Nov 13

Mark Seversen, Pastor of Hillcrest Covenant Church in Prarie Village, KS, will serve as Pastor in Residence Monday, November 17th thru Thursday, November 20th.  Pastor Seversen will preach in Chapel on Thursday. His sermon, The Triumph of Humility, is based on Judges 4-5.  Students, faculty and staff are invited to a lunch forum with Pastor Seversen on Thursday afternoon.  The forum, Left Handed Leadership: Elvis in the Fog of Leadership will take place in Olsson Lounge.  Lunch will be provided.  Pastor Seversen is also available to meet one-on-one with students on Tuesday between the hours of 10:30 am and 5:15 pm.  The sign-up sheet is posted outside of Mary Miller’s office in Nyvall Hall.

Nov 4

Chapel this year at North Park Seminary has a particular weekly rhythm structured around the essential worship tasks of GATHERING, COMMUNING and PROCLAIMING.  Three days a week we meet at 9:30am for roughly 30 minutes of worship: each service centers on one of these three primary points of orientation for worshipers.

On Mondays we meet for a service of GATHERING in which we celebrate the goodness of God and the faith of God’s people via musical expression.  One of the premises of this service is that most of us heard at least one strong sermon on Sunday at our own faith communities.  This service, we hope, sets a tone of gratitude and gladness as we enter into a new week together.  The style of music varies from classic hymnody to contemporary to gospel to bluegrass.

Tuesdays our services culminate with our COMMUNING at The Lord’s Table.  The sacraments of the church provide another essential point of orientation.  The focus of these services is constant with a communion homily pointing to Table as preparation for receiving the gifts of God for the people of God.  Bread and Cup are distributed in a range of ways:  Examples this semester include a liturgical service from the Episcopal tradition as well as a service from the Thai tradition.  On three occasions teams of students from Dr. Michael Van Horn’s Foundations of Worship class will have planned and led these Tuesday morning worship experiences.

Thursday chapel services are ordered around the PROCLAIMING task.  The preached word is another of the primary points of worship orientation:  These services are built around biblical witness offered by a diversity of voices as far as race, gender, students, faculty and guests.  Two weeks ago, for example, University Provost Joseph Jones was our preacher.  Last Thursday our new denominational President Gary Walter preached.

This post was provided by Assoc. Prof. of Ministry and Director of Field Education Tim Johnson

Oct 2

Brent Laytham, Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics at NPTS, is the author of this post which was originally posted in Theolog, http://www.theolog.org/blog

Decalogue Discipleship
Exodus 20:1-20

By Brent Laytham

No preacher should miss this week’s opportunity to preach on the Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments just won’t go away. Though Israel misplaced the tablets of stone long ago, the Jews never forgot their decisive encounter with the living God at the foot of Mount Sinai. They heard God speak the words that were meant to forever shape their common life. But as Paul later told the church at Corinth, their story reminds us that hearing doesn’t guarantee doing—that observing the commandments is not something we do with our eyes but with our actions (see 1 Corinthians 10).

• I have a friend who preached a ten sermon series on the Decalogue this summer. His intentionality contrasts with a profound amnesia about the Ten Commandments in much Christian worship. Whereas it was once common to rehearse them as part of weekly Sunday worship, they have now all but disappeared from not only our worship, but from our consciousness. It is important to note that the original, canonical context for the commandments is worship (see Exodus 19), and that rightly practiced, these commandments ground our worship in the living God and guard our worship against every false god. A story to illustrate: a few years ago I called my denomination’s bookstore to order a book. The person who answered the phone said, “Hello, would you like to order patriotic worship bulletins or flags today?” “No, and don’t get me started,” I replied. What I should have said is “No, as a Christian I am forbidden by the Ten Commandments to worship falsely.”

• Don’t hear my suggestion that we reclaim the Decalogue as more strident calling for commandment displays in schools and courthouses, or another nostalgic rant about America declining because we’ve lost sight of the commandments. I did suggest once, tongue in cheek, that “Coveting begins with television rather than kindergarten teachers; it flourishes at the mall more than the school. Let the Ten Commandments be engraved over the entrance to Wal-Mart, let them be read aloud at next year’s Super Bowl halftime.” In fact, Israel lost sight of the commandments pretty quickly. Sure, God inscribed them on tablets of stone, but almost immediately had Moses hide them in the ark of the covenant, never to be viewed again. Israel was supposed to keep the tablets well-hidden because Israel was supposed to keep the commandments in plain sight. That is, they were to live out these commandments in such a public, visible, obvious way that the world would sit up and take notice. The appropriate display of the Decalogue is not a plaque on a wall, nor a replica out front, but the faithful people of God.

• The key for any preacher is to find the gospel in the text, and that can be tricky if the text is a list of laws that we are most prone to take as constraints or limits. After all, eight of these ten words are “no” or “don’t.”Yet in the end and on the whole they articulate God’s active, saving “yes,” the same “Yes” that takes flesh in Christ and takes form in faithful ministry (see 2 Corinthians 1:19-20).

One place I find gospel in this text is by considering how Jews number the commandments. Some Christians will be vaguely aware that Catholics and Lutherans count commandments differently from Presbyterians and Methodists; the former see the first commandment running from “no other gods” to “make no idols,” whereas the latter count “no idols” as commandment number two.

Less well known is the fact that Jews count “no other gods” as the second commandment. The first commandment in Jewish tradition is “I am the Lord your God.” Let’s parse the grammar of that for a moment: grammatically, commands and laws have the imperative form. But “I am your God” is not an imperative; there is no rule to keep or action to do. It is an indicative, an announcement: gospel news for a people desperate to hear it. It is a creative word that speaks into reality a new existence: I am your God and you are my people. This reorients the grammar of the Decalogue, for it means that the one who keeps the first commandment—on which all the other commandments rest—is the faithful One of Israel. The other nine commands for Jews—all imperative in form, all engaging Israel’s active response to divine initiative—simply shape a life of gratitude, a life poured out in grateful response to the gospel announcement that precedes: I am your God.

Brent Laytham is the Coordinator of The Ekklesia Project, a network of Christian friendship committed to renewing faithful discipleship and recovering the unity of Christ’s church. See their online lectionary resource.