(Prescript:I love public speaking. I had a sunday school teacher named Jan Alford who was a sunday school teacher to both of my brothers. She always told me that she could see me at the pulpit on a sunday morning. I've never been quite sure how to take that idea lately, because of how I feel in general about church. I realized that if I were a pastor, I would just get up there and just try to be funny. I decided to put my keyboard where my mouth is. Here is the first part of what came out ~Imagine sitting down after a worship set, to begin with~)
Okay. So the music is over. Please settle yourself in your seat; keep your hands and feet out of the aisle, your cell phones in their upright and silenced position.
…and for that matter, shut up. You came here for the sake of hearing me talk at you for the next several minutes. By the end of my spiritually saturated monologue, you will realize that you once were lost but now are found; you were blind, but now you see. I’ll have some people pass trays around while soothing music is playing. Out of the thankfulness of your heart, you will proceed to pay my bills (thanks in advance for that, by the way).
Your life will change, and tomorrow you’ll wake up fulfilled and overflowing with the Holy Spirit. God will take the mountain range of straw that is your life and spin it into gold overnight. That is, at the cost of everything important to you, regardless of whether or not it is deemed “sinful.”
By the way, church will go much better on Sunday mornings if you would just choose not to sin during the week. Stop doing whatever it is your doing that is so sinful. Start doing, you know, more holier stuff.
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I hate stereotypical sermons. I do not care how many masters of divinity or theological doctorates one might have. Nobody has the right to stand up here bunkered securely behind a flimsy pulpit and tell you how to live your life. What happens in your day to day is something that is primarily between you and God. In the same way your extended family needs to be respectful of your marriage, people need to be respectful of your relationship with Christ; your bridegroom.
That said, I wish not to preach a sermon. I hate sermons. They tend to be far too long and they delay the union that I share with Sunday afternoon NFL football. I don’t want to tell you how to live your life. I’m not trying to inject into your psyche some kind of truth that I (because I’m behind this here pulpit) have and you must obviously lack.
I am merely trying to be myself; to do what I love to do in the presence of Him who created me to do just that. I would appreciate it if you would be respectful of my relationship with Christ as I will do everything in my power to be respectful of yours.
Many of us know Jesus Christ. If Jesus had a facebook profile, he’d be the mutual friend to an uncountable multitude of people. Would he not? Would you poke Jesus? Would you message him? Would you comment on His wall? Would you invite him to join Dope Warz and start dealing unheard of amounts of cyber drugs in many different cities? Would you send him a bumper sticker? Would you dedicate a song to Him? Which song?
I hold somewhat of a double standard. I’m not sure how exactly to correct it, but it haunts my conscious somewhat. See, I don’t want to stand here and tell you how to live your life. Yet I am a dreamer, and a dreamer will waste no time in letting everyone know about the way things should be. I’m not even asking you to adopt my view on the way things should be. I’m just expressing what I think, and there’s a very good chance I could be mistaken. I hope that before I start speaking, that many of you would consider being a good friend of mine. Friendship, however, is something that isn’t as easy as correct or incorrect; right or wrong; black or white; paper or plastic.
My hope in sharing my heart today is that we would all realize we have more in common to share besides our mutual friend Jesus Christ. Wait, I’d like to change that.
My hope in sharing my heart today is that we would all realize we have more in common to share in our mutual friend/bridegroom, Jesus Christ. We share a very creative creator, who has given each one of us an unmistakably unique and exquisite personality and mind to think with. Or, perhaps more aptly stated, an unmistakable unique and exquisite personality and mind to dream with. Welcome to my dream world.
In my dream world, there are many wonderful things. Has anyone seen back to the future? I would submit that anyone who has taken the time to see all three episodes of the priceless trilogy stands with me in proclaiming how awesome hover boards are. What would happen to the rappers music videos? Who wants chrome twenty-two’s spinning when you could be on a hover board?
Now imagine with me as we come to realize that in this dream world we’ve found a way keep ski resorts open year round while temperatures at the foot of the Rocky Mountains stay at a smooth sixty to seventy five degrees. Every day is a powder day, and through the miracle of distributive mathematical logic, there aren’t any lift lines.
We’ve found a way to turn gravity off and on. In this room, the gravity has turned off and so everything is floating around. In this room, however, each couch is safely in its place, and everyone can eat without throwing up. How awesome would this dream world be?
What I have realized is that the kind of awesome I’ve just spoken about is fractional at best in comparison with the kind of awesome that God has created in each and every person alive.
The unfortunate part about who I am is that I have somewhat of a dreamy expectation of my relationship with God. I have this sense of how things should be between created and creator. Don’t worry, not all of them are necessarily wrong or unreasonable. The reality is that I don’t feel as though things between me and the big man upstairs are what they should be. In fact, I tell myself pretty regularly that there’s a good chance they aren’t.
There are a lot of expectations I have of the way things with life should be.
There are a lot of expectations I have of the way things with relationships should be.
There are a lot of expectations I have of the way things with the church should be.
I think you and I have more of those expectations in common than we think we should.
And now, I think I should be done.
