{"id":1453,"date":"2024-07-07T07:04:50","date_gmt":"2024-07-07T11:04:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/?p=1453"},"modified":"2024-07-07T18:32:53","modified_gmt":"2024-07-07T22:32:53","slug":"falling-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/2024\/07\/07\/falling-forward\/","title":{"rendered":"Falling Forward"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ, Locust Grove, PA<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"blob:https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/ec24c772-83ca-4c58-b30c-fbd375429b38\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor \u00a92024<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Seventh Sunday After Pentecost\/B \u2022 July 7, 2024<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"http:\/\/bible.oremus.org\/?ql=587349935\">Mark 6:1-13<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Jacquelyn and I like to travel to Spain. One of the benefits of her being a flight attendant is that we can fly inexpensively, so once a year we pick out a new place and pre-see it. What I mean is, Jacquelyn watches travel videos about the place, I look at suggested things to see. We get a sense of what it\u2019s like to walk around before we ever set foot in the place. I mention all this because we\u2019ve been reading through the first chapters of Mark\u2019s Gospel, and that\u2019s what he\u2019s doing: giving us a tour, a preview, of what it looks like to walk with Jesus. So far, we\u2019ve been to Capernaum, which is a bit like going from York to Harrisburg, we\u2019ve been across Lake Galilee to an area that\u2019s mostly Gentile and back again. We\u2019ve seen him attract crowds, heal people in amazing ways, we\u2019ve been amazed as he stilled a storm, so amazed we had to ask, with his friends, \u201cWho is this?\u201d Now he\u2019s come home; now he\u2019s back in Nazareth, where everyone knows him and his family lives. What can we learn about our life following him from this moment?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I wonder what it\u2019s like for him to go home. Is he tired after his trip? Your mother is always glad to see you, so there\u2019s that. It turns out he has a big family: four brothers, some sisters. Are some of them married with little kids running around? Moms always have some special thing they make for returning sons; my mother\u2019s was coconut cream pie. The story says on the sabbath, he gets up and preaches at the synagogue. That was hard, I\u2019m sure. I\u2019ll let you in on a little preacher secret: it\u2019s a lot easier to preach to a crowd of strangers than a little group who know you. I remember my first sermon at my home church. I was just 18 and they all knew me, I\u2019d been leading the youth group and speaking in worship for years. They were proud to have one of their own going into the ministry. Everyone was very nice afterward but I heard someone say to my mother, \u201cYou must be so proud of Jim\u201d, to which my mother replied more or less, \u201cWell yes but you know it\u2019s hard to listen to someone preach when you remember changing his diapers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So Jesus preaches in the synagogue; this is actually the last time in Mark we hear about him in a synagogue. It\u2019s not clear what sort of reaction he gets. \u201cWhere did this man get all this?\u201d Commentaries are divided on whether we should read this as praise or sarcasm. I think the latter and I think that because of what follows. Remember where we\u2019ve been with Jesus: to the neighborhood, where he healed a man with a withered hand, though a storm he stilled, across the lake to Gersa, where he exorcised demons, to Capernaum where a woman was healed by just touching his clothes, and where he raised a little girl who had been thought dead. One amazing moment after another, but here at home, it says simply, \u201cHe could do no deed of power there\u2026\u201d Jesus is amazing until he gets home, where he fails. Right there, in front of the home town crowd, in front of all those family members, all those people he grew up with: nothing, fails, can\u2019t do anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I know what that feels like. I worked in a growing church during seminary and when I graduated, I went out to a little Congregational church in Seattle that said they wanted to grow. There were about 25 of us most Sundays, a group that had split off from a large church downtown and bought a small building in the northern suburbs. I knew what to do; I\u2019d read all the books on how to grow a church, I had the technique down. It took me a year but I convinced the church we should go out and call on people in the neighborhood. Now our neighborhood was a strange mix of everyone from single moms to retired folks to up-and-coming workers. I was sure this would work. It took hours and hours of planning, we printed up a really nice brochure, rehearsed what to say and finally off we all went one day. Our little group made about a hundred visits. I had calculated that we should expect to get a ten percent return, so figuring some of the visits would produce whole families, we got ready for 20 or 30 new people. We made sure there was extra food for coffee hour and waited. Nothing happened. No one came: not one visitor showed up on Sunday. The only immediate result was that some woman called me during the week and asked if we could help take care of her mother. It was a total failure. I was depressed for months.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus fails; we all fail. Are we failing as a church? Are we failing as churches? Last year, about 4,500 Protestant churches closed in the US. I could go on and cite statistics about church attendance and other measures, but that would just be even more depressing. What can we take from Jesus\u2019 failure? What does he do? What Jesus does is keep teaching. \u201cHe was amazed at their unbelief. Then he went about the villages teaching.\u201d The other thing he does is send out the twelve in pairs. He gives them authority, he gives them directions. I\u2019ll say more about that next week but for now, notice that what Jesus does about failure is to expand his ministry by sending out six pairs of healers. Notice when he sends them. It\u2019s not after a mighty work; it\u2019s when he fails. Jesus fails but he fails forward because of his faith in God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That doesn\u2019t look like failure, does it? Maybe the problem is our definition of success and failure. In Seattle, our definition of success was a lot more people sitting in pews. That didn\u2019t happen. What did happen, though, was smaller and harder to track. The people in that church didn\u2019t come from the neighborhood and had never cared much about it. But after some time walking around there, meeting people, they started to care. We changed some rules about membership; we learned to be grateful and welcoming when someone did show up and a few of those people stuck. We had a small choir you had to audition to join; we got rid of the audition and just let anyone sing, including a woman who couldn\u2019t read a note of music but had a beautiful voice. The church building was next to an elementary school. We had discovered there were a lot of single parent families and after talking to the school social worker, we discovered there were a lot of kids who went home to empty houses, so we created the first latch key program in Seattle, an after school program where volunteers helped kids do homework, played games and fed them a snack.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019d love to say that the church took off and grew into a big, strong place, but it didn\u2019t. When I left a couple of years later, it was still small, but it was a different place. It was a congregation where people were busy with various ways of helping in that neighborhood. At the end of this story in Mark, no deeds of power have been done. Except this one: those twelve guys who have just been following Jesus around are now off, practicing what Jesus preached. Is that success? What do you think? What is success following Jesus? Is it looking rich and powerful, or listening to him and doing what he says? This is what he says: \u2018The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.\u2019&nbsp; [Mark 1:15]. Every day,, we hear bad news: Jesus says, \u201cBelieve in the good news.\u201d This is the good news: you are a child of God; so is everyone you meet. Living in the kingdom means acting like it. So does living in the neighborhood. Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ, Locust Grove, PA by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor \u00a92024 Seventh Sunday After Pentecost\/B \u2022 July 7, 2024 Mark 6:1-13 Jacquelyn and I like to travel to Spain. One of the benefits of her being a flight attendant is that we can fly inexpensively, so [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1416,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[101,146,3,2,130],"tags":[338,5],"class_list":["post-1453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-after-pentecost","category-mark","category-sermon","category-worship","category-year-b","tag-failure","tag-sermon"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.firstreflection.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/cropped-Beach-at-Cambrils-Spain-scaled-2.jpeg?fit=984%2C212&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1453"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1457,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453\/revisions\/1457"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}