Day1 Podcast/Sermon Feed

Jesus' Invitation to Paradox

Sun, 6 Jul 2008 00:00:00 CDT

The Rev. Dr. Trace Haythorn is President of the Fund for Theological Education in Atlanta, GA.

The times were hard. The government, a huge bureaucracy that provided so many important things like roads and military support and the justice system, was hopelessly out of touch with the people. And the religious establishment wasn't much better. It seemed so focused on preserving what was that it had little or no vision for what might yet be. When a prophet spoke out, they were vilified, punished, especially if they called into question the decisions of the government. Voices of hope arose, but just as quickly they fell as questions arose about the character of the speaker, about their ability to deliver, or about the transgressions of their past. Apathy was the prevailing ethos in the community. It was not hard to imagine the people asking, "Why even bother when nothing seemed to change?"

Kind of hard to figure out the time referenced, isn't it? While this description is meant to refer to Matthew's community, they could be referring to today in any of our towns or cities. The pervasive apathy of our age, the sense that nothing can improve and to bother trying to make things better is a fool's errand, the despair that makes us resign our hearts to a belief that poverty, hunger and homelessness have no real answers, have no hope. Such matters are left to Sisyphus, sadly rolling that stone up the hill only to have it roll back down, generation after generation after generation.

The Art of Welcome

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:00:00 CDT

The Rev. Dr. Trace Haythorn is President of the Fund for Theological Education in Atlanta, GA.

Welcome. It's such a common word. It adorns floor mats outside all sorts of entryways. It's often on road signs as one enters a new state, a new town. I even saw a welcome sign recently as I entered a national forest. There are places where people offer "welcome" as a greeting as I enter: "Welcome to Wal-Mart!" "Good evening and welcome-table for two?" "Welcome to the greatest show on earth!"

Such conventional uses hide the loveliness of this word. Welcome. In English the word finds its roots in a compounding of "well" and "come," though with slightly different connotations that we tend to use today. The root of "well" could go in two directions: it could mean something close to our current understanding of "wellness" or "well-being," but it could be stronger than that, implying desire or pleasure. Some scholars see a link between "well" and "weal," the root of our word "wealth," and thus perhaps the word offers a kind of blessing. "Come" finds its roots in an Old English word "comer," that is, one who arrives or, perhaps closer to the Greek, one who is received. Thus "welcome" can offer in its earliest sense an invitation to come and be well, or to be well in coming. Either way, it is an invitation to be received into the goodness of this new place, this place here that one has just arrived.

A Bad Case of the I-Can't-Help-It

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:00:00 CDT

The Rev. Dr. Patrick Keen is pastor of Bethlehem Lutheran Church in New Orleans, LA.

Church, I have a bad case of the I can't help it!

I have to admit that I did not want to be a preacher or pastor. As a matter of fact I vowed that I would not be as my father was a pastor and that was not the life I wanted for myself. I did not want that life for myself or my family. A life of neglect of family needs and a time spent together because of ministry needs, and abuse by the hands of people who you care for and minister to. A life of being under paid and overworked. No, I did not want that kind of life.

Day 1 Podcast Extra -Ellison

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:00 CDT

Day 1 Podcast Extra -Craddock

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:00 CDT

A Great Time to Be the Church

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:00:00 CDT

The Rev. Dr. Patrick Keen is pastor of Bethlehem Lutheran Church in New Orleans, LA.

There have been many times in the history of the church for the church to manifest itself as the body of Christ. There have been times when the church has stood up to the challenge, and times when the church has utterly failed.

When Madalyn Murray O'Hair challenged prayer in schools, this was an opportunity for the church to stand and speak out against this movement which has fostered other anti-religious movements in our nation and even around the world. The church failed to be the church in response to this attack.

Soul Restoration

Sun, 8 Jun 2008 00:00:00 CDT

The Rev. Dr. Jim Ellison is pastor of Atlanta First United Methodist Church in Atlanta, GA.

This past week, as part of my annual physical, I had an EKG. Each year I go through the process of being connected to a machine that tells the technician and the doctors how my heart is doing. That's what an EKG does. One lies still while the machine reveals how the heart is functioning. My EKG didn't take long-just a minute or two. Within minutes the technician was scanning my personal printout. After a few quick glances, she says "Well, your heart looks okay to me but we need for the doctor to take a look."

When the doctor arrived, he too took a quick glance at the printout. He smiled and said, "You know what, Jim? I think you can sign up for another forty years." Those words were music to my ears!

Day 1 Podcast Extra -Nash

Thu, 5 Jun 2008 00:00:00 CDT

Turning the Great Commission on Its Ear

Sun, 1 Jun 2008 00:00:00 CDT

I doubt that any passage of scripture carried more weight and influence for the evangelical church in the United States during the last century of Christian history than the Commission of Jesus recorded at the end of Matthew's gospel. Its active verbs of "Go," "Make," "Baptize," Teach" and "Obey" provided the pounding rhythms of the global engagement of the church in the twentieth century. A particular subset of American Christians, those of northern and western European descent (of which I am one), were particularly captivated by its cadence.

It said to go-and we knew all about going. We were people on the move after all-we had a divine errand to the world that had been passed on to us from our Puritan forebears. "Going" was in our blood. Our hymns, many of them written on the frontier, expressed this reality. We were "pressing on the upward way-new heights (we were) gaining every day."1 Our covered wagons had made their way across the frontier all the way to the Pacific Ocean-and soon we would send our missionaries--first to China, then Nigeria and Kenya and Mexico, Brazil, Japan, India and Korea. They went-first a few dozen, then a few hundred and eventually thousands, driven to go by this clear and clarion call of Jesus.

The Commission didn't end at the point of Going. There was work to do-and we knew something about work. We'd cleared land, built fences and churches and homes, brought the Christian faith to hard-working, hard-drinking, hard-living frontiers-people. The stamp "Made in America" became a sign of quality, of stuff made out of the best of materials. Again, our hymns reflected our self-understanding of this calling-"To the work, to the work, we are servants of God. We will follow the path that our Savior has trod."2

On Chocolate Chip Cookies and Dirty Water and Being Church in a Shrinking World

Sun, 25 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

The Rev. Dr. Rob Nash is the Global Mission Coordinator for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, headquartered in Atlanta, GA.

Not too terribly long ago I made my way up to a first church in a rural county seat town in the South to deliver the Sunday morning message. As I drove into town, I nearly ran off the road when I saw a sign just in front of a little brick ranch home that said "Laotian Buddhist Temple." It was certainly the first Buddhist temple that I had ever seen in that part of the country. And I scratched my head in wonder and amazement and drove on up to the church.

Upon ascending into the pulpit, I said to the congregation, "I notice you have a Buddhist temple here in town. I'm assuming you folks have been out to the temple to welcome the Buddhists to your community." The congregation just stared at me, and an uncomfortable silence filled the sanctuary. I decided to push on. "Well," I said, "I tell you what I'm gonna do. On my way home this afternoon, I'm going to pull up to the temple and meet the monks and tell them that the First Church is going to be coming out to see them and to welcome them to town." I saw a few nods around the church that seemed to give me some license to fulfill this crazy mission.

Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah... Love

Sun, 18 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

The Rev. Dr. James B. Lemler is priest-in-charge of Christ Church (Episcopal), Greenwich, CT. He was formerly Director of Mission for the Episcopal Church in New York, NY, and dean and president of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, Evanston, IL.

So...here's a question for you, a deeply personal question. Can you think of a time when you really experienced love, when you really experienced being loved? Yes, it's a probing and personal question, but it's not one I dreamed up on my on. Rather, it was a question at the basis of a book that one of our best American theologians put together a few years ago. Diogenes Allen asked people far and wide about their experience of being loved and then wrote a marvelous book simply and accurately titled "Love."

My favorite entry was from a young woman who described her experience as a little girl sitting on her father's lap in a small church as her mother read the Christmas story from St. Luke's Gospel. She would listen to those familiar words, "In the year that Quirinius was governor, all the world went to be enrolled... And there were shepherds keeping watch o'er their flocks by night...And lo, an angel came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them...." It was such an experience of love, the message, her mother's voice, her father's embrace. She knew she was loved, and she knew, even more so, that her experience of earthly love in this way was a mirror of God's love for her.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Engines

Sun, 11 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

Day 1 Podcast Extra -Anderson

Thu, 8 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

You Can't Keep a Good Man Down

Sun, 4 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

The God in You

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:00:00 CDT

You can relax; I have not gone round the "new age theology bend" with this sermon title The God in You. However, I must confess to being just a bit provocative when choosing it, especially with those people who in the last decade have jumped on the bandwagon of new age spirituality. The phrase, "the God in you" has recently been popularized by new agers. But like so many things appropriated by that movement, the idea is anything but new. In fact, it is as old as Jesus sitting at a table with his disciples preparing them for his departure.

The lesson we have just read is the continuation of last week's gospel lesson in which Phillip has said to Jesus, "Show us the Father and we will be satisfied," and Jesus responds, "Have I been so long with you Phillip, and still you do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." All of this conversation in John's gospel takes place at the table in the upper room on the night of Jesus' betrayal. Jesus has told them that he is going away and that whatever we ask in his name he will do. We talked last week about that being God's promise to the church, to be at work in and among the church whenever it is about Christ's work in the world. That is an astounding promise. But today, we hear promises of even more staggering magnitude. First, Jesus promises not to leave them abandoned, bereft, desolate or orphaned, depending upon which English translation you might be reading. Each a suitable rendering of the Greek, which, by the way, is the word from which we get our English word "orphaned."1 Jesus is leaving his followers, but he is not leaving them orphaned-on their own. He is sending another who will be comforter, advocate, helper, guide, and intercessor-again, depending upon your English translation. This advocate will be with them forever.2

As Jesus has been their comforter, helper, guide, intercessor and advocate in the three years of their relationship with him, upon his departure they will have another, One sent from the Father.3 This advocate, who will continue Jesus' presence among them and work with them forever, Jesus calls "the spirit of truth." The three subsequent times Jesus speaks of this coming One, he identifies the advocate as the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God who proceeds from the Father at Jesus' request, who in fact will not come until Jesus returns.4 Jesus is sending the very One in the Godhead who is the bond between himself and the Father, who, because of being that bond between them, simply cannot come until Jesus returns to the Father. This One who has been named "the go-between God" will no longer be a link between the Father and the Son, for upon Jesus' return they will be reunited. Jesus is telling his followers that the gift of the God's Spirit is about to be bestowed on them. From that point on, the go-between God will be the link between Jesus' followers and the Triune God.5

No Power Shortage Here

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:00:00 CDT

The Rev. Dr. Fred R. Anderson is pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City.

This lesson contains some of the most familiar, some of the most comforting and some of the most astounding verses in scripture. But it also contains some of the most troubling, at least for many twenty-first century western Christians. When Jesus says, "No one comes to the Father, except by me," we almost always hesitate. I suspect we hear some preacher out of our past railing against anyone who does not "believe in Jesus" the way he believes in Jesus, warning that unless they conform, they are going to hell. And so, let us begin by dealing with what otherwise would keep us from hearing all of this as good news.

Jesus is preparing his closest followers for his imminent departure. They are more than a little confused. He says he is going to his Father's home to prepare a place for them, whereupon he will come and take them to himself so that where he is, they may also be. I have read these words at virtually every funeral or memorial service I have ever led, for they are words of astounding comfort and hope. Life as God has designed it for us is not confined to this world or to this brief "three-score and ten"-albeit today, increasingly more like four-score and ten or more. The risen Lord has returned to his Father's dwelling place to make room for each of us. And when the time comes for us to make that transition, we can expect none other than the risen Lord there to receive us unto himself that where he is we may also be, always! This is the first remarkable promise in today's lesson.

Day 1 Podcast Extra -Drake

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 CDT

God's Most Difficult Miracle

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:00:00 CDT

The Rev. Dr. Donovan Drake is the pastor of Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church in Durham, N.C.

As a kid, Sunday school often featured vanilla wafers and Kool-Aid. I can remember scenes of an acrobatic Jesus who would flip and fly and refuse to participate in felt board presentations. But I also remember those wonderful watercolor drawings that would tell a story. There would be pharaoh up to his neck in frogs. There was that pillar of fire reflecting light on the faces of those former slaves fleeing Egypt. I can remember the dust and demolition of Jericho's walls tumbling and crumbling down!

Such scenes put into my childhood mind a question, perhaps my first theological question. What miracle in the Bible was the most difficult for God to do? Surely miracles must come with degrees of difficulty. Like for a magician-I know that for a magician it has to be easier to pull a rabbit out of a hat than it is to saw a person in two. Isn't it? It has to be. Well, how about for God?

Gaining Recognition

Sun, 6 Apr 2008 00:00:00 CDT

The Rev. Dr. Donovan Drake is the pastor of Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church in Durham, N.C.

Who would not want to receive the standing ovation or to hear, "Good job!" "You're wonderful!" "I appreciate what you've done!" "Thank you!"? Ahh, my guess is just about all of us appreciate gaining a little recognition. Without recognition, then who am I? Who are you? We're strangers to one another - unknown. Gaining recognition makes all the difference in the world.

I saw it the other day on the face of a 5-year-old girl. There she was at the airport searching a sea full of faces and then suddenly her eyes lit up! Flash! Grinning from ear to ear, bouncing pigtails, she ran to a grandfather whose arms were extended wide in joy for he recognized this little one. He picked her up in his arms and gave her a kiss-a marvelous scene! What that grandfather and granddaughter enjoyed in a sea full of strangers was a little recognition.

Realities Old and New

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:00:00 CDT

The Rev. Dr. David Lose is academic dean and the Marbury E. Anderson Chair in Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN.

Well, I can hardly believe it, but another Easter has come and gone. What a day; truth be told, I miss it. After forty days of preparing, I wish it would have lasted just a little longer. But if I concentrate, it's not hard to recall, almost re-create, the sights and sounds of the day: the special music and the flowers, the readings and hymns which make Easter worship such a festive celebration.

But it's over. For those who had time off from work or school, it's back to the same old grind. For those who traveled to see family or friends, it's a long wait to the next holiday or vacation. And for those who were so involved in the special activities of Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, it's time to settle back into a more regular schedule.

Day 1 Podcast Extra-Hinkle Shore _ Lose

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 CDT

In this Day 1 Podcast Extra, the Rev. Dr. Mary Hinkle Shore and the Rev. Dr. David Lose of Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN., share their personal insights and experiences.

The Insecure Tomb

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:00:00 CDT

The Rev. Dr. Mary Hinkle Shore is associate dean for First Theological Degree Programs at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN.

"Go," Pilate says to the chief priests. "You have a guard of soldiers. Make the tomb as secure as you can." Security is almost everyone's concern in the last chapters of the Gospel.

- Those who arrest Jesus do so with the enhanced security of swords and clubs.

From Riches to Rags

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:00:00 CDT

The Rev. Dr. David Lose is academic dean and the Marbury E. Anderson Chair in Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN.

It's not supposed to end this way. Jesus' story, I mean. It's just not supposed to end this way. Deep down, maybe, we knew there'd be trouble. After all, Jesus had been causing trouble and making enemies his whole life. But we never expected this. The shame, the pain, the utter helplessness, even failure that Matthew unflinchingly portrays in his narration of Jesus' last days and hours.

Now, to tell you the truth, most of us are so used to this story--maybe too used to it--that we've forgotten how unpredictable, how disastrously unusual it really is. Think about it. Most of the stories we know and tell are uplifting. The characters in them get better, improve, go on to great things. This is the American way, the rags-to-riches story of the young man or woman who starts from a humble birth and through dint of hard work, frugality, sheer ingenuity, and just a little bit of luck makes it to the top. And Jesus' story starts that way, too. He's born in a manger, after all, to parents as poor as they are young; it doesn't get much more humble than that. And he's a hard worker, too, a carpenter. In time, his ingenuity and luck start kicking in, and he attracts a following, becomes known as a healer and revered teacher. And, then, several years into his surprisingly successful ministry he is welcomed into Jerusalem like some kind of conquering hero, or even a returning king. "Hosanna," the crowds shout. "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." But from there everything goes down hill quickly. Less than a week later he is neither king nor hero but criminal, outcast, loser. This isn't a rags-to-riches story after all. In fact, it's the exact opposite.

Unbind Him and Let Him Go!

Sun, 9 Mar 2008 00:00:00 CST

The Very Rev. Samuel G. Candler is Dean of the Cathedral of St. Philip in the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, GA.

Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. What a lovely family trio this is. Mary was the sister who loved to listen to Jesus. Martha was the sister who loved to serve others. Lazarus was the brother who was ill. Well, no family is consistently perfect, are we?

Each of us, from the smallest household, to the largest church, has people who like to listen, people who like to serve, and people who are sick. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. They keep showing up in the New Testament, and they keep showing up in church.

There Was a Man Born Blind

Sun, 2 Mar 2008 00:00:00 CST

The Very Rev. Samuel G. Candler is Dean of the Cathedral of St. Philip in the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, GA.

There was a man born blind.

On that point, everyone seems to have been in agreement. He had become a part of the cultural scenery, so familiar that people forgot to look at him. As a beggar he received food; but apparently he received little actual attention.