Pause

P.R.A.Y.

Pause

Mark 1:34-35

Good morning and welcome to worship today. I have to admit, I was hesitant to come back after I saw Conner’s message, you may want him preaching here every week instead of me. He and Schaefer did a great job! I am so proud to have both of them as a part of the ministry of our Church. One here every week working with our students and the other on mission in Mexico. We are so fortunate to have the talented people we have here at First Methodist Brownwood.

In July, you will have the opportunity to hear from Alex and Priscilla as they bring the message during my trip overseas, and the final week of July, you will hear from Brittney, our Children’s Ministry Director as she shares her first formal message ever. She has felt a call to ministry and is working on what that means. You will get to be a part of that very beginning. Once again, I am so proud to be a part of the ministry of this amazing church!

Today, I am beginning a series on prayer, that we need to Pause in our lives to commune and communicate with God, that we need to rejoice and Reflect on God, that we need to Ask of God, and we need to Yield to God. You will find a 30 day prayer devotional in the lobby, and this devotional and sermon series are meant to coincide with our 30 days of prayer as we as a church consider our denominational affiliation. I am not going to get into this topic today, but I encourage you to go to the Facebook page or check your email for the initial information about our time of discernment. As you may know, our Leadership Team voted in May to begin this time as we inquire about the options of disaffiliation from the United Methodist Church and the possible affiliation with another Wesleyan denomination. In the weeks ahead, we will have churchwide informational meetings to share information on the topic and to give you the opportunity to ask questions.

But today, we are going to pause, we are going to talk about prayer, and we will pray.

Turn with me to Mark 1:34-35

And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.

And now, would you pray with me?

<Prayer>

Who remembers recording off the radio? For those born after 1980, it goes something like this.

Saturday night, you were ready. You had your cassette deck FM RADIO ready to go. You had bought a 3 pack of Memorex – Your remember “Is it live, or is it Memorex?”

You know you need more than 1 if you want to record the entire list of the Top 40 with Casey Kasem…

You hear Casey’s famous voice and you are ready. As soon as you hear Casey say, “And now, On with the countdown, Coming in at 40th place for the week, Richard Marx with Endless Summer Nights.”

At that moment you hit play and record simultaneously, and the reels start rolling and you are recording. Then as the song comes to an end, what do you do? You don’t want all the commercials and talking on your recording, so what do you do? You don’t hit [STOP]… that would cause a break in the recording… so you wait for the music to come to an end and you hit… [PAUSE].

I know, all the Millennials and Gen Z have no idea what I’m talking about but some of you do. Pause was a very important button on the tape deck. It stopped everything, but at the same time the cassette was poised to play or record.

I guess a more modern version of pause is when we want to pause the TV show we are watching so we can run to the kitchen or the bathroom, but the effect is the same. Pause gives you a chance to step away from what is playing and take a break. Ladies and gentlemen, we live in a time where we need to hit pause.

The constant barrage of news about gun violence.

The constant coverage of the war in Ukraine.

If it isn’t stories about fires, it’s stories about floods.

Crisis at the boarder

Crisis in the home

Crisis in our schools.

Crisis at the pumps

Crisis in the denomination.

Grief, pain, sorrow, heartache, anxiety, worry.

We are full up to here… it’s time to pause.

Mathematician, theologian, and scholar Blaise Pascal once said,

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” —Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)

Maybe that’s an oversimplification, I’m not sure, but long before Pascal, Jesus gave us the example to stop, to pause, to go to a quiet place and pray. Over and over, we see in Scripture where Jesus went to be alone, or to take the Disciples with him to be away from the crowds. After his Baptism, when he heard about John the Baptizer’s Death, after he fed the 5000, in the Garden of Gethsemane and many more.

In the passage we read a moment ago, Jesus had been busy. He had been healing and visiting, and casting out demons. He had been surrounded by people constantly… I’m sure there was more to be done, but Jesus hit the pause button. He went away for a bit, he recharged, he spent time with the Father.

When Jesus has just done something miraculous, or when he was preparing to make a difficult decision, what did he do? He hit the pause button. He stopped to be alone with God.

He knew how to sit quietly in a room. He knew the importance of being alone with the Father.

He knew the importance of taking a break. You know a reason Jesus is my hero… beside the fact that he died for my sins and rose again?

Jesus changed the world… and he took naps. Amen, there is something godly about taking naps.

So often, we think we are so important that we don’t need a break. We don’t need to stop, to pause.

Let me tell you about a friend. I’ll call him Tom, but that really isn’t his name.

Tom, has been a great pastor. He was there for his people all the time. He preached every Sunday. When his wife said, “let’s take a vacation.” He said, “Not right now, ‘this or that’ is going on at the church. We’ll go when we get through this season.” Then they entered another season. He almost bragged about the fact that he hasn’t taken any time off since before COVID. You know what is happening now? He has to take a break. His health is failing. Cancer, heart disease, and other ailments are a real threat to his life… all because he was too important to take a break.

I’m not saying he didn’t pause in his day to pray, or to rest, But God has given us a rhythm that includes time away from the mundane. It includes daily and weekly times of pausing. If you really want to look at the Jewish rhythm of life, it included times of pilgrimage annually to different parts of the country. They may not have called it a vacation back then, but it was a break from the ordinary.

You and I… we need the same. We need to take times each year… each month… each week… each day to pause.

We have some big decisions in front of us. In some ways, the decisions ahead of us have been imposed by outside forces. I would rather things stay the way they are. I would rather not have to talk about affiliation and disaffiliation. I would rather my colleagues in ministry not accuse “the others” of talking bad about them and lying when they themselves are talking bad about “the others” and telling half truths.

But, as much as we would love to drive into the valley that is Brownwood and Early and ignore the world around us, we can’t do that. To ignore the change going on around us and avoid the discussion would be negligent… so, here we are. We will spend the better part of the summer discussing and considering the future of this church we love.

And, just as Jesus prepared to teach the masses and heal the sick and feed the thousands by pausing to pray, we need to do the same. I need you to take time each day to pause and to pray.

Not to pray about the gays… not to pray about fundamentalists… not to pray about anyone that you don’t agree with, but instead,

I need you to pray to God for guidance.

I need you to pray to God for a peace that surpasses understanding.

I need you to pray to God for an understanding of those that you disagree with.

We need to be praying for one another in this community as the other Methodist Churches go through the same thing we are going through.

So, here is what I want you to do.

Before you come up here for Communion today, I want you to take that pen or pencil in the pew in front of you and I want you to take your bulletin… Or on the prayer devotional if you already grabbed one.

And I want you to write down when you will pause this week, hopefully daily… but I want you to write down a time when you will pause from the craziness of the world around us, to pray for your church, to pray for the future of your church. This isn’t a 30 second pause while you are waiting for the coffee to brew… This is a time of intentional prayer, 10, 15, maybe 30 minutes or more, where you are praying for God’s guidance, peace, and unity. The devotional will be a guide, but my hope is that your prayers will grow much beyond what I have written for you. We need prayer, and we need to pray.

Now, won’t you pray with me.