Tomorrow's Offering

Tomorrow's sermon is still an attempt to dissect Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Preaching through the Sermon on the Mount is challenging for a lot of reasons. It's like preaching on gluttony after having to buy a bigger belt.

Tomorrow we will be focusing on Matthew 7:13-23: the narrow gate, good trees bear good fruit, don' t think you're good with God just because you say "Lord, Lord."

I can't read this text without hearing the voice of a Jamaican/Bronx preacher who preached this text at a funeral I attended. His sermon was so powerful that Jesus' words now echo in my mind with a Jamaican accent (this Jamaican Jesus is no-nonsense, let me tell you!). So I'm opening the sermon with the story of hearing him preach.

That means I'll have to try to do the accent. Accents are fun when they work; painful when they fail. We'll just have to see how this goes!

The Prayers of the Church for Grandview
July 22, 2007

God of wide grace and the narrow gate, who flooded the world with life through a small crack in a mountainside where your son was buried and left for dead; accept our feeble attempts to put words together in ways that honor you. You know our hearts. You know whether we are praying for your ends or ours. You know whether we are singing, listening, gathering, offering, and communing out of a desire to be faithful to you; or whether we’re just play acting.

Some days we are able to offer you ourselves out of the overflow of our joy. Some days we do so only because we believe we’re supposed to. Some days we can’t muster the praise at all. On those days, surrounded by people at every stage of willingness, we rely on each other and on you.

Thank you for calling together a group of people who have your name upon their lips. Thank you for forming your people Israel and then for grafting all nations into that most blessed branch. Thank you for bringing your people to full flower in the life of your Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus.

Having done all of this for us, having made us and kept us going, we desire to respond to your grace with selfless devotion to you and your causes. Thank you for Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It’s a hard sermon for us. When we see what selfless devotion really looks like, we aren’t sure we like it. And so now we ask for the grace to take you at your Word.

As always we hold before you those who are on our prayer list this morning. For healing, strength, peace, protection, and company we pray. And not only for the sick, the weak, the dying, those in harm’s way, and the lonely do we pray. We pray also for those of us you have called to minister in these circumstances. May we be worthy ambassadors of your kingdom.

Lord, we have all come to this room from different places, harboring different fears and sins, triumphs and joys. Together in the silence we share with you from the depths of our being:

silence

Remember your missionaries. Remember the Coleys, Freelands, Headens, McDades, Nyadors, Veals, and the Bruens and the Jacksons as they prepare to go into the field. Give them your blessing. Give them joy as they serve you on the razor’s edge.

We pray together as you have taught us: