Mosaic Church Of Clayton

"Why would someone choose to give us a perfectly good Sunday morning to be present in worship? Why would someone choose to be part of a community of believers, a kind of family that you don’t always like, don’t always get along with, don’t always agree with? Why would be part of anything that requires more from us with everything already pressing on us? "

Sermon preached on April 30, 2023"Diana Butler Bass’s book, Christianity for the Rest of Us, says, “The whole message of the Christian scripture is based in the idea of metanoia, the change of heart that happens when we meet God face-to-face. Even a cursory knowledge of history reveals that Christianity is a religion about change. The Christian faith always changes-even when some its adherents claim that it does not.” God did not meet all of those people in the Old Testament, ask them to build altars where they were to mark the place of the divine intervention of God, change their names just to believe that that just happens to them. God did not meet Paul on the road to Damascus and change his name to Saul. God did not meet him, one who was persecuting Christians because he believed in his heart of hearts that was the right thing to do, to just give us an interesting story. God did not meet Peter in a vision and say, “Don’t call what I have made clean, unclean” just to show that God did that one thing on

This is a sermon preached on May 23, 2021. Due to sound issues it was never posted. In light of the recent decisions by The Southern Baptist Convention, we felt it was important to retrieve it and make sure it was available. If you are looking for another way of understanding what scripture says about women, this will be a great starting place."Here are a few guiding principles when you are looking for what is right and true, students hear this because it will not be long that you are in college and looking for a campus ministry to join or a church to join, If you pull a few verses out of context and make sweeping statement about half of the world’s population, it is about power and control. Do not believe it as the truth when they convincingly lob a handful of verses at you as declarative, about anything. Just because it is something that we have come to believe or has been preached over time, does not mean it is right. The Bible is a radical account of a God that is calling the people back in relationship w

I heard a sermon recently by a national leader calling for unity, focusing on the ways we are alike. But the problem is that the ways we are different harm and belittle people groups that are on the margins and I believe that should be where we draw the line. We cannot hold up not speaking our mind, wanting to keep the peace for everything. Unity at the expense of health and humanity is dangerous. 

The truth is that we are made in the image of God, just as we are. There are up sides and there are down sides to who we are. But all of that has been made free, has been blessed, is continuing to be reformed for the work of God in Christ. It is in Christ that we can experience freedom from the things that hold us back. It is in Christ that we are lovingly refined to be the better image of God in the world, to rule as God would with love and care, each in our own way. We are who we are and we do not need to wallow in that, or feel shame about that. We are made for this glorious purpose when we are in Christ. In this new place, in this new perspective, when we are in Christ. And that is the glad text this morning. I am still me everywhere I go but when I go there, when I live in Christ, letting the way that Jesus sees me, the way that Jesus keeps shaping me, I am living out my glorious purpose in this world. Just as I am, and just as I am becoming. And in this place, in this in Christ place, the power struggle

"And the words of Paul say that when we feel that pain, we need to lean into grace. Grace for ourselves and grace for other people. We are to be reminded that God has seen us right where we are. Right in the place of where we are lacking, right in the middle of our failures, right in the place of our pride, Jesus meets us there. The point is the grace. The point is Jesus. Rachel Held Evans also wrote, “The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget-that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.” Remember this morning that includes you. Remember this morning that includes the one you would want to keep out."

This is an introduction to the sermon series about Romans. The title of the book I am using by JR Daniel Kirk for guidance says it all, "Romans for Normal People: A Guide to the Most Misused, Problematic and Prooftexted Letter in the Bible."

This honest sermon based on Matthew 3 is my (Rev. Dr Charity Roberson, pastor) story. It is how I grew up in a conservative Christian church but became a pastor and somehow found God different somewhere along the way. This is a word for all of those who feel they are not able to fully themselves or are not fully honored in their churches and where God is in all of that.

And then he goes on with kind of a group of mixed metaphors about the power of the tongue and talk. The bottom line he is getting at is that the words you say have the power to destroy or create. The words you put into the world can seem so innocent. You did not do anything, you just said something or maybe even hinted at something. If someone else chose to take action on your words, you can’t control that. And James says no, your words, the messages you send out into the world either build the world up or tear it down. 

The power gets the loudest voices. The poor, the people without the power are often treated like pawns in a game. And it is a game that we will never win. That is what James is saying here….don’t you get it. These power plays, these games we play to cater to the powerful to get more power to be protected ourselves will never end well. Power and money never find their way to trickle down to us. 

There are days where we feel like we are killing it. We are doing amazing. We are loving our neighbors, caring for our world, loving those closest to us well, and we feel the presence of God in our own lives. In these days it is easy to lose site of God’s presence with us because we can easily think we are doing it on our own. We deserve the things we have. We may just write off our mistakes because everybody makes them. 

We choose every day who we will follow. We choose who we will learn from. We can choose to fall into the stereotypes or believe the stereotypes. We can choose to think that anything other than God can save us. We can chase after the approval of someone who is well connected, has the look, has all the answers. Or we can think outside the box. We can find value in leaders and teachers who do not look like we would expect. We can value in humility and a really good question. We can learn from someone who does not look like us, who does not have our background maybe even is someone that we don’t at first agree with

It is helpful to ask our selves if the way they talked about God is to be descriptive of God, or more descriptive of their understanding of God at the time. Remember the culture in which this was written. They really did believe that God, and other cultures around them, their gods, made everything happen. They did not have the science we do today. They had no other language. Now, do I believe that God allowed these things to happen, I certainly do. God gave them chance after chance, tried to show them the way, and over and over again they abuse their power and their are consequences to that. They make wrong choices about how they live their lives and their are consequences. But do you see how that is different that a violent, wrathful God who hates the things that I do, and who has had enough and smites everyone? And I know that language is in scripture but again, is that God or is that the only language they had. I am certain that even today we all know someone who blames every good or bad thing that happens

It takes courage to celebrate. But life without celebration is a life of just wandering around in the dessert, moving from one calamity to another. This morning, let’s grab the tambourines and celebrate. Let’s have the courage, this isn’t just kid stuff. While the world and life are so hard around us, let us engage in the spiritual discipline of laughing, feeling joy and celebrating what God has done, what God has given us, even in the us that God has created. Let us be people who can dream also. 

Somewhere in the middle of Joseph’s story he recognized the presence of God with him. He recognized the presence of God working to make all things good, working to shape and mold him. It did not make the slavery, the prison, or the deceptions any less awful but it did allow them to have a different purpose. What his brothers meant for bad, what Potiphar’s wife meant for bad, what the cupbearers forgiveness meant for bad, God was present in. God worked them for good and somewhere along the way Joseph realized that. Our perspective changes when we can see God in the middle of it with us. In the thick of it with us. 

As humans we look for a lot of things to give us our identity and to help us feel secure, our blessing in this world. A position at work, a relationship, the next high grade, getting into the right school. We spend our lives chasing some sense of peace and purpose that God has been offering all along. We think, we would just achieve this next thing, all will be well. When this problem is resolved, when this relationship is fixed, when the next, when the next, when the next. That peace, purpose, that promise is always just out of reach and we become like Jacob, we are just grasping for the next thing that will surely fix it. 

But the truth is that life is a series of settling and unsettling. It is a cycle. There is illness, untimely death, a marriage falling apart, a child that makes choices you don’t agree with, a job market that drastically changes, families who have different opinions/ways of seeing the world that make it difficult to be in relationship. Abraham’s life was the same. The initial promise was go to the land I will show you, which appears to be Canaan. God promises that land to Abrahams ancestors but they don’t stay there. There is famine and war that has Abraham moving around. The promise was not just to go and settle. God keeps moving and working in Abraham’s life even in the unsettling seasons. 

I grew up in a culture where if you didn’t believe in a literal creation of the earth in six days with a day of rest, you weren’t really Christian. In fact, we were trained to argue it in our schools….to not let that scientific education get the best of us. Now, I believe that God could have created the world in six days if God wanted to. But I do not believe that arguing that was ever the point. I think that is also why we have two creation accounts. In the chapter immediately following this one, there is another account and in some traditions, like the one I grew up in, we mix the two, picking and choosing and saying that you have to understand just what we have picked from the two stories literally. 

Sermon from June 5, 2022Together we commit to being present for each other. Present on Sunday mornings, present in life. We commit to remembering that we cannot do this alone. I believe today in our culture we have lost site of the fact that the work of God, the work of the spirit, the work of the local church gathered on a Sunday morning is not just one of the many options we have available to us, but it ought to shape our we see the world, shape how we use our gifts, shape how we use our time. It should be the starting point out of which everything else flows. 

It has been awhile since we have uploaded a sermon due to our expanding technology. This was an important one to start back. "In our little worlds we stand up to those who would harm or belittle or make fun of others because we know that each person is made in the image of God. In our own little worlds we stand up to racist jokes, to jokes about peoples appearances, to the vilification of women and girls because those that abuse power are propped up by large systems of people who are often never lovingly challenged them to think or act differently. We have the hard conversations, we stick our necks out, we call or email or send letters to our politicians because they need to hear that we care.Our silence in these moments will be deafening. Benjamin Cremer said, “Our public witness as Christians should make people say, ‘look at the power of their love,” not “look at how much they love power.” What is your love motivating to do today?"