The following is the sermon I preached at Pasadena Covenant Church on August 31, 2008. The biblical text is Ephesians 2. [1] Audio of the sermon is available here.

Do you ever feel like you’ve been a rut and the mundane “blehs” of life surround you and then all of a sudden, you’re filled with awe and wonder? You encounter something new or something you’ve seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted countless times and then, surprisingly, you wake up to a deeper mystery surrounding you. What has evoked that awe in you? Is it a piece of music like a Sufjan Stevens song? Standing before the vastness of the Pacific Ocean? Hearing children laugh? What about a movie like WALL-E? Or a favorite book or story such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? Maybe a mathematical formula? Perhaps seeing a perfectly turned double play in baseball or watching Michael Phelps set records these past Olympics? Or is it a favorite meal whose flavors remind you of home? Isn’t it amazing to experience those moments when we feel God’s grace like a cool breeze, when we can sense that there is something special to this life?

I grew up in Sanger, California, a small farming community plopped between Fresno and the Sierra Nevada mountain range. My family spent a lot of time in those mountains. It was a great way to grow up, having granite domes and giant sequoia trees just an hour’s drive away. As a kid, I didn’t think the mountains to our east were all that special—seeing them was as much a part of our daily lives as homework or the street in front of our house. I even worked in those mountains during a couple of summers in college at a Christian camp. The tall trees were beautiful, but they were just the backdrop of my life. Then, one time when I was home from school, my dad and I went on a drive up to Sequoia National Monument. As we drove past trees I must have seen hundreds of times in my life, I felt like I was seeing them for the first time. Here were these behemoths shooting up out of the ground, topping out at a couple of hundred feet into the air. Their bases were fifty feet around or more. They began to grow around the time Jesus was born in Bethlehem. I couldn’t help but stare out the window in awe of these magnificent wonders of God’s creation. If you’ve never seen the giant sequoias, I’ll try to give you some perspective: Pasadena city hall is the tallest building in the city at 163 feet. The General Sherman tree stands at 276 feet. It had a branch that before it fell off was 100 feet tall. What powers of imagination does God possess in order to make trees like that? As we drove through the forest, I felt like I was the first person to ever see them. I remember saying to my dad in shock, “Do you see these trees? They’re awesome.” He just laughed and said he felt the same way the first time he saw them after he moved to California from North Carolina. When I saw those trees that time, I understood the words of the poet E.E. Cummings who wrote, “now the eyes of my eyes are opened.” [2]

The following is the sermon I preached at Eagle Rock Covenant Church on August 17, 2008. The biblical text is John 20.19-23 [1] Audio of the sermon is available here.

In the halls of my childhood church we had a bulletin board filled with prayer letters and pictures from of all the missionaries our congregation supported. I didn’t realize until much later how much this board shaped how I understood the idea of missions. I remember one missionary we supported in particular. She grew up in our congregation and would send my family personal letters that we read aloud at dinner. She served in Afghanistan, giving basic medical care and teaching classes to women and children. Because it was the 1980’s her letters were filled with stories of the war between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. More than once her team had to escape from attacks on their city with shells exploding behind their Jeep. After the Soviets left, she told similar stories of the civil war that brought the Taliban to power. Oddly enough, the one story that sticks in my head, came from a letter she wrote to my family when I was nine or ten. She wrote something she thought my brother and I would enjoy. She said in her report that the first snow of the year had fallen in their community. In the language of the people group she went to serve, the word for snow is, “barf.” She thought—rightly I might add—that my brother and I would appreciate the fact that it was “barfing” outside. We thought that was hilarious. I still think it’s hilarious.

And for most of my young life, my vision of what it meant to be a missionary was to go to a place where women had to cover their faces, where you had to evacuate cities under attack and mortar rounds exploded around your fleeing car, and where people said funny things like “barf” for snow. I thought missionaries were strange, exotic people, and incredibly rare in the Church. God sent them out into the far reaches of the world, but God clearly didn’t send all of us to those nations.

This story from the Gospel according to John that we read confronts the understanding I had of God and missions and being sent by Jesus. While in this story Jesus speaks to his disciples, I think the words are meant for the entire Church to hear. And if we’re all meant to hear these words, that means Jesus sends us all out on a mission. Missions and the call of God to reach the world are not reserved for a few special Christians. Missions are not just one ministry among many ministries of the Church. Nor is mission just an aspect of the kingdom of God or an piece of his character. Our God is a God of mission. We have a God who is active in the world, a God who engages, and who sends his Son. Mission is not just an attribute of his character—mission is God’s character. [2] God calls the universe into existence and seeks out a relationship with the world. He calls people into his kingdom, he seeks to create a new family, and he sends his people out to work alongside him in this mission. God has done this in many ways throughout history from the calling of Abraham that we heard about last week from Brian, to sending his own Son, Jesus, and to creating the Church to be his representatives in the world. I know this is all rather large and lofty, but then again so is God.

I’ve had the opportunity to fill the pulpit at two local Covenant churches in the past month, Eagle Rock Covenant Church and Pasadena Covenant Church, where Carey and I are members. It’s really the first times I’ve preached since 2006. The sermon-writing and preaching muscles were certainly a bit weak, but I enjoyed the experiences.

Audio for the sermon at Eagle Rock Covenant can be found here.

Update:

Audio for the sermon at Pasadena Covenant can be found here.

The texts of both sermons to come soon.