral , and Edward Farley s Practicing Gospel: Unconventional Thoughts on the Church s Ministry . Then, too, there is Edith Stein, who once summed it up in this way: To stand before the face of the living God-that is our vocation. 1
I give these sermons over to publication with a special thanks to my sister, Cherry Varee Falls, whose confidence in me so often has made up for my own lack thereof.

1 Edith Stein, The Hidden Life: Essays, Meditations, Spiritual Texts, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1992), 1.
(1)
Mark 1:14-15
Metanoia .
February 16, 2020, 6 th Sunday after Epiphany
Greeting
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you all!
Here, in this hour, in this place, the Holy Spirit of the resurrected Jesus Christ is at work to take what s said and sung and done here and to use all that to lift our hearts and stretch our minds toward God; to comfort us and to challenge us with God s own word; to gird us with the kind of hope and courage that nothing in and of this world, but only God, can give; and to move our wills with heavenly guidance and grace.
It belongs to my prayer that, through this service of worship, we all may experience new readiness to let our lives and our world be transformed by the gospel that Christ came bringing. Amen.
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Mark 1:14-15
Metanoia .
Preface This is from Mark s account of what he calls the beginning of the good news- the beginning of the gospel . In these two verses, Jesus moves from a time of preparation to a time of public declaration and demonstration of his mission to the world.
TEXT (English translation: NRSV)
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.
(1)
For Jesus, it comes down to questions such as these: What is the greatest-what is the most profound-influence in your life? To which entities, to which things, to which powers have you most ardently entrusted the meaning and course of your life? Where do you get your basic feel for who you are and for what your life is about? What gives you the experience of being fundamentally valued? What anchors your sense of security in this world? What is the ultimate ground of hope and of courage in your life?
For Jesus, it comes down to questions such as these.
What Jesus sees is this: what we humans have turned the world into, what we have let our world become, and what we have tolerated it as is tragically at odds with and even opposed to the life that God created us to know and enjoy together. The life that you and I participate in, here in this world, actually is at cross-purposes with the life that God intends for us to be sharing together, namely, life that, left to right, right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top, and through and through, is in glad accordance with-is in joyful keeping with-and is jubilantly saturated by-the justice, righteousness, peace, and love that are the hallmarks of the kingdom of God-which kingdom still is coming to our world.
That s what Jesus sees.
And what Jesus knows is this: as long as God is not the greatest and most profound influence in our life; as long as it is not to God that we most ardently entrust the meaning and course of our life; as long as our basic feel for who we are and for what our life is about does not come from God ; as long as we haven t experienced ourselves being fundamentally valued by and securely anchored in God ; as long as our hope and courage are not finally grounded in God ; then neither we nor the world around us will ever know peace; and neither we nor those around us-neither we nor our world nor our children s world nor our children s children s world-is going to blossom, bloom, grow, thrive, and flourish as wonderfully and as beautifully, as justly and as lovingly as can happen with God s help when we welcome and embrace God really, truly, genuinely, and fully as the beginning and end, as the center and foundation, of our lives and of all things.
That s what Jesus knows. And, Jesus knows that we and our world have not , in fact, welcomed and embraced God in this way.
Sure, we may have what s fair to call genuine faith and trust and confidence in God. And we may indeed, in many, ma