Articles from Sunday's Sermon

There were a couple of articles that I read and used as part of Sunday Sermon.

Both are very good articles.

(1) We’re all going to die. Why is it so hard to talk about it?

It’s not as if it’s a big secret that we’re all going to die. It’s just that for many of us, most of the time, it seems like an event that’s going to happen to someone else, some hypothetical me far in the future. Spiritual teachers in many traditions spend a lot of time trying to get people to see the foolishness of this perspective.

“To contemplate dying each day calls forth an instant reordering of priorities,” writes Kathleen Dowling Singh in The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older. “Just like a quick and deliberate shake of a kaleidoscope, it creates a whole new patterning, a whole new view.” I’ve seen that shake of the kaleidoscope happen many times in those who’ve received a terminal diagnosis...

(2) The Early Church Thrived Amid Secularism and Shows How We Can, Too

The success of the early church was certainly not inevitable. Christians could have accommodated to the culture to win recognition and approval, which would have undermined the uniqueness of their belief system and way of life. Or Christians could have isolated themselves from the culture to hide and survive, which would have kept them on the margins—safe, to be sure, but also irrelevant.

Instead, Christians engaged the culture without excessive compromise and remained separate from the culture without excessive isolation. Christians figured out how to be both faithful and winsome. They followed what was then known as the “Third Way,” a phrase that first appeared in a second-century letter to a Roman official named Diognetus.

What made the Third Way so successful and fruitful? At the heart of it was the unique identity and mission of Jesus. Jesus Christ shaped everything that followed in his wake. No one in the ancient world had ever encountered the likes of him before. Romans had no categories for him and neither did Jews. Not even his disciples could make sense of him until after the resurrection. Jesus Christ summoned his followers to a new way of life because he was first and foremost the way to new life. In other words, it was his uniqueness that made the early Christian movement unique.

I encourage you to read them both.