What do you want me to do?

Kenilworth Union Church

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What do you want me to do?

2024 Fall

September 29, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Mark 10:46–52

There are all kinds of good and bad reasons to come to church, but it’s good to pause for a moment and consider what we hope will happen here between us and Jesus.

Maybe we want Jesus to do for us the same thing that he did for Blind Bartimaeus—open our blind eyes. Open our eyes to the fact that not implacable wrath but unfailing love is the beating heart of the universe. He loves us enough to go to Golgotha. We are indeed beautifully loved.

In one of his novels Czech author Milan Kundera puts it like this: “All [our] faults are redeemed by love’s magic eyes.”[1] Do you see what he means? That only when we see ourselves with the magic eyes of God’s love can we live up to and into the person God knows we have the capacity to become?

[1]Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 122.

WDJA (What Did Jesus Ask?) III: Who will not leave the 99 to find the one?

September 22, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Matthew 18:10–14

But as someone put it, “the one statistically unimportant wanderer means everything to this shepherd. Human thinking says ‘Let it go; we have 99.’ God’s thinking is, ‘there were 100; where is my one.’ Jesus is trying to convert us to the mentality of the one, to the importance of the statistically unimportant.”#_ftn1 Sometimes we get this right, this mentality of the one. Sometimes we pour all our energy into the straggler. You might have one child you can ignore from mewling infancy to sensible adulthood. You don’t have to say a word to her, you practically don’t have to think about her, and she’ll still win the state championship in lacrosse and get a scholarship to Northwestern and become a brain surgeon. Meanwhile her younger brother has trouble reading and making friends and has you scurrying around from teacher to therapist to private tutor. #_ftnref1Frederick Dale Bruner, Matthew: A Commentary, vol. 2: The Churchbook (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, first published 1990, revised 2004), p. 219.

WDJA (What Did Jesus Ask?) II: Why do you trouble this woman?

September 15, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Mark 14:3–9

We don’t know who she is. Mark doesn’t describe her. He doesn’t even name her. She is one of the hundreds of unnamed but important characters in the biblical narrative. You see what she is doing, right? She is saying goodbye. She seems to be the only character in all four Gospels who knows what’s coming, and how short Jesus’ life will turn out to be—three more days. She is the only one who gets it. Sometimes words are not enough when it’s time to say goodbye, yes? You need your touch. You need your eyes to express the truth of your heart. You need the unspoken memories of a lifetime of shared experience. You need your tears. You might even need some laughter. You need the fragrance of perfume.

WDJA (What Did Jesus Ask?) I: Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

September 8, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Matthew 6:25–34

We know worry can kill us. Worry makes you older. Literally. Worry raises your blood pressure and beats up on your heart. Worry makes you depressed. If you have arthritis or diabetes, worry makes them worse. I get a cold every January 1. Like clockwork. It’s because the stress of the holiday suppressed my immune system. I would be a lot healthier if I would just chill out. So we know Jesus is right. The trouble is, it’s impossible to follow his advice. You can’t force your brain to stop worrying by an act of will. Bobby McFerrin’s advice—“Don’t worry; be happy”—is the most useless suggestion in history. Still, we’ve got to try. We’ve got to stop thinking that the future depends completely on us. Someone said that worrying is akin to atheism. It’s pretending that a benevolent, capable deity hasn’t got a handle on our lives, the world, and the future. I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you see his point.