Love Boldly | Rev. Adam Hamilton | Church of the Resurrection

1:59 That's one of our four radio and TV spots that are playing across the Kansas City area during the month of October. This is our 35th anniversary as a church, even though some of our locations just started last week. Resurrection Mason, hello to you. Resurrection Lease Summit, your grand opening last week. But as a congregation, we started 35 years ago. And so we're celebrating that by reminding people why church matters. And so there's a lot of people today who say, you know, I believe in Jesus. I try to be a good person. I'm spiritual, but not religious. I don't really need a faith community. But you know, Jesus thought we needed a faith community. So he said he was gonna build a church. He wasn't just gonna die for us and be raised from the dead. But he also said, I'm gonna build a church, my church, he said. And so church mattered to him. And he knew it would matter to us. We need what church has to offer. And so we're looking at that this month. In particular, this week, we're gonna look at the importance of loving boldly. We need love.

2:50 We also need to be called and inspired to go live out a life of love. Next week, we're going to talk about serving joyfully. And the last week, we're going to talk about leading courageously. But today, we want to talk about and focus on the need for community and loving boldly. Now, I want to start by recognizing that it's not just humans that have this need for community, affection, you know, companionship. Even our animals, our beloved pets feel this, and we feel it from them. So we have two dogs at our house. Many of you know this, Rocky and Mabel. Rocky's the youngest of the dogs. They'll sleep on our bed. And in the mornings when I am just, you know, I'm just starting to wake up, I can tell somebody is watching me. And this week when I woke up, I opened my eyes and I just had to laugh because this is what he does, you know, every time he's on the bed with us at night. I wake up in the morning and I grab my camera real quick. I didn't even have my glasses on. I grabbed my camera just to get a picture of this. But this is how I was awakened and how I'm often awakened in the mornings. Take a look. Now that's Rocky.

3:42 And he is on my chest and he is waiting. Like, when are you going to get up, buddy? When are you going to wake up? Come on, come on, come on, get up. And you know, his tail starts wagging and he desperately wants to be petted and play. He wants to come lick my face, which really grosses me out. But I just love this dog. And Maybell then comes over and she does the same thing. And they just yearn for affection. They want to be on our laps. They want to be under feet. They want to be close to us. They long for affection and they give affection back to us. You know what? I need that. I need it for my dogs, but I need it from people. And other people need it from us, not licking our faces. But we need friendship. We need companionship. We need belonging. We need community. We need all of these things. We were made this way. So in Genesis chapter two, verse 16, you may remember, verse 18, excuse me, the scripture says that God looked at the man and he said, it is not good that the human is alone. He's in paradise, but there's something that's missing and that is a need for companionship.

4:36 All right, so humans like dogs need companionship. We need community. We're meant to live out life with other people. Our purpose statement here at Church of the Resurrection is to build a Christian community, to build a Christian community. where non-religious and nominally religious people are becoming deeply committed Christians. That is, we're trying to create a space where people can experience love, companionship, where they can experience friendship, where they can be in community and belong with other people. The Greek word for this in the New Testament is maybe one you've heard before, koinonia. Koinonia means fellowship, sharing together, community, partnership. It has a variety of other meanings, but this is the sense we have in many of the passages in the New Testament that use this word. And we need that. We need fellowship, sharing together, community. We need partnerships. Now, study after study shows that humans need this. Even introverts need other human beings. So there was a study that came out a year ago from Harvard's Graduate School of Education.

5:29 It was titled Loneliness in America, Just the Tip of the Iceberg. They surveyed 1,500 people, and I want to just share with you some of the data that came from that particular study. 36% of the 1,500 people that they interviewed frequently or always felt lonely in the last 30 days. 36%, more than a third. men and women were equally likely to report that they were lonely. There was little difference based upon political affiliation. Republicans and Democrats and independents all felt lonely to the same degree, or roughly the same degree. Those who were 30 to 44 were the loneliest group in the survey. Those who were over 65 were the least likely to feel lonely. Loneliness, anxiety, and depression are closely linked together, they found in the study. And 67% of the people who felt lonely reported having no meaningful groups to which they belonged. 67%. There's a link between belonging to a meaningful group and feeling lonely, or lack of belonging to a meaningful group and feeling lonely, and along with that, anxiety and depression.

6:27 Now, researchers in the Department of Psychology at Brigham Young University noted that people with poor social connections, that is, without friendships, deep, meaningful friendships in their lives, they had a 29% increased risk of coronary heart disease. They had a 32% increased risk of stroke. They were 4.2 times more likely to develop a cold. And conversely, people who had friendships and close connections, they were 2.2 times less likely to develop type 2 diabetes. And there were a whole host of other medical benefits to being a part of a faith community or any kind of community, really, to have friendships that you were developing. So one of the researchers, Julian Holt-Lunstad, noted this, that loneliness or social isolation was found to increase the likelihood of mortality by 29%. The equivalent risk of smoking, you've probably heard this before, smoking roughly 15 cigarettes a day. So the impact of 15 cigarettes a day on your health, this researcher found is the same impact or maybe even a little less than the impact of having no social community, being socially isolated.

7:32 We were made for companionship. We were made for community. Now, this is why Jesus is not just simply offering a gospel and telling people to go out and preach it. He's offering a community. He's offering people. a community where people can find this kind of love. So getting involved in a church and a faith community and a small group and a Sunday school class, it lowers your risk of stroke. It lessens the likelihood of anxiety and depression. I mean, there's a power to being together with other people. Those of you who join us online or on TV, if you can make it in person, we want you to be able to do that. But if you join us on TV or online, you can still have connections. We found this, you know, in online groups. So we have all kinds of online groups where people meet together by Zoom and they have those connections in that way. but it's important that we have those kind of human connections. Now, you know, it requires more than just showing up, right? So in order to be able to experience koinonia, community, fellowship, friendship, all that, it requires not just sitting down in a seat in a room with lots of people.

8:26 You can sit in a room, this room seats 3,500 people. You can sit in this room, you know, and you can be surrounded by a big crowd of people. But if you don't talk to anybody, if you don't reach out to anybody, if other people don't reach out to you and connect with you, if you don't begin in small ways to develop relationships with people around you, you can feel pretty lonely in a big room too, filled with people. So it starts with something as simple as getting to know the people who, if you come here, who are sitting around you or at any of our locations. So that's part of why we have the greeting time at the beginning of worship as you begin to get to know people's names. We have name tags so that you don't have to ask five or six times. You can look at their name tag and remember. That helps me out a lot. But I noticed this happens throughout our sanctuary in our services of worship. So I think about Ken, who came one Sunday about five years ago or four years ago, wandered into the sanctuary, and Jim and Beth, who are husband and wife, said, hey, why don't you come sit by us? They'd never met Ken before.

9:18 He'd never met them before. He didn't really know anybody sitting in the room. But you know, every single Sunday, I see them sitting together on the front row right over here to my right, to your left, and they become fast friends. They care for each other. They watch out for each other. You know, that's part of what a coin and eel looks like. We have a whole group of people who sit underneath the balcony back to my right at the 11 o'clock service who have lost their spouses. And they connect together. They are friends with each other. They do things together because they all know that shared common loss. And so they worship together, they sing and they pray together, they listen to the message together, but they also are practicing koinonia with one another as they gather here for worship and when they leave. Now, we really experience this in small groups. So when you get together with a small group and those small groups can be anything. They can be, I think about our choir or orchestra. And you know, in the choir orchestra, when people are together, the bands that play, The various, we have so many serve groups that are packing backpacks for hunger on Fridays or serving in a variety of other ways, disaster response teams and everything else.

10:15 But you know, those teams are not just about doing the work that they're doing or playing beautiful music in the orchestra or singing in the choir or the band. Those groups are also about building relationships, connecting with each other, because we need that. We need that. Sunday school classes, Bible studies, men's groups, women's groups, support groups, all of these. This last week, I was walking down the hallway in Building C of our Leawood location. And I saw a group of, I think there were six women who were walking into a classroom. And as I walked by, they said, hello. And I popped in my head in the classroom. I said, so what are y'all doing here? And they said, oh, well, this is our women's Parkinson's support group. And there were, ultimately, I got there. I left before the rest of the group got there. But there's 15 women who meet. There's about 10 of them every week. And it's led by a woman who had early onset of Parkinson's. and they meet together to encourage one another, just to bless one another. And I got a note from Pam, the leader of this group this week, and she said, we're such a comfort to each other.

11:11 We learn from each other. We offer a listening ear and understanding. These women are becoming friends and in a way we take turns lying on the stretcher while others in the group struggle to carry it. You may recognize that metaphor. We use the metaphor of stretcher bearers because there was a man who had friends. He was paralyzed and his friends took him on a stretcher to Jesus and lowered him through the roof of a house to Jesus so that Jesus could pray for them and heal him. And because of their faith, Jesus healed the man. And so we have this idea of stretcher bearers, you know, that we carry one another, right? That's part of what we do. That's part of what it means to be church. And I want you to know if you have Parkinson's, especially women, we don't have a Parkinson's men's group that I know of right now. I'm hoping we start one soon. Maybe some of you who are listening have Parkinson's. You are here at Resurrection, you're a man and you would be willing to help start a male group. But if you're a woman who has Parkinson's, know that we have a support group for you right now and a whole host of other support groups for people who've lost children, for people who've lost spouses, for people who are struggling with addictions, all kinds of things.

12:09 And what we find is when there are other people who are helping you along the way, you find hope and help and healing and strength. That's what we'd like for you to find in the church. Now, it's interesting. I was reading recently, I'd asked a week and a half ago, nine days ago, I asked my friends on Facebook, I said, you know, tell me your stories of how the church has had a positive impact on your life. And I shared some of those last week in the sermon. And one of the things that struck me, though, as I was reading these stories again this week, and there were more that were added this week, was an old dictum that your mother taught you when you were a kid. And that is that the only way to have a friend is to what? Is to be a friend, right? Is to be a friend. And so, you know, when you get together in small groups, you go ahead and take the risk, you know, of joining a small group, or you get together and worship or you're meeting in some other connection with people, it still requires that we take some effort, right?

13:03 So we start befriending other people and then we find they befriend us. And pretty soon we find that we've created community. We've created koinonia together. And in the church, I mean, that's what I love about the church. You can find friendship in all kinds of places. The church is one of those places that was designed to be a community of love. It was intended by Jesus to be a place where people love one another, care for one another, serve one another, as we talked about last week. All right, so I want to remind you of a memory verse we shared here at Resurrection a few weeks ago. We memorized it over two weeks. It was 1 John 4, verses 7 and 8. And I'm going to put it on the screen so we can say it again together. And those of you who are not a part of us, Mason, who just joined on last week, this may be your first time to hear it, but let's say these words together out loud. Dear friends, let's love each other because love is from God and everyone who loves is born from God and knows God. The person who doesn't love does not know God for God is love.

13:57 I mean, this is the call from Jesus for us to love. I was reading an article this week about this. It was from the John Templeton Foundation. It was pulling together research that focused on the need for love. And the article was called, Without Love We Perish. And I love this quote in it. It said, having good quality social relationships, known as social capital, is the most important factor in your health, happiness, and life satisfaction. I remind you on the night before his death, So at the last supper, Jesus told his disciples, I give you a new commandment that you love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. That's John 13, 34 and 35. He's describing what he hopes for the church. The church is not a building. It's a people. It's a community of people. You see, he had that himself. He needed those 12 disciples. And not only those 12 disciples, before his death, he had 72 people who are following him and being a part of his ministry.

14:52 And so, you know, if Jesus needed to have people around him, how much more true is it of us who claim to be his followers? That we need community. We need people. So he's not describing, again, a building. He's describing people. But in the process of that and in creating churches like what Jesus is describing, part of what we know is we have some role to play in that. It's not simply the pastor is going to care for everybody. It's not simply the leaders who are going to do that. It's something we do together. That's part of what it means to be the church. All right, that takes me to the idea captured in the new United Methodist vision statement. So our bishops this last year in our connectional table put together a vision statement. They said, you know, this is our hope for the people who are Christians in our United Methodist churches. And I just say, this is a pretty good hope for anybody, whether you're a United Methodist or not. But their hope was that we might form disciples of Jesus Christ who are empowered by the Holy Spirit to love boldly, to serve joyfully, and to lead courageously.

15:56 Love boldly, serve joyfully, lead courageously. So today we wanna talk about, in the rest of the sermon, I wanna talk about loving boldly. So what does that look like, to love boldly? And this is my hope and prayer for you, that every one of you listening to this sermon, that we might together be people who love boldly, and that our church, when we come together, is loving boldly. And when we go out and we serve as the church in the world, we're loving boldly, individually and as a church. we're going to love boldly. So what does it mean to love? What does that look like? And as I was thinking about this, I was thinking of 1 Corinthians 13, of course, a passage many of you have memorized. And Paul describes what love is and what it isn't. So say these words with me out loud, if you don't mind. Love is patient. Love is kind. It isn't jealous. It doesn't brag. It isn't arrogant. It isn't rude. It doesn't seek its own advantage. It isn't irritable. It doesn't record a record. It doesn't keep, excuse me, a record of complaints.

16:50 It isn't happy with injustice, but it is happy with the truth. Love puts up with all things, trusts in all things, hopes for all things, endures all things. This kind of love never fails. Agape and its family of words. So you remember this word love here is agape. There's another word in the New Testament for love. That's phileo. There's a couple other words out there. Eros is another one. And there's one more I've forgotten. Or else, storge is another one. in the Greek language for love, but agape is the one most often used in the New Testament. It can mean affection. It can be used for affection, but it most often means an act in which we are, you know, something that we are doing in order to bless somebody else, in order to lift them up, build them up to care for them. That's what love looks like. It's self-giving acts of kindness, compassion, mercy, and sometimes affection is a part of that as well. Now, Jesus modeled this for us, right? So he came to model for us God's love, to embody God's love.

17:45 And that's what we find in that very familiar passage in John 3, 16. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. So Christ's coming is an expression of the love of God. And the people that Jesus loved, I mean, it's interesting to look and see. He's loving even his enemies, right? He loves the outcasts. He loves the people who were outsiders. He showed compassion to the prostitute and the woman who was caught in the act of adultery. He loved lepers and Samaritans and sinners. He loved a rich young ruler and a synagogue ruler and a Roman centurion. He loved them in the same way he loved the poor and the powerless. He cared about the mentally ill so much so that he sailed across the Sea of Galilee for a day to go out of his way to find a homeless, mentally ill man, a man who was demon-possessed, and to set him free. That's how Jesus loved, and those are the people that he loved. And you know, you get to the very end of his life and he's hanging on a cross, and there's a violent criminal who's hanging on a cross next to him.

18:39 And you remember that man says, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom. and with his dying breath, Jesus says, today you will be with me in paradise, right? Jesus loved all of these people. And so he calls us to love as well. Jesus loved boldly. All right, so I think about Thomas Aquinas. He said, to love is to will the good of the other. To love is to will the good of the other. But you know what? It's not just to will the good of the other. To love is to will and to work towards bringing about the good of the other. This is what we're called to do for followers of Jesus. Now reading these comments last week on Facebook and the ones that came in during this present week as well, reading the comments of people talking about their experience of church and what it meant, there were dozens and dozens of them. But I just wanna share with you a couple of them. One of the commitments that we made here at Resurrection was we are gonna be committed to welcoming LGBTQ persons, that everyone is welcome here and we're gonna love and welcome people and value them and see them as beloved children of God.

19:39 And that's been true for a very long time here at resurrection. And some people left our church because that was not, you know, they couldn't see that that was being faithful. And to us, it seemed the most faithful thing to do as followers of Jesus is to love boldly in this way. So one of the persons who wrote, there were a couple of gay and lesbian people who'd written on my Facebook page. One of them said this, he said, he had always loved God, but he felt like there was no place for him in the church. And then he found a faith community at resurrection where people, and I'm quoting him, live out a theology of radical welcome. And here he finally felt like he found a faith community who recognized him as a beloved child of God. I read several of our members who wrote the call to boldly love as they were a part of our congregation, led them to foster children in the foster care system. And so they began fostering children. And then some of them adopted children. And there were three or four of them who shared their testimony on my Facebook page. And it was beautiful to read these stories of people who not only did they foster children, take children into their homes and love these children who were not in foster, did not have a home up to that point, but they described how the church family just surrounded them with love.

20:44 That's part of what it looks like to love boldly. And you can find out more. If you're interested in finding out more about our foster and adopt ministry, go to cor.org slash next, cor.org slash next. You can find out more. You can read more today about this. David described himself as an atheist when he came to resurrection. He was an atheist, a drug addict, and an alcoholic when he began attending resurrection three years ago. And this is what he said. resurrection took me in at the lowest point in my life and loved me until I could love myself. He's been sober for almost three years now and he went on to say, to say I love my church family is an understatement. I am living proof of the power of church and the power of God. I love that. Jesus knew that love has the power to change people's lives. Love has the power to change the world if only his followers would live it.

21:33 All right, you no doubt remember that when Jesus was asked what God really wants from us, he shared two commandments. And these are things that I would say anybody who's been here at resurrection any length of time has heard these. These are just so pivotal to being a Christian, right? He said that we're to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and we're to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. He's quoting Moses, of course, there, Deuteronomy 6.5 and Leviticus, I think it's 19.18. Now, when he shares this, at one point, somebody says, you know, what is it that God really wants? And he shares these two commandments. And the person says, yeah, but, you know, who is my neighbor? Right. And so it's interesting when Jesus goes to answer that question, he's going to answer two questions, really. He's going to answer first, who is it that we have to love? Right. And, and, and the man was kind of asking, who don't I have to love? Right. Who, who's, who's, you know, who's excused from that because they're not really my neighbor. So Jesus is going to ask, answer the question, who do you have to love? And then he's going to answer the question that the man didn't ask. And that is, what does it look like to love? What does love really look like?

22:29 Which again, is not primarily a feeling. It's a way of acting for the good of others. So he told the story of a Jewish man who was going from Jerusalem to Jericho. I want to pause and just show you on a map where this is, especially in the light of the news this week where there's been, hopefully, an enduring peace between Hamas and Israel. So let me just show you. This is a satellite image. Here's Jerusalem right here. Here's Jericho right here. This is the Sea of Galilee up here. Jesus spent most of his ministry around the Sea of Galilee. This is the Jordan River that flows into the Dead Sea right here. This is the Mediterranean Sea. This is the Gaza Strip right here. This is Egypt down here. All right, so let's go a little closer, and we'll take a look. This man, Jesus said, is going from Jerusalem to Jericho. Now, it's a 15-mile, 15 miles is the crow flies, but that's going to take a little longer, maybe 20 miles by the time you've walked the switchbacks. This is a descent of 3,000 feet from here to here, and it's a pretty treacherous terrain.

23:25 I want to show you. This is a picture of part of the road to Jericho from Jerusalem, and this is Wadi Kelt, and there's a monastery. St. George's Monastery is built right in here, And every time we go to the Holy Land, I take people here so they get a chance to see what was that journey like that the Jew was making, the Jewish man was making from Jerusalem to Jericho. He's accosted by robbers. And they beat him. They strip him naked. They take everything he has. And they leave him for dead on the side of the road. You can still find stretches of the old Roman road there. I've walked on them in this area near Wadi Kelt. So a dangerous, treacherous area. And everybody knows this who's hearing the story Jesus is telling. And he says, then along comes a priest and then later a Levite. A Levite was like a worship leader or a key religious leader. And these two come by and they see the man on the other side of the road and they walk past. Either they're afraid that it's a trap and they're gonna be beaten themselves and robbed, or perhaps they feel like he's dead.

24:20 And if they touch his body, they'll be unclean because if you couldn't touch a dead body, you'd be richly unclean. Maybe they thought they were in such a hurry and there'd be somebody else who'd come along and help, which every one of us has thought when we've seen somebody who was in need, there's gonna be somebody else who's gonna come along and stop and help that person because I'm in a hurry and I don't really have time or I'm a little afraid. All right, so this is what's going on. And then Jesus says there's a Samaritan that comes along. Now, you remember the Samaritans and the Jews have a similar relationship to the Palestinians and the Jewish people. There are some Palestinians and Jews who have beautiful relationships, but then there's also a lot of pain as we've seen over the last two years. And so a Samaritan comes along and he sees the man on the side of the road, recognizes he's probably a Jew, but he goes over to help, right? And he puts them, he bandages his wounds. He puts them on his donkey. He takes him the rest of the journey down to Jericho. He provides for his medical care, his food, clothing, his shelter.

25:11 He takes care of all of these things. And then Jesus says, okay, so who's the neighbor, right? His point is he's teaching that when it comes to loving your neighbor, that's everybody. That is the person who is on the opposite side of the political aisle from you. That is the person who you cannot hardly believe that they believe the things that they believe. That is the person of another religion, another race. It's the person that you're afraid of or the person you're anxious to be around or the person who's irritated the daylights out of you, and they are still your neighbor. And so Jesus answers that question pretty clearly. Your neighbor is anybody who needs you. And then the second part of the question, which the man didn't even ask out loud, but what does it look like to love? And what it looked like to love wasn't the man going by saying, you know, I'll pray for you, God bless you, but actually stopping to help, right? It was rolling up his sleeves. It was bandaging his wounds. It was sacrificing what he had in order to help somebody else who was in need. This is what love looked like, Jesus said.

26:04 Now, you know, it struck me this week when I was preparing this sermon, and almost every week my sermons are first for me before they're for you. But what struck me was, you know, I get on my knees every morning, and I pray, and I offer my life to Christ. But it hit me, and I've been praying since the Wesley Sermon Series, you know, God, use me. I pray that I'll bring glory to you today. But one simple little idea is if you think about your life mission, you know, like what's your mission for today? Jesus made it pretty clear. Your mission for today is to love boldly, right? It's to love the people around you. It's to love your neighbor. It's to love the person who's in need. It's to love your enemy. You are called to love. And that's not a feeling. It's a way of acting and being. It's showing kindness, compassion, mercy, concern. It's helping when there's some way that you can concretely help. Sometimes it's a phone call. Sometimes it's a text. Sometimes it's stopping to listen. Sometimes it's just a smile. We're called to love boldly.

26:56 So every day as I was working on the sermon on my knees, I've just been praying. I've been praying through my calendar each day. And I do this many times, but I began praying through my calendar. Lord, I don't, you know, I'm gonna see this person who wants to talk about whatever's going on in their life, you know. But as I do that, I may not have the answers to that, but I do know I'm supposed to love them. Help me to love them well. And when I go to this meeting, help me to reflect your love in this meeting. When I have a chance to do this thing that I'm gonna do, please use me as an instrument of your love in this place So throughout the day, and it starts with, you know, help me to love my animals. Help me to love LaVonne, you know, when I finally go in the kitchen with her cup of coffee and I have a chance. You know, help me to love her well. Help me to love Stephanie, my assistant, when I walk in the office door. And anybody else that I'm coming in contact with, Lord, please help me to love boldly. Right, Jesus loved boldly. The Good Samaritan loved boldly. He's calling us to love boldly. What would happen if every one of us, and there's like 25,000 of us who are gonna hear this sermon today, TV, online, at all of our locations in Kansas City and Mason.

27:54 What would happen if every one of us, every day this week, every day for the rest of our lives, started our day saying, Lord, help me to love boldly. Help me to love boldly. How would the world change? Now, this is hard sometimes. I mean, we're a deeply divided nation right now. Every week, there's something that's happening in the news, multiple times usually. And when I'm watching the news, which I watch a lot less news now, just because I find it discouraging to watch. But when I'm watching the news, you know, and I find myself shaking my head and frustrated, sometimes even feeling anger welling up inside of me. And it may be towards the Republicans or it may be towards the Democrats, right? But I'm looking at people in other countries sometimes, the things that people are doing to one another as human beings and the way that we treat one another and act, I mean, I just, I find there are times I just think, how, you know, how do we live this way? And then I remember Jesus. And, you know, he's living in a time where the politics were arguably considerably worse than the time that we're living in today, right?

28:50 And I think about Herod Antipas, who was ruling over the Galilee. And I think of Pontius Pilate, the Roman emperors, you know, governor in Jerusalem and in Judea. And I think about Emperor Tiberius Caesar, who was the emperor when Jesus was pursuing his public ministry. And, you know, all of those people, they did things that Jesus just had to shake his head. I probably made him weep seeing the things that they were doing. What was his response? He didn't, you know, he didn't preach about, you know, Tiberius all the time or emperor, you know, or the Roman governor Pontius Pilate or Herod Antipas. Here's what he said. You got to love. You got to love even your enemies. Sometimes that's going to be hard. Sometimes you're going to have to take up your cross in order to love. Don't return evil for evil. This is something in the Proverbs and Paul picks it up. But Jesus says something very similar, you know, that we're not to strike somebody back when they strike us, but instead we are to demonstrate love, hard, difficult love, a love that's reflected in tangible forms of caring for other human beings.

29:51 And that has the power to change things. He demonstrated his love most dramatically in his death on the cross. He said, if you're gonna follow me, you may just have to take up your cross in order to do this. I wanna encourage each of us to be people who love boldly, to see that as your mission every single day, to see our church as a place where we can love boldly. you know, with the folks who walk in the door that we are called to love each other. And when we leave to go out into the world to serve and to love one another with boldness. I wanna remind you of something Martin Luther King said in 1957, his sermon, Strength to Love. He was preaching at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. And when he was preaching that, he was sick. The doctor said, don't go. He said, no, I gotta at least go and preach. So he went up and he stood up and preached. And then he left right away afterwards to go back home and get in bed. But he was preaching on Jesus' words, love your enemy. And he wrote this in his sermon.

30:46 He preached this. It's in the transcript. He says, far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies. He said this as one who was fighting against racism, who would know what it felt like to be arrested, to be beaten, and 10 years later to be put to death. for his quest for justice. But he never stopped believing that love was the answer. when I was eight months old, there was a song that came out. It was released two weeks, actually it was recorded two weeks after Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, when the marchers were on the sidewalk and they were marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And then they were beaten when they got to the other side and dispersed. 18, I think, were hospitalized.

31:39 And two weeks later, this song was recorded. Jackie DeShannon was the one who recorded it. Burt Bacharach and Hal David had tried to get several other people to record it. And everybody thought it was a little too sappy-er. I don't know what, but it was a song that was written as a prayer to God. And I want to remind you of this song. Again, even though I was only eight months old, this song has played some part. It's sort of wound its way through my life. Maybe you'll remember it too. Here's Jackie DeShannon recording the song. Here's just a little bit of it. Take a listen.

32:13 I love that song. I'm guessing many of you remember it. Some of you, it may be new to you. Go look it up. It's been recorded and recorded by other groups over and over again. What the world needs now is love, sweet love. Hey, by the way, this is our 35th anniversary T-shirt. I wore it last week underneath my dress shirt and underneath a sport coat because I was a little worried. Resurrection Mason launching in Ohio. You know, you don't know who I am. And so who's this guy preaching in a t-shirt? But it hit me when I got to church last weekend that, you know, I'm preaching and all you could see was a little blue, you know, underneath my dress shirt. And I thought, you know, how ridiculous is this? You have a shirt that on the back says what you really believe and what you think is important, but you're hiding it underneath a dress shirt and a sport coat. So I thought I'd take it off this week, the sport coat anyway, and not take the t-shirt off with a sport coat. And just let you see what it says on the back of this t-shirt, our 35th anniversary t-shirt. And there it is. Love boldly, serve joyfully, lead courageously.

33:22 That is what we're calling our congregation and each of you to do. Today, love boldly. Next week, we're going to talk about serving joyfully. And the week after that, to lead courageously. By the way, one way that we love boldly is by serving joyfully. Next Saturday morning here in the Kansas City area, and I believe at Mason in Ohio, you're doing some of the same things, we have a serve day. We have 400 opportunities for people to serve throughout Kansas City next Saturday morning. And my hope is that many of you will say, you know, let's go do that. Let's go sign up and serve. And let's get to know the people that we're serving with. I'm gonna be bouncing around to various serve sites. I clearly won't make it to all 400 next Saturday morning. But I want you to go to core.org slash next, and you can sign up today and say, I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna serve. And maybe you live in another part of the country where you can't be here in Kansas City for the serve day. So go find some way to volunteer next Saturday or sometime this next week.

34:15 And as a church, we're celebrating our 35th anniversary, not by doing something extravagant for us. You know how we're celebrating? Is we're challenging our members to serve 35,000 hours in the community. And you can do that on your own. And you can text, again, go to court.org slash next. You can find out how just to register. You know, I did this this week. I did this this week. Not to brag on yourself, but just so we can sort of keep track of, here are all the ways that our resurrection members were serving in the community. So however you're serving, whether it's with us or on your own, I want you to let us know that. And I want you to be people who recognize, like the Good Samaritan, that to really love and to love boldly means to roll up your hands and to serve. We'll talk more about serving next week, but I want you to know next Saturday is our Serve Saturday. I don't want you to miss that. All right, I have one last story to share with you. So this week I was meeting with one of our members, Amy. Amy and Mark joined the church some years ago. They have two girls. One is 12, one is 10.

35:07 Their 12-year-old daughter is Sophia. Sophia was born with Down syndrome. And Amy was telling me a little Sophia story. And she was describing how not long ago, she took her two daughters for breakfast on a Saturday morning. And as they were sitting there for breakfast, they were waiting for their pancakes. And there was a woman who was old enough to be the girl's grandmother. And she was busting the tables. So she had one of those plastic bins and was scooping up, you know, things on the table and cleaning up. And she said, I noticed Sophia began to lock onto her daughter with Down syndrome, began to lock onto this woman who was busting the tables. And she said, I just waited. I wasn't sure what she was going to do. And she said, pretty soon she started saying, hey, hey, hey. And she couldn't quite get her attention. She keeps shouting, hey, hey. And maybe the woman, you know, maybe she just thought it was rude and didn't really turn around. But Sophia was not to be dissuaded from this. And so finally, the woman turned over and she saw, turned over and saw Sophia who was shouting, hey, hey. And when she finally turned and looked at Sophia, Sophia said, I love you. And Amy said, the woman put her hands on her chest over her heart and she began to tear up. And she said, I can't think of the last time somebody told me that. And she was describing for me when Sophia was born, she wasn't sure when she found out she down, what was going to happen with her life? How would she live out her life? And how would she make a difference in the world? And she said, part of the joy I've had is watching my daughter who's figured out her purpose is to love boldly, to love boldly. I wonder, have you figured out that that's also your purpose? I want to end with this. Oh, by the way, here's a picture of Sophia. This was her first day of school. I just love that. So Amy said this, She said, this is the message I learned from my daughter.

36:58 Our greatest calling is to love and to love fully and boldly. That leads me to these words of scripture that were read at the beginning of the sermon, before the sermon began. And I'm going to invite you to read these out loud with me too. This is from Ephesians chapter five, verse two. Let's read them together. Live your life with love, following the example of Christ who loved us and gave himself for us. Let's do this. Let's be a church that loves boldly, that fosters community, that welcomes everybody, that goes out of our way to look around and see who needs to be cared for, who needs to be loved, who needs just a smile or a welcome. Let's love. Let's be engaged in building community together in our buildings. And then let's be committed to every day when we leave the building, living a life of love, loving boldly in Jesus' name, amen. Would you pray with me?

37:52 and I'm going to invite you to put your hands on your lap. Look at me right now for just a moment. Just put your hands on your lap like this, like you're offering yourself to Christ, and if you feel comfortable, you might just whisper this prayer into your breath, so we'll close our eyes. God, thank you for loving me. I accept your love. Jesus, help me to follow you.