Raleigh Mennonite Church

Luke 24:36-48 In this second in a series exploring questions, wonderings, and themes that come from our congregation, Juliet joins Melissa to bring today's message. After Jesus' resurrection, he keeps showing up. Jesus meets their doubt with what they need and gives it to them. Jesus helps us know that we all are special. What do you need for God to be in your life?

Colossians 1:15-23 Melissa started a new sermon series this week, "I'm not sure about that," exploring questions, wonderings, and themes that come from our congregation. The most frequent submission was around the subject of hell. We live our whole lives bearing consequences, around retribution and punishment. If you make a bad choice with money, no one is coming to bail you out. If you break the law, you go to jail. We want bad people to get what's coming to them. But that should also give us pause. Just a few months ago, Pope Francis was asked what he thought about the afterlife. "I like to think hell is empty," he told an Italian reporter. "At least I hope it is." Melissa also hopes that it is, and that hope is a core of her Christian faith. Core to a belief that no one is too far gone. No one is the worst thing they have done.

John 20: 1-18 Happy Easter to everyone! In this sermon Melissa Florer-Bixler preaches on the resurrection and the appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene at his tomb. Jesus asks Mary, "whom are you looking for?" This is a loaded question, however, as Melissa shows us. The question asks us to look into our own selves, our own motivations, and our hopes when we seek out Jesus, who asked this probing question of Mary, his disciples, and also (tellingly) Judas. Whatever you come seeking for from Jesus you will find it, for even Judas got a quick payout. Ultimately, Melissa asks us to consider how we will live and conduct ourselves if all of this is true, just as the early Church sought to help the sick, the poor, and the downtrodden. This Easter when you consider the life, sacrifice, and resurrection of Jesus ask yourself, whom are you looking for?

Mark 11: 1-11 Note: The English voice you hear in this podcast is that of the translator. You can hear Miguel in the background, preaching in Spanish In this sermon, RMC's Miguel Cruz preaches on the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem as related in the Gospel of Mark. While we often focus on the exhilaration of the scene with Christ surrounded by followers and having performed miraculous healings and casting out of demons in the previous verses, Miguel asks us to focus on the transition that is taking place at this moment in Jesus' life, ministry, and future which should act as a guide to order our own lives. Jesus arrives on a humble donkey, argues with the priests and vendors, curses a fig tree, and talks intimately with his followers about prayer, taxes, wealth, power, and betrayal. Miguel helps us to see in these passages that Jesus is leading us to a new understanding of triumph and success that rejects the accumulation of wealth, material possessions, and positions of power that the world teaches us to expect and respect.

John 12: 20-33 Note: At 2:19, ten seconds of audio was lost due to a technical problem during the live recording. Melissa Florer-Bixler preaches on a time in Jesus' life where there is no time left for ministry, but only to speak to those present of his imminent demise and fulfillment of God's plan. The Jesus who has constantly upset our comfortable balance with life and often called us to the do opposite of what we instinctively think correct, again reminds us that if we choose to follow Jesus faithfully, our path will lead to the cross. But the wheat that dies bears a field of fruit, albeit of a type we may not expect to be helpful in creating what we think the Kingdom of God should look like. Herein lies a freedom that comes from our vulnerability, in giving up our attempts to control and rectify the problems of the world, history, politics, and society. We can instead leave it to a God that is always faithful in his love and work of redemption. Our sacrifices, living the life of wheat, brings more wheat, which brings more wheat - beautiful, vulnerable, and a fundamental part of our calling to follow Christ.

Numbers 21: 4-9 John 3: 14-21 Our perspective on the trials and tribulations of life can have a profound effect and how we formulate our understanding of God's character and our own place and purpose in God's creation. Melissa Florer-Bixler preaches on the long and arduous Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt and how their focus on the harsh environment, dangers, and discomforts of the wilderness caused them to doubt the truth of God's love and divine plan for their rescue. God's response to their criticism wasn't to send snakes as a punishment but to let them go: to remove some of the many divine protections that had quietly always been in place. God's constant effort shielded God's people from sand storms, snakes, bandits, and had mapped out places to rest and drink. When the desert started biting with a vengeance and yet God also gave Moses a new means for salvation, the people suddenly realized a new perspective about how much of God's love and planning for them existed that they had never perceived. Melissa asks us to consider this shift of perspective within our own lives as we think about Easter, the crucifixion, and why God sent his son in the flesh to die for us. Did Christ come just to fix the giant wilderness we have made of this Eden, and that God is set in wroth against his rebellious creation unless they bend the knee? Or...has God, from before the beginning, cared for, loved, shielded, and planned for our existence in a harsh wilderness and the death of God's son came as a demonstration that God would rather, more than anything, be with us than without us?

John2: 13-22 Melissa Florer-Bixler preached on the cleansing of the Temple by Jesus. From this gospel we learn that the existence of an economy for selling sacrificial animals and exchanging currency was not what angered Jesus, being necessary for travelers to participate in rituals, but rather the proximity of these activities, within the holy space that God comes to inhabit and meet us. Melissa uses the destruction of the Temple and the Crucifixion of Jesus, Earthly places God has inhabited, to wrestle with the question of what kind of home does God make among us now? Without these touchstones, how do we possess a thing we cannot touch? All we have to make a home for God in the wilderness is each other when we meet in His name and the remembrance of his body and blood in the sacraments. We are now the feet and hands of Christ.

On this second Sunday in Lent, Melissa preached from Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 and Romans 4:13-25, focusing on the story of Abram. Way before Moses gives those laws on the tablets, Abram is righteous before there's a temple to sacrifice things in. Even before circumcision. And that's really important, especially for us, because most of us are not obligated to the 613 laws of the Torah like our Jewish siblings. The only reason that we're here? The only reason at all is that we have faith in the same God. And the same story. Somehow this promise, this miracle, has overflowed to us. In Abram's wilderness story we meet a God for whom everything has been stripped away. A God who places herself in the hands of people. A God who puts himself on the line. And one day when the time is right, that God will make a life fully on earth. One day when the time is right Jesus will come and will take upon the cross all the promises that we could not keep. Jesus will live, die and rise again to keep God's promise to us.

RMC member Phil Jackson preached on the temptation of Christ in the wilderness as told in Mark 1: 9-15. Although this relation of the beginning of Jesus' ministry is very brief, we should not be fooled into reading too quickly past Mark's description of this pivotal event. In it we can see how Jesus is being set up as the new embodiment of Adam and Eve, who will not falter under temptation and hardship unlike those first people, or God's people wandering in the desert for 40 years, or us. At the core of our faltering resides the persistent doubts that tear us down, sown by the accuser into our thoughts since the beginning...is God good, trustworthy, or even good for us? Are we worth saving? As the reflective and repentant season of Lent begins, Phil reminds us that the Gospel doesn't solely provide advice on how to live righteously. It also brings the good news of God's steadfast love for us as well as his son, shown through the example of God's sustaining presence during Christ's suffering and testing. As we submit ourselves to the testing and instruction of the Spirit during Lent, let us remember and reflect upon the humility, the obedience, and the good news of Christ as he walked into the wilderness.

Mark 9: 2-9 What will we do when we meet God? Will we run away? Cower? Ask questions? Or can we make a tent for God to inhabit and live among us? Melissa Florer-Bixler explores and unpacks the experience of Peter meeting God in the story of the transfiguration of Christ in the Gospel of Mark. Here we see that God not only wants to dwell with us, but also more importantly, within us - into the very blood and breath of our being. Our prayers and willingness of heart can build a special place for God to inhabit our bodies and allow us to experience God's love in its fullness.

I Corinthians 9:16-23 Paul descended into the laboring class rather than being paid for his ministry. That way he was able to be free from the patronage of the wealthy people of Corinth and others. There was something more significant in his life. He had been found by Jesus and this good news. The spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release of the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. Paul's letter to the people of Corinth is to a people who were still learning how to be free from the things that enslaved them. They were still figuring that out. We are still figuring that out. And that is our life's work.

Scripture 1 Corinthians 8: 1-13 How do we conduct our lives as believers when our decisions affect not only ourselves, but can cause harm or distress to other Christians or those in other communities around us? What do we do when our choices are technically righteous, but still harm other believers with a different interpretation? Melissa's sermon unpacks Paul's letter to the house church in Corinth addressing the controversy over the ethics of eating meat sacrificed to idols, a hollow but almost unavoidable practice baked into the everyday Roman life for the wealthier members of the church, and a symbol of persecution and sin to the poorer members. Within this missive Melissa reminds us that we have very few clear cut rules for how we relate to each other in controversy and still follow Jesus, but our primary goal is to take care of each other, with the expectation that the strongest might need to defer to and not run roughshod over the weakest, even if there is justification for those beliefs. Even if we are right we may still be the ones who must change our ways in order to love as Christ loved. Two things can be true - It's complicated.

Scripture: John 10:14-15 Each year, Anabaptist-related churches around the world are encouraged to worship around a common theme on a Sunday close to January 21. On that date in 1525, the first Anabaptist baptism took place in Zurich, Switzerland. Anabaptist World Fellowship Sunday provides an opportunity to remember our common roots and celebrate our worldwide koinonia. Today Melissa shared how each of us as sheep, whether here in Raleigh, or wherever Jesus' followers may be throughout the world, are together in the "same sheep pen" with Jesus as our shepherd.

Scripture: Mark 1:1-14 Nina Balmaceda provided the sermon this Sunday. Nina is on the faculty at Duke Divinity and president of the Peace and Hope International. She and her family are active at RMC. In the context of John the Baptist baptizing Jesus, Nina shared about the history of baptism and its relevance for us today.

John 1:6-8, 19-28 and Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 On this third Sunday of Advent, Melissa shared about a list of "I am nots" that she made this week. John the Baptist knew who he was not, and who he was. Think about (or make) your own lists of “I am nots.” How does that sentence end? Who makes it possible for you to be who you are and to rest in the confidence of God’s love without achievement and without competition? 

Mark 1:1-8 and Isaiah 40:1-11 On this second Sunday of Advent, Melissa reflects on our relentless focus on time; our need for efficiency. Time is invented; we made it up. Advent invites us into a different pace of time, a pace we call "Waiting." Time's first purpose was to be loved by God.

Isaiah 64:1-9 On this first Sunday of Advent, Melissa acknowledged that there is so much in our lives, in our world, to be afraid of. We are not in control of the world. We are vulnerable beyond our imagining. Somehow though, God is at work in this Apocalypse. She told the story, among others, of John Donne, who had fallen ill and was isolated, dying from the bubonic plague. Sick and alone, he wrestled through his fear, and then he prayed, "Give me a fear of which I won't be afraid."

Susan Scott preached during Christ the King Sunday, and yet the lectionary scripture for this sermon is Luke 23: 33-43, telling of the crucifixion of Jesus where he is mocked by the guards and one of the condemned for proclaiming his lordship. Susan invited us to see the kingship of Christ not as a ruler who bends people to his (or our) will, but rather as a "hidden" king who has labored hard to identify with and inhabit our suffering in the most intimate and vulnerable fashion. The manifestation of his rule and reign, unlike our traditional concepts of physical kingdoms, continues on in his followers through the commandment of love. Although we sometimes fall short of our goals to create a more just and loving world and feel discouraged or burned out, remember that Christ is the "hidden" King and he is the source of our hope.

Melissa's sermon this Sunday focused on the parable from Matthew 25:1-13 about the bridesmaids waiting for the long-delayed bridal party, with all of them falling asleep and half of them running out of lamp oil. Jackie and Trixie provided a reenactment of how things maybe could have gone better had they stayed awake. What might happen if we don't fall asleep on one another? The darkness is so dark, the night is so long. Pay attention to each other. Look towards each other's needs. Share hope with each other. Because some of us can be silly and some of us wise. It's likely that in the same day we could be both.