Sermons & Meditations

John 14:15-27
Presented May 29, 2011, by Joel Kline
The Sixth Sunday of Easter

As a pastor’s kid I grew up immersed in the Church of the Brethren, and some of you have heard me share that when I left home for college, I told my folks I had been to enough church to last me a lifetime! Yet, try as I would during those college years to dismiss the church’s role in my life, I soon discovered that I had caught far more of its faith and values than I wanted to admit. The civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements were raging, and I began to recognize how deeply the Church of the Brethren focus on peace and reconciliation, compassionate service and community living, personal integrity and respect for individual conscience, simplicity and nonviolence—how deeply these values had impacted my life and were guiding my responses to the struggles of the day. But I also recall those college years as a time of inner turmoil, a turmoil that led me, all too often, to be less than hospitable to those who had a different perspective towards life. At that stage of life, I had little discovered the truth voiced by Mother Teresa—so noted for her compassionate care of the poor and the dying in India—when she asserted, “Words that do not carry the light of Christ only increase the darkness.”

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Luke 24:13-35
Presented May 8, 2011, by Joel Kline
The Third Sunday of Easter
Mothers’ Day

I recently read an unusual novel entitled The Life of Pi. First published some ten years ago, the novel tells the story of Piscene Molitor Patel, a teenage boy in India with a keen thirst for connection with God. Born into a nominally Hindu family, Pi, from an early age, displayed a deep appreciation for the spiritual life, and as a teenager found himself drawn not only to Hinduism,  but to Christianity—and then to Islam—as well.

I found myself particularly intrigued by the description of Pi’s grappling with the story of Jesus. Pi first encounters Jesus at age fourteen, and the author, Yann Martel, has Pi confessing that he met this “troublesome rabbi of long ago…with disbelief and annoyance.” Divinity, argues Pi, should not be blighted by death; rather than vulnerability, Pi counters, God ought to display power and might. “This Son…who goes hungry, who suffers from thirst, who is sad, who is anxious, who is heckled and harassed, who has to put up with followers who don’t get it and opponents who don’t respect him—what kind of god is that?” Pi wonders. Answering his own question, Pi asserts, “It is a god on too human a scale, that’s what.”

Even more, Pi questions, “This Son appears only once, far away? Among an obscure tribe in the backwater of west Asia on the confines of a long-vanished empire? Is done away with before he has a single grey hair on his head? Leaves not a single descendant, only scattered, partial testimony, his complete works doodles in the dirt?” Still, Pi struggles, acknowledging being drawn by this disturbing Jesus. “He bothered me, this Son…I couldn’t get him out of my head. Still can’t. I spent three solid days thinking about him. The more he bothered me, the less I could forget him. And the more I learned about him, the less I wanted to leave him.”

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