Sermon 5 – Richard Jackson

You can bet on hurricanes. I don’t mean you can be certain that they’ll come; the experts tell us that’s a sure thing. I mean you can literally place a bet on how many, how strong, and where they’ll hit. It’s on the internet, of course. The odds aren’t very good. The going rate for a Category 3 or better is one-to-five, meaning a sawbuck bet would pay only two greenbacks.

Sounds kind of ghoulish, I suppose. Still, putting money on one’s own town could be seen as a form of insurance. Maybe you could put a grand on Corpus Christi across the board and another K on the nose, planning to use the payoff to replace your roof. And it wouldn’t be like you were wishing bad luck on another city; sort of like a professional athlete gambling on his own team – there’s no chance he’d shave points.

Bottom line: it strikes us as frivolous to worry about wagers with disaster roaring onshore. How much more foolish, then, to distract ourselves with the slot machine pursuits of getting and spending when the lead pipe cinch certainty of eternal doom rushes toward us. No bookie in Vegas would make odds on the likelihood of someone’s death; there’s no gamble where the outcome is already known. Yet every day men and women go about their business as if they had a chance of lucking out in some sort of lotto that would make them the exception to mortality. But the cough of dice in a leather cup can’t drown out the ominous roar of the storm that sweeps toward Golgotha.

If it is dumb to bet against death, it is dumber still when God offers a solution that is just as certain. Jesus declares that those who trust in him receive an irrevocable promise of eternal life, a betting slip for redemption written with his own nail-scarred hand and signed in his spear-syphoned blood. Shall not perish, promises the fine print: the only "sure thing" worthy of the name.

This Sunday, my dad, Richard Jackson, will preach for us from the text that has sustained us for five Sundays now, John 3:16. It is also a text that has nourished him through fifty-odd years of ministry. And it is a text which will shine unfading through all the ageless ages of eternity. Take time to attend; you won’t run the risk of not being blessed.

You Bet,

Sermon 4 – Justin Horton

The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. – John 1:14, The Message

That’s not a bad translation. In his book, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places, Eugene Peterson speaks of the summer when an upscale city family downsized into his rural community. The neighborhood kids gawked as the trappings of wealth and sophistication lumbered off the truck: skis, a motorcycle, expensive furniture. Bumpkin hearts thudded at the opportunity to upgrade through association with such lives.

Reality, however, failed to live up to sample. The newcomers proved to be carpetbagging snobs who sneered at the locals, invited no one to share their expensive toys, and guarded the threshold of their home like a religious shrine.

The incarnate Christ, by contrast, was neither a squatter nor a squire, neither a drifter wandering by nor a snob towering above. He entered our experience; he showed us who he was and invited us in. He defied the gnostic nightmare of a God who gives without really giving, a God who moves fast enough and stays long enough only to dazzle with charm, sell some spiritual snake oil, and abscond with our money like a traveling medicine man in the Old West.

For God so loved that he gave – came, stayed, settled in. Jesus didn’t simply parade a few chrome-plated miracles then withdraw into his holiness and leave us gaping on the sidewalk. He gave us all that he was, and took on himself all that we were. That’s a message worth more than a single sermon, so we have devoted the entire month of July to John 3:16. This week, our youth pastor, Justin Horton, will fill the pulpit to unpack a little more of the moving van and uncrate some of the riches of Christ. You should take a personal interest in this sermon, because you’re invited to use anything it contains.

Happy Moving Day,

Doug