Vocation in Action

Hebrews 12.18-29             Luke 13.10-17             Psalm 103:1-8 Prayer of Invocation Father, grant that your Church, being gathered together in unity by your Holy Spirit, may show forth your power and goodness among all peoples, to the glory of your Name through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. INTRODUCTION Two high profile cases have reminded us that faith in Jesus Christ requires endurance. I’m speaking of Joshua Harris and Marty Sampson. Joshua Harris has divorced his wife and renounced his faith. Marty Sampson, a song writer for Hillsong, has said that he is "struggling with many parts of the belief system that seem so incoherent with common human morality." Hold on to that thought for a moment. This is a sober reminder that being a disciple of Jesus Christ is not a sprint. It is a walk, a long obedience in the same direction.  2.

This is an important and helpful word to all those who will be studying at university this Fall and may be wondering what it is all for. (It is also a good word to parents who help shape what their kids want out of college.) Go With God: An Open Letter to Young Christians on Their Way to College   by Stanley Hauerwas https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/10/go-with-god#print

It was an honor to deliver this sermon at Dorothy McClendon's funeral. She was 89 years old. She was preceded in death by her daughter Cherrie, and survived by Jack, her husband of 67 years, daughter Michele Kilpatrick, son-in-law Jim Kilpatrick, and grandchildren Adrianne and Jason Kilpatrick. Funeral Sermon for Dorothy McClendon Reflections on 1 Corinthians 15 “I remind you of the gospel.” This is how Paul begins an expansive discussion about the topic of resurrection—the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but also the resurrection of those who belong to Jesus Christ. “I hand over to you as of first importance what I also received…[Christ] was buried…[and] he was raised on the third day” (1 Cor 15.1, 3-4). This is the ground on which the message of the gospel stands: if there is no resurrection from the dead, then death wins (death, which Paul reminds us elsewhere [Romans 5] came into the world through sin, our rejection of God’s gift of life). Death reig

"...we know creation properly by means of wisdom, not techne ...wisdom knows the world belongs to God, that it can be understood properly only in light of that relationship, that life is found only this way, and that a love for God and for creation rightly aligned with God's purposes in the only way to life... Techne seduces us into thinking that it is something that we can control and by which we can also control our world... techne is a false god that drains life from us by weaving a lie about the world and life...[it] requires that humans master their world. There is no God to trust that with that which we cannot understand or, understanding that which we cannot control or predict. And so we are driven to eradicate mystery, and by doing so we embrace a withered portrayal of life." Jonathan Wilson, God's Good World: Reclaiming the Doctrine of Creation , pgs. 20-21

In his Modern Technology and the Human Future , Craig Gay asks why we have been so accepting of automatic machinery, and why we are not more concerned that modern technological development is trending away from ordinary embodied human existence. How has technology become the metaphysics of the modern age (95)? Gay argues that our uncritical embrace of technology as the means to progress and the good life is the result of a particular way in which we see nature, or the world. Metaphors matter. And in chapter 3, Gay traces the development of a metaphor that has become the way in which humans now conceptualize the world they live in. The metaphor is a machine. We have conceived of the world as a collection of interconnected parts and elements that function in a mechanical fashion. This metaphor has had a radical impact on the way we understand our place in the world, our calling or vocation we might say. If all of life is more or less made of a vast collection of parts and elements

In concluding Part 1 of his book, God Freedom, and Human Dignity, Highfield observes that "If we learned about the human condition only from the high-flying rhetoric of the modern self, we would imagine humanity a race of gods. Given only the descriptions of Mirandola, Descartes and Rousseau, beings from another galaxy might imagine human beings as winged creatures in graceful flight, their noble faces shining with cool pride as they survey their broad domain. Their freedom knows no limit, their dignity exceeds all bounds and their power dwarfs all competitors. Ah, but we know the human condition too well for such illusions!...Anxiety, weakness, suffering, sadness, futility and despair mark its path from start to finish" (102). There is an enormous disparity between the inflated self-understanding of the modern self and the reality of the world we have made for ourselves in the modern age, especially with all the technological capabilities at our disposal. I have worked