There are thousands of intersections in Cape May. What intersections are the most remarkable to you? Which is closest to where you live? Closest to where you work or go to school. What is your impression of your intersection? Is it busy with traffic? Do kids wait there for their school bus? Consider the corner of Seashore and Academy Roads, for example. For hundreds of years, our intersection has been a gathering place, a sending place, a safe place for neighbors to worship Christ, pray, and serve the community together. Intersections are crossroads of activity. This Good News message from Luke 18 about a widow and a judge. Why did she go to the judge at night? What does Jesus want us to learn from the judge’s action even though he hated God and others!? Join us at corner of Faith Avenue and Justice Street where Jesus is looking for faith in action. Invest a few minutes to listen to Pastor Kevin’s message and meet Jesus at the corner of Faith Avenue and Justice Street. What will you find there?
This week, Pastor Kevin’s message starts with the disciples asking for more faith to meet a particularly thorny problem about forgiveness. But in response, Jesus says they had all the faith required, it just needed to get in motion! So its like riding a bike, because there’s a huge difference in outcomes between riding a stationary bike and a moving bicycle. We’ll learn about a Scientific American study that Steve Jobs shared many years ago. The research evaluated which species on the planet was the most efficient in locomotion. While the mighty condor was above any other species, beating even a human in an automobile, it was a human riding a bike that blew the condor away from its top spot! We will learn we don’t need more faith, in a message titled, Faith: Bicycle For the Spirit.
We also gather for Global Peace and Witness- World Communion Sunday with an opportunity to receive a special offering to help put our faith into action locally and around the world. You’re invited to join us for inspiring worship as as we gather around the Lord’s Table. All this and more this week at Cold Spring Church, your neighborhood stop for moving faith.
Coffee had a nickname. The Devil’s drink! How did that happen?
About 900 AD, Ethiopian Cadi the goat herder, discovered his goats eating berries that made them go crazy from what we know to be caffein! He tried it and made a drink. Eventually, word of mouth taste tests promoted the drink to Yemen. 600 years passed and in 1511 it comes to Mecca 🕋. First is banned by the Muslim clerics because this unwanted innovation with unknown consequences and side effects kept drinkers congregating in coffee bars instead of the mosque! But eventually, the Chief Muslim cleric enjoyed it so much, he lifted the ban! A hundred years after that, coffee reaches the trade routes to Europe. By 1600, Europeans are loving coffee, but this drink innovation was hurting the pocketbooks of proprietors selling beer 🍺and wine 🍷. Foreign innovation from the competing Muslim Ottoman Empire brought on another ban.
Church leaders called it the Devil’s drink! Coffee houses threatened the beer houses.
One day, anti-coffee Bishops petitioned Pope Clement 8 to excommunicate anyone who drank the Devil’s Drink! But, when the Pope asked to taste it, he found it to be delicious!
Instead of banning coffee, the Pontiff blessed coffee and said it should be baptized as the new Christian drink!
We fear new things and we doubt that something we believe to be “new” can be true. There is an anxiety over loss. When we doubt, we are protecting ourselves from loss.
With everything new, we risk the future we had been planning.
While we celebrate Easter every year, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead means we can enjoy a resurrection-way of life every day. At Sunset Beach’s sunrise service, the message offered resources on what we do with fear. Fear is understandable. Even expected to be experienced from time to time. But what about Doubt? This week, bring your doubts, your struggles of faith as we look in on many women and men disciples who expressed their doubt. Jesus appeared in their midst! Where did Thomas put his doubt? Find out where to put your doubt this Sunday as we gather for the Second Sunday of Easter and hear a message from John 20:19-31. (Hint: Doubt is not lessoned by more facts, but with personal experience with the truth. Jesus is alive! Meet him and see!)
Do you have a nickname? Sure. Many of us do. Some are very complimentary. Others, not so much. But if a nickname may fit us initially, we can always change our nickname to describe the best of us. For example, do you remember the disciple’s name who doubted Jesus was alive after dying on the cross for us? Yes. Doubting Thomas. Actually, Doubting was not his first name! It was his nickname given by others describing his lack of faith. We doubt when we don’t fully believe, when we don’t yet understand something entirely. Like when our parents tell us not to eat too much sugar, Or to go to bed early. We say to ourselves, “That can’t be true! Its just too crazy!” So we can give nicknames to our parents. They are “out of it”, or “Mean” or “Don’t understand me.” But we figure out most of the time these nicknames, labels, don’t need to stick because people can grow and change. We grow. Our parents grow.
Doubting Thomas grew, too. He came to understand that Jesus was truly alive! Its unfortunate that through the centuries we have kept Thomas in the Doubting box. Instead, let’s start a new tradition. Thomas’s nickname is Believing Thomas. And that’s a great nickname for us, too.
Have you ever felt at the End of your rope?! Sure, we all have. The rope is a familiar metaphor for many of life’s experiences and activities. Sometimes we can feel like we’re getting all Tied Up, or walking a Tightrope just to get through our day, or wistfully longing for the simple joy of Jumping Rope as a child in the neighborhood. Remember playing Tug-of-war on the field? It may have Ben a while since you enjoyed the Rope Swing in your backyard. Ropes can also keep us on the path and guide us in the best direction.Â
Our energizing message this week is from Mark 13 and Hebrews 4 and you are invited to consider Jesus’ promise to be with us in our present and our future. While visions of the “end times” may result in some anxieties, the end times is not at the end of our rope. Rather, Jesus promises to be faithful to us… “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23). Even when Jesus envisioned the future destruction of Herod’s Great Temple, do not fear. Even the uncertainties ahead can result in normal fears, God promises to stand with us in our fear, to tie us as with a safe and secure rope, not only to himself, but to one another. Sure, we may not immediately correlate encouragement and safety to former church experiences, but at Cold Spring Church, we not only stand on the promises of God, we stand on the promises of God together.
Did you know that the The Latin root of the word “religion” is re-ligare, which means to be tied to a yoke? Many monastic orders still require the monk to tie a rope around his waist. It’s not a rope that keeps the cassock from falling. It was a symbol of God’s promises. The rope symbolized that we are all bound together in ropes of hope and faith and love.
Find Ropes of Living Hope this week at Cold Spring Presbyterian Church.
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!
What do you want for halloween? Candy?
What do you need for Halloween? Faith!
 The Gospel lesson (John 6:24-35) continues the image of Jesus as the bread of life. This is particularly fitting for communion Sunday when we gather at the table.
Sometimes our vision is obscured. In the Gospel story, Jesus has compassion on the people because they keep looking for physical bread (what they can see), and he says “I have so much more to give!” They just don’t see it. What do you ask Jesus for? Is your vision and faith prompting you to ask for something beyond yourself? How can God use you to bless others. Feed the hungry. Quench the thirst. And remember God wants to do way beyond our wildest imaginations!
Here is an eye chart. Read the row. Nice. You see pretty good. Try these goggles on! New swim goggles. Tell me what you see. Oh, not so much? Why is that? There is something on the lens obscuring your vision. Sorry. Take this lens cleaner and let’s clean them up. Now you can see clearly. You know, God is doing all sorts of great things all around us. But some of the things God does can’t be easily seen. Love. Forgiveness. Hope. Peace. Our vision is clouded, our eyes of faith are obscured. What we need is a spiritual lens cleaning cloth. Here’s a lens cleaning cloth for your glasses. The spiritual cloth is made from hope and faith. Remember to begin your day with clear vision so we see God’s love in action right in fron to you.