Bricks! More Bricks!

But the king of Egypt said to them, "Moses and Aaron, why are you taking the people away from their work? Get to your labors!"  Exodus 5:4

In the Exodus story, when Moses first goes to Pharaoh, he relays this word from God. "Let my people go, so that they may celebrate a festival to me in the wilderness." I'm not sure if this original request, time off for a festival, was a ruse of sorts. Would it all have ended right here if Pharaoh had said something different? "Sure, take a few days off to worship. The bricks can wait."

Of course Pharaoh says no such thing. He's not about to give the Israelites a day off, much less several for a festival in the wilderness. The demand for bricks is too great. "Bricks, more bricks," is the never ending cry. And for even suggesting a day off, Pharaoh demands the same productions quotas with less raw material. It sounds a bit like modern factory systems that demand greater and greater efficiency, more and more production from fewer and fewer workers.

One of today's morning psalms praises the God "who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. The LORD sets the prisoners free." In the biblical story, and in my own experience, God can be excruciatingly slow to act, but God does act on behalf the oppressed, the hungry, the poor, the prisoner. However, the poor, oppressed, and prisoner aren't always amenable to God's intervention. In the Exodus story, the people of Israel struggle to trust this God who frees them. At every sign of difficulty, they long for their old slavery, where they had shelter and knew where their next meal came from. That seems preferable to becoming dependent on the provision of God.

It strikes me that the modern "rat race" is not so different. People speak of being caught up in it, being captive to it, but rare is the person who works very hard to break free. God, both in the Old Testament story and through the words of Jesus, speaks of a relaxed trust in the surety of divine provision. At Mt. Sinai, God command Sabbath, a break from the rat race. But anxious people can't stop. "Bricks, more bricks," the cry continues. Or perhaps, "Stuff, more stuff. Never enough stuff."  Jesus tells us not to worry about what we will eat or what we will wear, but we can't stop worrying. And so we cannot stop at all. We prefer the voice of Pharaoh, "Get to your labors!" over the voice of the one who calls us to Sabbath.

But "the LORD sets the prisoners free." Please, Lord. A lot of us could use a little freeing.

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(My own spiritual reflections on this are much influenced of late by Walter Brueggemann's book, Sabbath as Resistance.)

Sermon video: Absurd, Impossible Endings

Audios of sermons and worship are available on the FCPC website.

Resurrection, Individualism, and Community

Strictly speaking, the problems that the Apostle Paul faces with his Corinthian congregation have little contact with my church work. Speaking in tongues is not much practiced in the Presbyterian churches I've known, and so I have little cause to warn folks about it. Yet despite my unfamiliarity with speaking in tongues, I think Paul has some important insights.

Paul's concerns with tongues is not about right and wrong religious practices. Instead it is about the impact such practices have on the good of the community. The problem with tongues is its individual focus. It does not build up or instruct the church.

Paul is not against private spiritual practices that help draw one closer to God, but his understanding of faith is very much rooted in community. Any faith that does not get lived out in love toward the other, in a community of mutual love and support, is not the new life in Christ that Paul has found.

I wonder what Paul would think of American Christianity, especially some versions' tendency to focus on a personal, individual relationship with God/Jesus. I also wonder what he would say about the current fascination with meditation, prayer techniques, and spirituality that has emerged in many congregations. I don't know that he would have any objections to them per se, but I do suspect he would add a caveat about their needing to build up the body of Christ.

 __________________________________________________________________________

Today I began to think seriously about what I might say on Easter. The story is so familiar. The women go to the tomb early in the morning only to find it empty, to hear that Jesus is risen. Should I even preach? Why not simply read the story and sing that Christ is risen? But as I've thought about this, I've found myself thinking a bit along the lines of Paul. If the proclamation, "He is risen!" does not build up the community, if it does not make a difference in the world, then have we perhaps misunderstood the meaning of the empty tomb and Jesus' resurrection?

Paul says that his encounter with the risen Christ changes everything. It makes him an entirely new person. What he was has died. What he has become is a new creation. Paul's faith is not about a vague hope for something better when he dies, and it is not about personal spiritual fulfillment. It is about God entering into history in a manner that has creation itself groaning in anticipation, that creates a new community, the church, that bears God's love into the world. The resurrection has profound social dimensions. God's reaching out to the world in Jesus requires a reaching out and a reconciliation between neighbors. God's love cannot simply be savored for its own sake. It must be shared.

So then, how do Easter and the power of resurrection transform and direct the work of the community where you live and worship?

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Sermon: Absurd, Impossible Endings

Ezekiel 37:1-14 (John 11:20-45)

Absurd, Impossible Endings

James Sledge                                                                                       April 6, 2014

“Can these bones live?” The question would seem to be absurd. The scene in Ezekiel’s vision is one of utter and awful devastation, a valley filled with sun-bleached bones. There is only one possible explanation. A horrible massacre of some sort had occurred. An army had totally annihilated an enemy. No one was left to bury the dead, an appalling fate for a Jew. The fallen had been stripped of anything valuable and then left to the birds and the elements. In time there was nothing left but bones, dried out bones.

“Can these bones live?”  What an absurd question, but it seems the prophet knows better than to dismiss the absurd when God is involved. “O Lord God, you know.”

The prophet Ezekiel has blasted Israel for their total failure to be the people they were called to be. He says their defeat and exile by the Babylonians is God’s doing, and it appears God is done with them. Their story is over, and yet… “Can these bones live?”

Ezekiel tells exiled Israel that they are these dry bones. But what about us? Can we speak of dry bones?

Some see the Church in America “in exile” and facing death. Some predict a European landscape where churches are more museum than body of Christ, and all across our country, individual congregations and denominations are facing death.

Many in our country are worried about the decline of the middle class or the demise of the American dream. Is the promise of a better life for any who would work hard simply dead?

In politics and in world events, there are countless problems and conflicts that seem endless and hopeless. And surely most of us have experienced our own moments when all hope seems lost. There are relationships that are beyond repair, estrangement that cannot be healed. There is faith that is lost, dead and gone forever. “Can these bones live?”

“Can these bones live?” Perhaps I could ask another way. Is resurrection possible? Is new life possible? It would seem that one could not be a Christian without some sort of hope in resurrection, but too often this gets confined to “What will happen when you die?” But that’s a different question than, “Can these bones live?” And Jesus is talking about something different when he says, “I Am the resurrection and the life.”

Jesus speaks these words just before raising Lazarus from the dead after four days in the tomb. He’s talking to Martha, Lazarus’ sister, who already believes in a resurrection on the last day. But he tells Martha that he is something more, something bigger than heaven at the end. “I Am the resurrection and the life. These bones can live now!”

It is easy to forget that the power of God is about more than heaven when you die. You would think church would be the last place people would forget that God can do what seems absurd, even impossible, but most of us do forget at times. We see stories where we cannot imagine any ending but a bad one, and we think, “That’s it. There’s no hope,” without ever stopping to consider that God might imagine a different, improbable, impossible ending. We forget, even though our Christian story is about an absurd, impossible ending.

We're All in This Together

If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.  1 Corinthians 12:26

I saw an article this week describing how Americans are increasingly divided and distrustful of one another. Humans have always been good at creating divisions, but we seem to be getting even better at it. Think of all the ways we divide ourselves. There are Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, rich and poor, haves and have-nots, black and white, young and old, "makers and takers," religious and non-religious, young and old, the 99 percent and the 1 percent, and on and on and on. In fact, it seems increasingly difficult to find things where most Americans feel commonality or unanimity.

When Paul writes the Christians in Corinth, he is concerned about divisions there as well. There are divisions of rich and poor, divisions around degrees of theological sophistication, and divisions over who has more impressive spiritual gifts, to name a few. In today's reading, Paul undermines these divisions using the metaphor of a body, a body that, in tomorrow's reading, he explicitly names as "the body of Christ." And so when the Corinthians fail to care for each other or they injure one another because of their divisions, they do damage to this body of which they are a part.

(It is worth noting that Paul's instructions about the Lord's Supper that come shortly before today's verses reference the same body. It is common for people to hear Paul's words, "For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves," as referring to a mystical presence of Christ's body in the elements of the meal. But the context and the situation Paul seeks to correct indicate that Paul speaks of "the body of Christ" formed by the community of faith.)

Paul is addressing a church congregation, and so his words are perhaps not so easily applied to a larger society such as ours in 21st century America. And yet many of the voices in our divided America make much of their Christian faith. And some of the loudest voices seem remarkably unable to discern a body of any sort. Those who do not agree with them, and who do not seem likely to be converted to their point of view, are "the enemy," an obstacle to be overcome and any cost.

This inability to make the good of the entire body paramount is not restricted to any particular group or viewpoint. Whether the fight is within a Christian denomination or within the body politic, we routinely act at odds with what Paul proclaims. "If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it." We do sometimes attempt to justify ourselves by insisting that those we oppose aren't really Christian, aren't true Americans, etc. We declare them not part of the body, thus making them fair game.

As Paul's situation makes clear, this problem of divisions is nothing new. I do wonder, however, if the individualistic nature of our society doesn't make it even more problematic. I wonder if there is not some point beyond which individualism makes impossible the sort of community Paul envisions, the community God seeks to form via the Law and the prophets, and the community of love Jesus calls those who follow him to build.

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Too Anxious to Worship

I read another article the other day about how American teenagers are terribly stressed out and anxious, and not without good reason. If they are going to "make it," they need to get into a good college, and that means they need to get good grades in top tier classes. They also need to score high enough on the SAT or the ACT, but that alone isn't enough. They need to stand out in other ways: sports, arts, leadership, and so on. And so they are often over-scheduled for one "enrichment activity" after another.

Of course these teenagers didn't create the demands that cause all that stress and anxiety. They got them from their parents, from our culture, from the hyper-competitive world we live in. They've simply acquired, at a much earlier age, the same sort of anxieties and stresses that many of their parents carry around with them.

In America, we have become slaves to a culture of acquisition. We need more and more, and we must run ourselves ragged to get it. We are driven by fear of not having enough, but there are always more unfulfilled wants. And there are always those with more than us to make us fell bad about what we don't have. We are never quite able to make it, and so we are left with endless, 24/7 striving. We are captives to the market, to an anxious system that values only production, more and more production.

The Bible insists that this is distortion. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of God's good creation and of the meaning of human life.

Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving;
          make melody to our God on the lyre.
He covers the heavens with clouds,
          prepares rain for the earth,
          makes grass grow on the hills.
He gives to the animals their food,
          and to the young ravens when they cry.
His delight is not in the strength of the horse,
          nor his pleasure in the speed of a runner;
but the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him,
          in those who hope in his steadfast love.    Psalm 147:7-11

Anxious, stressed out people have no time for worship. Worship is not productive, it does not create any more. It is a waste of time that could be used to get ahead, to strive and produce, to take one more extra course or one more piano lesson.

Not only do anxious, stressed out people  have no time for unproductive worship, but neither can they afford to trust in or wait on the provision of God. The god of consumerism and production demands endless striving. It tells us that we will fall behind otherwise. To wait on a God who makes grass grow and who gives food to hungry creatures is too big a risk. We must secure blessing on our own. We dare not leave such things to God.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the Church is filled with the same anxiety that pervades our culture. There aren't enough religious folks to go around. If we aren't careful, we won't have enough and we may die or, at the very least, be failures. We had better scurry about trying to devise new programs and attractive activities that can be seen as good products, as something worth consuming. And so we must out-compete all the other churches. We must be better producers of religious commodities.

Strange how unlike God all this is. The picture of God in the Bible, from the God seen at creation to the God imaged in Jesus, is the polar opposite of our striving. God takes Sabbath and rests, not worried about what may have during this time of inactivity and no production. Jesus tells us not to worry, to trust in the providence of God who clothes the flowers of the field in splendor that unmatched by Solomon's temple. And Jesus was surely the most un-anxious person who ever lived.

The first of the Bible's creation stories says that the human creature, both male and female, in some way bears the image of God. That suggests that our true human identity is one that permits rest, that is not overly anxious, and is not captive to endless striving. No wonder that our stressed out, anxious world takes such a toll on our health. We are living at odds with our true identity.

But Jesus comes to save, and he invites all who are weary and weighed down by heavy burdens to come to him, promising to give us rest. He offers to free us from our captivity to acquisition, to endless striving and production. Surely we want to be free. But, to paraphrase Walter Brueggemann, like the Israelites who escaped slavery in Egypt, most of us are much better trained as captives in the anxious production systems of Pharaoh than we are in trusting the gracious provision of a loving God.

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Not Wanting to Fall

The LORD is near to the brokenhearted,
     and saves the crushed in spirit.
Many are the afflictions of the righteous,
     but the LORD rescues them from them all.   

Psalm 34:18-19

"First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!" -Julian of Norwich

I saw the second quote in today's meditation from Fr. Richard Rohr. He was talking about how it is necessary for us to stumble and fall if we are to become  spiritually mature. We must lose control in order to give control over to God.

That is a lesson that can be difficult for pastors. We are trained to be the experts with the answers, and we live in a culture that expects experts with answers. If we bump into a problem that seems beyond our capabilities, there is always a conference or seminar or training event that will teach us this bit of expertise we are somehow missing. Is it any wonder that many congregations take on the personality of their pastor rather than that of Jesus?

I detest the notion of being incompetent, of feeling not up to the task. I must admit that I find it terrible difficult to experience God's grace and mercy in failure, in stumbling and falling. But deep down, I'm reasonably sure that Julian of Norwich and Richard Rohr are correct. To borrow Rohr's phrase, we must "fall upward," but I do not like the sensation of falling. 

I've been feeling really worn out lately, and I have to wonder if some of my tiredness doesn't come from trying so hard not to fall.

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Misunderstanding Freedom

"All things are lawful," but not all things are beneficial. "All things are lawful," but not all things build up. Do not seek your own advantage, but that of the other.  1 Corinthians 10:23-24

Why on earth would I want to do that? What could possibly make me seek the good of the other rather than my own? That is not how the world works. When I fly on an airline, I try to check in early so I can get the best possible seat on the plane. Let a latecomer have the bad seat. America is all about competition, about using whatever advantage I have at my disposal to make it to the top.

Much of life is about accumulating advantages. My denomination's health plan negotiates rates with medical providers so that I get a cost advantage over someone without good insurance. If I have sufficient money, I have access to a different legal process than a poor person. And I don't want my taxes going to give that poor person the same advantages I have.

When Paul writes to the Christians in Corinth, he is upset with them because they take advantage of their "freedom in Christ" without regard for others. According to Paul, they fundamentally misunderstand what it means to be free a. It's not about being able to do what ever they want or whatever they like. Rather, they have been freed to become more Christ-like.

But that's not what freedom looks like to the Corinthians, or to very many present day Americans. Both groups tend to think that freedom makes us our own gods. We get to decide what is best; not anyone else. No one should be able to tell us what to do.

But we aren't gods. We are creatures, and creatures make terrible gods. When we attempt to be gods, we end up slaves to our wants and desires, easily manipulated by advertisers and cultural standards of success and achievement. No wonder so many of us are stressed out and worn ragged by such freedom. Bob Dylan got it right in the old song, "Gotta Serve Somebody."

You're gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.

I think that on some level, many of us know this intuitively. Such knowing is in that question many have asked, "What am I supposed to do with my life?" "Supposed" is not about whatever I want. It's about what I am fitted for and meant for. It is about what God means for me, about discovering God's purpose for me. And Paul says that God's purpose is not just about me. It is also about the other.

"Do not seek your own advantage, but that of the other" That can't be right, can it?

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Can't Keep 'Em Away

In case you somehow missed the news, traditional church congregations are struggling in the US. There are many individual exceptions, but on the whole, denominations and congregations are shrinking. Worship attendance is trending downward in the typical congregation, and the average age of those in attendance is trending upward. And study after study affirms that Millennials are much less likely to be part of a church that previous generations.

I'm not trying to be depressing, I'm simply setting some context for thoughts on today's gospel. If today's churches struggle to get people to show up, Jesus and his disciples have the opposite problem. So many people are showing up that they can't get a break. In today's reading, Jesus suggests they get away for some well deserved R and R, but eager crowds figure out the location of their weekend retreat and ruin this plan.

I'm struck by the contrast of Jesus' situation and ours. Granted we aren't Jesus. The wow factor is surely much less. But we do speak of ourselves as "the body of Christ." And so if Jesus still offers something the world desperately needs, shouldn't the world be beating a path to our door?

I saw this quote bouncing around Facebook yesterday. (Thanks to Jenny for sharing the source with me.) "Like a jagged rock thrown into a flowing stream, the church once 'troubled the waters.' Now, however, it seems as if the church has slowly, often imperceptibly been worn so smooth by the culture that it no longer creates any disturbance at all." 

I doubt that Charles Campbell had church attendance in mind when he said this. Presumably he was talking about the church making a difference and witnessing to the ways of God's coming rule in the world. But I suspect that our indistinctness, our inability to "trouble the waters," makes us equally easy to ignore on Sunday mornings.

Jesus is a distinctly counter-cultural sort of guy, and the Church had strong counter-cultural tendencies when it was young and new. But as the Church merged with the prevailing culture (Thanks for that, Constantine, although I suppose it would have happened eventually regardless.) it became more and more conventional. When I grew up in what I now realize was the end of the Christendom era, there was nothing more conventional than church. But if church and culture are virtually indistinguishable, then there is bound to come a point where people realize they can be conventional without bothering to do church. We seem to have arrived at that point for many in our world.

Do we in the Church have some clear message and some clear purpose that are distinct from the culture around us? Do we have some good news that cannot be found in that culture? If not, I think we ought to stop delaying the inevitable and simply shut our operations down. And if the only thing we have to offer is heaven when you die in exchange for believing the correct things, I'd recommend the same plan of action.

Yet we say that we are the body of Christ, followers of the risen Jesus. We claim that by the power of the Holy Spirit Jesus abides in us and in the Church, that he empowers and equips the Church to do all that he calls us to do. And when the power of the living Christ is present - at least if you go by the gospel stories - you can't keep people away.

Maybe our problem is: We've made this church thing way too much about us, and not nearly enough about Jesus.

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Wagging the Dog

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.  - 1 Corinthians 1-3

We Presbyterians are big on knowledge. We expect our pastors to be well educated, with at least a masters degree. Those with doctorates usually wear the associated chevrons on the sleeves of their robes. By the way, the robes Presbyterian pastors wear are not priestly garb. They are academic gowns, pointing to our special training rather than our ecclesiastical status. Like I said, we are big on knowledge.

It doesn't stop there. As a denomination, Presbyterians tend to be an educated sort. Traditionally, Presbyterian congregations have had more than our fair share of doctors, lawyers, bankers, teachers, professors, and such. As a result, Presbyterian worship sometime tends a bit toward the elitist side. We love pipe organs and Bach and Christmas cantatas. Our go-to Bible translation is the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) which is written at an 11th grade reading level, one of the highest among the English translations. By comparison, the more popular New International Version (NIV) is written on an 8th grade level.

I, along with many others, think of knowledge and education as generally good things. Yet Paul speaks of a problem with knowledge. Paul is a reasonably well educated fellow himself, but he criticizes his Corinthian congregants for their attachment to knowledge, urging them to be shaped more by love.

Knowledge, it seems, can easily become the tail that wags the dog. Our worship - the sermons, liturgy, and music - can become more a statement about us than a genuine encounter with God where we offer ourselves and are equipped and nourished to be Christ's body in the world. Worship easily becomes about the preacher's fine preaching, the choir's great singing, and so on. Worse, we sometimes erect barriers to those who aren't as educated, musically sophisticated, etc. as we are.

We Presbyterians say that our congregations are supposed to be provisional manifestations of God's kingdom, that day when all divisions end and people of every race, clan, and tribe join together as one. Yet too often our congregations simply mirror the divisions - ethnic, cultural, economic, educational, style, etc. - that are found in our world.

The Apostle Paul insists that love must take precedence over knowledge. Puffed up knowledge says, "This church is for people like us, who understand like us and appreciate the things we do." But love says, "How can I help you encounter the love of God that embraces all?" regardless of who that "you" is.

Now it turns out it is very difficult to do church without doing it in some particular way. Having a worship style and musical preferences is unavoidable. Every church has them, and a pipe organ or a choir that sings Bach is not, in and of itself, a problem. The issue is, what drives our decisions about style and liturgy and so on? Is it self giving love? Or is it a puffed up sense that our way of doing things is smarter and better and the right way?

In another or his letters, Paul writes, "As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of your are one in Christ Jesus." Paul names all the big divisions of the world he lived in, then insists that we who are joined to Christ in baptism have no part in these.

Knowledge sometimes puffs up by clinging to the very things that divide us. Love, on the other hand, builds up because it is focused on ending divisions. Like Martin Luther King Jr's dream, it sees a day when divisions end and it actively works for the coming of that day. And when the Church fails to work toward that day, it forgets who it is, becoming a parody of itself, the tail wagging the dog.

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Leaving Jesus Amazed

In today's gospel Jesus makes his triumphal return to his hometown. He's begun to make it big out in the world, to draw crowds and collect a band of followers, and now he makes a visit back to Nazareth. It seems to go well at first. Folks are "astounded," and they wonder where he got all this. But then it kicks in. Wait a minute. We know Jesus. We know his family. His brothers and sisters still live here. "And they took offense at him." That's what my translation says, but the word translated "took offense" more literally means "to stumble," and it's the root of our word "scandalize." After the hometown crowd stumbles, the gospel story ends with, "And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief."

I am struck by this picture of Jesus, amazed and scratching his head at how people cannot see him because he does not fit into what they already know about him. What is more, his power is constrained by their inability to see him for who he really is. And I can't help but wonder about the ways I box Jesus into a picture that I have of him.

Like Jesus' homies in Nazareth, I grew up with Jesus, too. My parents read my Bible stories and I saw pictures of him and heard more stories about him in Sunday School and in worship. Jesus was also hard to miss in the southern culture of the 1960s where I grew up. And so I "know" Jesus quite well. But what if the Jesus I "know" is, in some ways, like the Jesus those in Nazareth knew, a stumbling block to encountering the real grace and power of God in my midst.

I wonder how often the conventional and, too often, trite images of Jesus we traffic in at the church are as much problem as help. I wonder how often Jesus looks at me and those like me and shakes his head, amazed at how clueless we can be, how oblivious to the power of God seeking to work with and through us, simply because it does not fit into the pictures of Jesus we carry around with us.

It is incredibly difficult to know when we have failed to notice something. If Jesus was there and we missed him, how can we be aware of our having failed to be aware in the first place. If there is a burning bush on the roadside as I drive home tonight but I don't see it, I have no way of knowing I missed it, unless someone tells me about it. And if there is no one to tell me I missed Jesus, how am I to know?

At least today's gospel does alert me to the very real possibility that I might miss Jesus, obscured in the assumptions and preconceived notions of him that I've acquired from church and culture. It warns me that the Sunday School Jesus, or any other number of Jesuses, might become for me a pair of blinders that hide the presence of the living Christ that is right beside me.

I hope that I don't amaze Jesus, at least not in the manner the folks at Nazareth did, too frequently. And if I do, it sure would be nice if someone would tell me.

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Sermon video: On Knowing, Not Knowing, and Journeying

Audios of sermons and worship located on FCPC website.