Jesus Messiah – Chris Tomlin

Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)

Lead Me To The Cross – Hillsong

Sea of Faces – Kutless

In Christ Alone – Geoff Moore

Call My Name – Third Day

You Raise Me Up – Celtic Woman version

Come, Now is the Time to Worship – Brian Doerksen

Mighty to Save – Hillsong

Word of God Speak – Mercy Me

In the Secret – Sonic Flood

Your Grace is Enough – Chris Tomlin

Forever – Chris Tomlin

Beautiful One – Tim Hughes

Have a look at the Bulletin Cover from the last Sunday Night Alive.  The painting was done by an artist in residence at a church in Washington State as a depiction of Advent – light coming into chaos:

The Actual Order of Worship looked like this:

Sunday Night Alive Bull

These videos don’t show the whole group, and the sound is brought to you by a regular video camera…but it captures the gist of music from the last Sunday Night Alive worship service.  Thanks to all who volunteered.  We had a great group! And yes, the music group was set up in the back of the room and not visible to the people there.

Go Tell It On The Mountain – Garth Brooks Version

Better Days – Goo Goo Dolls

Jesus Messiah – Chris Tomlin

Mary Did You Know

HERE ARE MUSIC VIDEOS FOR ALL THE MUSIC PLAYED IN THE ORDER IT WAS DONE AT SNA:

Holy Holy Holy – thought about the Sufjan Stevens version, but a bit odd to learn

Mary Did You Know – Kenny Rogers

Go Tell it On The Mountain – couldn’t find the Garth Brooks version on Youtube

Better Days – The Goo Goo Dolls

Jesus Messiah – Chris Tomlin

God of Wonders – Third Day

Welcome to This World – Chris Rice

“I Can Only Imagine”

            How many of you would consider yourselves to be imaginative?  Don’t worry, this isn’t a trap and I am not going to pick on you. How would you consider yourself imaginative?  Do we have any painters? Writers? Scrap-bookers? Fiction readers? Quilt-makers? Sculptors? Teachers? Carpenters? Daydreamers?  For those of you who perhaps didn’t raise your hands I bet you’re pretty imaginative.  The imagination is defined generally by “the formation of a mental image of something that is not perceived as real and is not present to the senses.”  Or you can think imaginatively, or resourcefully thinking of answers to unusual problems in interesting ways.  Some say it’s the ability to form mental images of concrete events effectively.  So in one of these definitions imagination perceives what is not real and in another it perceives reality as images.  What’s more real – the world according to the imagination or the world outside of it?

 

In the last novel in the Harry Potter series there is a short exchange between Harry Potter and his decease professor Dumbledore:

 

Harry: This is all happening inside my head isn’t it?

Dumbledore: Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

 

Artists for years have written poems about their imaginations.  Close your eyes and listen to this one by Emily Bronte:

 

To Imagination by Emily Bronte

When weary with the long day’s care,
And earthly change from pain to pain,
And lost and ready to despair,
Thy kind voice calls me back again:
Oh, my true friend! I am not lone,
While thou canst speak with such a tone!

So hopeless is the world without;
The world within I doubly prize;
Thy world, where guile, and hate, and doubt,
And cold suspicion never rise;
Where thou, and I, and Liberty,
Have undisputed sovereignty.

What matters it, that, all around,
Danger, and guilt, and darkness lie,
If but within our bosom’s bound
We hold a bright, untroubled sky,
Warm with ten thousand mingled rays
Of suns that know no winter days?

Reason, indeed, may oft complain
For Nature’s sad reality,
And tell the suffering heart, how vain
Its cherished dreams must always be;
And Truth may rudely trample down
The flowers of Fancy, newly-blown:

But, thou art ever there, to bring
The hovering vision back, and breathe
New glories o’er the blighted spring,
And call a lovelier Life from Death,
And whisper, with a voice divine,
Of real worlds, as bright as thine.

I trust not to thy phantom bliss,
Yet, still, in evening’s quiet hour,
With never-failing thankfulness,
I welcome thee, Benignant Power;
Sure solacer of human cares,
And sweeter hope, when hope despairs!

 

Hope is imagined in a world that seems hopeless.  Imagination opens up possibilities hindered by circumstances and limitations. 

 

Most of you know that I work with the youth quite a bit while I’m here and it’s pretty common to hear phrases like, “get real,” “for real?,” “Really,” “in reality.” Is that little blip about so and so kissing so and so real?  Did one of our church members really go to Guatemala?  Was Mr. Rogers really a Presbyterian?  These phrases are pretty common – and most of the time they’re just phrases that don’t mean much – just common responses to hearing extraordinary news.  On the other hand, we still use the language all the time.  And if you’re an outsider looking in you might wonder what people consider real?  We’re brought up to ask questions and learn truths…and by the time we’re grown up, we’re still asking questions and learning about reality. 

 

And for good reason – we were created in the image of God the scriptures tell us – a God who is still “musterion”, a mystery.  The ancient Jews never spoke the name of God given to Moses: Yahweh – a verb precisely because to name something is to claim ownership over.  They never spoke God’s name because they could never presume to know God completely.  The word for “mystery” in Greek is musterion – a root that means “to shut one’s mouth.” Our descriptions and language aren’t adequate to embrace the full mystery of God.  And this is where our imaginations come into play.  Sometimes we think we’ve got God all figured out – we know what he wants.  We like to use God to justify our actions for our own purposes.  We like to use phrases like, “my Jesus,” “Jesus my friend,” “Jesus, my savior” – we like to think sometimes that we can be followers of Christ on our own because we have God all figured out.  We forget who we’re dealing with sometimes and who we are – created in the image of a mysterious, relational God we don’t control.

 

God revealed the true image of God’s self in Jesus – how he lived and what he said. And the mysterious Jesus invited us to imagine a world where people love God, and love their neighbors as themselves.  That’s our reality as followers of Christ – to imagine and to live in that image of love.  Our reality begins with our experiences, focused through the life of Christ, and is imagined in our world and our calling is to unleash our imaginations into the world.  Of course we open our windows and look out, or open our doors and step out into a world of death and pain and suffering and lying and cheating and stealing at every turn.  How do we see the reality of Christ in all of the chaos?  Our time has a passion for surety, for security, for simplicity. These things probably have never existed — save for brief moments when they were established by denying them to some other community. Talking about God in these days is risky business. It walks between the presumed at-homeness of the past and the anxieties of the future.  We are always living in tension.  To take the gospel into the world showing the world the possibilities of a bright future, love and imagination are essential.  We can’t think we’ve figured out God and give textbook definitions and hope that people understand what we’re talking about.  We need to take our experiences, imagine a world where we love God and people, and live it.  Jesus told stories rather than being descriptive – avoiding dictionary definitions of terms, and served as a sower of seeds in our imaginations – a poet of sorts.  What are stories in our time from our experiences that evoke a world of love?  What about this one:

 

Coretta King said…

 

“I remember one very difficult day when he [Martin Luther King, Jr.] came home bone-weary from the stress that came with his leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In the middle of that night, he was awakened by a threatening and abusive phone call, one of many we received throughout the movement. On this particular occasion, however, Martin had had enough.

 

After the call, he got up from bed and made himself some coffee. He began to worry about his family, and all of the burdens that came with our movement weighed heavily on his soul. With his head in his hands, Martin bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud to God: “Lord, I am taking a stand for what I believe is right. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I have nothing left. I have come to the point where I can’t face it alone.

 

Later he told me, “At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear a voice saying: ‘Stand up for righteousness; stand up for truth; and God will be at our side forever.’” When Martin stood up from the table, he was imbued with a new sense of confidence, and he was ready to face anything.”

 

Does this image remind you of Jesus in the garden the night before his arrest? Can you sense the emotions going through his head? The fear, the anxiety, the love, the vulnerability?

 

Here’s another story more in tune with our independence day celebrations:  Listen to this one:

 

We all remember the great president of this United States, Abraham Lincoln—these United States rather. You remember when Abraham Lincoln was running for president of the United States, there was a man who ran all around the country talking about Lincoln. He said a lot of bad things about Lincoln, a lot of unkind things. And sometimes he would get to the point that he would even talk about his looks, saying, “You don’t want a tall, lanky, ignorant man like this as the president of the United States.” He went on and on and on and went around with that type of attitude and wrote about it. Finally, one day Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States. And if you read the great biography of Lincoln, if you read the great works about him, you will discover that as every president comes to the point, he came to the point of having to choose a Cabinet. And then came the time for him to choose a Secretary of War. He looked across the nation, and decided to choose a man by the name of Mr. Stanton. And when Abraham Lincoln stood around his advisors and mentioned this fact, they said to him: “Mr. Lincoln, are you a fool? Do you know what Mr. Stanton has been saying about you? Do you know what he has done, tried to do to you? Do you know that he has tried to defeat you on every hand? Do you know that, Mr. Lincoln? Did you read all of those derogatory statements that he made about you?” Abraham Lincoln stood before the advisors around him and said: “Oh yes, I know about it; I read about it; I’ve heard him myself. But after looking over the country, I find that he is the best man for the job.”

 

Mr. Stanton did become Secretary of War, and a few months later, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. And if you go to Washington, you will discover that one of the greatest words or statements ever made by, about Abraham Lincoln was made about this man Stanton. And as Abraham Lincoln came to the end of his life, Stanton stood up and said: “Now he belongs to the ages.” And he made a beautiful statement concerning the character and the stature of this man. If Abraham Lincoln had hated Stanton, if Abraham Lincoln had answered everything Stanton said, Abraham Lincoln would have not transformed and redeemed Stanton. Stanton would have gone to his grave hating Lincoln, and Lincoln would have gone to his grave hating Stanton. But through the power of love Abraham Lincoln was able to redeem Stanton.

 

Think about the story of Zacheus as Jesus invites him to come from the tree and dine with him, or the corpus of the passion narratives where Jesus dies for the sins of the world.

 

Why am I telling you stories and asking you to use your imaginations? Because Jesus’ did, Yes.  But do you know that we spend a lot of time trying to descriptively talk about God using a language that’s pretty inadequate.  In a television interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury, he was asked to describe God. And he said God is “Something with one and beyond one that fills one with awe, and reverence, and gives one a sense of supreme obligation. . . .” At this point he was interrupted by the host who said, “That could be the Internal Revenue Service.”).  We’re all plagued by the “Moses-syndrome,” unable or hesitant to find our voices to speak for God when the time comes.  We put to rest our imaginations and attempt to be descriptive like we always do – so sure of ourselves and our learned answers and our comfort.  But to engage the mystery of God – to open up possibilities, to come up with ways to make the gospel relevant to the people of the world, we must always take our experiences and then imagine and re-imagine a world where we love God and neighbor.

 

I’m not saying that abstract thoughts should define how we live.  Concreteness is the beginning of poetry. Experience is the context of imagination. Scripture is the seedbed of language of faith.

 

Ask yourselves daily, Am I living the reality in Christ?  And use your imaginations to imagine a world where we love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.  Then allow God to speak to you with your eyes closed but your hearts and your experiences wide open.  Some of us serve on church committees, some volunteer in various places around our community, many of us work in various fields; we all have varying experiences and come from various places.  As a community of individuals let’s bring together our God-given imaginations and transform and redeem the world that yearns for a God of loving, and wondrous possibilities.  I want you all to close your eyes and use your imaginations:

 

Jesus asked people to imagine a new life – one lived in close relationship with God and others.  Taking Jesus’ lead, how might this look in our life together as God’s people:

 

• Imagine what your church would be like if its entire life was consumed by finding ways to mirror God’s love, as taught and modeled by Jesus, in your neighborhood.  Imagine how that might begin to alter your current congregational activities and priorities.
• Imagine your church filled with God’s Spirit, being of one mind and one body as it brings its life into line with God’s great dream of restoring your neighborhood and setting things right with the world.
• Imagine your church – and every one of its members without exception – fully committed in seeing God’s dream become reality.
• Imagine your church having one central objective for every Sunday School session, small group gathering and committee meeting it sponsored: to equip its members for living and sharing more effectively God’s love in the world.
• Imagine your church joyfully recognizing and putting to full use the particular gifts and capacities God has given you.  And imagine yourself desiring nothing more in life than to develop those gifts for the purpose of offering them back to God in passionate, life-long witness and service to others.
• Imagine your church being so welcoming of sinners, so filled with compassion for the lost, the last and the least, that word of your love and care spread across the street, throughout your neighborhood, and even around the world.
• Imagine your church designing and conducting worship experiences that celebrate what God is doing in your neighborhood and around the world, and that regularly invite each member to explore and expand their participation in these God-inspired initiatives.
• Imagine your church being committed to daily intercessory prayer for your neighbors, classmates, colleagues and friends.
• Imagine your church being sought out by those experiencing injustice, because you have become known for insisting on fair and just relationships.
• Imagine your church seriously searching the Scriptures in a vibrant new way, recognizing them as a blueprint for creative engagement with the seductive forces and influences of the surrounding culture and society.
• Imagine your church being the best window your neighbors have into the life God intended.  And imagine that what they saw pleased God.
• Imagine your church so in touch with neighborhood ways of understanding and experiencing life that you begin to reach people’s deepest hurts and needs.
• Imagine your church making headlines for its firm stand on loving enemies, offering healing to the broken, and extending open arms to people of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds.  And imagine all of this happening to such an extent that you were required to risk your security as a community for what you believed and practiced.
• Imagine going to lunch with the person in your church you dislike the most.  And over lunch God’s reconciliation allows the two of you to become friends.  And others in your church are inspired to follow your lead.  And the reconciliation and wholeness your church experiences spill out the front doors, across the street, and into your entire neighborhood.  And your church becomes known throughout your community as a place for restoration and wholeness.
• Imagine learning that other churches are experiencing new life in Christ just as you are.  That a neighboring congregation shares its experience with your church.  And you find that both of you are catching the vision to extend your new-life experiences beyond your own neighborhoods.  And a third church, then a fourth, links with you.  And in collaboration with this community of churches you begin calling out people from among you to share God’s mission in neighborhoods both near and far.  And together, you connect with other churches in still other places to support their sharing new life in their neighborhoods and beyond.

 

As you leave today with these images on your mind imagine what God is telling you about reality and how you can use your gifts in the world to spread Love to others.  God is always with you…in the words of the poet Wordsworth:

 

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:\

\

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. (Wordsworth)

 

Amen.

These boys seem to have the proper focus of worship — It’s all for God…

On Sunday, May 10, Mothers’ Day, Volunteers from FPC will be driving down to Waco to bring food to the homeless.  I invite all families in the church and in the community to take part in this event.  Bring your mothers and your grandmothers and let us celebrate the morning of Mothers’ Day serving the mothers who have little to nothing and who fear for the lives of their children each and every day.  This is what being part of the body of Christ is all about – escaping our tendencies to be comfortable and isolated and to serve others with unconditional love meeting their basic needs.  Contact me  for more information or if you would like to help.  Thanks. – Tim

Jonah’s Headphones: Tuning out God’s Mercy

I would like to tell you a story.  And I will warn you that this will not be an easy one to hear for the faint of heart.  The story is a personal one and I must admit not the sermon I meant to give for today being an Easter Sunday, but the hope embedded in Easter is the kind of hope needed in this story.  Jesus suffered and died…but then was alive again.  Jesus is the embodiment of true faith.  But by happenstance perhaps I ran across the story of Jonah, and snickered.  He was the one who couldn’t find faith with a GPS unit.  But in reading the book of Jonah I was reminded of the memory I am going to share with you hear today – a memory that certainly shaped my life.

One Saturday of last year, I arose early startled by the residual of distant thunder and the snorts of my 11-month old son fighting a cold who tossed in bed pinning his foot to my spine.  The usual moans of wind from outside and the skittering of squirrels on the roof made it impossible to sleep.  Since office hours at the church began at 7:00am I thought I would confront the day a bit more prepared – I showered, dressed, gathered my things and left.  Walking out into the early morning the wind had calmed into the usual early morning stillness that I had come to know in New Jersey.  When I reached the church I parked in my usual spot in the bank parking lot and sat there a moment allowing my brain to find clarity from the nightly dream-state.  The road between the church and parking lot was dimly lit by green fluorescent hues, and the morning fog created a surreal atmospheric tension, like straddling another world – cold and dark and dismal.  Then again, it was the morning and my brain was still in that transition from the routinely night-and-day mode.  Seeing the whiter light towards Main Street I mustered some energy for a short walk on Main to excite the body and energize the mind in preparation for possible office visits or perhaps as a substitute for my morning coffee since Starbucks hadn’t opened yet.

So I walked soaking in the sights of closed antique shops, Vito’s Pizza, the little Bed and Breakfast across from the church, a stray dog running through the graveyard behind the church.  The lack of noise reminded me of nights in Texas away from city sounds, but when you haven’t had that experience of hearing only your heart beat for a while, it can be eerie.

1. Though he didn’t talk for a while, but merely breathed heavily staring at his tennis shoes watching his own tears bounce off of them.

 

When he did start talking it was in violent bursts of rapid concession recounting horrors I’d never known, horrors alien to the world in which I live.  He’d talk until the tears and lump in his throat wouldn’t let him anymore. His feet tapped regularly, his hands on the seat of his chair in expectation of having to dash from the room.  Though I won’t talk about everything that was told to me that day, I will give a glimpse that encapsulates it.

His American name was Tyler, though he’d grown up in a city I can’t pronounce in Uganda and his previous name was Ungalla. His whole village was abandoned when a rebel army attacked a mine nearby.  It was during this time that he’d seen a car pull into the village, a man exiting the drivers-side door, bloodied from head to toe.  The man opened the other doors of the car pulling out a woman and three small children…as the man was escaping a town with his family rebels had fired streams of bullets into his car.  He survived.  Before his wife died she told her husband that at least he would know where they were buried.  At another point Tyler was knelt down in a line with other native Ugandans in a line and he watched as each one was.  But he survived because the executioner ran out of bullets.  Because of army casualties he was recruited as a soldier, given a gun, an AK-47, trained to shoot, to creep, and all the while was watched closely.  Many of his friends had also become soldiers for the rebel army.  For his final initiation into the army, Tyler was forced to kill a friend for selling out the location of key outposts.  At this point Tyler just wanted to die, but he still kept going. Because of his tears at this scene some of the soldiers thought it attractive to assault Tyler and beat him unconscious in the process.  The total number of people he’d killed was 10 and the same for the number of times he’d been assaulted.  He went on coughing and wheezing as he talked about other innocent people he was forced to kill.  And I’ll stop with this informing you that Tyler is living with a family member in Pennington, NJ.

The stories he told I couldn’t fathom, I couldn’t understand.  How does someone empathize with a person such as this?  I said nothing…what could I say?  What could I do?  My face expressed horror probably though I don’t remember.  What I do remember is Tyler’s quick movement in his chair to towering over me in my chair and then lurching forward with his arms as if to choke me and then the feeling of a warm body against mine and the wetness from tears soaking the back of my shirt.  I don’t how long we embraced, but for him it would never be long enough.  So many cold bodies in his life, but never enough warm.  Never had I cried like this, never to this degree, never this long – they were penitent tears and yet hopeless.  This person knows a side to life we westerners will probably never know except in our darkest nightmares.  But to Tyler, these dreams are real every day.  Before leaving he hopelessly and with fragility expressed fear for his brothers and sisters still there in Nigeria – two sisters dead, two alive.  Three brothers in the army and one dead, at least as far as he knew.  And he did not know where his family members were buried. 

For every time he was raped and he had killed he had aged years, though Tyler is only 9 years old and was rescued by UNICEF only last year.  He had served as a soldier and done and seen these things beginning at age 5. 

He’d never told his friends about any of this here in America…and perhaps because of their mindsets much like mine, comfortable in our own personal bubbles finding alien the things other, and keeping alien those other things we find in our nightmares.  Horrors in a language we do not speak.

We speak the language we posture as categorical imperative, as something universally true for all, perhaps because we wish it to be.  But people like Tyler hold an inverse mirror to us reminding us of the reality of the world and of ourselves outside of our constructed categories and barriers for understanding the world.  We seek to explain happenings like those experienced by Tyler speaking in terms of the history of the Nigerian State, or for that matter, philosophical discussions or theological discussions on evil.  But what do we really know about extreme evil except from the descriptions of those who live it?  From what we read.  We don’t speak their language and don’t necessarily want to learn how.  God had long been gone from this 9-year old boy who sought comfort in me, but he told me that he hoped God was with his remaining friends and family and that they carried this fire that he never knew.  Do we carry this fire that Tyler speaks of?  Do we really pursue life living in the image of God or is our pursuit of that image hindered by our experiences, our comfort zones, our languages, and our other barriers?  The walls we erect to protect us from the outside world.   There are many scholars who theorize that our own existential, personal security is what motivates us to act and react.  Do we as Christians follow this trend?  If we would put in Tyler’s position, would our faith persevere?

This is another one of those stories in a galaxy far far away isn’t it?  There isn’t much we individuals can do?  We are separated geographically by city borders, multiple state borders, the country borders, the Atlantic ocean and a few other country borders, we’re separated by our language, cultural assumptions, socioeconomic reality, our material stuff.  Our sound-proofing has prevented us from hearing the cry of the people of God crying for deliverance.  Bose and other manufacturers make such good headphones now, we don’t have to hear exterior noise that we don’t wish to hear.  Plug your earpieces into your ipods and mp3 players and tune out the world.  Jonah, after running from God’s request to go to Ninevah and prophecy, slept while a storm threatened all those on board the ship – a storm that Jonah himself was responsible for.  And Jonah did not even pray to God when he awoke.  What is our responsibility to the people of the world, those on board Jonah’s ship representing people of different faiths and cultures?  Each of them prayed to their gods while Jonah merely stayed silent. Do we have a responsibility to help them, to love our neighbors, or is the volume up too loud in our headphones to hear exterior cries of anguish, pain, and horrendous death?  It was Jonah’s inability to act in accordance with a divine command from God that led to the storm.  The world groans with pain and suffering.  If we are to take the Word of God seriously in our lives and in community, then may we always remember when our minds and bodies begin to relax and fall into blissful comfort, that there are situations much like Tyler’s all over the world. 

Each week we come to worship together as a community with the Word of God at the center of all we do – the uncomfortable and scandalous Word of God that preaches loving God and loving one’s neighbor unconditionally.  Let our worship be a wake-up call each week, calling us to be faces of grace to those around us, calling us to allow God to do what God will with us in the world, and calling us to hear the voices of those so often forgotten.

It isn’t until the captain of the boat wakes Jonah from his slumber that he becomes aware of the situation.  Jonah is cast from his comfort zone and aware that comfort is no longer possible.  “It is not I who live but Christ who lives in me” and Christ suffered and died.  Let’s take off our headphones and take in the pain and suffering and death in the world until it chokes us. People all over the world are attempting to wake us up from our slumber.  We cannot contain God in our own little boxes of comfort.  Let’s be messengers of God’s mercy, learning from Jonah’s mishaps, breaking away from what is comfortable each week and discover how God’s mercy is and can be active in the world through us.  Afterall, in the story of Jonah, God’s mercy is for all of creation – the people, the animals.  All are saved in the narrative.  Perhaps the mission projects for members of the church each month, perhaps through the generous donations of our cans for those suffering in our community, perhaps in our unconditional love we have with others despite our differences.  Unconditional love despite our views on politics, on values, on religion, on race, on gender, etc.  In Christ there is not longer slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile, male and female.  We create categories and boundaries in our lives, but Jesus’ actions on the cross destroyed them!

The point is that worship on Sundays, in light of the resurrection of Christ, calls us to open our eyes, to get real, to see the truth, to use Christ’s story as a lens through which to see the world – and the truth is that all of creation is trying to rouse us from our lethargy and our slumber – the fish, the animals, the people of various faiths and conditions – the poor, the lame, the blind, the oppressed.  Our bliss and our comfort, our boxes we put around God, our sins – all of these things affect others, not only ourselves and prevent the spread of the gospel – the very thing that we come here to do.  Let’s abandon the narcissistic tendencies of our culture and listen to what God is telling us.  God listens to us, even in the belly of whale.  But are we listening to God in our daily lives when all we talk about is where to have lunch, what can entertain me today, when will the sermon be over so I can watch baseball, why isn’t the gas station serving the coffee I like today, why aren’t the tablecloths I buy the right shade of red, those people over there aren’t dressed properly or look presentable, where are we going on vacation, it’s unfair?  Let’s unplug our headphones and get real, wake up, embrace the uncomfortable calling of the gospel and actively be the body of Christ that takes unconditional love to the world.  Remember the Tylers of the world.  Amen.