Remember growing up with the Sears Christmas Wish Book? I do. Flipping through pages filled with toys and gift ideas delighted kids of all ages as they marked their favorite items, hoping mom and dad noticed in time for Christmas. What did you wish for?
Beginning in 1886, 22-year-olds Richard Sears and Alveh Roebuck did more than wish for a brighter future when they started a retail business that sold, well, anything. Whatever you wanted, watches, clothes, furniture, chances were that Sears, Roebuck, and Co., could deliver it to your door. In fact, they could deliver the door, too, attached to the pre-fabricated house you purchased out of the catalogue! The business seemed to peak in 1969, ironically as it built what was then the “largest skyscraper in the world” in Chicago.
Diversifying into other product lines from brokerage, insurance, and pre-internet services failed to improve the company’s health, and by the 1990’s, Walmart, and later internet companies like Amazon, made the Sears and the Christmas Wish Book obsolete. Desperate attempts to stay afloat couldn’t save the struggling retailer, which listed $6.9 billion in assets and $11.3 billion in liabilities. An economist explained the retailer’s demise: “Sears and Kmart simply trudged along and thought that was good enough.” Good enough is rarely good enough, and on October 15, the Sears Holdings Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after 132 years in business. While sad, there’s more for us to learn from the wish book story.
What do you want? Jesus asked this question of his good friends, James and John, and you wouldn’t have guessed what was on their wish list! This Sunday, let’s get our wish lists out for Jesus to examine. We will also take a look at Job’s wish list, too, and we’ll discover that God delivered more than Job bargained for!
What do you need when you go trick or treating? Candy, right? What’s you favorite? Sure. Twist. Snickers. Skittles! But, what do you need? Not candy! How about faith? Jesus said that if you have faith even a small as this mustard seed, you can move mountains! Here is a mustard seed. Can you even see it? It’s super small. It’s one of the very smallest of the seeds, yet it grows and produces a great plant. You probably don’t need more candy, and guess what? You don’t need more faith, either. All you need to do is trust in God and know that God loves you more than you could possibly know, and wants your very best and has given you all you truly need in Jesus Christ. So this Halloween, as you fill your bag with candy, fill your life with faith and see what God will do!
Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). The word abundantly could also be translated ultimately. Jesus sails our life can be an ultimate life, a life experience beyond our greatest hopes or soaring imaginations! This week, we will find out how to live an ultimate life as we consider three related Bible texts about integrity, living our lives with a coherent sense of truth, respect, and character (Job 1:1ff; Hebrews 1:1-2ff; and Mark 10:2-16.) We will also learns few lessons from the Frisbee!
What are some rules you remember? No running down the hallway? Sitting quietly in class. Hands and feet to yourself! Sure. Rules are necessary so that everyone can be treated fairly, with dignity and respect. We live our best life when we follow the right rules. You know, the game of Frisbee has rules, too. Here’s a Frisbee for you. Our game is to toss the Frisbee to the pew and the rule is throw it just hard enough so that it doesn’t end up in rear of the sanctuary! And it has to land on the bench. O.K. Play! Great. So each of you played the game and you followed the rules. God has given us some rules, too. We find them in God’s love letter to us we call the Bible. In the Bible we learn about how Jesus lived his life and how to make our life look more and more like his! They guide us. They remind us. And when we have Jesus in our heart, we can learn and grow to follow the rules on our own. Whether in games or in life, following the rules helps us to treat others with dignity and respect, and also have a lot of fun as we live our very best selves. Enjoy the Frisbees! 
Do you know what time it is? Just now, you likely paused to check. You may have looked to the clock on the wall, or the phone in your pocket. Maybe you raised your arm to glance at the watch on your wrist. Or called out, “Hey, Siri, what time is it?” You have your answer but what time is it, really? You’ve heard it said, “We have all the time in the world!” But have also been cautioned, “Time’s a’wasting.” How do we really know what time it is?
It’s all about time. How do we know what time it is, or know if if the clock we have is set correctly? What do we do? Live “out of sync” or reset? Our choices: Try to set everybody else to our time (not a good choice!), or the better choice to set our time to God’s time. Let’s ask God to reset our clocks and keep in time with God.
Make America Great Again is , well, a great slogan! It stirs our imaginations to conjure images of America as Great! But what is our frame of reference to be Great? Back a few centuries ago, America was considered Great because it was the friend of all, welcoming of every religion, even the Puritans (who were kicked out of England because their faith was just weird), the Anabaptists (who fled Europe because their faith was non-conformist), the Roman Catholics (who were feared to be worshipping a prince in a tall white hat instead of the Prince of Peace), and welcoming of Italians, Germans, Scots, French, Asian, African, and South American countries, too. Being great means no one is left behind. There is room for you. One more. The ones no one else seems to want. The others who are forgotten. Being Great as in winning the Great War, enjoying the Greatest Show on Earth, hearing the Greatest story ever told, singing Great is Thy Faithfulness, and recalling Jesus tell his disciples, Greater things you will do, are all, as I said, really great. Aspiring to greatness can be a great thing to aspire to. But what is great? And how do we as individuals become truly great? How do our communities become great? How can Cold Spring Church become great?
What’s the difference between children and adults? Age? How about speed? Listen to the following pieces of music. Two pieces. Same music. Same pianist. Same piano. What’s different? (Glenn Gould, Goldberg Variations: 1. 1955. 2. 2005.) The first was faster than the second. The number “50” represents the difference between these two performances. 50 years between them. When younger, we move faster. As we become older, we move slower. But the childlike love for the music in 1955 was the same childlike love Glenn Gould played in 2005. All of us are children. We just move at different speeds. God loves all children, no matter how fast or slow they move!
Who am I? This week, Jesus asks his disciples who others say he is. Our identity, sense of self, is something that is uniquely ours, yet also something that others influence and may even have opinions about. Many of us struggle as we attempt to deal with the opinions of others, or we seem to invest a lot of energy in trying to live up to the unrealistic or artificial expectations of others. We also take steps to “protect our identity” whether it is the password on our bank account or smart phone, the key code on our garage door, or the safe keeping of our wallet. Some aspects of our identity can be “stolen” but our true self is not only safe in God’s hands, it is not static either because as we learn and grow, our sense of self grows, as well. Our text this week from Mark 7:27-38 invites us into a dramatic encounter with Jesus who gives a rather shocking answer regarding his identity. His messianic identity of suffering, rejection, death, and resurrection is hard for the disciples to comprehend, and Peter tries to dissuade Jesus from his mission. Jesus’ disciples must see themselves as “followers” more than
This week, Jesus asks his disciples who others say he is. Our identity, sense of self, is something that is uniquely ours, yet also something that others influence and may even have opinions about.