Mosaic Church of Clayton

"Why would someone choose to give us a perfectly good Sunday morning to be present in worship? Why would someone choose to be part of a community of believers, a kind of family that you don’t always like, don’t always get along with, don’t always agree with? Why would be part of anything that requires more from us with everything already pressing on us? "

Sermon preached on April 30, 2023"Diana Butler Bass’s book, Christianity for the Rest of Us, says, “The whole message of the Christian scripture is based in the idea of metanoia, the change of heart that happens when we meet God face-to-face. Even a cursory knowledge of history reveals that Christianity is a religion about change. The Christian faith always changes-even when some its adherents claim that it does not.” God did not meet all of those people in the Old Testament, ask them to build altars where they were to mark the place of the divine intervention of God, change their names just to believe that that just happens to them. God did not meet Paul on the road to Damascus and change his name to Saul. God did not meet him, one who was persecuting Christians because he believed in his heart of hearts that was the right thing to do, to just give us an interesting story. God did not meet Peter in a vision and say, “Don’t call what I have made clean, unclean” just to show that God did that one thing once. God is a God of movement and change, God is at work right now in ways and in places that we cannot even imagine. We have this changing moments in scripture to show us that it is possible, even probable. What change of heart, what miracle of change is happening in you today?"

This is a sermon preached on May 23, 2021. Due to sound issues it was never posted. In light of the recent decisions by The Southern Baptist Convention, we felt it was important to retrieve it and make sure it was available. If you are looking for another way of understanding what scripture says about women, this will be a great starting place."Here are a few guiding principles when you are looking for what is right and true, students hear this because it will not be long that you are in college and looking for a campus ministry to join or a church to join, If you pull a few verses out of context and make sweeping statement about half of the world’s population, it is about power and control. Do not believe it as the truth when they convincingly lob a handful of verses at you as declarative, about anything. Just because it is something that we have come to believe or has been preached over time, does not mean it is right. The Bible is a radical account of a God that is calling the people back in relationship with God and we have too often used it to limit, to put people in their place, to define who are sinners and who is not. And that is not the message of scripture."

I heard a sermon recently by a national leader calling for unity, focusing on the ways we are alike. But the problem is that the ways we are different harm and belittle people groups that are on the margins and I believe that should be where we draw the line. We cannot hold up not speaking our mind, wanting to keep the peace for everything. Unity at the expense of health and humanity is dangerous. 

The truth is that we are made in the image of God, just as we are. There are up sides and there are down sides to who we are. But all of that has been made free, has been blessed, is continuing to be reformed for the work of God in Christ. It is in Christ that we can experience freedom from the things that hold us back. It is in Christ that we are lovingly refined to be the better image of God in the world, to rule as God would with love and care, each in our own way. We are who we are and we do not need to wallow in that, or feel shame about that. We are made for this glorious purpose when we are in Christ. In this new place, in this new perspective, when we are in Christ. And that is the glad text this morning. I am still me everywhere I go but when I go there, when I live in Christ, letting the way that Jesus sees me, the way that Jesus keeps shaping me, I am living out my glorious purpose in this world. Just as I am, and just as I am becoming. And in this place, in this in Christ place, the power struggles, the things that shame us in this world, the kinds of burdens we carry, none of that holds the same value here. We are free from those.