Author: admin_tgc

Mark’s account of the Gospel, and especially his story of the resurrection (which he would have learned from Peter, an eyewitness) is the worst. The story leaves out some of the best details and then ends without much good news at all.

The tomb is empty. But now what?

This Easter, amidst a pandemic and some difficulty seeing the good beyond the present moment when so much of our world is in crisis, we learn something meaningful and powerful about how Mark tells the story of the resurrection. And we learn it’s not so bad after all.

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This Sunday, we enter into Holy Week. And many of the things we treasure most about these days will be absent. We won’t break bread around one long table for our beautiful Maundy Thursday meal and foot washing service. We won’t gather in a hushed and holy sanctuary to sing and pray and weep our way through the passion of Jesus on Good Friday. We won’t hold a prayer vigil on the lawn on Holy Saturday. There won’t be flowers on the cross or eggs on the lawn or pews packed with beautiful people on Easter Sunday.

We won’t have any of those things and I will miss them.

But, these things we won’t have—they were never the things that made this week holy. The things we’ll lack were never the things we were supposed to be celebrating. The moments we’ll miss were never meant to be the sacred center of this holy week that tethers us to our faith.

They were only signs. Beautiful and powerful—but only signs.  They were never holy—they only pointed us toward the Holy in our midst.

The life-giving Holy reality remains, and we may be able to see it and celebrate it and experience it more fully this year than ever.

I believe that these might be the most powerful holy days we ever live.

They will be stripped down and strange and uncomfortable. And they will help us see that it is God who gives us life, not our sacred rituals. We don’t produce Holy Week and Easter for ourselves—we make a space for God to reveal salvation through Jesus Christ.

So, I invite you to enter into this Holy Week with all the real feelings you have—doubt, loss, and fear are welcome. But, make room for some unreasonable expectations and wild anticipations. Because—it’s Holy Week, and there is power and life in the cross of Jesus our savior.

When Jesus entered Jerusalem, those who understood who he was and why he was coming waved branches to celebrate. They rejoiced that he was the savior of the world. They celebrated that he was coming to destroy everything that destroys us. Authorities tried to shut them up, but Jesus said nothing can stop the joy and hope of those who know him.

So, nothing will stop us either.

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This Sunday, we smash our last idol: control. None of us have it anyway, so it’s long past time to stop worshiping it. And we learn how to worship what gives us life: grace. It’s even more than you thought.

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We prayed and plotted out this Smashing Idols worship series months ago, asking the Holy Spirit to give us wisdom and direction. And, how amazing is it that God led us to decide that on March 22, 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting public health and economic fallout, we would explore Fear and the false god that it is—how it steals and imprisons us and how we can break its power in our life.

Listen in to be encouraged as we keep moving, despite our fears, into God’s calling for us in this season.

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Greed is probably our favorite idol to redefine. We agree that greed for other people is a problem. But for us? Well, we just put another label on it and re-frame the situation as if it is good for us to have the blessings we do, regardless of how it impacts someone else. But greed is more than consuming or saving . Greed is the assumption that everything — including every blessing — is for our own personal benefit and advantage.

That’s what makes greed an idol: the fact that we find security in it. And if there’s anything we’ve learned over the last week of crisis dealing with COVID-19, it’s that our storehouses of anything material are not truly secure.

So what do we do in response? We invite the Holy Spirit to smash an idol we have been grasping on to so that God can replace it with something better. Listen in to learn how.

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“Love people and use things,” the old saying goes, “because the opposite never works.” Still, we constantly find ourselves doing the opposite—loving things and using people. Anytime we treat a person like an object, even if only in our thoughts, we destroy a little piece of our own humanity. We hide it, we rationalize it, we normalize it—but Jesus isn’t having it.

So, listen in as we talk about the way Jesus defines lust, as opposed to what The Church or culture says it is.

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This Sunday, the first in the holy season of Lent, we begin a new worship series called “Smashing Idols.” You may be thinking—when is the last time anybody saw an idol? I promise you, they’re hidden in plain sight.

An idol is anything we put our trust in other than God—and, these days—our idols aren’t statues that we bow down before. Honestly, they are the sins we’ve normalized and enshrined in our personalities. This Sunday, we’re starting with the biggest idol of all—pride.

It’s pride that led the first humans to turning away from God in the garden, and it’s pride that blinds us to our own sinfulness. The good news, though, is that Jesus teaches us what it is like to come face-to-face with the enemy and to be tempted towards and yet turn down the spiritual snare of pride.

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It was love that led Jesus to put his own beloved body between us and the raging powers of sin, death, fear, hate, and violence. And it is that same love that leads us close to our enemies in humility and, even closer, to home.

Because the truth is that sometimes, surprisingly, it is hard to let love lead us to the ones we love the most. To lean into this mystery, we are looking at one of Jesus’ most familiar stories, the parable of the prodigal son. In particular, we’re focusing on the unsatisfying ending of the older brother standing outside the homecoming party, not celebrating, but instead resenting his younger brother’s restoration to the family.

Mother Theresa famously said, “if you want to save the world, first go home and love your family.” Too often, when we do embrace the radical root of Christianity, we sometimes act as though we are too spiritually elite to love the people closest to us. But if it’s true that the way we love our enemies is the way we love God (which, by the way, it is true), then it’s equally true that the way we love our families is the way we love God.

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The whole country is focused on love this week, but by the time Sunday rolls around, everyone will have moved on. The flowers will be wilted, the chocolate gone, and the stores will be decorated for Easter.

But at The Grove, we’ll still be worshipping, talking, and singing about love. Just not the kind of love that’s celebrated in Hallmark cards.

When we let the love of Christ lead us, it directs us towards the people we least want to love. Strangers. Enemies. People who won’t love us back.

But like Jesus said, “If you love those who love you, what good is that? Even sinners love those who love them back.” The love of Jesus leads us towards those we have no earthly reason to love. And if that just seems wrong to you, well then you’ll find good company with the prophet Jonah. We’re stopping to take a seat next to him underneath the unpredictable plant, and listening as he argues with God about the unfairness of God compelling us to serve our enemies. Then, we’ll hear what God has to say about it.

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Last summer, our young people returned from the Montreat Youth Conference full of passion about all they’d seen and heard. They spent a week worshiping, studying, and reflecting on the theme “Let Love Lead.” As they shared their testimonies, we all saw how this radically simple concept gave them a powerful way to claim their Christian identity.

I listened, that day in July, and thought we need this here, too.

So for the next three weeks, our worship theme is “Let Love Lead.” We’ll dig into the beautiful hard truth that God is love. We are comfortable with that truth, as long as it stays a slogan on our coffee mugs, but when we let the Holy Love of God lead us, we end up in hard and dangerous places.

So come on in and join us (in spirit and in podcast) for worship. Let the holy truth that God is love catch your soul on fire. See how that love will lead us through the valley of the shadow of death, loss and pain—into the glory of freedom and salvation.

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