A little over a week ago, I preached my first sermon as Pastor of Orlando Presbyterian Church.
I was a little nervous and worked diligently to choose the best words I could find to begin my time in Orlando and try to communicate with my new congregation. I chose these words…
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.
Those are, of course, the first words of the first book in the Harry Potter series. I thought those words authored by J.K. Rowling had worked well for her, so I thought they would work well for me and mine as well.
In this new city, with a new life ahead of me, Carrie, Cayla, Abbie, Nathan, and the Orlando congregation, these are not bad words for a beginning not just of a novel but this next stage in our family and communal lives. Too, often, like the Dursleys, I can seek to be perfectly normal, thank you very much, while Jesus was far from normal and instead quite strange and mysterious and spoke of what seems to me often like nonsense. Jesus said such strange things as, “Love your enemies,” and “Pray for those who would do you wrong,” and even the dangerous, “Follow me.” Jesus continues to pull us out of the normal, no matter how comfortable we are in our Dursleyish lives. For the closing lines of The Gospel of John, the author wrote in the final chapter 21,
There are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.
The authors of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John never intended for their writings to be finished works. They never imagined a group of disciples of Jesus might read their words, say, “Amen,” as if all was settled and finished, then go home to watch television. That would be a very Dudley Dursley thing to do. To go in the world and find not only the magical around us but something far greater, a power beyond our words, a power rooted in God – the miraculous – that was the intention of the Gospel writers as they shared their “Good News.” They weren’t trying to settle anything, just to point, “Jesus is out there. In a world where neither death nor evil nor violence have the final say, in a world where anything is possible, little and normal, and when each new day is just the beginning.” I think the Orlando Congregation has a good sense of what the Gospel writers intended as they end each service sending one another into the world with this charge,
We go nowhere by accident.
Wherever we go, God is sending us.
Wherever we are, God put us there for a purpose.
Christ who indwells us has something he wants to do
through us wherever we are.
Wonderful words to begin a ministry, a week, each day. Let the adventures begin and may God’s miraculous work abound.
