Randy Harris 11-16-25

If you're a visitor here, you're very welcome. I hope you will come back and hear our preacher at some point. I'm not him. If you were here last week like I was and were really kind of inspired by the vision that was cast and were anxious to hear what comes next, so was I. But you're not going to hear that today.

I don't preach other people's sermons, so I don't know what it was going to be. Well, I preached a sermon on the mount occasionally, but anyway, Jeff is right. I do have some sermons in my hip pocket. But unfortunately, all the sermons I have in my hip pocket, you've heard.

So on Friday morning, I go, okay, what are we going to do here? And about that time, I get emails from Jeff saying, what text are you going to preach? I'm going to say the Bible.

And truly the best sermons. Simmer.

But I needed a microwave sermon. So I got to thinking, okay, what can I. What can I do on short notice? And, you know, I'm just drawn to First Corinthians because I'm teaching that in my Bible class. And.

But I didn't want to do something that they'd already heard. So I thought, okay, what. What is it that I have unquestionable expertise in? And what I decided was the one thing no one can question that I know a lot about is I'm uncool.

I don't just sit at the nerd table. I rule there. Not only do I love classical music, I listen to it on CDs and LPs.

I have no idea what the most popular current TV program is, but I am an expert on the Andy Griffith Show.

I don't go on vacations. I go on nerdcations. Baseball plays, art museums. By the way, if you're one of those people, this is sounding good to you. Sit at my table.

I don't know very much about cool. It made me. It made me think of a book I read a few years ago. Most things do. That's part of my uncoolness, which was a book about the church and Jesus and being cool.

And he was sort of opining that that churches often try to be cool, but that's a fool's errand because cool is always a moving target.

And the only way for there to be cool is there has to be a whole lot of uncool, because if everybody's cool, that's not cool anymore. Cool is all always exclusive. It. It's always putting people on the outside. That's what cool is.

If churches try to be cool, they're always going to be a step short and a day late, a dollar short. But. But that got me to thinking about Jesus.

If the church isn't cool, then maybe at least Jesus is cool.

But that only works if you don't pay any attention to Jesus because he will have nothing to do with cool.

Many of you will know one of Jesus most famous stories in Luke 15 called the Prodigal Son. If you're new to us and don't know that story, you just ask the person beside you afterwards and they will be happy to tell it to you. And if they can't tell it to you, you tell me and I'll tell it to you. And most of you know that story. But I want to remind you of way the story starts.

The religious leaders are saying about Jesus he eats with sinners and associates with them. That's what makes Jesus told the story. Because those religious leaders wanted to make the party invitation list smaller and smaller. And Jesus would have nothing to do with that. He wanted everybody to come to the party.

No cool table here, everybody's invited. Jesus is not cool. He's attractive. And they're not the same thing at all.

Well, that brings me to our text.

This is one of those texts in Paul that does something that Paul rarely does. It displays a sense of humor.

Paul's sometimes angry in his writing. He's often erudite. He's very seldom funny. But here he kind of plays it for laughs. He gets this monstrous picture of what would a body be if it was all nose?

How would we function if our body was all I? Although Shane might think that's not such a bad idea right now. You know, how do we get around if we're all nose and no feet? It's pretty funny for Paul, but he is trying to solve a problem. It's a serious problem.

It is the problem of cool.

It's the problem of religious superiority. It's some people claiming to be more spiritual than others because they have the coolest spiritual gift. Speaking in tongues. It is ironic that after 2000 years that problem still exists. But Paul's going to have none of that.

No religious superiority here. No coolness of gifts. All the gifts are given for the same reason. For the common good. Whatever gift you have, it's not for you, it's for me.

Whatever gift I have, it's not for me, it's for you. They're all given for the common good. And the church functions best when you have all of this variety of gifts. And after Paul has gone on and on in that, he closes it by saying, but I'm going to show you an even more excellent way, which is, in a word, love.

No cool table here. Paul's going to have none of that. Okay, I'm going to do something. We've done this before, but it's been a long time and a lot of you weren't here. If you're a visitor, you don't have to participate in what we're getting ready to do.

You're invited to, but you don't have to. I'm going to give you six different ways of loving God. And after I've described those six ways of loving God, we are going to vote on which one is most natural to you.

And I'm going to invite you to look around while we vote because you'll learn a lot about your church. I especially want to encourage you to watch and see when your spouse has their hand up.

And you might be tempted to say, as I give you these six ways. Oh, they're almost natural to me, but that would make you Jesus, and I'm not convinced.

Okay, here are the six ways. First I'll describe them, then we'll vote again. If you're a visitor, you don't have to vote. If you're a member, you have to absolutely must vote. Some people, number one, primarily love God with their hands.

They're servants. They're the people who constantly want to do something. A church I was at before, a person in our. In our congregation could die. I could be there 10 minutes after their death and she would have already been there and started the laundry.

You know, it's just hands, always looking. How to serve.

Two, Some people primarily love God with their heads. They're the thinking people. They're the people. If you give them a choice between two Bible classes, one's on relationships and one's on Leviticus, they'll take Leviticus because it's so much more practical.

Three, some people primarily love God with their feelings, with their emotions. They're given to great joy and they're given to great sadness. It's with their feelings that they primarily love God. Fourth, some people primarily love God through prayer. These are the quiet folk.

If you give them the choice between going to a mass worship service or sitting under a tree praying, they'll choose to sit under a tree and pray. They might do stuff like visit monasteries. And Highland does an unusual job of reminding us that those people are part of our congregation. Otherwise you often don't know it because they tend to be pretty quiet.

They're off praying.

Fifth, some people love God primarily by loving other people. And it's not so much service as it is community.

You know, lock them in a room by themselves for five minutes and their heads will explode because they don't have anybody to talk to. And they're the social glue that holds groups together. And six, some people primarily love God through worship. They're the people who walk around their houses humming hymns, and they. They love to sing, and they love to get them come together to worship, and that's primarily how they love God.

Okay, now we're getting ready to vote. If you remember, you have to vote. I'm not asking you which one you do. I know you do them all. What I'm asking is which one is most natural to you?

All right, those of you who say, I'm a hands person, service is the primary way I love God. There's always, always a lot of hands on that one. Number two, I love God primarily with my head. I'm one of those head people. Okay, there's the ACU folks.

Just kidding. If you're one of those people who loves God primarily with your emotions, put up both hands and wave them.

Well, several years, several decades ago in churches of Christ, we tried to exterminate all those people, but some have obviously survived.

How about the quiet folks? Can you quit praying long enough to put your hands up? How many of you primarily love God through prayer and contemplation?

How about those who love God primarily through community and being with other people? Of course. And how about worship? Primary love language? Okay.

You know, if you. If you look around, You know, my first reaction is always, if everybody in church were like me, it would be easier.

Not for a moment to be confused with better.

It wouldn't be better at all.

The problem in the Corinthian church, and occasionally it's a problem in churches today, is we tend to evaluate other people's spirituality by our particular bent.

So the prayer folks say, if we could just get those service people to quit running around all the time and pray, we'd have some spirituality in this church. And the head people say, if we could get some serious Bible study here, then we'd have some spirituality in this church. We still have people here who don't read Greek.

And the service people are thinking, if we could get those prayer people off their knees and get them actually out here doing something, that would be helpful. And the emotion people are thinking, if Randy Harris could get his hands higher Than that. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

Oh, we'd have some spirituality here.

But you don't have to think about it very long to know how wrong headed that is.

What would we do if we didn't have all those different kinds of people?

And I do believe that I should try in my own life to develop all those ways as best I can. But I also believe that not every person has to be a church.

When you put all those people together, they become the church of God. And none of them are greater than the others.

One of the reasons why the church is so important for the cool kids is they learn this single crucial lesson. In the kingdom of God, there is no cool table.

There isn't. The love of God is given to every human being generously and none of us deserve it more than anybody else does. And that's what the gospel is.

No cool here.

That's not what we do. We bask in the relentless love of God.

So I'm excited to hear the rest of the presentation on kind of the vision of what we're going to do over the next little period of time. And what I know is it's going to take people with all sorts of different kinds of gifts. I'm pretty sure that my part in this is not going to be hammering nails because with a hammer I'm dangerous. I'm not helpful. I don't do work, I create it.

But some of you have the gift of nail hammering. And we're so glad you're here.

Some of you are going to help pray the world into submission.

And we're going to serve and worship.

And that's the church being the church.

Paul is frustrated with a Corinthian church that he thinks ought to be more mature than it is.

You're worried about having the cool gifts when what you really should be doing is thinking about how you love one another.

And when you come to the Lord's table, you should be grateful for all of these varieties of people who come around the table together.

The true gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ is not the gospel of cool. It's the gospel of radical inclusion. There is no cool here because there cannot be uncool. With the love of God would you stand?

The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and give you peace. To him who's able to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy. To the only God, our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power through Jesus Christ our Lord before all ages now and forevermore. World without end.

Amen.