Funeral Arrangements for Pastor Joy Carroll

Pastor Joy Carroll, our beloved Pastor of Discipleship from July of 2001 until November of 2006, passed suddenly but peacefully of natural causes into the nearer presence of God on Saturday, February 23, 2008.

Visitation will on Tuesday Feburary 26 from 2-4 PM and 7-9 PM at Bongiovi Funeral Home in Raritan, NJ.

The Memorial Service will be Wednesday, February 27 from 4PM at the North Branch Reformed Church with a light supper to follow.

Meanwhile our prayers go out to her family and to the wider church family in our grief. May we be the hands and feet of Christ to each other in this difficult time.

Todd Buurstra, D. Min.
Pastor of Worship and Witness

Pastor Joy Carroll

Pastor Joy Carroll, our beloved Pastor of Discipleship from July of 2001 until November of 2006, passed suddenly into the nearer presence of God on Saturday, February 23, 2008. She never woke up from a nap.

When arrangements are available they will be posted at NBRC.com. Meanwhile our prayers go out to her family and the North Branch church family in our grief. May we be the hands and feet of Christ to each other in this difficult time.

Todd Buurstra, D. Min.
Pastor of Worship and Witness

Sermon 2/17/2008

Giving Up Something for Lent?
Matthew 4:1-11

Mom, what are you giving up for Lent? came the question at our Ash Wednesday supper table. Suzy is giving up chocolate said one. Yeah, Jim is going to give up being mean to his sister said the other. That’ll be impossible! came the reaction. Lent.

Historically we Protestants have not given up anything for Lent in order to sacrifice year-round for Jesus. Yet this Lent the pastoral staff is asking the healthy adults among us to give up food for one day, possibly Good Friday. Until then Mark, David and I will be teaching on the ancient spiritual discipline of fasting on Sundays and Wed-nesdays. Richard Foster’s chapter on fasting in Celebration of Discipline will assist us.
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Sermon 2/10/2008

Relational Kinks      Matthew 6:7-15

 We have all done it.  It often happens when we are in a hurry.  There we were watering the garden or washing the car, pressed for time and when we pressed the hose– nothing.  Ugh!  What’s wrong?!  Then it soon dawned upon us that there was a kink in the hose.  Tracing it back to the source we unkinked it, and the water flowed.
 I am suggesting to you this morning that the three primary relationships of life get kinked up also, even though God designs the water of life to flow freely in and through them.  I notice these relational kinks in my life.  In my relationship with myself the kink becomes to think it’s all about me, about my work, about my problem, and I become dry.  In my relationship with others I may get too bent out of shape that someone else might think differently or feel differently from me, so that my love runs dry.  In my relationship to God I may get so focused on Bless me, Help me that I forget to let the love flow back to its source.  So how does God use prayer to help our relational flow?
 
 Jesus is unkinking God’s flow of love to ourselves when he teaches us to pray:
Give us this day our daily bread… And forgive us our debts… lead us not into temptation.
These are all prayers for God’s love to flow into personal empty wells.  But once in a while I come across a person, like my younger brother, who proudly states, I don’t pray for myself.  I pray for others.  But Jesus wants us to pray for ourselves, too.  For prayer is a free therapy session where we learn to trust his provision of daily bread, have our guilt (debts) washed away, and feel protected (lead us not).  Dr. Alexis Carrel won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, and later wrote a 1936 book extolling the therapeutic value of prayer. 
 Prayer has always been a way of letting God save me $200/hour for therapy.  When Yancey describes his weekly “anger walk” I remember my own up in the Sussex County woods behind the parsonage of my first church.  That church was a surly bunch then.  And being the rookie that I was I often got in the middle of a metaphorical punch intended for someone else.  That made me angry.  And so I remember many woods walks working out my anger at the left jabber du jour with God. Those walks saved my ministry
 The way that prayer is unkinking the water of life to me today is more in line with Dr. Anthony Bloom.  As a physician his pace is described in this way…  My kids tell me at the supper table, You JUST asked me that!  So where was my mind?  Prayer helped Bloom receive the present of the present.  He slowed down… and became more productive.  Yancey concludes… When I…move faster and faster…
 
 Jesus is unkinking God’s flow of love through us to others when we are to pray:
Give us our daily bread…And forgive us our debts as we… lead us not into…
How can we pray give us our daily bread here and then go home, brush half of our baloney sandwich into the garbage not caring about those for whom that would be more than they’d eat all day?  How can we pray forgive us our debts right here and then not answer the caller I.D. when we see it’s the brother with whom we’re fueding?  How can we pray lead us not into temptation here but then yawn at the internet story of the increase of sexual trafficking of Thailands pre-teens?  Our hose is kinked.  So as the demon-possessed always need to be brought to Jesus so prayer brings others to Jesus.
 Bonhoeffer wrote: Christ stands between us, and we can only get into touch with our neighbors through him.  It reminds me of that classic story of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 where our forefathers gathered in the city of brotherly love to write our constitution.  But brotherly love did not prevail for the first 4 weeks during which they had not written a single word.  Wrangling special interests played tug of war to a stalemate.  So Benjamin Franklin stood to make this famous motion: That henceforth prayers, imploring the assistance of Heaven and its blessing on our deliberations, be held in this assembly every morning.  The Almighty was sought and the words were found to the blessing of this union.  To this day that practice continues.

 Jesus is unkinking God’s love flow through us back to the Source when we pray:
Hallowed be Your name, Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is…
My great challenge in prayer is to end my therapy session, get beyond the flow of compassion to others, in order to complete the circle of love to God.  Yancey reminds us that 16th century English country pastor George Herbert called us secretaries of praise.  You and I have no higher purpose on earth than to get lost in wonder, love and praise.
 Yancey tells the story of the great German preacher, Helmut Thielicke who suffered terribly for opposing Hitler.  One day he walked to his Stuttgart church only to find it reduced to rubble and his home destroyed.  But that wasn’t the greatest pain.  His heart broke when he saw his own nearly starving children licking pictures of food in recipe books.  Yet each Sunday amidst the rubble he preached hope in God because he lived in praise.  Surrounded by crushed stones Thielicke declared: The one fixed pole in all the bewildering confusion is the faithfulness…of God!  Whoa!  Praise has power.

 This week, upon which relationship do you need to focus prayer to unkink God’s flow of love: to yourself, to others, or to God?  Concentrate on one and let it flow.  Amen
 

Sermon 2/3/2008

Given God’s Prayer Promises,   Mark 11:20-25

Think of a BIG prayer that you’ve been praying. For: healing, depression, money Got it? Then hear Jesus say… This sweeping prayer promise moves mountains!

Yet, even though Jesus promises such sweeping power to prayer, why do certain prayers go unanswered? Moses prayed to enter the Promised Land—God refused. David prayed for an infant son to live—God let him die. Paul prayed that his “thorn in the flesh” (maybe his eyesight?) be removed—God kept his vision at 20-2000, whatever. Even Jesus prayed that his cup of suffering pass from him—God sent him to the cross.

Today the Spirit will help you examine why a prayer of yours may not be answered.

The first reason Yancey helps us see in the Bible is sin. Jesus is referring to this in verse 25… Someone here is praying for Uncle Harry to get along with the family, but you’re forgetting that prayer probably isn’t going to change Harry, until it changes you to forgive him for the scene he made at Christmas dinner. Another example of sin getting in the way of prayer’s answer, writes Yancey, is when prison chaplains share that some convicts only pray when they hear the police siren. God help me get away! Of course, Yancey points out, that prayer makes God an accomplice to the crime. Then there’s the sin of religious extremism. Faith Assembly church in IN teaches that God heals by faith alone, without the help of modern medicine. So medical researchers have studied the results: the infant mortality rate is three times higher than normal, and the mortality rate associated with childbirth is 100 times greater! Faith and medicine is best!

The second reason that God may not be answering your prayer Yancey calls contradictory prayers. That’s partly what this fig tree curse is about. Jesus was hungry, but it wasn’t fig season. So, no matter Jesus’ desire, God wasn’t about to magi-cally produce figs in February even for his own son! This is why I don’t pray for weather or sports. If I pray for sun on my picnic but the farmer prays for rain, why should God answer me? If I pray for the Giants and my MI family prays for U of M graduate Tom Brady’s Patriots, what’s up with that? (That’s also why I don’t bet because then I’d be tempted to pray a contradictory sports prayer.) On a slightly more serious level Yancey quotes the ironic British WWII poem-prayer… Please read it with me…

The last reason that God may not be answering your prayer, and maybe the most common reason, is that God may have a higher purpose for you. What was the higher purpose of Jesus cursing the fig tree? It was to symbolize Israel’s unfruitfulness in carrying out her mission. So God would prune Israel (e.g., destroy the temple) and graft in we Gentiles to accomplish the mission. (cf. Romans 11). Yancey gives two great examples: 1) Augustine’s mother prays that her son will not sail to wicked Rome. However Augustine tricks her and goes anyway. Later he was converted to Christ there and became the greatest church father of the 5^{th century. 2) The missionaries prayed for China as they were kicked out in 1950. It looked like the church might die. However, under communist oppression God multiplied the underground church many times over!So what are you praying for that is not being answered? Find a quiet time today to think about whether it is because of sin, a contradiction, or God has a higher purpose. Turn from the sin, back away from the contradiction, and/or accept the higher purpose.}