Friends, this morning our teaching scripture is 3 verses
from three different books. Come, let us return to the Lord.
Hosea 6. Return to me with all your
heart, Joel Chapter 2. Return to me, says the Lord of
hosts, and I will return to you from Zechariah.
This is the word of the Lord. OK, thanks for being here,
friends. Welcome to the new year.
Welcome to a new season of of your life.
I don't know if that's how it feels for you at the beginning
of the year, but that's that's kind of how it feels for me.
I'm super grateful to be here with Parker and the rest of our
teams. You know, obviously it goes
without saying that at the turn of a year, there's a lot of
reflection that goes on, a lot of sort of assessment of the
past year, a little bit of a looking ahead to the next year.
And if you were with us last week, we heard from three people
who have leaned their life towards this community and the
invitations that God is having for them over the past year,
June and and Quran and Joel, thank you.
I'm used to seeing Joel in the back corner, but he's not there.
They did a phenomenal job of just sharing with this community
just ways in which God has been inviting them to respond.
It was, it was very meaningful and it just got me a little bit
reflective on my, I, my past year.
I've been thinking a little bit about where I find myself in my
own story at the end of 2025, at the beginning of the year of our
Lord 2026. And you know, like what's the
shape of my story? I don't know if you guys, you
guys get reflective at all at the end of the year.
It's a little different than just setting resolutions.
But I just noticed that like I'm slowly making my way to the age
of 50, which sounds incredible. I'm, I'm still 2 years away.
By the way, I'm in my 25th year of marriage.
I have a really a handful of really hard years behind me.
I have a lot of gratitude for the shape of my life.
I'm in a season where most of my kids are heading into their
adult years. And I've just been a little
reflective on the basic shape of my story.
Like this is the basic shape of my story right here in the
middle of my life. And, you know, this is the kind
of thing we do. We, we ask some questions, we
make some goals. Maybe some of you have chosen
some some words for the year. That's kind of a bit of a trend.
You know, words like, you know, eat pray, love.
Do you guys remember that eat pray love kind of word season?
Actually, that sounds like a great year.
I bet I could find a sign to put on my wall to just help me
remember that. That's a good agenda, but I'm
crossing over. We're crossing over from one
year to the next. And I've been reflecting on the
shape of my life in the season, and I've been sitting with this
idea, and I came across something that writer Kurt
Vonnegut used to talk about. Vonnegut was one of those odd
prophets of the 20th century, kind of sarcastic, a little bit
brilliant, a little bit heartbroken.
He actually would have fit really well in this community.
And he survived the firebombing of Dresden in World War 2.
And he spent most of his life and writing career trying to
make sense of a world that seemed kind of bent towards
absurdity. And he wrote novels to try to
find meaning. And anyway, Vonnegut gives this
lecture that you can find on the Internet by Googling it, it's
became kind of a popular lecture.
And he would begin to to kind of sketch out the shape of stories
on a chalkboard. And he basically said that the
stories that we see in the novels and the movies, they have
a particular emotional tenor and a typical emotional shape to
them. And he says that you can kind of
graph the the movement of a story with the horizontal axis
representing the timeline from the beginning to the end, and
the vertical axis representing the character's good fortune or
I'll fortune. And when you, when you hear
Vonnegut say it, you realize like, he's right.
There's like four or five basic kinds of stories that all of the
stories sort of move into. And he believes that the shapes
of stories are not random, but they reflect the rhythms of
human experience. The rises and the falls, the
losses and the gains, the good years and the hard ones, the
things that we wish did not happen and the things that we're
really grateful that have happened.
He says this next graph, he kind of graphs it out.
He says that this is a story where the character starts out
fine and falls in a hole and everything kind of turns out
fine in the end. It's like the man in the whole
story is what he calls it. And here's another story that he
talks about. He says this is a story where
something somebody is going through, like a bad season and
just goes from bad to worse. And like, people actually love
this story. They have to read about this
story. Or there's another story about a
little girl who's in a really bad shape and, you know, she
loses her mom and her dad remarries another woman.
And the other woman had two sisters.
And so now she has two stepdaughters and things are not
going very well, but she meets a fairy godmother who gives her a
dress and some shoes and a way to get to the ball and to meet
the boy. And at midnight, the clock
strikes and down, down, down, she goes into the hole until the
guy shows back up with slippers. And she lives happily ever
after. Like, this is the shape of that
story. And he believes that the shapes
of these stories were of literary structures were kind of
reflective of the of the shape of our own lives.
OK, why am I saying all of this? It's because the Scriptures are
just stories. And most of the stories of the
Scriptures are about different parts of the journey of one
particular people called the Hebrews, which was a people that
was originally made-up of 12 tribes, which then multiplied
and increased in population. And each of these tribes can
trace its origin back to a common family, the family of
Jacob, who was later named Israel, whose father was Isaac,
whose father was Abraham. And almost all of what we now
call the Old Testament is the story of this family who God
began to reveal himself to through a series of visions and
dreams and conversations that began with Abraham and then
continued on down in the line of his family.
Where God slowly reveals to this family, which had become a
people and a nation, what kind of God he was and how this God,
whose name was Yahweh, was different from all of the other
gods. This is the basic shape of the
Old Testament story. The other gods that people
worshipped were gods of war and violence.
And this God, who was said to be the God over all of the other
gods and the one responsible for all of creation, was not a God
of War. He was not a God of violence.
He was not a God that required you to sacrifice your babies on
an altar. This one God who revealed
himself to Abraham was a God pursuing peace and justice, and
he desired to reveal to this particular people, not just to
this one family, but to the whole world, that all of the
people have been created by God in a way where God has placed
inside of them a representation of his own self.
You and I were made to be like God.
That is how God has created you to be, and that the people have
always been meant to reflect back to each other what it is
that God is like. And so this family that becomes
this collection of tribes, which become a people who trace their
ancestry back to Father Abraham, are the recipients of this
ongoing slow relational outpouring of the Creator's love
for the humans and for all of the world.
Sounds like a pretty good story, right?
But over time, what happens is that the relationship has these
seasons where the relationship between the people and God
becomes strained. And so the story takes on the
shape of like the man and the whole story, everything is going
fine. And they dip down and they come
back up and they're constantly being reminded that they were
meant for a kind of relationship with their Creator that was
better than the one that they were living in.
And so while they're in the midst of their own story, they
tell another story to try to make sense of the plight that
they find themselves in. And they told a story inspired
by God that was meant to explain what it is that had gone wrong
in the whole situation. And the shape of the story that
they told to to explain sort of how it is that they've ended up
a bit of a mess over and over and over again.
The shape of the story they told was, was this, they said in the
beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and the
earth was formless and empty and darkness was hovering over the
surface of the earth and over the waters.
And so they start their story with this story of darkness and
chaos and emptiness. Darkness, chaos and emptiness.
And then the God that has been wooing this family into
relationship is also there at the beginning through the spirit
that is hovering over the darkness and the chaos and the
emptiness. And God said, let there be
light. And the origin story is off to
like a really good start and it looks something like this.
Everything is fine. We could just do this forever.
Light comes in the midst of darkness.
Order is spoken into chaos. The emptiness is filled with
life and beauty and abundance and vision and love and
tenderness and a sense of purpose and vocation.
And it's said that God walked with the humans in the cool of
the morning and everything is going great.
And then the serpent comes and the lies and the shame and the
nakedness turns into hiding, and the rightly ordered loves and
desires begin to get off track and the mutuality between God
and the humans is broken. Do you do you see the shape that
the story is beginning to to make right here?
This is the shape of the story that they tell.
We're over and over, this God of all creation comes to the family
and says, I made you. I love you and I'm coming after
you. I'm inviting you into this
project of restoration. And over time, this God gave
them some feedback and some input and he says, I want to try
to make you like me once again. And so I'm going to give you
some laws to try to follow, like simple things like don't lie to
each other. Don't covet the things that your
neighbor has. I'm, I'm going to give you
everything you need because I'm a God of abundance.
And so don't covet. And you can just trust me.
Don't commit adultery. Just be faithful to the one that
you have because this relationship is actually
indicative of the kind of faithful love that I have for
you. You know, don't, don't lie to
your neighbor. Don't bear false witness about
your neighbor. Relationships are built on
trust. All of these things God began to
say. And so God begins the
restoration project to restore and rightly size all of the
human relationships. And the stories multiply.
There's seasons of glory. There's seasons of heartache
where their God is near and leading them and guiding them
and providing for them. And then seasons where they
wonder if God is even real. And I happen to know that there
are some of you here that you have been in a season where you
are just like, I don't even know if any of this is real.
And I just want to let you know that the scriptures have
multiple instances where people are asking that question.
So you're in like, really good company.
So the general shape of their story becomes like this.
It's the one with the really curvy.
There you go, over and over and over again, ups and downs.
There are seasons where their shoulders are turned towards
God. There are seasons where their
shoulders are turned away from God.
And in these seasons where their shoulders are turned away from
God, there are a few people among them who have not
forgotten who got it. In fact, there are a few people
among them who have a really tight knit, close relationship
with God. And God begins to speak to these
particular people and ask these people to tell everyone else and
to remind everybody else of what they're supposed to be doing and
the kind of relationship that they're supposed to have.
And these people, the ones who have not forgotten about God,
they live their life in a way that tries to get the attention
of all of the other people. They tried to explain to the
others or remind all of the other people and all of the
leaders of the people that God was still around, that God was
waiting for their return, that God was desiring them to be
faithful to their mutual commitment to one another.
And these individuals, they told stories, they told particular
kinds of stories. They lived their story as a as a
witness to the faithfulness of God.
They embodied their life with a message that corresponded to
what God had wanted the people to pay attention to.
And these people became known as the prophets.
There it is, the prophets. This is all to say we are
beginning a new series. We are going to spend the next
12 weeks all the way up to Easter looking at a group of
prophets that the tradition has come to refer to as as the minor
prophets. And these minor prophets,
they're not minor because of their influence.
They're minor because they just didn't write very much.
So I don't know what that means. Maybe write more, I don't know.
But the minor prophets, the scope of their writing was
small, But in the Hebrew tradition, there were twelve of
these minor prophets that are interspersed throughout the
story of the Hebrew people. And as these stories were told
and written down, they were copied into one single scroll
called the Book of the 12. Did you guys know that?
I actually didn't know that until about 4 weeks ago when I
was looking into this. I was like, I and I've been
saying the scriptures for like 25 years.
So they were, they were copied on one single scroll called the
Book of the 12. And this book of the 12 Minor
Prophets has some sort of light editorial help which suggests
that there is some intentional unity and some sort of
theological coherence that formed it into a scroll.
They tried to make sense of the shape of the story that the
people of God were in. And what what we read about in
this book of the 12 is that they looked at their long history and
they noticed that it seems that there are sometimes in our
history as a people that we can see that over and over and over
again. We're kind of falling and
turning away from God and we start following the ways of the
world and we seek after other gods and we try to gain our own
security and, and follow our own ways.
And then what happens is that, well, what happens?
We fall in a whole things don't go well for us.
And then God sends a prophet, and that prophet generally does
three things they tell. They tell us the truth about
ourselves. They extend to us an invitation
from God, and they remind us of the promise that God has made to
us. Over and over again this
happens. The story within the story
changes, but the shape of the story, friends, is basically on
repeat. The prophets come and tell the
truth. They extend an invitation, and
they remind the people of the promises of God.
So they collected all these prophetic voices.
They put them on a scroll. And over the next 12 weeks,
heading into Easter, we're going to take a look at the book of
the 12/1 prophet each week. And we're going to try to wrap
our mind around the shape of the biblical narrative, the shape
that God is telling his people, because the shape of this story,
you might have noticed, tends to also be the shape of our story.
Do you guys have years where you're just like you felt like
you fell in a hole? Anybody have those kinds of
years? I happen to be coming out of
2025 was sort of a year coming out of like a three-year hole
for me, like a real wilderness season for me, struggled in all
kinds of ways and grateful for friendships and for my marriage
and for my kids and for this community and for other
communities. But it just is the shape of our
story that our story ebbs and flows.
And sometimes that is not necessarily related to like the
sense in which you're following God.
We live in a really weird world and sometimes there are just
holes that like, through no fault of our own, we kind of
fall into. Does that make sense?
Other times, it's not that way. Other times it actually is
because of the kinds of choices that we're making or because of
the things inside of us that are unhealed or, or, or the
relationships that we refuse to sort of like work out.
So we're going to try to pay attention to the way that the
biblical story is shaped and try to pay attention to how that
might inform us for the shape of our own story.
When I was about 9 or 10, I was really into BMX bikes.
Anybody remember the BMX bike phase of the 1980s?
Like my neighborhood was the height of the flurry of
activity. Of BMX bikes and we could
literally ride our bikes to this BMX park and we would sneak in
right at dusk, which was not too dark where we would like lose
our way on the BMX track, but dark enough that people couldn't
quite see us. And so all of that BMX energy
got transported back into my neighborhood and and I lived on
a cul-de-sac. So we would build all of these
ramps and the traffic was kind of low and we sort of knew all
of the little curbs that you could kind of hop over and the
kind of places that definitely were not up to code by any
stretch of the imagination. But it worked for us on our
bicycles. And there was this one evening
where some friends of, of mine put up a couple of ramps like
this and they were actually pretty close together so that
you could go down the sidewalk and you can jump over 1 ramp and
then kind of slide down the other side of the ramp.
And I'd probably done 20 or 30 turns on this ramp.
And then I got called in for dinner and it was tacos.
And you're like, how does he know what he had for dinner in
1987? Oh, hold on, we're going to get
there. So it was dinner and where my
story really progresses. I got on my bike after dinner,
kind of woofed down those tacos and I was at the top of my
driveway and I barreled down the sidewalk at the top speed headed
for that same set of home built ramps.
But what I didn't know is while I was at dinner, some of the
older boys have come around, you know, and they they're the boys
that had like titanium BMX bikes, like a third of the
weight of my bike. And, you know, I'm, I'm riding
this like clunky steel Dukes of Hazzard sort of banana seat
looking thing. And you guys remember the Dukes
of Hazzard. OK, What a show, man.
OK, actually, could that show even be made today?
I don't think it could, no. So I'm barreling down the
sidewalk, and what the older boys had done is they had moved
the ramps quite a bit apart because they could jump farther,
and they were bigger and stronger and older, and they
were riding real BMX bikes made of titanium.
And I didn't know any of that. And what also happened is I
didn't really pay much attention to the dozen or so neighborhood
kids that were lining the sidewalk yelling at me, trying
to tell me that the thing that I was dead set on doing was not
going to end well for me. And so I speed towards the
ramps, and the prophets were shouting at me.
They were telling me to stop, to turn back, to slow down.
And yet I was convinced that whatever warning they were
trying to give me probably didn't really apply to me.
And over the ramp I went, with the front tire of my bicycle
hitting the front edge of the second ramp, sending me over the
handlebars, chin first, into the sidewalk.
This turned out to be the my greatest childhood injury.
Skin ripped off to my bone, 11 stitches, emergency room and
somewhere in the middle, throne of tacos.
That's how it happens. So I want you to imagine that
the story I've just told you, it's, it's a little easier story
to remember than like Obadiah, right?
This is a parable that actually happened, by the way, a parable
for the book of the 12 prophets, because this is basically what
the storyline is for God's people in the Old Testament.
And 1 by 1, standing on the sidelines of this unfolding
tragedy, doing everything they can to get the attention of
God's people. They're shouting and they're
waving their hands, and they're jumping up and down.
And time after time, God's people just run headlong into
their own ruin. And the book of the 12 is the
collection of the writings of the 12 prophets who were
standing on the edge of the sidewalk yelling and waving
their hands. Does this make sense?
They told the truth when no one wanted to hear it.
They invited people to return to God, and they held out in front
of people and reminded the people of the faithfulness of
God's promises even in the midst of going into ruin.
That's the good news. This is the pattern, by the way,
of the prophets. The truth, the invitation, and
the promises. The truth, the invitation and
the promises and through the stories that they would tell
and, and the kind of peculiar lives that they would live.
Guys, these, these prophets were strange people and their life
took on the shape of, of a kind of strangeness.
But some of that strangeness was meant to put on display the
message that God was trying to communicate.
Like Hosea, who marries this woman named Gomer who he knew
was going to have an affair. And God uses his life and his
story as a parable for God's covenant love for his people who
are unfaithful to him. And in this story, the prophet
Hosea's suffering, it reveals not just divine judgement, but
the way that God aches for the people that God loves.
The prophet Hosea puts on display the grief that God
carries for his people who keep running after the things that
will not satisfy. Or the Prophet Amos.
His message was directed at the religious elite of his day.
I'm really looking forward to our Sunday on the prophet Amos
because there is a problem in our land around the commingling
of religion and whatever else we're going to call the thing
that we're living in. This guy doesn't even identify
as a prophet or the son of a prophet.
He doesn't come on the scene rolling out his resume.
He doesn't sort of wave a flag saying that you should listen to
me. Like he is a shepherd and a fig
picker from the middle of nowhere.
And his status as a no named outsider to the places of
influence reinforces and embodies God's confrontation
with the corrupt system of worship and power that have wed
themselves together. Or the well known prophet Jonah
who gets swallowed up by a whale when God asks him to go and
share the good news of God's love with his enemies.
And and what does Jonah do? He says I'm not going to do
that. He refuses to do it.
And his resistance to preach grace to his enemies becomes
part of the truth telling message.
And the invitation. God's mercy extends to those
that we ourselves cannot stomach.
God's mercy is for every person. So as we look through the book
of the 12, we're going to focus on three things all throughout
this series, among other things. But we're going to focus on the
truth and the invitation and the promise.
And just briefly, let me name a couple of things about each of
these. First up, the truth, the
prophets. They name reality as they see
it, and one of the main things that that they keep crying out
from the edge of the sidewalk is that God's people, they tend to
turn their shoulders to other gods.
And in the language of the Scriptures, that's called
idolatry. They turn their shoulders to
worship idols. And this describes the way that
the people kind of latch on to security and adoration and power
in ways that the world is inviting them into.
And sure, like that might work out for a little bit, but in the
end, what the prophets say is that trusting in anything else
other than God is going to lead us to ruin.
Trusting in anything else other than his provision and his love
and the energy that comes from God and his spirit has a way of
deforming us, has a way of bending ourselves towards
destruction. So like a primary, not a primary
example, but one example could be, you know, you might think,
OK, 2026, it's the year to open up my retirement fund.
And honestly, that's actually probably a good idea.
If you don't have a retirement fund, you should, you should
think about that given the culture that we live in.
And you can imagine that, you know, it starts off like
innocuous enough, you just like put a little bit of money away.
But then if there's a season like down the road where you
become kind of obsessed in your thinking about about how much
money is in that fund, you start holding back generosity from
other people. You start squeezing really tight
onto the things that God is actually asking you to let go
of. Something good becomes outsized
in a way that the scriptures will call idolatry.
It's really simple to happen. It's really easy to unfold like
that. So the prophets constantly
expose how trusting in idols, they deform people and they
cause us to lose our capacity for the things that God is
creating in US, namely justice and compassion and faithfulness
to one another. So, for example, Hosea and Amos
and Micah and Malachi, they all confront a people who've not
sort of outright rejected God, but they've allowed the things
of the world to commingle with their life with God in a way
that is actually unfaithful to what God is inviting them into
and naming the truth of what is going on.
Hosea says of God's people. Their hearts are divided.
They're performing all of these rituals, but their hearts are
somewhere else. And that split allegiance
creates a spiritual confusion and social injustice because
it's really hard to take care of your neighbors when your focus
is not in that relationship with one another.
And sometimes the prophets, they speak of judgement, but not
judgement of like an angry father or a wrathful God.
It's kind of a divine judgement that Pope Benedict many years
ago said that God allows us to feel the full weight of our own
choices. You guys ever had that happen to
you? You just like choose something
that's not best and now you're just like stuck with the
consequences. This is sort of how the Old
Testament narrative and the prophets thought about what it
meant that God was also a God, that that spoke judgement.
So friends, the prophets, they tell the truth about the
situation. And what we're going to learn
over the next 12 weeks is that. Nobody really loves.
To hear the truth about themselves When?
The truth about ourselves. Exposes the little bits inside
of us that are maybe a little unlovely.
Do you guys know? That there are unlovely.
Parts in your life? I happen to know that there are
unlovely parts in my life. I have.
I'm married. And.
I have 4 kids and life has a way of exposing some of that
unloveliness and nobody likes to get present to any of that.
But my friend Caleb has a friend named Paul and Paul's all says
this. He says the good news begins
with this, that in your unloveliness, you are beloved.
That's the gospel, and it shows up.
Over and over and over again through the prophets.
So, friends, we are. Meant to become a community of
people who know how to gently and kindly and lovingly be a
prophetic witness and a prophetic voice to one another.
We don't. Have to wait.
You know, for like an old guy with a beard and a robe named
Obadiah to show up in our life to tell us where we might be
headed down the wrong path. So when we can hear.
The truth about our lives as it really is and name reality.
What we find is this constant and faithful invitation from
God. Listen to the invitation from
Hosea. Come, let us return to the Lord.
Or or from Joel. Return to me with all of your
heart. Or through Zechariah.
Return to me, says the Lord of Hosts, and I will return to you.
Do you guys hear a little bit of a repetition here?
The invitation from the minor prophets to the people of God
and to you and I is always just just come on back.
You can just come right on back. You can turn your shoulders
again back to this relationship, back to the goodness that I have
for you. So the invitation of God is.
Always the invitation to be welcomed back into relationship
and back into the family of God and I'll.
Close with this. Once we do that, we are able to
be reminded of the promise, and the promise is that God is
always faithful, even when we are unfaithful.
You can turn. Your shoulders away from.
God over and over and over again.
And do you know what will happen next?
God will. Come looking for you.
And he will. Get in front of.
You and he'll be like, come back to me.
And. Even for those of you that are
like, like following Jesus, like you're really, you're in it.
I promise you that there are. Things that God.
Wants to continue to reveal about the truth about your life
all of these little microwaves that God just wants to sort of
come right down like a like a gentle dad and put.
Your face in his. Hands and just said can you just
come back to me in this one particular area so I.
Don't know what the. Shape of your life is at the
beginning of 2026. I, I don't, I don't know how
much thought you've given it, but what we're going to try to
do as a community from now until Easter is to think about the
shape of our life, to try to imagine where are you on this
graph? What?
Is the truth. About your life that God would
want to reveal to you. What is the invitation that God
would want to extend and what are the promises that you need
to be reminded of in the? Season that you're in so as we
turn towards a. Time of of prayer and ministry
and worship. I want to invite Noah and Naomi
to come back up and. I just want to.
Extend a little bit of an invitation to you for prayer.
We're going to have some folks in the corners to pray.
I think I'm. Just curious, you know?
What season you might be in? Are you in a season where you're
like, I'm ready to hear the truth?
Lord, we would love to pray for you just to see if God would
stir up, you know, the kind of ears that we need to have in
order to hear him. And then secondly, I just think
that there's probably some of you at the start of a year, you
just need to remember what God has promised.
And we would love, we would love to pray for you, particularly as
we head into this season of teaching.
OK, if you're able to stand, I would invite you to stand as we
worship and respond to God in prayer.
If you're part of our prayer ministry team, could you find
your way to the sides? Thank you.