Who's The Boss?
Stories
Object:
Contents
"Who's the Boss?" by C. David McKirachan
"The Love of Christ Makes a Difference" by Keith Wagner
"Trusting the Great Shepherd" by Keith Wagner
Who's the Boss?
by C. David McKirachan
Luke 1:68-79
Christ the King Sunday has always been one of my favorites. Admittedly, it falls just before Thanksgiving and Advent. Churches sizzle with preparation and excitement. And I do too. But this moment, the end of our liturgical calendar is a glory. We celebrate the lordship of Jesus, the ascendency of the incarnation to its rightful place in our lives and in all creation.
Its mystery is the mystery that creeps into all our faith stories. It moves up stream against the thundering demands of our existence. They insist that we should affirm the power and importance of the world’s priorities. It is so hard to focus on what’s really going on as we proclaim Christ as King that it gives us stiff necks and pains in various body parts trying to steer the mob in directions that make no sense to them. The two passages from Luke given to us for this Sunday express the whip saw perfectly.
Mary is one of my heroes. She was the first disciple, she refused to allow her potential as a good girl, a good wife, a good mother to drown her calling, and she knew that God had chosen her to be a prophetic moment for all who would come after. She also knew the price she would have to pay for that privilege and she did it with a will. She was a warrior of the light.
So why does she come up to help us to get a handle on Christ the King?
When I was a sprout, my mother asked me who the most important people in my life were. That was easy. My father and she. She nodded and thanked me for considering her as a candidate. She asked me why I considered them to be so important. That was easy too. Because they loved me. She nodded and told me that she hoped when she asked me that question again that I had the smarts to remember my basis for evaluation. ‘When people are willing to love you it makes them the most important people in the world.’ She hoped that I would have a cloud of people that I considered important, because it would mean that I knew I was loved. And she hoped I would remember that when I was trying to figure out what kind of person I wanted to be. Did I want to be an important person, or something else?
Mary got that. She knew she was loved and that changed the way she looked at the world and how she considered herself. She was important to God, loved by God. So she knew what was going on in her life was important and she claimed that as her MO.
In spite of the world’s judgement of her as a failure according to its categories of power, importance, even goodness, she was a child of God, a messenger of God’s good news, and a proof that God’s love was changing the world. It changed her, it allowed her to go through the loneliness of her pregnancy, the destruction of her family’s expectations, the ostracism of her culture, the discomfort and fear of the conditions of her first delivery and still see God’s hand using her as a sign of love for all the world. And so she sang the song of a prophet. A thundering affirmation of everything God was doing. Oh yeah girl! You know what’s going on. Tell it like it is!
There is a wall in front of my desk that has pictures of folk I consider to be heroes, Jerry Garcia, Robin Williams, a man who died of AIDS, my wife, my mother, my brother, my father, Sir Francis Chinchester, some firemen I knew from 9-11, Mariano Rivera, Eli Manning, Martin Luther King, President Obama, and Mary. Quite a crew.
Somehow each of them allowed me to see what it meant to have courage in the face of adversity and to remember who they were, success or failure. They are all people, human people full of limitation and fear, just like I am. But somehow they held on to their own sense of purpose and value. And so I value them, and I feel a bit more able to be valuable because of them.
I want to be a hero. I guess that means I gotta listen to the boss, you know the king, you know, the Lord, you know, Jesus. He loves me. And that’s a fact.
Time to shine.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. Two of his books, I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder, have been published by Westminster John Knox Press. McKirachan was raised in a pastor's home and he is the brother of a pastor, and he has discovered his name indicates that he has druid roots. Storytelling seems to be a congenital disorder. He lives with his 21-year-old son Ben and his dog Sam.
* * *
The Love of Christ Makes a Difference
by Keith Wagner
Colossians 1:11-20
In my first pastorate I had three rural churches. Each one originated with a few families. The three churches had been served by the same pastor for decades but they rarely worshipped or worked together. Descendants of the charter members of each church still remained. Just about everyone in those churches was related in some way. Consequently it was very difficult for a newcomer to be accepted and find his/her way into the life of the congregation.
At one point one of the churches needed a custodian. There was a new family who had moved into the area and the woman was looking for work. They hired her and everyone was pleased with her work. But, to everyone’s surprise, she started coming to worship and eventually I convinced her to join the church. I never will forget the look of acceptance and joy in her eyes the day she was welcomed as a member.
Years later I returned to that same church to preach at their 150th anniversary service. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the woman who was once their custodian was now on the church council. She came up to me, hugged me and thanked me for helping her to find a church home. There again was that same look of joy and acceptance on her face. It was as though I was receiving a hug from Christ himself.
In this chapter of Colossians the Church is encouraged to embrace the supremacy of Christ. It is Christ-like attitudes that will make a difference and make for a more peaceful world. We meet God when we go beyond known boundaries and welcome someone new or different into our midst.
* * *
Trusting the Great Shepherd
by Keith Wagner
Jeremiah 23:1-6
In the devotional book, Sunset with God, from Honor Books, Tulsa, Oklahoma, there is a story that reminds me of trusting the great shepherd. Two young women had boarded a ferry to cross the English Channel from England to France. About halfway through their five-hour journey the ferry hit rough waters and a crew member told them they were experiencing some of the roughest seas of the year. The ferry tossed about rather violently on the waves, to the point where everyone, including the crew, felt ill.
At the time the ferry hit rough water, the two women were eating a light lunch in the back of the boat. They quickly put their sandwiches away. One woman said, “It’s hard to eat while you’re riding on the back of a bucking bronco.” When it became apparent that the pitching of the boat was not going to abate, one of the women decided to return to her assigned seat in the middle of the ferry. She soon fell sound asleep and experienced no more sea sickness. Toward the end of the trip, after the ferry had moved into calmer waters off the coast of France, the other woman joined her. “That was awful,” she said, “I was nauseous for two hours!”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said her friend, almost ashamed to admit that she hadn’t suffered as her friend had. “Weren’t you sick?” her friend asked. “No,” she admitted. “In this seat I must have been at the fulcrum of the boat’s motion. I could see the front and back of the boat were moving up and down but here, the motion was relatively calm. I simply imagined myself being rocked in the arms of God, and I fell asleep.”
Life can be very unsettling all around us and we can be bounced around by life’s storms, but by trusting the good shepherd we are taken care of. The woman trusted that she would experience little motion in her seat in the middle of the ship. Someone was looking over her.
God is the Great Shepherd who cares about us. God knows us and is watching over us. When God is the center of our lives we live with reassurance and hope, not fear and despair. Just as a shepherd protects his flock from the wolves, God protects us from those things in life that threaten us. When we find ourselves in the midst of a storm, we can find peace and safety by trusting in God.
When we went on our very first cruise my wife was fearful of getting sick. As a precaution she went to her doctor and he prescribed a patch that keeps you from getting sea sick. Since I was in the Navy I knew that the safest place to be during a storm was mid ship. Therefore I made sure our stateroom was located in the middle of the ship. There you don’t experience the extreme motion of bouncing up and down and side to side when the weather is rough. Between the medical expertise of my wife’s doctor and my Naval experience my wife did not get sick on her first cruise. She trusted the experience of her physician and she also trusted me.
In the "All in the Family" daily cartoon there is one cartoon which shows the family in four squares on a summer day. Like sheep they are all scattered from the flock. In one scene, kids are hollering in the front yard, playing ball. In another the dad is mowing grass in the backyard. In a third the two younger children are arguing and shouting at each other in the house. In the fourth scene the dad comes into the house playing his pocket radio, turned up too loud to be heard over the lawnmower. About that time the mother turns to dad and says, "Listen." She goes upstairs with Dad and there they find the youngest, PJ, crying in his bed after waking up from his nap. Despite all the noise, the mother’s ears were tuned in to the cry of her youngest child.
The shepherd is tuned in to the flock. He hears our cries of despair. He is sensitive to our needs and has empathy for our pain. Although there are times when it seems as though no one is listening, God is. God hears our cries of help since God is tuned in to our problems, our trials and our tribulations. We can trust that he hears our cries for help.
Rev. Dr. Keith Wagner is the pastor of St. John's UCC in Troy, Ohio. He has served churches in Southwest Ohio for over three decades. He is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ and has an M.Div. from Methodist Theological School, Delaware, Ohio, and a D.Min. from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. He has also been an adjunct professor at Edison Community College, Piqua, Ohio. He and his wife, Lin, live in Springfield, Ohio.
*****************************************
StoryShare, November 20, 2016, issue.
Copyright 2016 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
"Who's the Boss?" by C. David McKirachan
"The Love of Christ Makes a Difference" by Keith Wagner
"Trusting the Great Shepherd" by Keith Wagner
Who's the Boss?
by C. David McKirachan
Luke 1:68-79
Christ the King Sunday has always been one of my favorites. Admittedly, it falls just before Thanksgiving and Advent. Churches sizzle with preparation and excitement. And I do too. But this moment, the end of our liturgical calendar is a glory. We celebrate the lordship of Jesus, the ascendency of the incarnation to its rightful place in our lives and in all creation.
Its mystery is the mystery that creeps into all our faith stories. It moves up stream against the thundering demands of our existence. They insist that we should affirm the power and importance of the world’s priorities. It is so hard to focus on what’s really going on as we proclaim Christ as King that it gives us stiff necks and pains in various body parts trying to steer the mob in directions that make no sense to them. The two passages from Luke given to us for this Sunday express the whip saw perfectly.
Mary is one of my heroes. She was the first disciple, she refused to allow her potential as a good girl, a good wife, a good mother to drown her calling, and she knew that God had chosen her to be a prophetic moment for all who would come after. She also knew the price she would have to pay for that privilege and she did it with a will. She was a warrior of the light.
So why does she come up to help us to get a handle on Christ the King?
When I was a sprout, my mother asked me who the most important people in my life were. That was easy. My father and she. She nodded and thanked me for considering her as a candidate. She asked me why I considered them to be so important. That was easy too. Because they loved me. She nodded and told me that she hoped when she asked me that question again that I had the smarts to remember my basis for evaluation. ‘When people are willing to love you it makes them the most important people in the world.’ She hoped that I would have a cloud of people that I considered important, because it would mean that I knew I was loved. And she hoped I would remember that when I was trying to figure out what kind of person I wanted to be. Did I want to be an important person, or something else?
Mary got that. She knew she was loved and that changed the way she looked at the world and how she considered herself. She was important to God, loved by God. So she knew what was going on in her life was important and she claimed that as her MO.
In spite of the world’s judgement of her as a failure according to its categories of power, importance, even goodness, she was a child of God, a messenger of God’s good news, and a proof that God’s love was changing the world. It changed her, it allowed her to go through the loneliness of her pregnancy, the destruction of her family’s expectations, the ostracism of her culture, the discomfort and fear of the conditions of her first delivery and still see God’s hand using her as a sign of love for all the world. And so she sang the song of a prophet. A thundering affirmation of everything God was doing. Oh yeah girl! You know what’s going on. Tell it like it is!
There is a wall in front of my desk that has pictures of folk I consider to be heroes, Jerry Garcia, Robin Williams, a man who died of AIDS, my wife, my mother, my brother, my father, Sir Francis Chinchester, some firemen I knew from 9-11, Mariano Rivera, Eli Manning, Martin Luther King, President Obama, and Mary. Quite a crew.
Somehow each of them allowed me to see what it meant to have courage in the face of adversity and to remember who they were, success or failure. They are all people, human people full of limitation and fear, just like I am. But somehow they held on to their own sense of purpose and value. And so I value them, and I feel a bit more able to be valuable because of them.
I want to be a hero. I guess that means I gotta listen to the boss, you know the king, you know, the Lord, you know, Jesus. He loves me. And that’s a fact.
Time to shine.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. Two of his books, I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder, have been published by Westminster John Knox Press. McKirachan was raised in a pastor's home and he is the brother of a pastor, and he has discovered his name indicates that he has druid roots. Storytelling seems to be a congenital disorder. He lives with his 21-year-old son Ben and his dog Sam.
* * *
The Love of Christ Makes a Difference
by Keith Wagner
Colossians 1:11-20
In my first pastorate I had three rural churches. Each one originated with a few families. The three churches had been served by the same pastor for decades but they rarely worshipped or worked together. Descendants of the charter members of each church still remained. Just about everyone in those churches was related in some way. Consequently it was very difficult for a newcomer to be accepted and find his/her way into the life of the congregation.
At one point one of the churches needed a custodian. There was a new family who had moved into the area and the woman was looking for work. They hired her and everyone was pleased with her work. But, to everyone’s surprise, she started coming to worship and eventually I convinced her to join the church. I never will forget the look of acceptance and joy in her eyes the day she was welcomed as a member.
Years later I returned to that same church to preach at their 150th anniversary service. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the woman who was once their custodian was now on the church council. She came up to me, hugged me and thanked me for helping her to find a church home. There again was that same look of joy and acceptance on her face. It was as though I was receiving a hug from Christ himself.
In this chapter of Colossians the Church is encouraged to embrace the supremacy of Christ. It is Christ-like attitudes that will make a difference and make for a more peaceful world. We meet God when we go beyond known boundaries and welcome someone new or different into our midst.
* * *
Trusting the Great Shepherd
by Keith Wagner
Jeremiah 23:1-6
In the devotional book, Sunset with God, from Honor Books, Tulsa, Oklahoma, there is a story that reminds me of trusting the great shepherd. Two young women had boarded a ferry to cross the English Channel from England to France. About halfway through their five-hour journey the ferry hit rough waters and a crew member told them they were experiencing some of the roughest seas of the year. The ferry tossed about rather violently on the waves, to the point where everyone, including the crew, felt ill.
At the time the ferry hit rough water, the two women were eating a light lunch in the back of the boat. They quickly put their sandwiches away. One woman said, “It’s hard to eat while you’re riding on the back of a bucking bronco.” When it became apparent that the pitching of the boat was not going to abate, one of the women decided to return to her assigned seat in the middle of the ferry. She soon fell sound asleep and experienced no more sea sickness. Toward the end of the trip, after the ferry had moved into calmer waters off the coast of France, the other woman joined her. “That was awful,” she said, “I was nauseous for two hours!”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said her friend, almost ashamed to admit that she hadn’t suffered as her friend had. “Weren’t you sick?” her friend asked. “No,” she admitted. “In this seat I must have been at the fulcrum of the boat’s motion. I could see the front and back of the boat were moving up and down but here, the motion was relatively calm. I simply imagined myself being rocked in the arms of God, and I fell asleep.”
Life can be very unsettling all around us and we can be bounced around by life’s storms, but by trusting the good shepherd we are taken care of. The woman trusted that she would experience little motion in her seat in the middle of the ship. Someone was looking over her.
God is the Great Shepherd who cares about us. God knows us and is watching over us. When God is the center of our lives we live with reassurance and hope, not fear and despair. Just as a shepherd protects his flock from the wolves, God protects us from those things in life that threaten us. When we find ourselves in the midst of a storm, we can find peace and safety by trusting in God.
When we went on our very first cruise my wife was fearful of getting sick. As a precaution she went to her doctor and he prescribed a patch that keeps you from getting sea sick. Since I was in the Navy I knew that the safest place to be during a storm was mid ship. Therefore I made sure our stateroom was located in the middle of the ship. There you don’t experience the extreme motion of bouncing up and down and side to side when the weather is rough. Between the medical expertise of my wife’s doctor and my Naval experience my wife did not get sick on her first cruise. She trusted the experience of her physician and she also trusted me.
In the "All in the Family" daily cartoon there is one cartoon which shows the family in four squares on a summer day. Like sheep they are all scattered from the flock. In one scene, kids are hollering in the front yard, playing ball. In another the dad is mowing grass in the backyard. In a third the two younger children are arguing and shouting at each other in the house. In the fourth scene the dad comes into the house playing his pocket radio, turned up too loud to be heard over the lawnmower. About that time the mother turns to dad and says, "Listen." She goes upstairs with Dad and there they find the youngest, PJ, crying in his bed after waking up from his nap. Despite all the noise, the mother’s ears were tuned in to the cry of her youngest child.
The shepherd is tuned in to the flock. He hears our cries of despair. He is sensitive to our needs and has empathy for our pain. Although there are times when it seems as though no one is listening, God is. God hears our cries of help since God is tuned in to our problems, our trials and our tribulations. We can trust that he hears our cries for help.
Rev. Dr. Keith Wagner is the pastor of St. John's UCC in Troy, Ohio. He has served churches in Southwest Ohio for over three decades. He is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ and has an M.Div. from Methodist Theological School, Delaware, Ohio, and a D.Min. from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. He has also been an adjunct professor at Edison Community College, Piqua, Ohio. He and his wife, Lin, live in Springfield, Ohio.
*****************************************
StoryShare, November 20, 2016, issue.
Copyright 2016 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
