ExtraChristy

[b]Always a Bright Sunshiny Day[/b] This has been a rainy week. On gloomy days, I often think about my elementary school principal, Mrs. Washko, who gave the weather report on morning announcements at King School in Akron. Every day was "A Bright Sunshiny Day"; on rainy days she explained the sunshine was, "...indoors".

On the other hand, I remember a bright sunshiny day outdoors that was dark. It was the day of my brother's funeral. I could see the sun was shining and the blue sky, but to me the day felt gray and cloudy. Spiritually, I was in a different climate than I was physically. Our inner condition is not determined by our outer environment.

We may not be able to change the weather outdoors, but we have a more important task. For our inner weather can change quicker than even the fickle moods of northwest Ohio. We can have a bright sunshiny day indoors any day we choose, even every day, like at the school of my youth.

I hope you decide to enjoy the sunshine, inside and out, today and every day.

Learning to be Happy…

…I've learned by now to be quite content whatever my circumstances. I'm just as happy with little as with much, with much as with little. I've found the recipe for being happy whether full or hungry, hands full or hands empty. Whatever I have, wherever I am, I can make it through anything in the One who makes me who I am.- Philippians 4:11b-13 (The Message)

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Mark 8:31-38

Pastor Christy talks about ways to invest your life for good returns.

The message below is available as a podcast recorded live at our worship service. Click the podcast image to listen now or right click the image and choose "Save As" to save this message in mp3 file format on your computer for playing later.

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Tough Words. What can we learn from this? I think we can learn that when we want to make a difference when we want to be truly great, there will be suffering and sacrifice. There will be suffering as those around who are in power and even your close friends, like Peter was to Jesus, might try to sabotage you, rebuke, criticize you. For most do not value greatness enough to suffer for it. Most will not pick up a cross to help others easily. This is why Christ had to come and show us how suffering can lead to salvation.

How can you keep from giving up when even your greatest friends tell you that the effort isn't worth the suffering? Accomplishing great things requires great efforts, which is why most folks don't do great things. The answer is in not looking at the suffering from the human point of view, the human assumption that we should never suffer, that any suffering is never worthwhile. Instead we should look our efforts from a divine perspective. What is our values and vision? From God's point of view, what should we be doing with our life? This is very different than the human point of view which is to seek comfort and safety. From the human point of view, suffering is to be avoided, since comfort is not just the highest but the only value. From God's perspective, there are other values than comfort, we see that in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, but especially in his suffering, his passion. A vision that is grander than a life of ease.

The human point of view causes us to strive to make money so we can buy comfort for ourselves at the cost of everything else. Jesus tells us that if we strive to make life our aim, we will lose life. You just break even if all you do with your life is live well. To spend one's life to live a life, is to lose a life…there is no benefit, no difference to society…it is as if you have never live, you've lost your life.

But if you live your life for others, for sharing the good news of Jesus Christ, even though that sometimes means carrying his cross instead of heading for your couch, then your life goes beyond the human to the divine. If you choose to live a life instead of make a living; if you choose to invest in people instead of profits, if you choose to live as if you saw the world with a God's eye view instead of just your narrow self-interest…you can spend your life for greatness.

How to do this? One answer was found by a man named, Michael Gates Gill. He was an Ivy League graduate and a successful creative director with a six figure salary. Then he got old and advertising is a young persons industry. He was fired at fifty-three after giving 12 hours a day for twenty-six years to the job that required him even missing Christmas with his family of four children to do an New Year's ad campaign for Ford. Yep, Ford called him Christmas Day and told him they wanted him “Now.” He left the still wrapped presents and the tearful children and flew to Detroit.

After an affair that brought him a fifth child and first divorce, he lost his home, family, and friends as well as his job. A few years later the consulting contacts and their payments faded away and he found he had a brain tumor. He found himself at a Starbucks. There a young black woman asked him, “Do you want a job?” He found himself saying “Yes.”

He went from a six-figure salary with an expense account in one of the top advertising firms to a ten dollar an hour barista at Starbucks. He clean bathrooms, restocked the napkins, stirrers and other supplies, sweated over the registered balancing and eventually made the drinks. He began by wondering if the job was beneath him. After a few weeks of honest work and complicated register operations, he wondered if he was up to the job!

In the midst of sweeping one day, he realized that for the first time in a long time, maybe his entire 30 years of working life, he was happy. His journal became, How Starbucks Saved My Life where he shared how much happier he was after he lost his life as a highly compensated creative director at an ad agency. He had a life outside of work. In a CNN interview, he declared he would not give up his Starbucks job if he was offered a half-million dollar salary at a advertising firm. He said the price was too high, the job cost your life. He was always working, even when he wasn't at work, he was still thinking about work. At Starbucks, when your shift was over, you left the job at the front door and had the rest of day to be with friends, family, even your own pursuits, like writing a book. He learned that there is no job worthy of giving your life.

As jobs fail at providing a lifetime of activity, as the credit contraction shuts down the frenzy of constant consumption, I hope we find our lives as we lose those lives. Instead of chasing after economic success with larger houses filled with more things that we gave our life to acquire, I hope we find that we can find our lives in relationship to others, in service to people instead of corporations, in seeking the way of the Lord instead of the ways of the market.

May you find your life after you lose it. Amen.

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Benediction

by the partners at 93rd & Broadway Starbucks
on the last day that Michael Gates Gill worked with them.

May the Lord give you
A few friends who understand you
and remain your friends
A work to do that has real value,
without which the world would be poorer
A mind unafraid to travel,
even thought the trail be rough
An understanding heart,
A sense of humor
Time for quiet, silent meditation
A feeling of the presence of God
The patience to wait
for the coming of these things,
With the wisdom to recognize them
when they come.

— from How Starbucks Saved My Life

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[b]Alone in a Crowd[/b] Did you know you can be in a bowling league... but bowl alone? You come when you can, bowl your frames and record your score, no social interaction necessary! Bowling Alone is a book by Robert D. Putnam. There is a related web site that talks about the benefit of being together instead of alone, (Better Together is also the title of Putnam's follow up book). One benefit of being in even one group is to cut your odds of dying in the next year by half!

Worship services can be a collection of folks doing private individual devotions who happen to be in the same place and time. (Silent prayer, listening to messages and music, even watching TV) Individual Bibles, printed guides, and hymnbooks contribute to the folks being alone in a crowd.

Communal activities, a unison prayer read aloud, singing songs, passing the peace, open source sermons, hugs and hand holding bring people together. Some community worship efforts are unplanned, such tag team child care and once when a team assembled to get a flaming window decoration out of a church.

I hope you bowl with others.

More than a handshake…

Jesus got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples' feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”

Jesus replied, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”

“No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.”

Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”

“Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!” - John 13:3-9 (NIV)

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Genesis 9:8-17

Pastor Christy talks about rainbows of promise in the storms of life.

The message below is available as a podcast recorded live at our worship service. Click the podcast image to listen now or right click the image and choose "Save As" to save this message in mp3 file format on your computer for playing later.

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An appropriate selection for the beginning of Lent, when we remember both our mortality in the death of Jesus on Good Friday, and our immortality redeemed by the risen Christ. Lent can be seen as the gathering of the storm of death and before the rainbow of new life on Easter on the other side of death.

A pastor I know wished Christians in the audience a “Happy Lent”! I whispered to him later that if he has a “happy” Lent…he is not doing it right. What do you think? Can one enjoy Lent? Have you waited for a storm? Maybe watching it roll in from the horizon or as a crawl on the bottom of the television screen. I remember a California couple being glued to the television as a tornado came through Louisville, Ky. For the mid-westerners, the tornado warning had meant we just moved the party to the basement, but to them it was a fearsome thing, they could think of nothing but updates on television. We had been through tornados and knew we have survived them, and will survive this one. We happily continued the church dinner. Our West Coast friends hadn't seen the other side of a tornado warning. They didn't even know what a thunderstorm was. They had never seen the rainbow the other side of a storm. Without the memory of the rainbow after the storm, the storm a threat, not a promise.

Last Friday morning, my cell phone buzzed four times. All the calls were from one person, me. Actually they were texts that I had sent various times to remind me of a task or a question to ask Friday morning. A high tech string around the finger to jog my memory about what I'm supposed to be doing when.

Today's scripture reading talks about God needing a memory jolt. A God-sized one, a rainbow, God's bow in the clouds. Does God need a memory device? Do we have a forgetful God? I talked to the children today about a memory device, a wedding ring. Just like the rainbow, it is a sign, a reminder of something never to be forgotten. It is more than a historical record, it reaches from that event in the past to present action. Because this happened in the past, my present world is changed. It is not for the danger of forgetting a historical fact but to celebrate a living relationship. Just as a wedding ring is not remind one of a wedding, but to serve as a anchor for a marriage relationship. When a married person hold up his or her hand it isn't to remind them of a wedding event, but to witness to the present relationship that the ring memorializes.

In the Secret Life of Bees, Elizabeth, a little girl, learns from Hira the meaning of the memory stick. A device that recalls the history of the generations before with each knot and nick. It is not a stick recording dead details of dusty history but way for those alive now to become part of the tribe, to be in relationship with their people, their ancestors. The stick is a way into the living faith of dead people.

The rainbow is for us not remember the ending of the flood, but the to witness to the continuing relationship with God who is not the destroyer. No matter how bad the storm, it isn't the end of the world. The rainbow still shines and it arches across all of creation.

It is a sign of the covenant between God and all the living creatures, that no matter how bad the storm…God is not the destroyer. The rainbow is as much for the animals as it is for us humans. Every living creature of all flesh are included in God's promise. The God of creation is concerned not just humans but with all animals. This should give us pause when our actions threaten God's creatures to the point of extinction, God did not save creation for us alone, the rainbow is for animals as well. We still travel in the ark together in God's care, today.

God's rainbow tells us that the storm will pass. God's rainbow tell us that destruction is the way of the world. There will be still be storms, but they will end. They will not be the end of us. Where are the rainbows after life's storms?

After the storm of financial world, folks might see that accumulating things isn't the sure way to happiness. We might have to invest in relationships rather than things. A rainbow might be a return to visiting instead of shopping, to valuing the long term sustainability of creation instead of a throwaway world. Perhaps the growing inequality between rich and the poor will be addressed. Perhaps we will take care of one another instead of trying to build our own solitary empires. Already, people are trending away from spending the future toward saving for the future. We might be on our way to a simpler way of living and thus allow others to simply live.

After the storm of being hitting bottom, of losing everything, a rainbow might appear of soberity and living clean. One that would not appear without the storm.

The mainline church is facing a storm. We might move out into a rainbow of a missional church where we seek not to preserve our era, but promote God's gospel. One of the things I see here is the move from fund raising dinners every quarter with me and my friends…to a missional free community dinner for the poor, our community and members together.

I continue to look for the rainbow in Color Our Rainbow Academy. I know the storms have come, but I have faith that there is a rainbow of hope and promise on the other side in our story together.

Finally, take time from looking for rainbows of God's care to thinking about how you are a rainbow. Do people see the storm or the rainbow in you? Do you shine the message that destruction isn't the last word? Do you remind people of the promises and relationships they have made that make them the persons they are today?

Maybe I was wrong, maybe even Lent is happy if we can remember that the rainbow of Easter is on the other side of the storm.

Amen.

Advanced permission is given for non-profit, for-prophet use of the above at no charge as long as it is reproduced unedited with notices and copyright intact. Written copies are provided after they are preached as a courtesy for the personal, private, appreciative use of the congregation of Goodyear Heights Presbyterian Church, their families and friends to support the ministry of Goodyear Heights Presbyterian Church and its pastor the Rev. J. Christy Ramsey. Join us Sundays! Join us Sundays! 9 AM Worship or 11 AM Song & Service. Sunday School for all ages is at 10 AM with a special Pastor's Class at 8:15 AM.

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