It
only takes one lunch to find out what is going on with a friend. One lunch,
dinner, or just hanging out with them will help you understand what is going on
in the world of others. I have a friend who just lost his mom to cancer. I
found out this week that a pastor who is highly loved and highly revered has
ALS. Also this week we watch as Webster Gardens mourns with their pastor at his
loss. (This may seem like deja vu for you.) I just heard a story of lady who
lost her dad while he was out riding his bike, which he had been doing to get
healthy and take care of himself. We don’t have to look hard to see that this
is a broken world, and every morning we wake up and realize we are living in
it. Yet, so often we pretend like it doesn’t have brokenness. I guess we think
it is easier on people if they don’t have to hear about our brokenness, so we
smile and pretend like our lives are going great. Sometimes we try to not to
hear about the brokenness of others because it is just easier that way.
No
matter how long we try to ignore it, the reality is that this is a broken
world. Every household is facing that brokenness in one way or another. They
could be facing a sin they personally struggle with, the death of someone they
know, illness, or the sin of others to them. A lot of my call as Pastor is to
listen to that brokenness, but it is also my job to prepare others to listen to
it. God calls all of us to listen to the brokenness of others and seek out
those opportunities to share the healing love of Jesus with them.
The
final two Mt. Calvary outcomes collide together. The first one is living in
this broken world, but the second one is connecting Sunday morning with the
rest of our life. In worship we take time to give that brokenness to Jesus and
let him heal it, but do we do that on a daily basis? I can’t be everywhere
pronouncing absolution on you. That would be cool if I could. Imagine, you are
on the street corner thinking about the pain or the sin of your friend, and
miraculously I appear sharing Jesus’ forgiveness for those sins and His healing
for our pains. If that was my call I would never get a break, not just from all
of you, but from telling it to myself. But isn’t that what we need? We
encounter brokenness so often and we need to hear from God’s word that His
forgiveness can heal all of it. The
challenge now is how do we connect what happens in worship on Sunday with the
rest of our lives? How do I wake up hearing the forgiveness that Jesus gives on
Sunday morning, but hear it on Monday or Wednesday? It doesn’t take long before
we understand why these are outcomes we want to see at Mt. Calvary, but then how
do we carry them out? This weekend we
talk about that.
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