On January 12th, Tim Reardon preached from Luke 7:24-30 and Acts 2:40-47. He brought in John the Baptist from Luke and the community of Acts 2 — both for the welcoming of new members and a baptism we celebrated that day, and for our upcoming Consecration Sunday, the day we make our annual commitments of time, talents, and finances for the year ahead.
The passage that we have from Luke today is this scene right after John’s
disciples have come to Jesus, essentially to ask if he is the Messiah. Jesus
responds by healing, driving out demons, and proclaiming the good news of God’s kingdom. He tells John’s disciples to go back and report all these things.
Then, Jesus begins to talk about John, and one of the things I love about this scene is the tension between the wilderness and palaces. I’ve talked about the wilderness before, how it is an important theme in the Gospels. In Luke, the Word of God comes in the wilderness, John baptizes in the wilderness, and Jesus himself comes from the wilderness into inhabited places to preach God’s kingdom only to retreat to the wilderness to pray and recharge. Jesus gathers a people and feeds them from 5 loaves and two fishes in the wilderness.
The wilderness or desert (same word) for many is a threatening place, a
destabilizing place, a place on the edges, but also a place of possibility, a place away from everything that structures and dominates. Delores S. Williams, Womanist theologian in her book Sister in the Wilderness, speaks of the wilderness as a place of resistance, survival, and transformational encounter with Jesus, a place away.
Later in the sermon, Tim asks us, “What did you come out to PMC to see? Pasadena Mennonite Church is primarily lay led, meaning that:
Most of you will know this, but it is worth mentioning. Our community is quite intentionally, and often very inefficiently, lay led. Nothing happens if we don’t do it. Have you ever thought “We should really be doing this as a church,” but you do not have the space to do it? That means it doesn’t get done. We can only do what we together commit to do as a community.
Hear more about the wilderness, as well as the variety of tasks we tackle as a community through the audio link below.
Pasadena Mennonite Church 