Picture of Fort Garry EMC. taken by Donita Reimer for the FGEMC Facebook Page.

The first time I ever preached was at Fort Garry EMC, on November 28th, 2010. I know that date, even now a decade later, because it was the first Sunday of Advent. To the best of my knowledge no recording of that Sunday exists, but after bravely plunging into the abyss that is my files from that time of my file, I have emerged victorious with my outline from that day!

Looking at this outline ten years on, I can say it is pretty clear I had only just started down my path of being a preacher. At that point, I had only been in Seminary for hardly a full school year; my first preaching class was still two semesters away! The sermon is clunkier than I remember. It is a tad pretentious, as I daresay most first sermons trend toward being. It makes two theological points, one about the fallenness of humanity and the other about Divine Apathea - both points on which my opinion has shifted dramatically over the past decade - with such rigidness and force that I can’t help but wonder what I was all going through at that time in my life to warrant such bleakness. However, there is something comforting to me that even now, a decade on, it is easy to tell that I wrote this. While If I were looking to write this same sermon today there would be a lot I would word differently - add as well as omit - that the seed of what would one day grow to be my style of preaching was here already, that makes me smile. That I can recognize myself in this sermon, even with all its rough edges, even though it is separated from me through so much time, leads me to wonder how I will grow as a preacher over the next decade. Wonder, “how will I think of my preaching when I look back ten years from now?”

For the first handful of sermons I gave, instead of scripting, I would instead make an outline. In those days, by the time the outline was written, I only had to go over it a handful of times before I could preach entirely from memory. Unfortunately, the days when I was 24 and had a memory capable of such feats are long since behind me, as was demonstrated painfully one Sunday morning a few years after when I forgot enough of what I was going to say to parse a 25-minute sermon into a cool 8!

So, what I present you with now is the lightly edited, but otherwise unaltered, outline prepared for my first sermon, given the First Sunday of Advent, November 28th, 2010, to the congregation at Fort Garry EMC. It was a very important day in my life. So, my family at MacGregor EMC, I want to share it now with you. I hope it still has something to say about the first Sunday of Advent today.

Before I Begin: A Masai Speaking Tradition

The Masai People who straddle the border of Kenya and Tanzania have an interesting spoken tradition
The speaker will randomly say the phrase “Say” and then a number and the audience will repeat that number
It is great because it lets the audience know the speaker is thinking of them, and it lets the speaker know the audience is awake, which is a fear of mine
So to practice, say six

Picture of the Fort Garry EMC Sanctuary. taken by Donita Reimner for the FGEMC Facebook Page.

A Patient Christmas Story From my Childhood

Alright, so to begin, Christmas eve around twenty years ago
My sister and I used to spend the night of Christmas eve in front of the tree waiting for my parents to bring the presents they were wrapping in the other room
As the parents in the audience know this inevitably meant we would fall asleep in about 10 minutes
This is a very happy intro, into a very depressing topic
Say five

Why We Are Not Good

We as a part of creation have fallen away from God
We try our best to be good people, and still, we fall miserably short
Many of our best intentions as humanity are events that end the worst
We are like the child in the playground who licks the frozen flagpole twice. We know better and we do learn from the mistakes we make, but somehow they still repeat themselves
But to even begin to comprehend the severity of our fallenness we have to go back a little bit
Before the internet and books, the wheel, fire, rocks and trees, birds and bees, there was nothing and there was also God, the loving God
The God whose love was so perfect that he created all. To get hung up over how, is very much missing the point that this God, three in one, our God, created everything as an expression of his perfect love
And as to be expected, his creation was perfect, from the birds and trees to the rocks and the bees it was perfect, and at its pinnacle was us, humanity
And then we messed it up. I deliberately say ‘we’ instead of naming anyone, because to do that is to again miss the point. We have all sinned and have fallen short of the Glory of God. The specifics of the situation are irrelevant, what is important here is that we are all to blame, and we are all part of fallen creation and it is obvious we are fallen creation
Go forward from here a while and we see the Hebrew people, slaves in a land that once welcomed them with open arms. The Pharaoh orders all of the firstborn thrown into the river just to keep the population down. We are all fallen
Go forward from here a while and we see the Hebrew people have slaves of their own, as is the way of the time. We are all fallen
Go forward from here and we see Antiochus Epiphones sacrifice a pig on the altar to our God in the rebuilt temple in Jerusalem. This is not right
Go forward a few hundred years and we see the Romans under Nero hunting the Christians and throwing them to the starved lions of the arenas for the nation to enjoy. This is not right
In a few hundred years we see the crusades, where Christians rape and pillage their way across mostly Christian eastern Europe. This is not right
We see colonialism, we see the senseless destruction it brought, we see the enlightenment lead to the horrors of the French revolution, we see war, intentional plague, ignored famine, genocide, regicide, infanticide, and homicide. This is not right
We see that time in grade 10 when I cheated on a test, lied about cheating on that test and then didn’t say anything when I received a perfect grade. This is not right
We see brother raising sword against brother, the underlying racism in society. We pretend to be so good, so much better than those come before us, and yet we are not different even in the slightest. All of this anger, hostility, and sin, in this we point our finger at our God, our truly loving God and with clenched teeth, childishly tell him to leave. We are not right
We really are the pinnacle of a fallen creation
Say four

Picture of Fort Garry EMC stage. taken by Donita Reimer for the FGEMC Facebook Page.

God’s Response And Our Rejection Of It

One of the greatest things about our loving God is what being God entails. Divine Apathea. For God to be moved by our hatred of him would make him dependent upon something other than himself, something we know isn’t the case. God does not love us because of anything we do. He will not love us more if we praise him devoutly, and he will not love us less if we curse his name. God loves perfectly and it is because of this that he loves us
God loves us, the terrible humanity we are, so much that in response to our constant rejection of him, he did not wipe us off the face of the earth, but instead did something unimaginable
He sent his son, his only begotten son, fully man and still one of three of one, Jesus Christ, to reconcile his now fallen creation to himself
The fully divine was born and lived a pain-filled human life for us all
But we reject it, we reject him, we reject our loving God. We all meet him with Judas’s kiss. We are all there in the courtyard screaming crucify him. We are all there torturing him as he slowly drags the cross towards Calvary. We nail his hands and feet, we raise him into the air, we all plunge that spear into his side, and then we throw him into his cold grave
Say three

God’s No To Our Rejection

But as we all know this is not the end of the story. He arose, He arose, hallelujah Christ arose
In this single act, our loving God gave his final answer to our constant berating rejection of him. And it was, “No”
Jesus Christ, bearing the weight of all the sins of us, fallen humanity died, and to that death, to Christ’s death, the Father answered no
In the resurrection, we see our saviour, fully man and fully divine, and we now look forward to his return when things will be set right
Say two

Waiting For The End

And so, for now, we wait until then
It is not bad to wait, waiting is a skill most of us have lost, though
Our exhausting protestant work ethic has become severely ingrained into our conscious mind to the point where we almost believe that we are doing something wrong if we are not doing anything rather redundant
It is okay to do nothing for a while. Maybe the list of sins from earlier would have been shorter if we would be okay with doing nothing for a while
Our fuses wouldn’t be so short, our tempers wouldn’t flare so hot. No, it’s not bad to wait
Maybe there was something greater than I thought to when my sister and I stayed up as late as we could in front of that tree 20 years ago. We didn’t argue, we didn’t fight, we were content just looking at the pretty lights and waiting for my parents to come and place the wrapped Steel Tech set for me, and …well whatever my sister’s favourite toy was for her, under the tree
Am I saying that all our ills would be gone, if only we learned to wait? No, by no means. We are quite obviously incapable of fixing all our own problems, or we probably would have done it already. That is why our saviour will return, to set those things right
This is not a, “set things right,” filled with the hate-filled vengeance and smiting that we usually think of, either. Our God is our loving God, and we can depend on him. Things will be set right as only our perfectly loving God can do
This is what we as Christians pray for. This is what we long for. This is what we need and want with all that we are
And so, It is for this that we now wait
Say one

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