Community Presbyterian Church of Bellefonte, KY

Community Presbyterian Church of Bellefonte, KY This is the gathering place for Community Presbyterian Church of Bellefonte, Kentucky, a member of the Transylvania Presbytery of the PCUSA.

Community Presbyterian Church of Bellefonte, KY is a church of the Transylvania Presbytery, PCUSA. Established more than fifty years ago, it continues to speak the Word of God to Bellefonte. Our worship services are simple Presbyterian, the music traditional, the sermons (usually) bearably long. We're located one mile from the intersection of Route 5 and US 23 on Bellefonte-Princess Road (Route 5).

06/21/2026

The Elephant's Tale

Last Sunday I talked a good deal about the Imperial God, the one who so humbled Abraham that he threw himself in the dust in submission. We don’t talk much about the Imperial God. I think we find it easier to talk about the loving and undemanding Jesus we were given as children. Nevertheless, it is important that we examine our relationship to The Holy in its fullness. That’s what I’m going to try to do today. Let’s start with a story told by Pete Seeger, the folk singer. It goes like this:

Four blind men are examining an elephant. One felt the side of the elephant and reported that an elephant was like a great wall, reaching up higher than he could stand. Another felt the leg of the elephant and said that an elephant was like a great tree. Another felt the trunk of the elephant and described an elephant as a great snake, and the last felt the elephant’s tail. He reported that an elephant was like a rope hanging from the sky. If you pull on it, the heavens open up with filth.

Coming to know God is like the experience of the blind men. Each man’s observations were valid, within their own experience, but each observation failed to accurately capture the essence of an elephant, and, more importantly, even if we consider all their observations together, we still don’t know the totality of what an elephant is. Recognizing this truth is the first step to a proper relationship with God and why those people who fool themselves into believing that they have captured the essence of God within their own little boxes are so very much to be pitied. Such an error has led the Southern Baptist Convention to ban women from their pulpits, a very great error. Nevertheless, even if we admit that we are unable, due to our own human frailty, to know the totality of God we can, just as the blind men did, come to know portions of God’s existence as He reveals Himself to us in our own lives. That is a blessing.

This Sunday, our texts present opportunities to examine the ways in which God intervenes in our lives to complete His purposes. As Jeremiah tells us, the intervention of God into our lives is overpowering and, inevitably, uncomfortable.

O LORD, you have enticed me,
and I was enticed;
you have overpowered me,
and you have prevailed.
I have become a laughingstock all day long;
everyone mocks me.

This sort of intervention by God in our lives, our plans, our priorities, scares all of us, including Jeremiah. I had a friend years ago, who was very wary of her church because she feared that if she became too involved with God, He would send her as a missionary to “darkest Africa”, wherever that might be. Now, I knew her mother, so I know where that came from, but it was a great stumbling block to her in her faith journey to admit that God has the ability to intervene and demand obedience of her.

Jeremiah is sometimes called the “broken-hearted prophet” because nobody would listen to him. Worse than that, God told him ahead of time that nobody would listen to him. His message was that God’s people had so far strayed from their covenant with God, that God intended to punish them through the agency of the Babylonian army. Jerusalem’s only hope was to surrender to Babylon, accept the just punishment of God and to repent. As you can imagine, this was not a best-selling book. Nobody’s happy to hear that God is not pleased with them. Besides, God’s Temple, His very house, was in Jerusalem. God would never allow Jerusalem, and His Temple, to fall to Babylon, would He? Everybody but Jeremiah was quite sure that God would protect them no matter how badly they had failed Him.

It’s odd to think about, but Jeremiah’s message to Jerusalem in the Sixth Century b.c.e. has strange echos in our own time. History shows that America has, in fact, sinned against blacks, against Native Americans, against the poor. The failure of the government to look upon the poor with compassion is a very great sin. It is not much of a stretch to imagine that God would be justified in punishing us for that. Jeremiah’s broken-hearted prophesy was just as popular in his time as such a speculation is in our time, by which I mean not much. Then and now, nobody’s happy to hear that God is not pleased with them.

Babylon did besiege Jerusalem in 588 b.c.e., just as Jeremiah had prophesied, but then, in a stunning reversal, they withdrew when they believed Egypt was sending troops to assist Jerusalem. Here’s poor old Jeremiah preaching the destruction of Jerusalem to people who don’t want to hear that and then the people he’s talking to see the enemy withdraw in response to their prayers. The people thought they understood the fullness of God, just as did our four blind men. Jeremiah had to feel a perfect idiot, but try as he might, he could not stop delivering the message.

For whenever I speak, I must cry out,
I must shout, "Violence and destruction!"
For the word of the LORD has become for me
a reproach and derision all day long.
If I say, "I will not mention him,
or speak any more in his name,"
then within me there is something like a burning fire
shut up in my bones;
I am weary with holding it in,
and I cannot.

Then, two years later, Babylon returned, took Jerusalem, and carried its people off to exile, just as Jeremiah had prophesied.
Jeremiah’s experience is a good example of how God can, for His own reasons, reach out and grab us to accomplish His purposes. But, Jeremiah was a pretty cranky old bear anyway. It’s easy to put some distance between us and Jeremiah.

Then Jesus tells us:

“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. . .”

Jesus is being pretty clear in this difficult passage that he has first call on all we do, on all we are. If we take on the name Christian, our first loyalty is to Christ, and that loyalty and obligation is even greater than the love a child owes a father or a mother. No wonder my friend who feared being sent to “darkest Africa” was wary of involving herself too closely with the work of her church!

So, how does this relate to the elephant and the four blind men? You do remember the elephant, don’t you?

Each of us finds a piece of God which we can touch. For most of us, it’s the loving, sustaining God, the one that died for our sins who makes one set of footprints in the sand when he carries us, the Jesus who will meet us in our time of need, the throne of grace from which we obtain mercy. Because we are blind, our belief is that God is like a wall, or a great tree, or a snake. It is only when we realize that there are other dimensions of God, and acknowledge that we don’t have the fullness of God in our pockets that we can come to understand the degree to which we live by God’s grace in God’s creation and the enormous debt of loyalty we owe to Him.

Our passage from Genesis today is a difficult one. It starts out with some ugly jealousy by Sarah which God seems to endorse:

The child grew, and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.”

The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you.

That’s hard to hear, as hard to hear as Jesus’ words from Matthew:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

Neither exchange sounds much like the undemanding Jesus I was taught about in Sunday School at First Pres. How are we to approach such challenging passages?

If we are willing to admit that God has power to intervene in life, we have also to admit that God has power to intervene in our personal lives, and that’s scary, church. What if He wants to send you to darkest Africa? What if you don’t even know what part of Africa might be the darkest, but you’re sure you don’t want to go there? Maybe it’s best to leave a little wiggle room between me and God?
No, church. Seek first the kingdom of God and HIS righteousness. The challenges we were experiencing with this passage spring from our mistake in referring to our own sense of righteousness rather than God’s. God has plans for His people and will see to them.

But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.”

The “son of the slave woman” was Ishmael which is translated as "God (El) has hearkened", suggesting that "a child so named was regarded as the fulfillment of a divine promise" and so it was for Ishmael is counted as the founder of the Ishmaelites. Before that fulfillment, though, there was still much heartbreak to be borne.

So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-Sheba.

When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a drink.

For Hagar and Ishmael, the situation was hopeless. They could only see the tail of the elephant not the totality thereof. The similarity to our little church strikes me. We are taking in less than we are spending and were unable to pay me this time. That’s fine. I'm not here for the paycheck, but be aware that your church struggles. It’s hard not to see us as Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness, but that is because we can’t see the whole elephant. I can’t possibly tell you what God has in the future for Community Presbyterian but I can assure you that we go nowhere without God’s guidance for the elephant is always greater than our notions about the elephant.

God may not call on us to prophesy a message as unpopular as Jeremiah’s. He does, however, call upon us to respond to His sovereignty in faith and loyalty. Go ye and do likewise, church.
AMEN

BENEDICTION
It baffles me but God sends me words to say to you by Facebook. I’m not kidding. Here’s what he told me to end with today:
McDonald’s can mess your order up 101 times and you still keep going back...One thing goes wrong at church and you quit. People just aren’t hungry enough!
I will be with you through God’s plan for Community Presbyterian.

06/14/2026

Heed the Lesson of Abraham

SERMON
I want to talk a bit about our understanding of our relationship with God. With the chaos in our streets, the cries of pain and fear from our communities of color, the anger of our police at being tarred with the sins of the few, it’s no surprise that we turn to God in prayer so that He might fix it. Our world is so broken that I can’t escape the feeling that we are on the brink of something – whether a great fall or a great rise, I can’t say – and that scares me. Then, I remember that this is not the first time the world has stood at a brink.

Our Gospel passage is sometimes called Jesus’s ordination sermon.

Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

Jesus has carefully groomed and trained his small corps and He is now sending them out into the world to disperse His message. He grants them power to cast out evil spirits and cure diseases – that is to say to address individual suffering – but then instructs them to take nothing with them, relying on the kindness of strangers that they can share the suffering with those whom they touch. They are not going out as powerful men who are to address the broken structures of the world, but as servants to those who suffer and as one with them.

What did Jesus do right that we are missing today? I think Jesus succeeded where we flounder because He focused on people – the only real things in the world. When we become alarmed at the crowds in the streets, we turn to thoughts of structural change. Jesus focused on those who suffer.

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

Make no mistake! As meek as He sounds, this is the powerful Jesus, the Imperial Jesus, speaking. He saves the world from itself by focusing His attention on the pain of those who suffer, harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. How very many in our world are like that, helpless within structures which deny them the dignity of their status as God’s own children! How easily we tinker with the things that are wrong and overlook the compassion we should feel for the suffering of God’s own children! It is there that our journey begins! We need an intentional shift in our understanding of our relationship with God and His children. Abraham met with God before his tent by the oaks of Mamre.

When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. He said, “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on – since you have come to your servant.”

Abraham, aged 99 years, ran to them. He bowed down to the ground. He addressed them as “My Lord”. He acknowledged that he might not be worthy for them to even notice. He begged to be permitted to serve them. That’s a lot of running and hastening for a 99 year old man and very different from the way we think about prayer—a petition to God for something WE want. Abraham knew he was in the presence of the divine, and he buried his face in the dust, unwilling to even look at the Lord. His every action was to find ways to please the Lord, to serve him. There was no thought of how it might benefit him, no thoughts of heaven when he died. His only desire was to serve the Lord. Abraham’s protestations aren’t the false modesty of a very rich man, or mere hospitality. They are exactly the response that we should have in the presence of God, and God’s reaction confirms it. “Do as you have said.” No mention of, “Don’t trouble yourself”. Rather, “Do as you have said.”

White Americans have been big shots on the world stage so long that we find it enormously difficult to see ourselves in a subservient position. But Abraham, rich and powerful as he was, did just that. His every word, his every action acknowledged his inferiority to these visitors. Americans celebrate the individual, and as a consequence we think of prayer in terms of getting something we want. When our daughter Kat was a little girl, she made friends with another little girl whose family did not very often go out to eat. One weekend, we took both girls to Jenny Wiley for a show and dinner. The little girl had never visited a buffet before, and was mightily impressed. We loaded up our plates and headed back to our table where she announced that we had to pray first. We said grace and, after a bit, went back for seconds. To our surprise, she insisted on praying a second time, explaining that praying over your food makes the food taste better.

The little girl understood prayer as something one did to make the food taste better. That’s the baggage we often bring to prayer. If we are not very careful, we’ll come to see prayer as something one does to make life better, to insure something we want, instead of as a time of communing with God to beg for an opportunity to serve Him. In the presence of the Almighty, Abraham buried his face in the dust. His every action was to find ways to please the Lord, to serve him. There was no thought of how it might benefit him. His only desire was to serve the Lord. We must heed the lesson of Abraham!

To serve the Lord is to bring your life into the Lord’s way. The Lord’s way is the way of compassion for the suffering of the world. This is the example of Jesus.

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

When next you pray, church, be aware of how you approach God. Is your prayer based on compassion for your brothers or do you seek for the Father to remake His creation to something you would prefer? Are you hastening to bring the best and begging to be permitted to serve Him? Jesus loves me, this I know, not just because the Bible tells me so, but because every day, every minute of the day, I can sense Him directing me, caring for me, buoying me up, giving me words for these sermons. Nobody would take that much time and trouble with somebody as broken as I am if they didn’t love me.
AMEN

BENEDICTION
Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention, So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.1

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

06/08/2026

TRUE RIGHTEOUSNESS

I learned what little I know about people from the movies shown at the Capital Theater on Saturday evenings. That was my parents’ date night and my maternal grandfather took me, my brother and our two cousins to the Capital. That is where I learned that there are three kinds of people in the world: the good guys, the bad guys and the helpless mass of humanity upon whom the bad guys prey until stopped by the good guys.

I wanted to be a good guy. That was the first problem: I didn’t know how one came to be recognized as a good guy. Granddad had to feed us before we got to the theater so we arrived midway through the first feature by which time everyone’s roles had been assigned. Sometimes, you could tell the good guy by the fancy horse he rode. Sometimes, it was a clean scarf around his neck. One good guy even shot silver bullets, an unnecessary expense to my mind.

However one became a good guy, the role meant you could do some pretty awful things, like having shoot-outs on Main Street, leaving the bad guy face down dead in the dirt, without consequence. No wonder I wanted to be a good guy! Good guys could get away with all sorts of things, without consequences, while the bad guys … got what was coming to them for being a bad guy. That was the law of the Capital Theater.

Paul foresaw this state of affairs:
For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.
Now, Paul”s words need some clarification. When he speaks of “the law” he is speaking of Torah – the book of the law given to Moses by God himself that defines how life is to be lived as one of God’s chosen people. To live life as a Jew while ignoring the Law was unthinkable. Such a one was liable to be excluded from the community so we’re not talking about what I heard on WSAZ last night – a man charged with two counts of sexual abuse on a child and one count of IN**ST – the kind of things I handled as Commonwealth’s Attorney.

Back to the Capital Theater -- I suppose I could have elected to be part of the helpless hoard of humanity represented by the decent people of the town, mostly farmers and such like. They were portrayed as inoffensive people who were trying to do the right thing, law-abiding folks in short. That did not hold any appeal for me. They seemed to me to be perpetual victims, though truthfully the bad guys seldom paid them any attention at all. No, I wanted to be a good guy, the one who would terminate badness and leave it bleeding in the dirt of Main Street outside Miss Kitty’s saloon. That’s what I wanted to be — the one who put paid to bad guys everywhere. In other words, I wanted to do just what the bad guys did, only to a different population, one in which the law approved, I fancied. As a consequence, when I grew up, I became a cop and, later, a Commonwealth’s Attorney. Is that a path to righteousness? Paul thinks not.
The promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void.

I’ve had no experience with Torah but my extensive experience with the criminal law seems to resonate in Paul’s words. What I did was to bring wrath. Is that the best way to bring peace to a culture?

I had an interesting conversation with a counselor who works with addicts. There was such a difference in how we approached the problem of addiction. My efforts were directed to punishment. If I got a verdict of many years, I felt good about that -- I had ruined the bad guy’s life and that’ll show them. My friend seeks to cure their addiction and introduce them to a more healthy and less deadly life and that’ll show them!

I knew the sort of success my way produced, and I asked her about her success rate. I was astounded. She told me her success rate runs from 60% to 70%! You could have knocked me over with a chicken feather! Go my way, and I’ll ruin the rest of your life by incarcerating you for years and guarantee your life will be miserable. Go her way, and have hope. WOW!

Paul saw the same problem with Torah that I now saw with our criminal law. The law brings wrath, Paul says. Jews who fail to honor Torah can be expelled from the community, just as I expelled bad guys from the community. That can’t be a positive move!

Now, don’t get me wrong. Any society must have laws that govern how one lives in concert with others. That’s not a problem. The problem is that we confuse being law-abiding with righteousness. Righteousness springs from faith and faith rests upon God’s gift of grace. Paul writes:
For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”) —in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

There, at last, was my epiphany. One doesn’t become a good guy by being law-abiding, however necessary that is. Neither does one become a good guy by public acclaim. It is a gift of grace from God and it has nothing to do with leaving evil bleeding out in the street.
As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me.”
And he got up and followed him. And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

At this point, my whole understanding of humanity was changed. Yes, we owe it to our brothers and sisters to be law abiding neighbors but all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and Jesus came to call not the righteous but sinners. Jesus’ task was to make the law-abiding folk see that they, too, were sinners and that’s not an easy task, nor one which can be undertaken without making people mad – mad enough to kill. A wise man once said that you must step outside your culture to appreciate how much your culture has shackled you. Jesus came to the aid of those who thought adherence to the 613 Mitzvoth in the Law was all that was necessary. He came to teach that the law brought wrath, not mercy, for it called for expulsion of those who violated the law, just as the teachings of the Capital Theater required the death of the bad guy on the street, rather than extending God’s grace to all His children.

I got a second insight as well. I was so excited to hear the counselor’s reported success rate (because, believe me—the law’s success rate is much lower) that I shared it with someone. Her response? “I very much doubt that. That just let’s them get away with it.” Justice demands suffering from the bad guys! Without suffering from the bad guys, justice is defeated. Once a bad guy, always a bad guy. Does this sound even remotely like the teachings of Jesus?

I came to understand that being inoffensive and law-abiding, necessary as it is, does not represent true righteousness, which is our response to God’s gift of grace. Jesus’ commitment to the message He brought was so powerful that it led him to the Cross. Something happened to show me the error of my ways and brought me to this church to tell it of God’s gift of grace and the way to righteousness.
How do you measure righteousness?

AMEN
BENEDICTION
If righteousness was a simple matter of feeling good about all the right things you have done then faith is null. That’s what Paul said, and he is right. True righteousness flows from God’s gift of grace, directing us in the paths He wishes us to follow. It reflects God, not you, as the source of all good.

05/24/2026

What do you think? Is “Christian” a status or a calling? Is being a Christian something you ARE or something you DO? It’s a fundamental question. The answer is bedrock to our understanding of our place in God’s world. You are a child of God. God created you and I believe He did so in furtherance of His plans for His Creation. What might be His plans for you? Bear with me while I look to the Exodus story for clues to the ancient path we must follow to answer that fundamental question.

The slaves in Egypt who would become the Israelites were a confused mob until Moses came along. They weren’t yet “Israelites” any more than you and I could have claimed to be “Christian” as babies. They had no sense of being part of something bigger and no sense of identity, rather like you and me when we were kids. After the death of many Egyptians and the mark of the blood on the door lintel that marked the homes of the people to be passed over, Moses led them out of Egypt and began the process of welding them into a people—the Israelites. In the same way, we were taken to Sunday School and welcomed into the church, marking ourselves as “Christian”.

Their story wasn’t complete though. The people were freed from the shackles of slavery but they were still a mob who didn’t recognize themselves as a people. We children in Sunday school were still an unaware mob who didn’t really recognize ourselves as “Christian”. We were just doing what our parents demanded.
The parallel is clear. We kids needed something to show us that we are children of God. The Israelites needed something to join them into a people. For us, we were taken to church to find our place within the congregation of believers. In the beginning, we mouthed the words of a Creed which was meaningless to us for we had as yet no understanding. Then, we began to gain understanding from the stories of Jesus and the Disciples recounted by our teachers.

For the Israelites, that something was the Law of God, Torah. The gift of the law which would weld them together is celebrated to this day by Jews as Shavu’ot, or Pentecost. Thereafter, they would be known, down to today, as the people who live by Torah. The Jews celebrate freedom from slavery at Passover and the gift of Torah at Pentecost. We celebrate the resurrection of Jesus at Easter as the event which frees us from slavery to sin and marks us as Christian but then we go astray for the next step is beyond human effort. It is the gift of the Holy Spirit, poured out upon the disciples.

Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

The gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost empowers us to do the tasks God has assigned us, but our sin is that we give Pentecost less attention and that is an error, for with the receipt of the Spirit, we should be activated to do the will of God.

So, what are we to DO as Christians? Listen to our passage from Acts:

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, "Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say.
`In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.' "

Wow! No question about mere status here! Being a Christian is something you DO!

`In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

“Prophesy” doesn’t mean predicting the future, remember. In the Old Testament, to prophesy means to speak a message from God.
Prophets were messengers who:
• warned people to turn away from sin,
• called Israel back to faithfulness,
• explained God’s judgment or mercy,
• encouraged hope and justice.

That’s way different from what I understood from the teachings from the pulpit as a child, which made no demands upon me to prophesy or to do much at all beyond attending services on Sunday. I really don’t mean to be critical of people now long dead. That was the understanding at the time, that churches sort of oozed good medicine, and if you sat in the church you’d soak it up, like a sink sponge. What was being oozed wasn’t entirely clear, but it had something to do with being a person other people would treat with respect—again, a status, not something you were called to DO.

You see, the problem wasn’t only that nobody was bothering to tell my brother and me what all this mysterious stuff was about. The more serious problem was that I don’t think my mom and dad knew, either. This was the 1950’s. Folks went to church because that’s what folks did, and it would do you a world of good if you’d pay attention, as my grandmother used to say. My problem was that nobody was explaining to me what I ought to pay attention to, or what good it might do me, so for the 1950’s it seemed as if “Christian” was a status. It carried little responsibility to others beyond living a life others would find “decent”, whatever that meant. Nothing about Pentecost, to my memory.

And I mourn this. Being a Christian was something we WERE, not something we DID. Taking the Gospel of Jesus Christ and removing it from the here and now to some place in the sky, outside our day to day lives, is a tragedy. I don’t want that to happen here. I want us to recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit within us, here and now.

All through the Sundays of Easter, I have shown you that the stories of the new church aren’t things that happened to people long dead in a place far away and a time turned to dust, but represent the path of all believers as they move from unschooled disciples to Apostles, ready to go about their Master’s work. That was the message last Sunday. “Go church! Be about your Master’s work.” How do we prepare ourselves for such a challenge?

The Jews see the same intimate connection between Pesach and Shavu’ot as I am urging us to see between Resurrection Sunday and Pentecost: Liberation from slavery in Egypt was not complete until the gift of the law. Liberation from sin is not complete until the gift of the Holy Spirit. If you’ll accept a little mild criticism, I think the Jews do a better job of living out that connection. Orthodox Jews “count the Omer”, each day between Pesach and Shavu’ot. An “Omer” is actually a unit of weight, but it is also a measure of the time between Pesach and Shavu’ot. They count each day, giving a blessing and saying, for instance, “Today is sixteen days, which is two weeks and two days of the Omer”, thus reminding themselves daily that their release from slavery was not complete until they received God’s law. That is vitally important.

The children of Israel, leaving the slavery of Egypt, were just a confused mass of people, following their leader, Moses. They had no identity. They had no God calling. They were just a mob, out in the desert. They rebelled, they complained, they had mutinies. They drove Moses half nuts. It was the gift of Torah, God’s law, that organized the mob into a God-led people, a people with a purpose. For that reason, Pesach and Shavu’ot have to remain connected. The one without the other is unthinkable, just as it should be for us. We start knowing nothing of the grandeur of God, or of our position in God’s plan and wind up prepared by the gift of the Holy Spirit to prophesy to the world.

But still the story is not yet complete. There was something yet to come. Joshua became alarmed that two men in the camp were prophesying, and begged Moses to make them stop. Moses replied:

“Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit on them!”

Something is yet to come. Torah has been given. A covenant between God and his people has been made. Still, something is yet to come. In the Gospel of John we read:

“Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”

This is what Moses wished for – the Spirit of the Lord within the heart of all believers. The thing yet to come is the indwelling Holy Spirit, not an alien thing out there somewhere beyond the stars but God-with-us, present within the soul of a believer. This is critical.

As a child at First Presbyterian, I saw myself in relation to Sam Curry in just the way the children of Israel saw themselves in relation to Moses. I was to sit quietly in the pew and listen to what Sam Curry said from the pulpit. He would tell me what I needed to know. I did not understand that I had any responsibility to speak the Gospel into the world.

I’m older now. I believe we are charged to go out in the day-to-day world and speak the Gospel as the Spirit grants us power to do in our lives, our approaches to our brothers and sisters, our relationship with God’s creation. Resurrection Sunday without Pentecost is as unthinkable as Pesach without Shavu’ot. The liberation of the children of Israel wasn’t complete until they received Torah and became a God-led people. Our redemption from the slavery of sin is not complete until we have received the Holy Spirit for without the Spirit, we have no power. Until then, we’re just a mob, wandering in the wilderness like the children of Israel without God’s law. Our redemption is not complete until we receive the Holy Spirit, and that is what we celebrate on Pentecost.

Church, I want you to hear this. If you don’t remember anything else I have told you during the Easter season, I want you to remember this: If you celebrate Resurrection Sunday as the day our Lord was resurrected, and Pentecost as the birthday of the church, but don’t live out the connection between the two, accepting the gift of the Holy Spirit into your own lives as the completion of Jesus’ sacrifice, you will be like the children of Israel following Moses, complaining, mutinying, wandering. If you see your role as sitting in a pew while the minister delivers speeches from the chancel, rather than accepting the Holy Spirit into your own heart, you will wander in the wilderness until you do.
AMEN

BENEDICTION
Archbishop Timothy Dolan wrote:

“Maybe the greatest threat to the Church is not heresy, not dissent, not secularism, not even moral relativism, but this sanitized, feel-good, boutique, therapeutic spirituality that makes no demands, calls for no sacrifice, asks for no conversion, entails no battle against sin, but only soothes and affirms”.

Do your Christianity, church. Receive the Holy Spirit and carry it into God’s world that it may feed God’s people.

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

Address

605 Bellefonte-Princess Road
Ashland, KY
41101

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Monday 9am - 3pm
Tuesday 9am - 3pm
Wednesday 9am - 3pm
Thursday 9am - 3pm
Friday 9am - 3pm
Sunday 10:45am - 11:45am

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+16063246484

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