Preaching at the Mission

Tonight I had the chance to preach at the Portland Rescue Mission again. The whole evening went great. The Evergreen Community had about 12 people show up to serve dinner and Aaron was playful with his worship. Good on’ya mate!

This week as I was thinking about what to say tonight, I truly wanted to relate to the people at the Mission (I fear irrelevance) while making something in the Bible very accessible to them. But what do you say to people who probably don’t want to hear you “preach” and are just looking for a meal and warm, dry place to sleep.

At times like this I try to think through what I have in common with the people I'm speaking with. But, I also wanted to give them something by speaking with them and not to or about them. Right from the start I knew I had to tear down the emotional, sociological and stereotypical barriers that separated us. We had to be one group of people seeking Jesus. Tonight I wanted us to be part of the Jesus story told in the Scriptures.

Here I was, speaking with a room full of homeless, marginalized, poor men and women whom life has dealt a 2-7 off suit (the worst hand in Poker) trying to establish a bond. The commonality I found tonight that everyone in the room could agree on was that life sucks! Interestingly enough, there were some people I had to convince of the suckiness of life because they disagreed with me. This of course was not a hard task.

I explained life sucks because we experience tragedy everyday. Sometimes we lose our keys, we lose our glasses, we lose our jobs, we lose our homes and occasionally we lose our friends. “Sh*t happens everyday,” I said (wow, sh*t and Jesus in the same sermon! That was a first). From this point everyone agreed, “life sucks.” They were buying what I was sellin'.

But, I went on to explain, this was not the way it was supposed to be. Jesus said he came to give us life and life to the fullest (John 10:10). For a few moments I told how we have been sold a shadow of "life to the fullest" by the kingdom of man, the world at large. The things it says are important and will make us happy will never allow us to experience life to the fullest. We have been duped.

I continued. Only when we trust Jesus, only when we hope in his words of love and forgiveness are we able to see past the hollow emptiness of this world and experience the kind of life we were created to enjoy. Jesus gives us hope (no matter who we are: black, brown, white, short, tall, rich or poor) that at his side life can be different! Life can be peaceful, secure and filled with genuine love, maybe not on this rotating mud ball, but for the rest of eternity.

Hope for the future is what I wanted to serve tonight with the rice and beans.

The night was good. God showed up and loved on his people.