By This We Know
Children's sermon
Illustration
Preaching
Sermon
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Object:
Last week the lectionary texts focused on the Good Shepherd, and identified a key aspect of shepherding as caring for all of the flock rather than just attending to the narrow interests of the hired hand. This week takes that theme one step further, as the gospel passage uses the horticultural metaphor of the grapevine to underline the importance of our being organically connected to God. But it's not enough to have a personal relationship with God -- as this week's epistle text makes clear, the external evidence of our being connected to God is the care that we exhibit for others. As the writer of First John starkly puts it: "Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen" (1 John 4:20). In this installment of The Immediate Word, team member Dean Feldmeyer notes that perhaps the best example of this dynamic at work is the unconditional love that parents routinely demonstrate -- akin to the unconditional love of the shepherd for his flock. As Dean points out, this sort of love defies any attempt to measure it, particularly in dollars and cents. Dean reminds us that a vital personal relationship with God is defined not by an emotional experience but by our actions... and that's the way to be truly connected to the vinegrower.
Team member Mary Austin offers some additional thoughts about the gospel passage and the ways we're connected to others in the modern world. Mary suggests that while technology has given us many new possibilities for connecting with others across time and distance (one of the big attractions of Facebook), it has also allowed us to carefully manage just how close we are to others. While real relationships can be messy, Mary notes that modern technology also allows us to craft "Goldilocks relationships" in which we keep others not too close and not too far away... and once that becomes our standard mode it's all too easy to treat God in the same manner. As Jesus' comments about the vine illustrate, we have to be meaningfully connected to the vine -- and one another -- in order to bear fruit.
By This We Know
by Dean Feldmeyer
1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8
How do we know that our parents love us? How do we know that we, as parents, love our children?
Every year about this time, as Mother's Day and Father's Day approach, someone decides that the only way to measure a stay-at-home mom's love for her family is to place a monetary value on the work she does.
This year the gauntlet has been taken up by Insure.com ("The #1 Resource for Insurance"). They took "an informal look" at an "assortment of common tasks" that moms usually do around the house and what it would cost if the family had to pay someone to do those chores. It turns out moms got a pay cut this year.
Insure.com says that, according to data from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Mom is worth about $61,436 a year to that average family (down about 2% from last year). As the line from Fiddler on the Roof goes: "If that isn't love, what is?"
Dads, on the other hand, are worth only about $20,415. Dads are "fungible."
It isn't so much the amount of money that gives us pause here. It's the assertion that the only way to measure the value of a parent's love is to place a dollar amount on it.
But how do we measure love? And especially, how do we measure God's love for us and our love for God? How can we know what God's love is like?
THE WORLD
Two books that are currently occupying the popular imagination address these questions. One makes a direct attempt to answer them, while the other approaches from an oblique angle.
In When God Talks Back, anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann examines what she calls "the American Evangelical relationship with God".
Luhrmann spent six months in a Vineyard Fellowship church, attending worship and classes, and interviewing people about their relationship with God and how they came to that relationship. Vineyard churches, she says, are very experientially oriented. That is, they encourage their members to seek not just a "knowledge about" God but an "experience of" God as well.
This seeking begins in the large, plenary worship service and then moves to a class where people are taught to use their imagination, creating settings where they are present with and talking with God. They "have coffee" with God or "take walks" with God or "just chat" with God. At the same time they are taught that God loves them unconditionally and wants only good for them. Eventually, after following this contemporary style of spiritual discipline, Luhrmann says, "They would start to say that they recognize God's voice the way they recognize their mom's voice on the phone." Borrowing a concept from C.S. Lewis, they pretend that it is real until it becomes real. They imagine the close, personal, intimate relationship with God into being.
But when pressed by Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air interview program, Luhrmann cannot, of course, provide proof that what these very sincere folks are hearing is in fact the voice of God and not just their own voices reflected in their imagination. They feel very strongly that the voice they are hearing is God's. They feel it so strongly that they are convinced. But it is still very subjective. It is a feeling.
In the best-selling book and subsequent movie The Hunger Games, author Suzanne Collins warns us of a future in which "reality TV" has gone completely off the grid.
In Panem, the futuristic country that used to be North America, people watch the "Hunger Games" on television. In a plot that borrows liberally from Richard Connell's short story "The Most Dangerous Game" and Stephen King's Richard Bachman novel, The Running Man, this story features a futuristic reality show that pits 24 teenagers against each other in a gruesome televised competition that leaves only one alive at the end of the game. Desperately poor and hungry, these teens kill each other off in a bid to live the rest of their lives in luxurious comfort.
As the story opens 12-year-old Prim Everdeen is chosen for the games. But Prim is shy and frail -- and her older sister Katniss, who is clever, strong, and skilled with the bow and arrow, volunteers to take her place. For Katniss, love is something you do -- it is measured in your willingness to sacrifice on behalf of the beloved.
THE WORD
The author of the First epistle of John would probably see more of God's love at work in The Hunger Games than in When God Talks Back.
John believes in an experiential faith too. But the experience he commends to us is much more prosaic and mundane than the one described in When God Talks Back. It doesn't involve imagining or pretending so much as it involves doing. For him, the love of God is about much more than feelings. It is as much objective as it is subjective. It is measurable. The most repeated phrase in 1 John is "by this we know." John is all about knowing God and God's love in an objective, measurable way.
Do you want to experience God's Spirit? Do you want to experience God's love? There is a way you can do that: Love your neighbor. Blanket your human relationships in love. Let love be your way of moving and being to the degree that we can do that, we can experience God's presence and love in our lives.
Do you want to abide in God? You can. Abide in love. By this we know that we love -- by the fatigue we feel at the end of the day, by the thickness of our callouses, by the ache in our muscles, and by the sweat on our brow. The measure of our love is counted in energy spent.
For John, living in God's love is not about having coffee with God, or snuggling with God, or chatting with God, or taking a walk with God. It isn't about imagining or pretending a relationship with God into existence. It is about making a decision and acting on it, even if -- especially if -- that decision calls for personal sacrifice on behalf of another. It is about deciding to love one another in real and concrete ways.
In fact, he tells us in verse 16 that "those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them."
You just don't get any closer to God than that.
CRAFTING THE SERMON
Indicative
One of the most common and seductive heresies alive in the church today is the "personal relationship with God." That is not to say that a personal relationship with God is not possible or desirable; it is both.
The problem, the heresy, comes when we believe and practice that that's all there is to Christianity. When we reduce God to little more than "my big spiritual buddy," we have left out a great deal of what scripture teaches us about the nature and being of the divine Creator.
When we treat God as our personal therapist -- a shoulder to cry on, an ear to bend when life is not going the way we want it to go -- and as a miracle worker upon whom we call whenever we need something, we are treating God like a personal servant, a cosmic Mr. Belvedere, a spiritual Jeeves.
Moses may have spoken with God "as a man speaks to his friend" but that wasn't all there was to the relationship.
Imperative
Jesus calls God "Father" -- Abba. The relationship is personal, but it is also parental.
Sometimes we come to God crying about a booboo, a hurt feeling, a personal failure or problem. But sometimes we come before God to be held accountable, to ask forgiveness.
God has given us a commandment to love one another and John makes it clear in his first epistle that obeying this commandment is the way we best come to know God.
SECOND THOUGHTS
What Gardeners Know -- and the Rest of Us Hate
by Mary Austin
John 15:1-8
A teenager who uses texting to communicate almost everything in his life says -- "almost wistfully," according to Sherry Turkle in a recent article in the New York Times -- that "someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation." Turkle, a psychologist who studies the impact of technology on human interaction, wrote about the difference between technological connection and human connection.
Jesus' words from John's gospel remind us of the layers of connection we experience in the life of faith. Connected to Jesus and lifeless apart from him, we are also connected to each other. It's not just us and Jesus, alone in blissful connectivity. "Abide in me," Jesus invites us, promising that in this connection we bear fruit in the world. The branches live in community with each other -- no one ever had a fruitful tree with just one branch. "You all are the branches," Jesus tells us -- plural.
We can't sustain our connection to God without also feeding our connections to each other. And yet technology challenges us to be connected more deeply than texting or Facebook (great as they are) allow. Turkle observes: "Over the past 15 years, I've studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I've learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are." If who we are can change based on what's in our hand or on the table in front of us, what does that mean for the life of faith?
Technology allows us to control when and how we interact with people, answering when it's convenient and cutting off the conversation when we feel like it. In the article noted above Turkle writes: "At home, families sit together, texting and reading email. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we're on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it's hard, but it can be done." Turkle refers to this dynamic as the "Goldilocks effect," in which we "use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right."
Of course, once we're accustomed to "Goldilocks relationships" that keep each other not too close and not too far away but just right according to our own preferences, it's easy to put God in the same category.
Actual conversations are messy, full of complicated emotions not covered by emoticons, prone to wander and run on. They require attention to the words, plus all that is unsaid. They require eye contact and focus. People can feel our attention, or the lack of it.
Actual relationships are messy. They can't be contained on the screen. Other people have their own hopes, pains, and demands, and they want sometimes more, sometimes less from us than we want to give.
Actual faith is messy. We have to meet up with our own flaws, our grief, our disappointment with God, and then go past all of that to where God is.
Actual plants are messy too. The branches grow unevenly, seemingly haphazardly. Vines get tangled up in each other. The roots grow together. Nothing is as simple as our screens would make it seem. Jesus calls us to a deeper, richer fruitfulness than technology allows us, if we can remember to set it aside sometimes and look up from the screen at each other. Jesus reminds us that we have the potential to bear much fruit, if we are willing to grow and be stretched and allow life to be messy, rooted in him and not in our technology.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Julian of Norwich believed that "love" was the only word that could be used to describe God. God is totally love. We are called to love everyone whose lives we touch. "But God," we moan, "if we are to love everyone, why on earth didn't you make everyone lovable?" And how are we to love if we are called to love those whom we don't even like very much and would prefer not to spend time with?
It's all in how we treat them, how we act in their presence. First John tells us that love is a verb. Acting in a kind and loving manner may make all the difference in our relationships, even if it doesn't happen overnight. Then there are all the people of the world who are so easy to love in an abstract sense, but without involvement. The greatest commandment is all about loving God with everything we've got, and loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.
* * *
Although not referring directly to Jesus' command to love one another, Albert Schweitzer did sum up the command's essence in a comment on human capital. Schweitzer wrote:
"Open your eyes and look for a human being, or some work devoted to human welfare, which needs from someone a little time or friendliness, a little sympathy, or sociability, or labor. There may be a solitary or an embittered fellowman, an invalid, or an inefficient person to whom you can be something. Perhaps it is an old person or a child. Or some good work needs volunteers who can offer a free evening or run errands. Who can enumerate the many ways in which that costly piece of working capital, the human being, can be employed? More of him is wanted everywhere! Search, then, for some investment for your humanity, and do not be frightened away if you have to wait, or to be taken on trail. And be prepared for disappointments. But in any case, do not be without some secondary work in which you can give yourself as a man to men. It is marked out for you, if you only truly will to have it."
* * *
There is no big secret about how love goes from person to person. If we receive love, we grow in love. There is much truth in Dorothy Nolte's comments about children growing up:
If a child lives with criticism, he learns to condemn.
If a child lives with hostility, he learns to fight.
If a child lives with ridicule, he learns to be shy.
If a child lives with shame, he learns to feel guilty.
If a child lives with tolerance, he learns to be patient.
If a child lives with encouragement, he learns confidence.
If a child lives with praise, he learns to appreciate.
If a child lives with approval, he learns to like himself.
If a child lives with acceptance and friendship, he learns to find love in the world.
We could add:
If we abide in God's love, we love.
* * *
Melinda Gates was interviewed online after returning from a trip to Bangladesh in which she observed the humanitarian work being performed by Gates Foundation.
When asked what an individual who had limited financial resources could do, Melinda replied: "I believe that each of us can do important and meaningful work to make the world a better place. It's not about the money. It's about using whatever resources you have at your fingertips to try to improve the world." She went on to say, "I think that real giving starts with caring about others and wanting to learn more. I encourage everyone to become a student of the causes they care about."
John tells us that we are to love one another. This means we learn what we can and help where we can.
* * *
When finding players for their team through the draft or free agency, there are many things that NFL coaches and general managers want to consider. In judging a player's potential future performance, their past performance is an important indicator -- so their evaluations often emphasize a scouting report and a player's statistics.
But the Jacksonville Jaguars have redone their evaluation process, and now begin by looking for players who have loving and stable marriages. To date there are no statistics to prove the success of this new innovation, and everyone knows that players who are poor husbands still perform well on the field; but the Jaguars believe that a good marriage is still the best bet.
The program was initiated by general manager Gene Smith. Smith said he borrowed the idea from college recruiting, where a parent is always involved. Smith, now coming to the NFL, simply shifted the focus from the parent to the spouse. The Jaguars front office believes that a stable marriage can compensate for the long hours spent in training, and that a loving marriage makes a happy player, who is then more energized on the field. Since players now travel less and spend more time at home, a loving wife keeps the player at home, away from the party circuit, and in a more disciplined environment. The Jaguars have come to call the examination of the qualities of the wife and marriage as the "stability dividend."
This recruiting procedure truly recognizes the meaning of "abiding" in love.
* * *
Matt Ridley wrote an interesting article for the Wall Street Journal titled "Now You Know Why Your Boss Is Such an Ape". The context for his piece was a study conducted by primatologists, who discovered that the behavior of alpha male apes was similar to that of academics and corporate executives.
In grooming, a subordinate ape spends an extensive amount of time and care maintaining the alpha male. But when it becomes time for the alpha male to care for the subordinate, the time spent is minuscule and the attention very detached.
When this behavior is taken into the corporate world, the subordinate writes long and extensive memos to his superior; in reply, he receives a quick, curt answer. But when the same manager who penned a brief reply writes his superior, the memo is long and involved -- and he usually receives the same unattached response from his superior.
This behavior extends to discussions around the boardroom table, and all other places where managers and subordinates gather.
Most interesting, when a new employee arrives, the manager often degrades that individual unmercifully. In this way the alpha (ape) manager asserts who is dominant.
In such a working environment, the manager truly has been severed from the vine that gives life and the abundance of love.
* * *
Pruning a tree isn't easy -- it's an acquired skill. Cut off too little, and nothing happens; cut off too much, and you risk killing the tree.
More than the horticultural skill involved, pruning is difficult because it seems so unnatural. The nature of trees is to grow, right? Wouldn't it stand to reason that in order to produce the most fruit, you ought to let the tree grow as tall as it wants to? The bigger the tree, the more fruit -- right?
Not so. It is only a carefully pruned plant that delivers the maximum yield.
It's hard to know exactly what Jesus means by this saying, in all its poetry and passion -- although, judging from the fact that he speaks it at the Last Supper, the very night of his arrest, he's probably thinking about his own suffering. Jesus' own vine would be pruned the very next day on Calvary.
* * *
Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply. You might be afraid of the pain that deep love can cause. When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love ever more fruitful. It is like a plow that breaks the ground to allow the seed to take root and grow into a strong plant. Every time you experience the pain of rejection, absence, or death, you are faced with a choice. You can become bitter and decide not to love again, or you can stand straight in your pain and let the soil on which you stand become richer and more able to give life to new seeds.
-- Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love (Doubleday, 1996)
* * *
Stalin, absolute dictator of the Soviet Union, was one of the most powerful men on earth -- yet he was afraid to go to bed at night. Stalin had seven different bedrooms. In order to foil would-be assassins, he slept in a different one each night. Stalin also had five chauffeur-driven limousines. Every time he went out, all five cars left the garage, each one with curtains drawn, so no one on the streets would know which one contained the mighty Stalin.
If possessions could conquer fear, then the late billionaire Howard Hughes would have been fearless. But we've all heard his story. Hughes lived his last days a pathetic hermit, closed up in his Las Vegas penthouse suite. He had all the money anyone could ever dream of, but he was so afraid of germs that he breathed through pieces of Kleenex and refused to cut his beard or his nails.
There's always popularity. If popularity -- or fame -- could cast out fear, then John Lennon would have been utterly fearless. Yet the former Beatle, one of the most famous people in the world, became a recluse. Lennon's biographers report that in the months before his tragic assassination, he refused to sleep with the lights off and was afraid to touch anything because of possible germs.
"All you need is love," John Lennon sang back in his Beatles days. It's a pity he didn't understand what love means -- at least, not love in the Christian sense, the sort of love that perfects itself in giving oneself away to others.
* * *
In a recent interview about leadership in Washington Post, Leocadia Zak, the director of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) said, "I am a true believer that knowledge is power." Thus, she engages in the practice of extensive reading and observing the leadership style of others. Zak also observed that "Ultimately, a leader's style must flow from the individual's personality. It must be natural."
When we review Philip's encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch, we see that Philip was knowledgeable enough to answer the questions posed to him. We also see that Philip was a natural leader by the friendship that he was able to establish.
WORSHIP RESOURCES
by George Reed
Call to Worship
Leader: All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to God;
People: all the families of the nations shall worship before our God.
Leader: Dominion belongs to God,
People: our God rules over the nations.
Leader: To God shall all who sleep in the earth bow down.
People: They shall bow down to the dust, and we shall live for God.
OR
Leader: Christ is the living vine!
People: We are Christ's branches!
Leader: Apart from the vine, we can do nothing.
People: Only in Christ's life do we have life.
Leader: Only connected to the vine can we produce fruit.
People: We will stay connect to the vine so the abundance of God's love will produce fruit through us!
Hymns and Sacred Songs
"I Come with Joy" (Communion)
found in:
UMH: 617
H82: 304
PH: 507
NCH: 349
CH: 420
ELW: 482
Renew: 195
"Love Divine, All Loves Excelling"
found in:
UMH: 384
H82: 657
PH: 376
AAHH: 440
NNBH: 65
NCH: 43
CH: 517
LBW: 315
ELW: 631
Renew: 196
"Come Down, O Love Divine"
found in:
UMH: 475
H82: 516
PH: 313
NCH: 289
CH: 582
LBW: 508
ELW: 804
"Help Us Accept Each Other"
found in:
UMH: 560
PH: 358
NCH: 388
CH: 487
"Thou Hidden Love of God"
found in:
UMH: 414
"O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing"
found in:
UMH: 57/59
H82: 493
PH: 466
AAHH: 184
NNBH: 23
NCH: 42
CH: 5
LBW: 559
ELW: 886
"Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee"
found in:
UMH: 89
H82: 376
PH: 464
AAHH: 120
NNBH: 40
NCH: 4
CH: 2
LBW: 551
ELW: 836
"There's a Wideness in God's Mercy"
found in:
UMH: 121
H82: 469/470
PH: 298
NCH: 23
CH: 73
LBW: 290
ELW: 587/588
"Give to the Winds Thy Fears"
found in:
UMH: 129
PH: 286
"I Am Loved"
found in:
CCB: 80
"You Are Mine"
found in:
CCB: 58
Music Resources Key:
UMH: United Methodist Hymnal
H82: The Hymnal 1982 (The Episcopal Church)
PH: Presbyterian Hymnal
AAHH: African-American Heritage Hymnal
NNBH: The New National Baptist Hymnal
NCH: The New Century Hymnal
CH: Chalice Hymnal
LBW: Lutheran Book of Worship
ELW: Evangelical Lutheran Worship
CCB: Cokesbury Chorus Book
Renew: Renew! Songs & Hymns for Blended Worship
Prayer for the Day / Collect
O God who is perfect love: Grant us the faith to put our trust in you that we may find our fears banished and our hearts encouraged; through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
OR
We offer our praise to you, O God, the one who is love. We pray that as we worship you we will be so filled with your loving Spirit that our fears will be banished and our hearts made courageous. Amen.
Prayer of Confession
Leader: Let us confess to God and before one another our sins and especially the ways in which we let our fears rule our lives.
People: We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. You are perfect love and invite us to abide in you, and yet we hesitate. We aren't sure how comfortable we are being so close to you. And in our timidity we allow our fears to overwhelm us. Our fear of you keeps us from giving up the fears that destroy our wholeness and joyfulness. In this sinful world we find it hard to believe in love. Forgive the hardness of our hearts and pour out your Spirit upon us that we may live in you, in love and with great courage. Amen.
Leader: God is love and opens that great heart of love for all of us. Enter in with joy and know the forgiveness of sin and the banishment of your fears.
Prayers of the People (and the Lord's Prayer)
We offer to you our praise and worship, O God, for you are perfect in love. In you there are no shadows but only the light of love.
(The following paragraph may be used if a separate prayer of confession has not been used.)
We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. You are perfect love and invite us to abide in you, and yet we hesitate. We aren't sure how comfortable we are being so close to you. And in our timidity we allow our fears to overwhelm us. Our fear of you keeps us from giving up the fears that destroy our wholeness and joyfulness. In this sinful world we find it hard to believe in love. Forgive the hardness of our hearts and pour out your Spirit upon us that we may live in you, in love and with great courage.
We give you thanks for all the ways you have shared your love with us. We thank you for those we have noticed and those we missed. We thank you for family and friends and for your church that have nurtured us and held us in the arms of your love. We thank you most of all for Jesus and the ways he taught us in word and deed how great your love is for us.
(Other thanksgivings may be offered.)
We pray for all who find it difficult to believe in love either from you or from others. Poverty, illness, grief, hatred, and violence make it hard for many of us to know that creation is based on love. Help us to reach out to those around us, so that we may be avenues whereby your love breaks down those barriers so that your love will triumph.
(Other intercessions may be offered.)
All these things we ask in the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ, who taught us to pray together, saying:
Our Father... Amen.
(or if the Lord's Prayer is not used at this point in the service)
All this we ask in the name of the Blessed and Holy Trinity. Amen.
Children's Sermon Starter
Put the children in a circle and place a picture or other object to represent Jesus in the center. (Maybe let one of the children play Jesus.) Have them stand in the circle so they can put their arms out and not touch one another. Make a point of them being "out of touch" with each other. Then have them move a little closer to Jesus. Ask them if they can now touch each other. Have them move closer still to Jesus. Talk to them about this is really how life is. We can't get closer to Jesus without getting closer to each other. We can't love Jesus more without loving each other more.
CHILDREN'S SERMON
Love God by Loving People
1 John 4:7-21
Object: a newspaper
Good morning, boys and girls! I brought today's newspaper because it tells us something about our relationship to God. Let's look at the front page. (do it) Do you see any stories like what you might have in Sunday school? (let the children answer) Probably not; I don't. I see mostly stories about people hurting others or being involved in bad accidents. I don't see anything about God here. (If there are news items about people showing their love, note that this indicates a celebration of God's love.)
There seems to be mostly bad news on the front page of today's paper. Here's a story about... (choose a story about war or crime) Do you think these people love God? (let them answer) They may say they love God, but they are acting like people who do not know God because they are doing hurtful things to others.
In today's reading from the Bible, the writer says that God loves us and the way to show this love of God is for us to love one another. Where people love one another, they reflect God's love. Where people hate one another, God is absent.
How can we say we love God and hate people? (let them answer) We can't. The only way of showing our love for God is by showing our love for people!
As a church we show our love for God by loving others in some of the things we do. We give money to help the poor of the world. We give money to send missionaries to tell the good news about God's love and show that good news as they love the people. We show our love for others by volunteer work like helping out at soup kitchens. We show our love for others by the prayers we pray in church for healing of those who are sick. We pray for wars to stop and for people who suffer in any way to receive God's aid. As a church we show our love by our friendliness to visitors. We show our love by providing teachers for Sunday school and materials for you to use. In many ways we show that God loves us by our love for others. Church is a great place to celebrate God's love for us and our love for one another and the people of the world. It's just like the writer of today's Bible passage says: "Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God" (v. 7).
Prayer: Dearest loving God, teach us to love one another -- especially those who might be different from us. Amen.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The Immediate Word, May 6, 2012, issue.
Copyright 2012 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
Team member Mary Austin offers some additional thoughts about the gospel passage and the ways we're connected to others in the modern world. Mary suggests that while technology has given us many new possibilities for connecting with others across time and distance (one of the big attractions of Facebook), it has also allowed us to carefully manage just how close we are to others. While real relationships can be messy, Mary notes that modern technology also allows us to craft "Goldilocks relationships" in which we keep others not too close and not too far away... and once that becomes our standard mode it's all too easy to treat God in the same manner. As Jesus' comments about the vine illustrate, we have to be meaningfully connected to the vine -- and one another -- in order to bear fruit.
By This We Know
by Dean Feldmeyer
1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8
How do we know that our parents love us? How do we know that we, as parents, love our children?
Every year about this time, as Mother's Day and Father's Day approach, someone decides that the only way to measure a stay-at-home mom's love for her family is to place a monetary value on the work she does.
This year the gauntlet has been taken up by Insure.com ("The #1 Resource for Insurance"). They took "an informal look" at an "assortment of common tasks" that moms usually do around the house and what it would cost if the family had to pay someone to do those chores. It turns out moms got a pay cut this year.
Insure.com says that, according to data from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Mom is worth about $61,436 a year to that average family (down about 2% from last year). As the line from Fiddler on the Roof goes: "If that isn't love, what is?"
Dads, on the other hand, are worth only about $20,415. Dads are "fungible."
It isn't so much the amount of money that gives us pause here. It's the assertion that the only way to measure the value of a parent's love is to place a dollar amount on it.
But how do we measure love? And especially, how do we measure God's love for us and our love for God? How can we know what God's love is like?
THE WORLD
Two books that are currently occupying the popular imagination address these questions. One makes a direct attempt to answer them, while the other approaches from an oblique angle.
In When God Talks Back, anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann examines what she calls "the American Evangelical relationship with God".
Luhrmann spent six months in a Vineyard Fellowship church, attending worship and classes, and interviewing people about their relationship with God and how they came to that relationship. Vineyard churches, she says, are very experientially oriented. That is, they encourage their members to seek not just a "knowledge about" God but an "experience of" God as well.
This seeking begins in the large, plenary worship service and then moves to a class where people are taught to use their imagination, creating settings where they are present with and talking with God. They "have coffee" with God or "take walks" with God or "just chat" with God. At the same time they are taught that God loves them unconditionally and wants only good for them. Eventually, after following this contemporary style of spiritual discipline, Luhrmann says, "They would start to say that they recognize God's voice the way they recognize their mom's voice on the phone." Borrowing a concept from C.S. Lewis, they pretend that it is real until it becomes real. They imagine the close, personal, intimate relationship with God into being.
But when pressed by Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air interview program, Luhrmann cannot, of course, provide proof that what these very sincere folks are hearing is in fact the voice of God and not just their own voices reflected in their imagination. They feel very strongly that the voice they are hearing is God's. They feel it so strongly that they are convinced. But it is still very subjective. It is a feeling.
In the best-selling book and subsequent movie The Hunger Games, author Suzanne Collins warns us of a future in which "reality TV" has gone completely off the grid.
In Panem, the futuristic country that used to be North America, people watch the "Hunger Games" on television. In a plot that borrows liberally from Richard Connell's short story "The Most Dangerous Game" and Stephen King's Richard Bachman novel, The Running Man, this story features a futuristic reality show that pits 24 teenagers against each other in a gruesome televised competition that leaves only one alive at the end of the game. Desperately poor and hungry, these teens kill each other off in a bid to live the rest of their lives in luxurious comfort.
As the story opens 12-year-old Prim Everdeen is chosen for the games. But Prim is shy and frail -- and her older sister Katniss, who is clever, strong, and skilled with the bow and arrow, volunteers to take her place. For Katniss, love is something you do -- it is measured in your willingness to sacrifice on behalf of the beloved.
THE WORD
The author of the First epistle of John would probably see more of God's love at work in The Hunger Games than in When God Talks Back.
John believes in an experiential faith too. But the experience he commends to us is much more prosaic and mundane than the one described in When God Talks Back. It doesn't involve imagining or pretending so much as it involves doing. For him, the love of God is about much more than feelings. It is as much objective as it is subjective. It is measurable. The most repeated phrase in 1 John is "by this we know." John is all about knowing God and God's love in an objective, measurable way.
Do you want to experience God's Spirit? Do you want to experience God's love? There is a way you can do that: Love your neighbor. Blanket your human relationships in love. Let love be your way of moving and being to the degree that we can do that, we can experience God's presence and love in our lives.
Do you want to abide in God? You can. Abide in love. By this we know that we love -- by the fatigue we feel at the end of the day, by the thickness of our callouses, by the ache in our muscles, and by the sweat on our brow. The measure of our love is counted in energy spent.
For John, living in God's love is not about having coffee with God, or snuggling with God, or chatting with God, or taking a walk with God. It isn't about imagining or pretending a relationship with God into existence. It is about making a decision and acting on it, even if -- especially if -- that decision calls for personal sacrifice on behalf of another. It is about deciding to love one another in real and concrete ways.
In fact, he tells us in verse 16 that "those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them."
You just don't get any closer to God than that.
CRAFTING THE SERMON
Indicative
One of the most common and seductive heresies alive in the church today is the "personal relationship with God." That is not to say that a personal relationship with God is not possible or desirable; it is both.
The problem, the heresy, comes when we believe and practice that that's all there is to Christianity. When we reduce God to little more than "my big spiritual buddy," we have left out a great deal of what scripture teaches us about the nature and being of the divine Creator.
When we treat God as our personal therapist -- a shoulder to cry on, an ear to bend when life is not going the way we want it to go -- and as a miracle worker upon whom we call whenever we need something, we are treating God like a personal servant, a cosmic Mr. Belvedere, a spiritual Jeeves.
Moses may have spoken with God "as a man speaks to his friend" but that wasn't all there was to the relationship.
Imperative
Jesus calls God "Father" -- Abba. The relationship is personal, but it is also parental.
Sometimes we come to God crying about a booboo, a hurt feeling, a personal failure or problem. But sometimes we come before God to be held accountable, to ask forgiveness.
God has given us a commandment to love one another and John makes it clear in his first epistle that obeying this commandment is the way we best come to know God.
SECOND THOUGHTS
What Gardeners Know -- and the Rest of Us Hate
by Mary Austin
John 15:1-8
A teenager who uses texting to communicate almost everything in his life says -- "almost wistfully," according to Sherry Turkle in a recent article in the New York Times -- that "someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation." Turkle, a psychologist who studies the impact of technology on human interaction, wrote about the difference between technological connection and human connection.
Jesus' words from John's gospel remind us of the layers of connection we experience in the life of faith. Connected to Jesus and lifeless apart from him, we are also connected to each other. It's not just us and Jesus, alone in blissful connectivity. "Abide in me," Jesus invites us, promising that in this connection we bear fruit in the world. The branches live in community with each other -- no one ever had a fruitful tree with just one branch. "You all are the branches," Jesus tells us -- plural.
We can't sustain our connection to God without also feeding our connections to each other. And yet technology challenges us to be connected more deeply than texting or Facebook (great as they are) allow. Turkle observes: "Over the past 15 years, I've studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I've learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are." If who we are can change based on what's in our hand or on the table in front of us, what does that mean for the life of faith?
Technology allows us to control when and how we interact with people, answering when it's convenient and cutting off the conversation when we feel like it. In the article noted above Turkle writes: "At home, families sit together, texting and reading email. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we're on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it's hard, but it can be done." Turkle refers to this dynamic as the "Goldilocks effect," in which we "use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right."
Of course, once we're accustomed to "Goldilocks relationships" that keep each other not too close and not too far away but just right according to our own preferences, it's easy to put God in the same category.
Actual conversations are messy, full of complicated emotions not covered by emoticons, prone to wander and run on. They require attention to the words, plus all that is unsaid. They require eye contact and focus. People can feel our attention, or the lack of it.
Actual relationships are messy. They can't be contained on the screen. Other people have their own hopes, pains, and demands, and they want sometimes more, sometimes less from us than we want to give.
Actual faith is messy. We have to meet up with our own flaws, our grief, our disappointment with God, and then go past all of that to where God is.
Actual plants are messy too. The branches grow unevenly, seemingly haphazardly. Vines get tangled up in each other. The roots grow together. Nothing is as simple as our screens would make it seem. Jesus calls us to a deeper, richer fruitfulness than technology allows us, if we can remember to set it aside sometimes and look up from the screen at each other. Jesus reminds us that we have the potential to bear much fruit, if we are willing to grow and be stretched and allow life to be messy, rooted in him and not in our technology.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Julian of Norwich believed that "love" was the only word that could be used to describe God. God is totally love. We are called to love everyone whose lives we touch. "But God," we moan, "if we are to love everyone, why on earth didn't you make everyone lovable?" And how are we to love if we are called to love those whom we don't even like very much and would prefer not to spend time with?
It's all in how we treat them, how we act in their presence. First John tells us that love is a verb. Acting in a kind and loving manner may make all the difference in our relationships, even if it doesn't happen overnight. Then there are all the people of the world who are so easy to love in an abstract sense, but without involvement. The greatest commandment is all about loving God with everything we've got, and loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.
* * *
Although not referring directly to Jesus' command to love one another, Albert Schweitzer did sum up the command's essence in a comment on human capital. Schweitzer wrote:
"Open your eyes and look for a human being, or some work devoted to human welfare, which needs from someone a little time or friendliness, a little sympathy, or sociability, or labor. There may be a solitary or an embittered fellowman, an invalid, or an inefficient person to whom you can be something. Perhaps it is an old person or a child. Or some good work needs volunteers who can offer a free evening or run errands. Who can enumerate the many ways in which that costly piece of working capital, the human being, can be employed? More of him is wanted everywhere! Search, then, for some investment for your humanity, and do not be frightened away if you have to wait, or to be taken on trail. And be prepared for disappointments. But in any case, do not be without some secondary work in which you can give yourself as a man to men. It is marked out for you, if you only truly will to have it."
* * *
There is no big secret about how love goes from person to person. If we receive love, we grow in love. There is much truth in Dorothy Nolte's comments about children growing up:
If a child lives with criticism, he learns to condemn.
If a child lives with hostility, he learns to fight.
If a child lives with ridicule, he learns to be shy.
If a child lives with shame, he learns to feel guilty.
If a child lives with tolerance, he learns to be patient.
If a child lives with encouragement, he learns confidence.
If a child lives with praise, he learns to appreciate.
If a child lives with approval, he learns to like himself.
If a child lives with acceptance and friendship, he learns to find love in the world.
We could add:
If we abide in God's love, we love.
* * *
Melinda Gates was interviewed online after returning from a trip to Bangladesh in which she observed the humanitarian work being performed by Gates Foundation.
When asked what an individual who had limited financial resources could do, Melinda replied: "I believe that each of us can do important and meaningful work to make the world a better place. It's not about the money. It's about using whatever resources you have at your fingertips to try to improve the world." She went on to say, "I think that real giving starts with caring about others and wanting to learn more. I encourage everyone to become a student of the causes they care about."
John tells us that we are to love one another. This means we learn what we can and help where we can.
* * *
When finding players for their team through the draft or free agency, there are many things that NFL coaches and general managers want to consider. In judging a player's potential future performance, their past performance is an important indicator -- so their evaluations often emphasize a scouting report and a player's statistics.
But the Jacksonville Jaguars have redone their evaluation process, and now begin by looking for players who have loving and stable marriages. To date there are no statistics to prove the success of this new innovation, and everyone knows that players who are poor husbands still perform well on the field; but the Jaguars believe that a good marriage is still the best bet.
The program was initiated by general manager Gene Smith. Smith said he borrowed the idea from college recruiting, where a parent is always involved. Smith, now coming to the NFL, simply shifted the focus from the parent to the spouse. The Jaguars front office believes that a stable marriage can compensate for the long hours spent in training, and that a loving marriage makes a happy player, who is then more energized on the field. Since players now travel less and spend more time at home, a loving wife keeps the player at home, away from the party circuit, and in a more disciplined environment. The Jaguars have come to call the examination of the qualities of the wife and marriage as the "stability dividend."
This recruiting procedure truly recognizes the meaning of "abiding" in love.
* * *
Matt Ridley wrote an interesting article for the Wall Street Journal titled "Now You Know Why Your Boss Is Such an Ape". The context for his piece was a study conducted by primatologists, who discovered that the behavior of alpha male apes was similar to that of academics and corporate executives.
In grooming, a subordinate ape spends an extensive amount of time and care maintaining the alpha male. But when it becomes time for the alpha male to care for the subordinate, the time spent is minuscule and the attention very detached.
When this behavior is taken into the corporate world, the subordinate writes long and extensive memos to his superior; in reply, he receives a quick, curt answer. But when the same manager who penned a brief reply writes his superior, the memo is long and involved -- and he usually receives the same unattached response from his superior.
This behavior extends to discussions around the boardroom table, and all other places where managers and subordinates gather.
Most interesting, when a new employee arrives, the manager often degrades that individual unmercifully. In this way the alpha (ape) manager asserts who is dominant.
In such a working environment, the manager truly has been severed from the vine that gives life and the abundance of love.
* * *
Pruning a tree isn't easy -- it's an acquired skill. Cut off too little, and nothing happens; cut off too much, and you risk killing the tree.
More than the horticultural skill involved, pruning is difficult because it seems so unnatural. The nature of trees is to grow, right? Wouldn't it stand to reason that in order to produce the most fruit, you ought to let the tree grow as tall as it wants to? The bigger the tree, the more fruit -- right?
Not so. It is only a carefully pruned plant that delivers the maximum yield.
It's hard to know exactly what Jesus means by this saying, in all its poetry and passion -- although, judging from the fact that he speaks it at the Last Supper, the very night of his arrest, he's probably thinking about his own suffering. Jesus' own vine would be pruned the very next day on Calvary.
* * *
Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply. You might be afraid of the pain that deep love can cause. When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love ever more fruitful. It is like a plow that breaks the ground to allow the seed to take root and grow into a strong plant. Every time you experience the pain of rejection, absence, or death, you are faced with a choice. You can become bitter and decide not to love again, or you can stand straight in your pain and let the soil on which you stand become richer and more able to give life to new seeds.
-- Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love (Doubleday, 1996)
* * *
Stalin, absolute dictator of the Soviet Union, was one of the most powerful men on earth -- yet he was afraid to go to bed at night. Stalin had seven different bedrooms. In order to foil would-be assassins, he slept in a different one each night. Stalin also had five chauffeur-driven limousines. Every time he went out, all five cars left the garage, each one with curtains drawn, so no one on the streets would know which one contained the mighty Stalin.
If possessions could conquer fear, then the late billionaire Howard Hughes would have been fearless. But we've all heard his story. Hughes lived his last days a pathetic hermit, closed up in his Las Vegas penthouse suite. He had all the money anyone could ever dream of, but he was so afraid of germs that he breathed through pieces of Kleenex and refused to cut his beard or his nails.
There's always popularity. If popularity -- or fame -- could cast out fear, then John Lennon would have been utterly fearless. Yet the former Beatle, one of the most famous people in the world, became a recluse. Lennon's biographers report that in the months before his tragic assassination, he refused to sleep with the lights off and was afraid to touch anything because of possible germs.
"All you need is love," John Lennon sang back in his Beatles days. It's a pity he didn't understand what love means -- at least, not love in the Christian sense, the sort of love that perfects itself in giving oneself away to others.
* * *
In a recent interview about leadership in Washington Post, Leocadia Zak, the director of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) said, "I am a true believer that knowledge is power." Thus, she engages in the practice of extensive reading and observing the leadership style of others. Zak also observed that "Ultimately, a leader's style must flow from the individual's personality. It must be natural."
When we review Philip's encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch, we see that Philip was knowledgeable enough to answer the questions posed to him. We also see that Philip was a natural leader by the friendship that he was able to establish.
WORSHIP RESOURCES
by George Reed
Call to Worship
Leader: All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to God;
People: all the families of the nations shall worship before our God.
Leader: Dominion belongs to God,
People: our God rules over the nations.
Leader: To God shall all who sleep in the earth bow down.
People: They shall bow down to the dust, and we shall live for God.
OR
Leader: Christ is the living vine!
People: We are Christ's branches!
Leader: Apart from the vine, we can do nothing.
People: Only in Christ's life do we have life.
Leader: Only connected to the vine can we produce fruit.
People: We will stay connect to the vine so the abundance of God's love will produce fruit through us!
Hymns and Sacred Songs
"I Come with Joy" (Communion)
found in:
UMH: 617
H82: 304
PH: 507
NCH: 349
CH: 420
ELW: 482
Renew: 195
"Love Divine, All Loves Excelling"
found in:
UMH: 384
H82: 657
PH: 376
AAHH: 440
NNBH: 65
NCH: 43
CH: 517
LBW: 315
ELW: 631
Renew: 196
"Come Down, O Love Divine"
found in:
UMH: 475
H82: 516
PH: 313
NCH: 289
CH: 582
LBW: 508
ELW: 804
"Help Us Accept Each Other"
found in:
UMH: 560
PH: 358
NCH: 388
CH: 487
"Thou Hidden Love of God"
found in:
UMH: 414
"O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing"
found in:
UMH: 57/59
H82: 493
PH: 466
AAHH: 184
NNBH: 23
NCH: 42
CH: 5
LBW: 559
ELW: 886
"Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee"
found in:
UMH: 89
H82: 376
PH: 464
AAHH: 120
NNBH: 40
NCH: 4
CH: 2
LBW: 551
ELW: 836
"There's a Wideness in God's Mercy"
found in:
UMH: 121
H82: 469/470
PH: 298
NCH: 23
CH: 73
LBW: 290
ELW: 587/588
"Give to the Winds Thy Fears"
found in:
UMH: 129
PH: 286
"I Am Loved"
found in:
CCB: 80
"You Are Mine"
found in:
CCB: 58
Music Resources Key:
UMH: United Methodist Hymnal
H82: The Hymnal 1982 (The Episcopal Church)
PH: Presbyterian Hymnal
AAHH: African-American Heritage Hymnal
NNBH: The New National Baptist Hymnal
NCH: The New Century Hymnal
CH: Chalice Hymnal
LBW: Lutheran Book of Worship
ELW: Evangelical Lutheran Worship
CCB: Cokesbury Chorus Book
Renew: Renew! Songs & Hymns for Blended Worship
Prayer for the Day / Collect
O God who is perfect love: Grant us the faith to put our trust in you that we may find our fears banished and our hearts encouraged; through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
OR
We offer our praise to you, O God, the one who is love. We pray that as we worship you we will be so filled with your loving Spirit that our fears will be banished and our hearts made courageous. Amen.
Prayer of Confession
Leader: Let us confess to God and before one another our sins and especially the ways in which we let our fears rule our lives.
People: We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. You are perfect love and invite us to abide in you, and yet we hesitate. We aren't sure how comfortable we are being so close to you. And in our timidity we allow our fears to overwhelm us. Our fear of you keeps us from giving up the fears that destroy our wholeness and joyfulness. In this sinful world we find it hard to believe in love. Forgive the hardness of our hearts and pour out your Spirit upon us that we may live in you, in love and with great courage. Amen.
Leader: God is love and opens that great heart of love for all of us. Enter in with joy and know the forgiveness of sin and the banishment of your fears.
Prayers of the People (and the Lord's Prayer)
We offer to you our praise and worship, O God, for you are perfect in love. In you there are no shadows but only the light of love.
(The following paragraph may be used if a separate prayer of confession has not been used.)
We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. You are perfect love and invite us to abide in you, and yet we hesitate. We aren't sure how comfortable we are being so close to you. And in our timidity we allow our fears to overwhelm us. Our fear of you keeps us from giving up the fears that destroy our wholeness and joyfulness. In this sinful world we find it hard to believe in love. Forgive the hardness of our hearts and pour out your Spirit upon us that we may live in you, in love and with great courage.
We give you thanks for all the ways you have shared your love with us. We thank you for those we have noticed and those we missed. We thank you for family and friends and for your church that have nurtured us and held us in the arms of your love. We thank you most of all for Jesus and the ways he taught us in word and deed how great your love is for us.
(Other thanksgivings may be offered.)
We pray for all who find it difficult to believe in love either from you or from others. Poverty, illness, grief, hatred, and violence make it hard for many of us to know that creation is based on love. Help us to reach out to those around us, so that we may be avenues whereby your love breaks down those barriers so that your love will triumph.
(Other intercessions may be offered.)
All these things we ask in the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ, who taught us to pray together, saying:
Our Father... Amen.
(or if the Lord's Prayer is not used at this point in the service)
All this we ask in the name of the Blessed and Holy Trinity. Amen.
Children's Sermon Starter
Put the children in a circle and place a picture or other object to represent Jesus in the center. (Maybe let one of the children play Jesus.) Have them stand in the circle so they can put their arms out and not touch one another. Make a point of them being "out of touch" with each other. Then have them move a little closer to Jesus. Ask them if they can now touch each other. Have them move closer still to Jesus. Talk to them about this is really how life is. We can't get closer to Jesus without getting closer to each other. We can't love Jesus more without loving each other more.
CHILDREN'S SERMON
Love God by Loving People
1 John 4:7-21
Object: a newspaper
Good morning, boys and girls! I brought today's newspaper because it tells us something about our relationship to God. Let's look at the front page. (do it) Do you see any stories like what you might have in Sunday school? (let the children answer) Probably not; I don't. I see mostly stories about people hurting others or being involved in bad accidents. I don't see anything about God here. (If there are news items about people showing their love, note that this indicates a celebration of God's love.)
There seems to be mostly bad news on the front page of today's paper. Here's a story about... (choose a story about war or crime) Do you think these people love God? (let them answer) They may say they love God, but they are acting like people who do not know God because they are doing hurtful things to others.
In today's reading from the Bible, the writer says that God loves us and the way to show this love of God is for us to love one another. Where people love one another, they reflect God's love. Where people hate one another, God is absent.
How can we say we love God and hate people? (let them answer) We can't. The only way of showing our love for God is by showing our love for people!
As a church we show our love for God by loving others in some of the things we do. We give money to help the poor of the world. We give money to send missionaries to tell the good news about God's love and show that good news as they love the people. We show our love for others by volunteer work like helping out at soup kitchens. We show our love for others by the prayers we pray in church for healing of those who are sick. We pray for wars to stop and for people who suffer in any way to receive God's aid. As a church we show our love by our friendliness to visitors. We show our love by providing teachers for Sunday school and materials for you to use. In many ways we show that God loves us by our love for others. Church is a great place to celebrate God's love for us and our love for one another and the people of the world. It's just like the writer of today's Bible passage says: "Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God" (v. 7).
Prayer: Dearest loving God, teach us to love one another -- especially those who might be different from us. Amen.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The Immediate Word, May 6, 2012, issue.
Copyright 2012 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
