In Season and Out

A. deSilva David

Description

Grow in the Scriptures throughout the church year with David deSilva as your mentor.Beginning with Advent and moving through the church year, David deSilva brings his years of experience as a biblical scholar to the church in the form of sermons delivered to his home congregation throughout the church year, now adapted into a thoughtful and inspiring collection of reflections. These reflections, which draw on readings from the Revised Common Lectionary, will inform and inspire your understanding of Scripture, written with Dr. deSilva's characteristic warmth and wisdom.In Season and Out makes for excellent devotional reading that will feed saints both in front of and behind the pulpit.

Sujets

• Sermons
• Philosophie et théologie
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: Lexham Press
• Date de parution: 18 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781683592921
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

In Season and Out
SERMONS FOR THE CHRISTIAN YEAR
DAVID A. DE SILVA
In Season and Out: Sermons for the Christian Year
Copyright 2019 David A. deSilva
Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225
LexhamPress.com
All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [e-mail] .
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are the author’s own translation.
Scripture quotations marked ( CEB ) are from the Common English Bible © 2011 Common English Bible. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Scripture quotations marked ( ESV ) are from ESV ® Bible ( The Holy Bible, English Standard Version ® ), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked ( NRSV ) are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Print ISBN 9781683592914
Digital ISBN 9781683592921
Lexham Editorial Team: Elliot Ritzema, Abigail Stocker, Danielle Thevenaz
Cover Design: Kristen Cork
To the Rev. Jeffrey M. Halenza,
a most gifted preacher and dear colleague in ministry
Contents
Preface
Part One: Sermons for Liturgical Seasons
Chapter 1
“Our Wake-Up Call” (Advent)
Chapter 2
“A Messiah Nobody Expected” (Advent)
Chapter 3
“A Mother for God’s Son” (Advent)
Chapter 4
“Prepare Him Room” (Christmas)
Chapter 5
“Living into Baptism” (Baptism of Our Lord)
Chapter 6
“A Necessary Spoiler” (Transfiguration)
Chapter 7
“The Divine Source Code” (Lent)
Chapter 8
“Letting in the Light” (Lent)
Chapter 9
“How Far Is Enough?” (Palm Sunday)
Chapter 10
“A New Commandment” (Maundy Thursday)
Chapter 11
“Living Like You’ll Live Forever” (Easter)
Chapter 12
“Our Great High Priest” (Ascension)
Chapter 13
“Should We Let Him In?” (Pentecost)
Chapter 14
“New Spirit, New Heart” (Pentecost)
Chapter 15
“An Unfailing Endowment” (Pentecost)
Chapter 16
“A New Pentecost” (Pentecost)
Chapter 17
“The Arithmetic of God” (Trinity Sunday)
Chapter 18
“A Surprisingly Satisfying Spread” (World Communion Sunday)
Chapter 19
“Who’s Watching You Run?” (All Saints)
Chapter 20
“Just Remember Who’s Boss” (Christ the King)
Part Two: Sermons for Ordinary Time
Chapter 21
“God’s Bottom-Line Performance Metrics”
Chapter 22
“Jesus Christ, Investment Planner”
Chapter 23
“From Consumers to Producers”
Chapter 24
“Faith Is Just the Beginning”
Chapter 25
“The Least Valued, the Most Honored”
Chapter 26
“The Lord’s Prayer, the Disciples’ Pledge”
Chapter 27
“Knowing Christ”
Chapter 28
“Growing More Like Christ”
Chapter 29
“Going to Serve Christ”
Appendix: Correspondences with the Revised Common Lectionary
Scripture Index
Preface
S ermons arise within particular contexts and are composed to speak to those contexts. Just as the Scriptures—which themselves arose within and were written to give guidance and direction to people in particular contexts—can continue to speak to people beyond those original times and places, so it may be hoped that sermons grounded in those Scriptures can speak to people beyond the occasion for which they were originally composed. But also like the Scriptures, it is important to know something about the contexts in which the sermons arose.
I had the privilege to serve as interim pastor at Port Charlotte United Methodist Church in Port Charlotte, Florida, from October 2017 through June 2018, and these sermons largely derive from that period. It is a church accustomed to observing the liturgical seasons of the year (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, etc.) and to liturgical worship, chiefly as found in The United Methodist Hymnal and The United Methodist Book of Worship but with many clear and obvious connections to the liturgies of the Anglican tradition and beyond. While I am extensively familiar with the Revised Common Lectionary, I look to it more for suggestions and ideas than rules. As a result, a number of these sermons are based cleanly on the lectionary texts for a given Sunday; others may join two lectionary texts from different Sundays in order to better facilitate (in my opinion) the development of a particular topic; and still others show a looser connection with lectionary texts but may still be of value to preachers who follow the lectionary more closely than I did. I have included a table of these correspondences as an appendix to facilitate the use of this collection by lectionary preachers.
Some years ago, the church adopted as its mission statement, “Know Christ; grow more like Christ; go to serve Christ.” There are frequent echoes of the church’s mission statement in the sermons that follow, and the final three sermons in this collection take the three elements of that mission statement one by one. While I have edited the sermons to remove references to particular individuals in the congregation (they were always praiseworthy references, not calling people out!) and other indications of context that might be unduly distancing for the reader, I have not tried to disguise the fact that these are, in fact, sermons that were composed for oral delivery to a gathered congregation in the context of our services of worship. Scripture translations throughout are my own unless otherwise noted.
I have had the privilege of serving as music director under several pastors who were gifted preachers and liturgists, but the style and voice of one in particular has always stood out in my memory as a model to emulate—the Rev. Jeffrey M. Halenza, pastor of Christ Our Hope Lutheran Church since its founding in 1976, with whom I worked from 1990–1995. It is to him, in honor of his ministry and with deep appreciation for his pastoral character and gifts, that I dedicate this collection.
PART ONE
Sermons for Liturgical Seasons
1
“Our Wake-Up Call” (Advent)
Isaiah 64:1–9; Mark 13:24–37
T oday marks the beginning of another season of Advent, that period of watchfulness, of renewed waiting, that begins the church year. This Sunday’s readings remind us that the season of Advent is not just about, nor even chiefly about, getting ready for Christmas. Indeed, I’ve long felt that it was rather artificial, Advent after Advent, to act as if we were looking “forward” to Christ’s first coming in humility as a baby born in Bethlehem. Putting ourselves in the position of those who, more than two thousand years ago, were anticipating the coming of a Messiah and acting as if we were yearning for the baby yet to be born has long seemed to me to be a kind of playacting, of holy make-believe.
The readings appointed for this Sunday, starting off this Advent, do remind us of that for which we are indeed still waiting, that for which we need very much to get ready—Christ’s coming again in glory.
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence. (Isa 64:1 NRSV )
Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory. (Mark 13:26 NRSV )
What I say to you, I say to all: Keep watching! (Mark 13:37)
If we find that Christmas is upon us this year and we’re not altogether ready for it, it won’t be the end of the world. But if Christ’s coming again finds us unprepared, living as people who haven’t been looking for it—well, that’s another story, isn’t it? Advent is our wake-up call to what is coming, to who is coming, rousing us to shake off our sleep and restore our souls to vigilance. And we cannot afford to keep hitting the snooze button on this alarm.
Preparations for Christmas tend to overwhelm Advent, to bury beneath an avalanche of gift buying, travel planning, cantata preparing, menu mapping, and home decorating what Advent, as a gift of the liturgical year, seeks to give us—a chance to examine ourselves and to realign our lives, both as individual disciples and as a church family, so that we will move this year toward greater readiness to meet our Lord at his coming in glory to judge the living and the dead. So let’s pause together and unwrap these two texts, and see if, perhaps, they might help us to receive this gift of Advent and make the best use possible of it, rather than setting it aside in favor of our Christmas preparations.
The passage from Isaiah 64 really begins in the previous chapter. The prophet tells once again the familiar story of Israel. God showed them great favor, leading them out of Egypt and into the land of promise. Rather than keep faith with God by living as he commanded in his covenant, they rebelled against God and God’s law, so that God brought upon them the punishments that God had promised—destruction and exile. And now things are simply not the way they were meant to be. God’s chosen people are not walking in God’s ways and relishing God’s presence; Israel is not experiencing the promises that had been extended to it. It’s all just wrong. “How can God stand it?” Isaiah asks. How can he not “tear open the heavens and come down” and set everything right, the way it ought to be?
We might ask the same questions—perhaps not on our own behalf (though we have no doubt had our moments) but on behalf of the many who have suffered significantly due to the evil or callousness of others. And we can be sure that the blood of the innocent cries out with these words before the throne of God day and night—“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”—the blood of a young family killed during a house robbery; the blood of countless children dead or maimed by the violence of mercenaries in Africa or land mines in abandoned war zones; the blood of a young woman raped and killed; the blood of generations who died as slaves; the blood of thousands who disappeared as a