Lent5: Rehab: Promise

• Fifth Sunday of Lent

with Jeremiah 31:31-34

www.FirstChurchBville.com    @FirstUMCBville   @kerrfunk

This sermon was broadcast on Facebook Live 3/18/18 https://www.facebook.com/FUMCWV/

#rehab #promise #umcgbod #lent

• 40 day season of spiritual preparation before the Easter celebration.

This season we’re following the lectionary and the denomination’s suggestion for a sermon series called REHAB. Why REHAB? As a part of our spiritual preparation before the Easter celebration. We’ve talked about the need to follow Jesus into the wilderness of rehab, open to the possibility that in the prayer, fasting, self-denial of the desert, and even in the face of pain, discomfort, and suffering, God can be working in us, God may in fact need the focus of the desert for us to be positioned for healing.

• One thing we may always have to deal with is the present vs the projected future, losing sight of the long term goal. In recovery I can get bogged down in the craving of the moment, or I can trust in the promise of hope, even if I can’t see it just yet.

[story from A Prayer For Owen Meany when Owen and John are playing basketball at dusk. Owen asks if John can see the statue at the other end of the lot, even though it’s dark. John says he knows it’s there even if he can’t see it. Owen says that’s how it is with God. I know he’s there even if I can’t see him.]

• Story of Jeremiah. 120 years after fall of northern kingdom. Real time things are looking bad. Jeremiah clings to hope of God’s promise “I will be with you.” Jeremiah even purchases land, demonstrating solidarity and planting hope.

• Jack Lengyl responds to Red Dawson’s cry that the Young Thundering Herd is disgracing the 75 that died. Not today not tomorrow, this season or next, but one day winning will matter, and then we’ll honor them.

• Another thing about WeAreMarshall is community. Team 71 lost. Team 72 lost. It’d be a decade before winning season, but the wins that would come could only come if the team didn’t stop, and the winning team in 84 belonged to all of Marshall for the years prior.

• And along the way, when one of us can’t see past the struggle, the community steps in bearing the affected while bearing the hope the promise as well.
I will be with you.

• I will be with you, you are not alone. Your sin grief shame are in the past. You will smile and laugh again. You will be free from slavery.

• Song Who Am I? by Casting Crowns

Not because of who I am
But because of what you've done
Not because of what I've done
But because of who you are

Live now while hoping in promise of future. 

Bear hope and bear brethren.

• May God use this time of Lent to shape us into disciples and witnesses to God’s kingdom.

• Hymn 368 My Hope is Built

Jeremiah 31:31-34 (HCSB)

³¹ Listen to the Lord’s declaration: “Look, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. ³² This one will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant they broke even though I had married them”—says the Lord. ³³ “Instead, this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days. I will put My teaching within them and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be My people. ³⁴ No longer will one teach his neighbor or his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know Me, from the least to the greatest of them.” This is what the Lord declares. “For I will forgive their wrongdoing and never again remember their sin.”ò

John 12:20-28 (HCSB)

²⁰ Now some Greeks were among those who went up to worship at the festival. ²¹ So they came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we want to see Jesus.”

²² Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. ²³ Jesus replied to them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. ²⁴ I assure you: Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains by itself. But if it dies, it produces a large crop. ²⁵ The one who loves his life will lose it, and the one who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. ²⁶ If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me. Where I am, there My servant also will be. If anyone serves Me, the Father will honor him.

²⁷ “Now My soul is troubled,” Jesus said. “What should I say—Father, save Me from this hour? But that is why I came to this hour. ²⁸ Father, glorify Your name!”

Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again!” ò