[Mcgregorpage] McGregorPage #542, Epiphany 6, 2/11/07

[rmcgregoralbq at aol.com]

Epiphany 6, February 11, 2007

 Jeremiah 17:5-10
Psalm 1
1Corinthians 15:12-20
Luke 6:17-26

Consider Your Roots

We think of the United States as a rootless society, a mobile society 
anyway, but rootlessness is not that new.  "The wicked are not so, but 
are like chaff that the wind drives away."  (Psalm 1:4) Jeremiah 
foresaw the uprooting of Jerusalem and exhorted his country to root 
itself in God to fortify itself against that day.  He asks us to think 
of ourselves as two sorts of bushes, the one trying to live in a salt 
flat, the blistering dead end of a seasonal stream, and the other in 
root's reach of a stream that always flows.  The truth of God's word 
operates at two levels here.  Jeremiah is talking about living in 
Jerusalem instead of a wasteland.  He is also talking about the 
invisible roots of faith that hold even when the physical roots are 
torn.  Paul points to the taproot, the resurrection of Jesus.  Luke 
helps us remember that Christians are rooted also in the radical, 
sacrificial love taught and lived by Jesus.

The Great Depression drove my parents from their hometowns in search of 
work. They found each other but never returned home. I was to see only 
one grandparent only once thereafter. As an itinerant preacher I have 
pulled up the tent stakes about every four years throughout my work 
life.  Our children when they were grown scattered to the four winds 
seeking their fortunes.  I am not complaining. Life hasn't singled me 
out for this treatment.  Life is treating most of us this way.  We poke 
at the ashes of genealogy looking for roots.  We come to "The Antique 
Road Show" clutching trinkets of the past.  There is no "home place," 
no hometown, no repository of memory and meaning, none that is, if it 
were not for our shared faith and the church that gives it a home.

There is a "home place," a shared experience that has rooted us from 
generation to generation, the resurrection of Jesus and the message 
flowing from that event.  When Jerusalem fell we still had a "home 
place."  When Rome fell we still had a "home place."  When secularism 
took over public discourse we still had a "home place."  When Western 
Civilization gasps its last, we will still have a "home place," we will 
that is if our children can find it, will return to it, are rooted in 
it.  "Train up a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old 
he will not depart from it."  (Proverbs 22:6) But if there is to be a 
"home place" for our children, a "home place" where they can always 
find us and we can always find ourselves, we must build it.  Our 
children can't have roots we don't have, can't have roots the church 
doesn't have.  Children will always leave home to seek their fortunes.  
They will sever their roots just to prove they can.  But a church 
somewhere, sometime will invite our children back to the "home place," 
back to faith in the resurrection and an ethic of sacrificial love.  If 
our children are not to be like bushes trying to grow in a salt flat, 
not to be the chaff scattered by the wind, we must root them in faith 
 from the beginning and welcome them back home when they come to 
consider their roots again.


May these thoughts strengthen you.

An Open Letter to Fellow Pastors
>From Roland McGregor, United Methodist Pastor
(an e-mail service)

[See Web Page address below for a Children’s Message coordinated with 
these lections.]

http://www.webspawner.com/users/ChildPage/

Multiple Sermon Starter Essays are available at
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  --Copyright 2007, Roland McGregor, all rights reserved—
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