FYI.  ILY.  JW

>===== Original Message From ordinarylife-owner@yahoogroups.com =====
ORDINARY LIFE - Thoughts and Ideas to Help You Live a Happier Life

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        Summary of July 22, 2001

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Dear Folks -

   Before I forget it, my beautiful bride wants to know if one of you
is responsible for the bird feeder that appeared hanging in one of the
trees in our front yard. I'm honoring her request to inquire.

   Also, I was not going to do this but I've had several requests for
the text of the sermon I gave Sunday at St. Paul's. My reluctance in
doing this is that sermons, unlike the talks I give in our regular
Ordinary Life gathering, are meant to be heard and not read. Sermons
are set in a particular liturgical setting and use a language unique to
that context. Nonetheless, I'm posting it below. If you don't care for
sermons or don't like being "preached to," just delete it.

Stay well,


Bill Kerley

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

     THE BEST NEWS YOU EVER HEARD

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

   I am so glad you are here today. I've been thinking about you all
week. Actually, longer than that. I was hoping you would be here
because I have something to say just to you.
Before I tell you want it is, let me tell you what I'm shooting for in
this sermon. I want you leave here today saying, "That's the best news
I've ever heard." Not only that, I want you leave here with an ability
to see the world in a new way. So that you can infect others with this
good news.

   Don't misunderstand. I don't want you to leave here feeling smug
because your prejudices have been confirmed. I want it to be because a
transformation of values and beliefs takes place here so that you can
leave this place to lead a new life.

   You know as well as I do that so many people don't live life at all.
They just exist. Getting by from day to day. Some people have trouble
just seeing what is.

   Friends of mine became deeply concerned when their daughter, a
straight-A student and who had never offered them a minute of serious
difficulty, showed up to introduce her new boy friend. His hair was at
least four different vivid colors, he had tattoos over all exposed
places on his body, and so many pieces of metal piercing his body that
the father wondered, "How does this guy get through a metal detector at
the airport?"

   The parents endured this encounter and when it was over began to try
to reason with their daughter that perhaps this young man was not the
best choice for a boyfriend. When they said things that implied they
questioned his character, the daughter assured them that he was of the
highest moral sort. "Really?" said the parents. "How can you be so sure
of that?" The daughter said, "Well, if he weren't, why would he be
doing 500 hours of community service?"

   Some people can't see what is. Plus, we can talk ourselves into
almost anything we want. I've come to see that very often we do not so
much love the truth as we make true what we love.

   Learning to live the life God wants for us is determined by what we
say "yes" to and what we say "no" to. In the gospel text for today
Martha is described as being distracted. As one translation has it,
"She is concerned about all she has to do." Jesus in commenting on
Mary's choice to spend time with him, talking and learning, Jesus says,
and this is my translation, "Martha, you worry and fuss about a lot of
things, but only a few things are necessary, really only one and that
part that Mary has chosen is the most important of all and you must not
tear her away from it."

   Mary has learned what to say "yes" to. That is the secret of life.
It is not easy to do. Being able to do it is both a gift of grace and
extremely hard work. But it is what makes the difference between living
and existing. Our lives, your life, is shaped by what you say "yes" to.

   Outside the walls of a place like this, there is almost no place or
activity that encourages us to say "yes" to real life. We are
encouraged at every turn to believe that our happiness is in what we
have or what we do. And though this process never really satisfies, we
are reluctant to give up on it.

   The two chief forces of consumer marketing are desire and fear. "Eat
this, drink this, do this, drive this, and you will be happy. If you
don't, you won't. Take this pill and avoid pain. Don't take it and
suffer." The spiritual teachings of the world, however, clearly say
that desire and fear are our two biggest barriers to a truly happy
life.

   One of the things saying "yes" to life means is to see life as a
demand. That's a problem for us because most of us have grown up buying
into the notion that no one should make demands on us. We want to be
free. One of our mottoes is: "Don't you dare tell me what to do!"

   But, make no mistake about it, life is demand. The demand is that
you must choose your own life. No one else can do that for you. Not if
your living is to be satisfying and significant. That's work you have
to do.

   Most of us live life as if it were a trial run for a second chance;
ambling along, meaning to do many things, yet somehow never quite
getting around to most of them. And all too suddenly life is gone.

   There is no time for trial runs in life. Whatever is important in
life should be firmly grasped now. Whatever is to be done should
receive our best. Whatever dreams we have should be pursued. Whatever
joy and beauty we find should be shared and savored. If misfortune
finds us, as it surely will, it should be conquered quickly, lest
precious days for living be lost forever. Life is fragile and should be
handled with care and prayer.

   Martha got distracted doing what she thought was important. Now
there is a certain truth in Martha's position. Jesus was coming for
dinner. I saw a line once somewhere that said, "If you are expecting
God for breakfast, you don't burn the toast." Certainly we must "do" in
life. But Martha's doing had distracted and worried her so much that
she couldn't enjoy the party.

   My word, is that true for our culture!

   This pace of life sneaks up on us and we get seduced into thinking
that just because it's possible, we need to be doing it; that if we
don't get with what everyone else is doing, we'll be left behind.
Consequently we have created and live in a culture where you have 15
phone numbers to reach your family of three. You chat several times a
day with a stranger from South Africa, but you haven't spoken to your
next door neighbor yet this year. Leaving the house without your cell
phone, which you didn't have the first 20 or 30 years of your life, is
a cause for panic and turning around to get it. Cleaning up the dining
room means getting the fast food bags out of the back seat of your car.

   Most of us, like Martha, feel hard pressed to deal with the hundreds
of things that compete for our attention daily. Nearly every minute of
our daily life revolves around job and mortgage, bills and debts,
personal ambitions and family problems, with an occasional expensive,
exhausting vacation thrown in for diversion. That's what we call the
"good life." We have come to think that we have no alternatives. What
used to be called the fast lane has taken over our whole highway. But a
spiritual fact is that if we do not make the choice that Mary did, if
we do not touch the sacred, we will have done nothing.

   That wonderful passage in the Old Testament that I'll bet all of you
are familiar with doesn't say, "Be loving and know that I am God," or
"Be obedient and know that I am God." It says, "Be still and know that
I am God."

   The hectic pace at which we try to live is not, of course, the kind
of demand I'm talking about. We don't have life because of what we do.
When, like Mary, we choose the one thing needful, and become quiet and
still at his feet, we find ourselves doing all sorts of things. Not in
order to have life but because we see the wondrous love we have been
given and we can't stay still about it.

   Let me tell you something and, I hope, you hear this as the best
news you ever heard: You don't have to earn the right to be here. You
don't have to prove your worth. You are born worthy. You don't have to
compete for a place in life. There's already a place for you. You don't
have to go somewhere else to live. The opportunity for abundant life
surrounds you where you are. You don't have to bargain with God or
plead with God or manipulate God to get God's favor or attention.
You've already got both of these things. Here is some solid Wesleyan
Methodist theology: In Jesus Christ God has already said a loud, clear
"yes" to you.

   It took me years to get this message and I can still fall off the
path about it. Somewhere along the line I bought the message that my
worth depended on what I did. If I did an inadequate job at something,
it meant that I was inadequate. If I failed at something, I was a
failure. If I did a bad thing, I was bad.

   I'm not meaning to be hard on myself or others. It's so easy to get
this message growing up. A child goes to a parent and says, "What
should I wear to the party tonight?" The parent says, "Wear whatever
you like." Soon the child emerges dressed for the party and says, "How
to do you like this?" "No, no, honey!" the parent says, "Stripes and
polka dots don't go together. Go back and change either the shirt or
the slacks." One week later the child says, "What should I wear to the
party tonight?" "I've told you over and over, wear whatever you like.
Why do you always ask me?" Why indeed.

   You might as well face up to this: There is nothing you can do,
learn or buy that can make it possible for you to escape disapproval.
If you are living that way, you are living hopelessly, burying chunks
of yourself every day. If you can see, right now, how worthy and
wonderful you are, you'll not be depressed when approval is withheld as
it surely will be. Disappointed maybe, but not depressed.

   There is a demand in life, never mistake it. That demand comes as a
result of our seeing how loved and accepted we are.

   When his followers went to him and asked, "Lord, how will people
know that we belong to you?" his answer was simple and significant. He
didn't say, "People will know you are mine by what you believe about
the Bible, or the virgin birth or the resurrection." Or any to the
other doctrinal matters Christians have their silly disputes over. What
he said was, "People will know that you are mine by the way you love
one another." That's the demand. And we live it joyfully because we've
heard the best news ever in his saying, "You belong to me."

   Not only is life promise and demand. Life is also freedom and
responsibility. Again, it is easy for us to hear only one part of this,
the part about freedom.

   Lord do we ever want to be free. Free to do our own thing. If there
is one thing that can make us bristle it is someone else trying to tell
us what to do.

   But, folks, freedom without responsibility is an illusion, a joke, a
fraud. Freedom to do what you want when you want is not freedom, it's
licence.

   Authentic freedom in our theology is the power to become what you
can become. To be free, really free, is to be responsible; that is, to
have the ability to respond to life in such a way as to move toward
God's intention for your life. That's freedom.

   I love this church. I love so much about it. The freedom, the
acceptance I've felt from the first. The way it looks and feels. The
people. This church is made up of such wonderful people. Well, except
for two or three. And, you know who you are.

   We have the freedom to be church. I've been part of this community
of faith for sixteen or seventeen years now. And almost from the
beginning I've been tempted to sneak in here at night and change the
wording on these signs you see up here. They say, "Enter to Worship"
and "Depart to Serve." I think that's backwards. Real church is made
possible when we all understand that we "Enter to Serve" and "Depart to
Worship." Sure, there are times when, out of our need, we come here to
be taken care of in some way. But if we all did that all the time,
there would be no church at all. I think one of the things that makes
it sometimes so difficult to take in the good news is that we have
closed ourselves to serving, to giving, to contributing.

   All throughout my ministry I've heard people be critical of the
church and, God knows, a lot of that criticism we deserve. I wonder
what the Jesus I know would say about a lot of the stuff we say and do.
I wonder if he wouldn't look at some of our beliefs and behaviors,
scratch his head and say, "That's not what I had in mind at all."

   Be that as it may, this church will be the kind of church for you
that you want to the precise degree to which you exercise your freedom
to be responsible for seeing to it that we are the kind of church you
want.

   To the degree that church happens here, when we leave this place we
are to take our sense of joy and confidence into the world with us. We
are to get new eyes in here so that we can see God at work in the
world. This is true worship and the test of our rituals here - that we
live with reference to a transcendent reality out there whether we feel
like it or not. That we don't go unconscious and drift into life as
usual.

   In the Gospel selection Jesus says that Mary chose the better part,
that she had hold of something that could not be taken from her. I know
you and me well enough to know that that is our heart's desire - to
choose that which cannot be taken from us. I also know that we so often
look in the wrong places for it. Mary chose to be present to Jesus.
That's the trick. To be here, to be present. We get so distracted like
Martha, planning for the big someday, that we miss the fact that the
future we have been hoping for is right here, right now.

   This is the only day you have to do your living.

   Now, don't mishear that. To live with no eye on the future is to
live with no meaning in the present. Life that is real and lasting
comes from giving yourself to something lasting. That's what Mary
chose.

   Our critical task, it seems to me, is to learn the difference
between filling up a day and fulfilling a day. Until we have learned to
live for something other than "me now," we have not learned to live for
today or tomorrow. That kind of living comes - listen carefully, I'm
going to give you the definition of eternal life - that kind of living
comes when we learn to penetrate our past with sacred memories, when we
learn to accept the future with hopeful expectancy, when we learn to
saturate our present with an acceptance of ourselves and each other as
people created in the image of God. In that is eternal life. And that
this kind of living is available to you and me, that it is possible for
you and me, is the best news you could possibly ever hear.

   I want you to hear the Good News, best news you ever heard: That no
matter how far you may think you are away from it; or, on the other
hand, how smugly you may think you don't need it, God loves you exactly
the way you are. I cannot think of better news than that.

   Now, go live it. Let this news transform you so that you begin to
see the world in an entirely different way.

   What might that look like?

   Frederick Buechner says that when you get to the heart of all good
theology, all you are left with is a story. Stories like: "A man was
journeying from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves. Who do you
think was neighbor to him?" Stories like, "A certain man had two sons
and one demanded his inheritance." Stories like, "He entered a certain
home where a woman named Martha welcomed him." So, let me tell you a
story.

   Years ago in the world of professional golf, before Tiger Woods
transformed the game, the sport was very different. Didn't get a lot of
publicity. Prizes weren't very big. Golfers usually drove themselves
from tournament to tournament. The tournaments themselves weren't
played for television audiences with big corporate sponsors but for
local communities and the country clubs. The purses were, of course,
considerably smaller.

   A golfer from Australia won a tournament at a club in Georgia. His
purse was something like $1500. As he was leaving, after the closing
ceremonies and visiting with the others, he went to get in his car. A
woman who had been in the gallery confronted him in the parking lot
begging for his help. She had come to that part of the country
following her golfer husband. Even though he was alcoholic and abusive,
she hoped to make her marriage work. Not only had it not but now she
was on her on, away from home. No family. No support. Even worse, her
baby was very sick, in need of medical help. She had no resources. She
was desperate.

   Her story was so touching to the golfer that he simply endorsed his
winning check over to her. That's doing.

   The next year he returned for the same tournament. The pro at that
golf club, knowing what had happened last year, decided to tell the man
from Australia that the woman was a con artist. She had, in reality,
bilked him out of those winnings.

   The golfer was stunned at this news. He then responded,
   "You mean that woman lied to me?"
   "Yes."
   "You mean to tell me that I was tricked?"
   "Yes."
   "You mean to tell me that there is no sick baby?"
   "That's right."
   "That's the best news I ever heard."

   That's what I want. For you to get the best news you ever heard here
- about yourself, about the way life is, so that you and I and you and
I together can go out there and live lives where we see the world and
ourselves and each other in the way he wants us to see. That we see
ourselves and each other in the way he sees us. That we see the world
in the way he wants us to. That we see in a way that would cause him to
say about us, "You have chosen the one thing that really matters."

   I am so glad you've been here today. I've been thinking about you
all week. Actually, longer than that. I was hoping you would be here
because I had something to say just to you. Now I've said it. I hope
you've heard it as the best news you ever heard.

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Ordinary Life is a gathering that provides an opportunity to develop an
enlightened heart and an awakened mind to the reality of the present
moment.

The gathering meets on Sunday mornings at 9:45 am in Fondren Hall at
St. Paul's UMC - 5501 South Main, Houston, Texas and is taught by Dr.
Bill Kerley. If you would like more information -

Contact

Bill Kerley -

E-Mail - Bill@bkspeaks.com
Web - www.bkspeaks.com
Voice - 713-663-7771
Fax - 713-663-6418
Mail - 6300 West Loop South, Suite 480 Bellaire, TX  77401
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