Theme for 2024: Show us Jesus

As we flip our calendars to December we also enter the season of Advent and a new Church Year cycle. There are two things I want to discuss as we do that:

I want to establish a THEME for this church year: “Show us Jesus.”

We’re going to depart from the standard cycle of readings (the Revised Common Lectionary), and we’re going to read through the Gospel of John in a single year, with our OT readings moving sequentially through the book of Genesis.

The Theme I selected comes from John 12:21 where some Greek gentlemen come to Philip, and say “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Oddly, Philip doesn’t seem to know what to do, so he brings them to Andrew. Together they introduce them to Jesus. Jesus says its time for him to be glorified—then he explains that glory looks quite different from what we’d expect: “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” And he urges us to follow him.

I selected this theme for several reasons, and as often as possible I’ll return to it in sermons throughout the year. Broadly speaking we can find ourselves like Philip—uncertain how to show people Jesus. Fortunately, like Philip, we are a part of a community where others will be happy to help us in our discipleship and sharing Jesus with others. Sometime we may be called on to be like Andrew and help one another out, coach someone, in sharing Christ. And all of us will be challenged at times to remember that Christian glory often isn’t what we tend to think it is. The Glory of Christ is all wrapped up with personal sacrifice with the goal of blessing others in their discipleship. It is always moving forward and outward…rarely back into what’s comfortable. Discipleship is always focused on Jesus and what he wants of us. People should see that in us.

The second point is about the Gospel of John. For whatever reason the people who craft our system of readings decided to take the 4 Gospels and create a cycle which repeats every 3 years. To accomplish this they dedicated a year to each Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Then they dissected John and spread portions of his book across those same three years, so we end up having no sense of continuity with this Gospel. To remedy this I have written a lectionary dedicated to this neglected Gospel. I have paired it with readings from Genesis—we’ll read through this vital book of scripture sequentially. You’ll likely hear Biblical stories you haven’t heard before…you certainly didn’t hear all of them in Sunday School. We’ll round this out with selected “wisdom readings” from Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, two other books that are neglected in our current lectionary.

I hope you’ll learn some new things, and be blessed by this twin focus in the coming year!

Pastor Derek