Sermon - No Longer Strangers, No Longer Servants

[shayan]

Especially dedicated to disjecta, cottonmouth_sg, drewadrew and vengerov. I really love you guys!

PREFACEI was away for work in Bangkok the past week. Clarence asked me last Sunday to take over preaching this week as he had to be away in London this weekend. So I grabbed my Bible and some material I wanted to review and my work gear and boarded the plane. And it was both a good week

Comments

[anonymous]

Thanks for the beautifully crafted sermon.

on a certain level it spoke to me and has affirmed everything that i know about God and providence and that gentle, subtle finger He's lightly touching the top of my head with. but now i'm at a place where the word "God" is such dirty, dirty name; where i'm covered with callouses to ward of the Word and the Message; and where every other sermon is just a beautiful sound that rolls off someone else's tongue. The message is now so impersonal, it's distant, and as much as i can intellectually connect with it, it's a wonderful and bleak fairytale happening to the group of guys at the other corner.

I hear your comment about parents who love their children, and all I can picture in my head is this man who would take his child and fry her in the microwave oven. And while my own existence makes sense to me, I can't understand anymore the logic of God as a parent, as my parent. I want to say that it isn't some teenage disillusionment coming back to haunt me, but less and less I find pertinence for a father who whispers so impotently. But I'm not sure that one who roars will be any better than the one who has put us in this big, big microwave oven. Doesn't it seem like everyone's slowly roasting, their ears blistered, and going blind... but here I am, the apple of God's eye - my life is twirling on marvelously, and I'm here going - why me? It's not that I don't think I'm worthy - it's that I think everyone is, and that it's ridiculous for me to keep clutching at some message that has failed to register sense with my current world view. I've stopped resonating with the word, and really, I feel that sometimes I just listen as some weird-ass insurance policy. Ah well.

God is as real to me as anything I can hold with my hand, but His goodness is so indiscernible over the clamour: the chanting and moaning of "you're altogether worthy..." - like we actually believe that this structure, this image of God that we've put together is adequate, sufficient, potent, enough to capture the entirety and cruelty of a God that is as magnificent as he is cruelly good.

But in my position as the apple of God's eyes, I feel now that I've lost my voice, my ability to stand aside and say, hey God, what about me? what about these other people who stand here? it's strange that as I now type this, it's increasingly apparent that I fear most that acceptance into the fold of the Church which will mean the death of this subaltern voice within me, that I'll become one with the masses that have birthed the Shirley Phelps.

Good god help me. Or help me even if you're not all that good. I am the apple. I am the apple. I am the walrus.