Welcome to Pastor Jack Buckley's weekly blog and podcast.
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Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Hallelujah For Hea Jung
Our church family has been blessed this school year by Hea Jung Noh's leadership of our youth ministry. (She came our way last September immediately after finishing a chaplaincy internship at Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley, to work part-time here while finishing her Master of Divinity program at San Francisco Theological Seminary.)
Of course, Hea Jung has blessed the families of our high school students. Her ministry to the youth includes their parents and siblings. As she spent time one on one with this young person or that one, she made it a point to get to know their families as well. Moms and dads appreciate both her personal warmth and her professional skill. They trust her with their kids, and with themselves.
All of us have benefited from her good work with the youth. I've observed our young people growing stronger in their fellowship and in their sense of Christ's daily presence. Their long-standing enthusiasm for volunteer service has a new spiritual resonance. So I look forward all the more to this year's Vacation Bible School and our All-Church Retreat, which are both famous for the youth group's mentoring ministry to our children.
Hea Jung fit right in to their annual snow trip to Tahoe. Then she led them into a new mission trip as well. They worked for a week in post-Katrina construction ministry in New Orleans. Daily blog entries kept us posted on their prayer requests and praises throughout their stay. Their testimonies upon return helped renew our compassion for the hurricane's thousands of victims, 2 1/2 years after the devastating storm tore through their hometown.
I can't thank Hea Jung enough for her contribution to our church's life and work. But this is the season for us to say one last "thank you," for she will be leaving us on May 25. She's returning to her family home in Korea to assist her parents for a year before entering the Ph.D. program in Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union. We will miss her, and we will pray God's best blessing on her as she steps out to follow God's lead from here.
Hea Jung will be our preacher on Pentecost Sunday, May 11. A week later we will honor her at the coffee hour on Sunday, May 18. I hope you can join us for both of these very special events in our life together as God's church -- one congregation right here in little Alameda and one small part of Christ's Body spread all across God's good earth.
posted by Jack Buckley at
8:35 PM
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
True Love Loves The Truth
Psalm 66:8-20; John 14:15-21
Thinking about Jesus and his disciples at the dinner table on that last night they had together, in a borrowed upper room somewhere in Jerusalem, I remember a late night I had together with a dear friend I hadn't seen for a few years.
Mike Parker and I were at a national church conference on a midwestern college campus. At the end of a busy day, we joined several friends from seminary days for dinner and a lot of chatter -- gossip and jokes and some chewing of the theological fat. At the end of all that, Mike and I walked across campus to the dorm he was staying in. At the entrance door, we stood a while wrapping up our conversation. Or so we thought.
Instead, we ended up walking over to my dormitory, where we stood out front talking some more. Then we walked back to his dorm, then back to mine again, talking all the way.
It finally dawned on me -- We were like a couple at the end of a date! The fun and joy we were sharing was wrapped around our love for each other. And who wants to say a quick good-night to all of that?
Something like that was going on between Jesus and his men at the last supper in John 14...
Every minute counts, as if it were the last minute of them all. He says
"This is the end." But not yet! "Now is the time for..." But there's more! "Rise," he says, "let's be on our way."
And then come three more chapters of conversation! Finally, in John 18, the action picks up again.
Among all their conversation, all the theological themes Jesus unfolds one on top of another -- the heart of the matter turns out to be love. "Love me... Love God... Love each other."
Not warm fuzzy feelings. Not hot passion (which anyway runs hot and cold beyond our control). But God's kind of love, that chooses to do the loving thing regardless of how the lover presently feels about the beloved.
Jesus showed his men what he meant at that very meal. John 13 says the first thing he did as they settled down for dinner was to go around the table and wash each disciple's feet. You'd expect one of them, his apprentices, to assume the servant role towards him! But he did it as an act of loving respect -- and said they (we) should be willing to do the same kind of thing with the same motivation.
I wish my sermon had recorded well enough to post as this week's GODcast, but that's not the case. Argh and %$#^+*!
Lacking that, here's the prayer I read to bring the message home. It's from Robert James St. Clair's Prayers For People Like Me...
Help Us Do What You Require
Great God who made everything beyond our knowledge,
who is before the beginning and after the ending,
inspire in us new confidence
to create beyond our knowledge
and love beyond our limits.
Over the years we have become distressed
with those we could not love.
We could not be expected to forgive that relative;
or reasonably be expected to love that neighbor;
and no one with any sense could forgive
that alleged friend;
and as for that person who divorced us
(just up and abandoned us)
well, only God knows the anguish -- the torture.
How could I forgive and maintain my self-respect?
Lord, nothing less than the hand that planted
a thousand forests
and poured the seven seas can impart to our hearts
the impulse to love the unloved, the unloving,
and the unlovely --
a power beyond limits and foreign to reason.
Except, O Lord, we are convinced you love us,
will love us down through the ages to come,
until the seas become deserts and the forests
are no more.
Outlasting any bond will be the everlasting
covenant of life,
somewhere keeping as one the family of God.
Keep before our vision the victory over death
and the resurrection of Jesus,
an event to be lived, and relived, O God,
where friends and enemies meet,
where the alienated come together,
where those outside are drawn in,
and those who dislike themselves are invited back,
and people like us, bound with the cords of resentment,
may rendezvous, and find at the old cross
liberation at last.
May this be the week we inherit the earth,
and when the whole Gospel of Christ is entrusted to us.
Then, while you keep telling us what we can do,
we shall stop telling you what you cannot do.
Through Christ our risen Lord, Amen.
posted by Jack Buckley at
11:54 AM
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Heaven Here and Now
Psalm 31:1-5,15-16; John 14:1-14
Well hey, this week has turned into one of those times you don't quite get done all that you've intended. Can you say "scramble"? Which doesn't much live up to Sunday's sermon title. Ah well...
Even so, the MP3 recording is all loaded up for your listening pleasure. And your spiritual nourishment, too, I'm hopin'.
Listen to the GODcast!
posted by Jack Buckley at
11:35 AM
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