VBS Sunday

Welcome Statement

Good Morning Camp firelight! As you can tell, many of us are filled with a spark of Joy from the Good News of Jesus Christ this week. We just finished Vacation Bible School, and I hope you enjoyed the program the kids did! We are filled with this Joy because we were able to reflect on this joy through dance, music, crafts, science experiments, and fellowship over snacks. Getting to witness to and learn from these kids this week has been a humbling experience and I am extremely proud of them for coming and learning about Christ with us. The most profound story we read this week was about Jacob’s Ladder, probably one of the most confusing and quite frankly mesmerizing stories, and it’s the one I chose to reflect on today, to get us started on how to think about trusting in God, and also how he creates these reactions in our hearts. So Our primary reading today will be in Genesis 28:10-22

Old Testament Reading - Genesis 28:10-22

Genesis 28:10–22 ESV

Jacob left Beersheba and went toward Haran. And he came to a certain place and stayed there that night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” And he was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” So early in the morning Jacob took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called the name of that place Bethel, but the name of the city was Luz at the first. Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house. And of all that you give me I will give a full tenth to you.”

So some context, the whole reason Jacob is even here, is because he stole a blessing from Esau, he is trying to escape from the wrath of his brother for pretending to be him in front of their father Isaac who became blind at this point in his life.

As he is here, he experiences a dream, after sleeping on a rock, that he receives a promise from God, that he would give Jacob’s descendants the land promised to Abraham. That he would stay faithful to the covenants that had been established long before him. Because of everything he witnessed. He decided to name the place Bethel, and anoint the rock. And promised God he would return this place. Bethel in Hebrew simply means, House of God. It becomes interesting, as we see Jacob go along his journey of wrestling with his struggles of being a mischievous person. He doesn’t entirely learn from his lesson until later in the story. In Chapter 32 of Genesis, he begins to prepare esau, he sends off all of his posessions, his servants, sons and family, across a stream, and stays in camp by himself, and suddenly finds himself wrestling a man all night.

We quickly learn this is no mere man but God himself:

Genesis 32:28 ESV

Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.”

So he is renamed Israel. Which is interesting as it means to “He who wrestles with God” in Hebrew. Why would God allow this for Jacob in this short story? The point is, God is desiring that wrestling, he desires us to come to him, and he is willing to bless us. It’s not that he actually physically overpowered him, it is that he was blessed for his determination to fight the fight of struggle. It is the same with our faith. We need to realize something though. Jacob doesn’t come out of this fight unscathed, he actually was getting his behind kicked by God, it was the fact he kept getting up and refused to let Go, that God finally yielded to that great faith as the Sun rose. This is an early example of God’s desire to serve, a foreshadowing of Christ’s life of service in the New Testament, a show of his consistent love, mercy, and compassion, through his yielding to allow our mess to heal.

This is a reminder, that regardless of the number of years it takes, there is a sun rise that will happen in our own lives as we wrestle with scripture, and stories in the Bible, or problems in our lives in context to God. We will eventually find that holy place that allows us to live with the tension of Grace and truth that says Christ is in the midst of our pain. |

Receive the Good News Like a Child

That is what these Stories reminded me this week at VBS. That’s what these kids reminded me at VBS this week. That fierce determination we have to have to wrestle. To fight. They reminded me of the importance that we receive the good news like a child, with the joy and innocence of one: “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive[e] the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” Some think receiving the gospel like a kid means indoctrination and naivety. Absolutely not. For myself, that was me drilling my parents with questions of curiosity because of my awareness of my own lack of knowledge, but desire to know and learn. Kids have intelligent, inquisitive minds, and we have to know how to nurture and sustain those minds, and provide those spaces to allow for questions, even ones that might push at the walls of the foundations of our faith, because believe me, they strengthen our faith as we wrestle with these questions kids throw at us. My own parents, instead of just telling me “that is the way it is”, or “you shouldn’t ask that kind of question”, would answer my questions to the best of their knowledge, and when they knew they had a knowledge gap, or if it was something that was legitimately unknowable, they were willing to admit “I don’t know”. Helping kids grasp that reality early on that everyone else is learning to is important. Not to undermine the authority of parents, but to engage in healthy, organic dialogue in our Christian communities. The truth is many of us find ourselves weary and weathered as we grow older and see the pain of the world. We begin to lose the hope of news, and stop to believe in the “magic” of it. The supernatural power of Christ, that he really is this mystic power that is a present reality, not a historical past, that can provide deep meaning for ourselves and our families. I realized again this week, how important it is for myself to humbly come to God, like a child, and remember, I don’t understand it all, don’t know it all, and need to really believe in his power and significance, to see his breakthrough in the world. It’s not that I have to “behave” like a child. Although my wife might say I act like a child sometimes, but that we have that child-like joy, and child-like wonder of the great news, even into our advanced age. We have to learn how to trust God again. Our Camp Callout this week was Psalm 56:3

Psalm 56:3 NKJV

Whenever I am afraid, I will trust in You.

How many of us, Trust in God to breakthrough our moments of despair? Or even to be walking beside us in our moments of pain? Let’s reflect on a Psalm I once mentioned a while ago that was a powerful lament to help with this idea: Psalm 77:18-20

Psalm 77:18–20 LEB

The sound of your thunder was in the whirlwind; lightnings lit the world; the earth shook and quaked. Your way was through the sea, and your path through many waters. Yet your footprints were not discerned. You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.

This Lament, first is a cry out to God, but the psalmists reflects how God, despite his unseen footsteps, still is faithful. I really felt something stirring this week, a movement, a desire, a hunger, for meaning, and joy, in people’s lives. I’ve witnessed that same hunger in my own life as I’ve grown up, questioning the meaning and reality of life. As I’ve grown, I went through a time where I struggled with my own faith, and went to college and wrestled with my faith again and again, wrestling with the question of God through Science, wrestling with question of God through philosophy, and theodicy, the problem of good and evil. These problems took years of my time away, but they did help chip away at least at some of the issues I was wrestling with, eventually I found myself at a place where I felt the call and desire to start serving, thanks to those helpers around me who refused to give up on me. I find it important to thank those people today. Thank you Pastor Tom Shepherd for inviting me to lay servantry when no one else called me up to serve in the church. May you rest in peace. Thank you Cindy Boggs for inspiring me through your lay servantry courses, and giving me meaning in what it means to serve others, may you also rest in peace. Thank you to my parents who put up with my inquistive mind my entire life, and to my faithful Church family at Meadowdale who raised me, to be the person I am today, it really does take a village. Thank you all here who have supported me this past year serving for the first year as a lay minister, it has been a humbling experience, I look forward to seeing what else we can do as this ministry grows. I hope this sermon can be a reflection and a reminder, of the sparks of Joy, that we can have, when we are willing to bridge the gap between generations, and find ourselves working with eachother, looking past our differences, and realize we all desire that same salvific love from God. I Close with with a reminder I received from Annual Conference this week thanks to a guest speaker, a Bishop from another conference, Bishop Hector. He reminded us to reclaim the Good News with Great Joy! How he reminded us to reclaim this Good News, was with an ironic tension. He reminded us the Good News stands on its own feet, that regardless of anything we do, it will live on, God is eternally faithful and sovereign, the Good New is a beacon in the darkness, he is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, nothing we do can change that. We can only help this message foster and grow. We simply have to take it and share it. Let us Pray

Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father, we are reminded today of how you are our rock in our life, how you build that fire in our hearts through dreams, scripture, the wisdom brought forth through young minds in our families, and our faith communities. As we go out this week, let us proclaim this Good News that Christ is Lord, despite anything the world tells us. Let us remember, there is meaning in what we do, we can do good in this world for you and for others, as you’ve commanded us to do. Let us Love as you’ve called us to love. Let us be an example for generations of kids to come.

Amen.

Doxology / Benediction / Closing

As you go out this week, Reflect on how Church was pivotal in the growth of your own early faith life, what it did right in growing your life. What is it that we need to do again to help the next generation to grow? What is it that we need to adapt to help reach the next generation? People need to know this Good News, but the noise of the world is filtering it out daily. People are looking for churches built by integrity and action, and I believe our church is one of those churches, that can share that gift of consistent love to the world.

May you Have a Blessed Sunday, and rest of your Week! Amen!