Giving Up: Superiority with Pastor Ryan Braley

Amen, you can be seated.

Good morning everyone.

Man, I love that there's just a ton of new people hanging around Central, and so here's what I ask you If you're a longer time member of Central, just please be on the lookout for folks who are kind of new.

We don't want to embarrass anybody who's new or make them feel like you know, like they stick out, but hey, but just give them a high five, say hey, do I recognize you?

If not introduce yourself?

People that come and check out new churches, they'll hang around because they met somebody.

As dynamite as the worship might be or the preaching might be or whatever, people will hang around if there's a community of people to belong to, and so we want to be that place for all those who are checking.

So if you're new here, I genuinely want to say welcome.

I always have this long standing offer.

If you want to get a burrito or coffee with me, I'm willing to do that.

I'll take one for the team and I'll buy you a burrito.

You can get extra guac if you want to, but yeah, we just we're genuinely.

It's like 12 bucks to get an extra guac.

You know they got to take out a small loan.

It's a real good offer.

But, yeah, we're grateful that you're here and I don't know just off the cuff.

I want you to know that what we want to, what I, it is important to me, is that we think deeply about the world and faith and God and life and death.

And if you're here and you're like checking out faith or not really sure about the whole God thing, I get it and I really do, and so we want, I'd invite you to join us as we explore these things and we hope to pretend we hope to not pretend that we have all the answers, but we're trying to help each other explore these deeply meaningful things, what it means to be a fully alive human, and so if that's interesting to you at all, then I encourage you to stick around and hang out.

Sound all right?

Okay, great, the three of you that are okay with that, let's keep going.

We are on the Novaar Lenten journey.

Lenten is this 40 days going up to Easter, where we do intentionally want to think about what does it mean to be people of the cross?

So in the Christian story, jesus starts heading to the cross the last part of his, you know, of he's doing three years of ministry, and at the end he starts to head to the cross and we want to journey alongside him and like explore what does it mean that Jesus died and what does it mean to be people who follow Jesus?

And so we're going to do a series called Giving Up, and by that we don't mean like just giving up on life and wearing sweatpants and eating laced potato chips all day If that was your day yesterday, no offense, I didn't mean anything.

Sometimes you got to have that kind of a day just to kind of recoup.

But really like to let go and as we venture towards that second half of life that language I used a couple weeks ago may we begin to see how little control we have over many things and we just let go to live more in tune with the spirit and not fight the things that are not worth fighting over or fighting for or fighting against.

Rather, this morning I was doing my morning stretches.

As you know, my stretches are important to me as I get older and you know, sometimes when you're stretching there's a muscle that just doesn't want to let go.

You know, like come on, you know, and the worst thing you do is like just to push it even harder and make you know you could tear a muscle doing that.

So what the idea is you know this probably to be true is you have to like consciously breathe and just let it go and like, hey, muscle, you're going to be okay, and as the muscle lets go you can go into a fuller stretch.

That's kind of what we're doing as we journey towards the cross, and even in our own faith, we're trying to let go of all the things that just don't matter.

And man, I so long to be anyway, I don't have to track too far, but just to all say this one great spiritual leader says that all great spirituality and Christianity is about letting go, and so maybe people will let go.

This morning I want to talk about something this morning that is not anything novel.

You probably have heard this before, you probably know this to be true about Christianity, but it is, I think, the one thing in our life that we fight to hold on to, because the world is telling us constantly to not let go of this.

In fact it's championing us to hang on to it, and that is this idea of superiority.

Jesus says again and again, and I think all throughout scripture the way to life is taking the low road, the road to humility, letting go of the self, putting others for serving and not coming to be served.

And that sounds really great in theory, but it is super hard because everything in us, whether it's the old self, the old Adam, the old Eve, sin, whatever you want to call it.

We want to cling to fighting for superiority.

We live in a world ravaged by war and violence and systems that are just trying to fight for control over and against each other, and it's madness.

And my invitation this morning to us is to opt out of that game.

That's a fool's game, I'm just telling you.

So I'm going to tell you this sermon about why it's important that we give up superiority, and the whole time I imagine you're going to be like as I was writing it like this is ridiculous.

Why would I let go of superiority?

I want to conquer and win and fight, and whoever dies on the top of the hill wins.

But I want to suggest that the fundamental ordering of the universe is not that way, and people who die fighting that battle in the end are empty and have nothing but a shell.

So instead I want to invite us into what we call the mind of Christ.

So here's what I want to do.

I'm going to begin with some theology in the front end.

So if theology is not your bag, just kind of hang on and let it wash over you.

But I want to kind of frame this whole thing in a theological idea.

Then I want to tell this story about Jesus and the Samaritan woman, which I think is just a beautiful story, and maybe you've heard it.

But then I want to end with Mark 10, a quote by Teresa of Avila, and then a story about my man, ryan Leith, the ex-NFL quarterback Sound.

Okay, all right, thank you, you don't have a choice.

I'm up here, you're down there.

I wanted to give the sermon from the pews, but hey, I'm giving it my own superiority and then that will be a terrible idea.

So anyway, here I am.

This is a picture of God.

I drew God.

Oh, by the way, I drew all my own slides today, so I hope you enjoy them.

Remember that I did not go to school for art but theology.

So, thank you for your grace and mercy.

This is God.

No, thank you.

Okay, a couple of you noted.

But Sarah, can you make God bigger for me?

Okay, a little bit bigger.

That's still not what I would really mean.

Okay, there we go Better.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, that was a joke I was looking forward to all morning One of the Christian tenets of our faith, like the main things, by the way.

People always ask me what do you guys believe at Central, or what do you believe as a pastor?

Well, there are many things that we agree upon as Lutherans or as Christians, or then there are some things that are just my ideas, and then there's, like, all these other things we can just argue and talk about.

Fair enough.

This one, though, is one of the main things, that it's a hill that we would die on, that I will die on, and that, I think, changes fundamentally how we see God.

That is, the Trinitarian, or the theology of the Trinity, or an idea of the Trinity.

So the Trinity means that this is a basic Christian truth, that we kind of hold on to this idea that God is three persons in one.

So we call these three persons the Father, god, the Father, god, the Son, god, the Holy Spirit.

You'll hear that language used a lot God, the Father, son, holy Spirit.

You hear it in our prayer, you see it in Scripture.

So we believe in a three-ness in one.

How it works out, I'm not exactly sure.

When my son, gavin, was younger, he was like five years old, and Gavin is always like the philosophically minded one in our family.

They all are too, but I mean like he's like dad.

So do we worship three gods, or one, like no dude, one?

Monotheism was one of the basic foundational truths of Judaism too.

I mean no buddy, just one.

He was like okay, can you explain that to me?

This is right before bedtime, by the way, which is always when these things come out, dad, dad, can you explain that to me?

Not right now, son, go to bed, I'll tell you in the morning, but it's hard.

But here's the idea there's a three-ness in oneness of God, that the father, the son and the Holy Spirit exist within God.

They are God, somehow.

This is a foundational, like relational part about who God is.

Now the great theologian Augustine a Saint Augustine of Hippo, who's one of my favorite writers, he's brilliant he said this worshiping a Trinitarian God, a three-in-one God, is way more beautiful than a Unitarian God.

Unitarian means like there's just one God, not father, son, only spirit.

And there are some Christians who are called Unitarians.

That's not who we are, but they reject the idea of the divinity of Jesus.

Now we hold that Jesus is God, and I'll explain that in a minute, but he says this is why a God who exists in isolation, in only like a one Unitarian God, doesn't know love, how to give love or how to receive love, and doesn't actually doesn't actually do it until creation.

So this God, who's a Unitarian kind of God, has to create in order to give and to receive love.

Here's a picture.

I think I drew a dynamic picture of this.

There it is Before.

This God has nobody else to love or to receive love from.

Does that make sense?

A Trinitarian God, though, is the opposite.

Here's a picture of the Trinity that I drew.

This is a live action shadow of the Trinity right now, just kidding, but the Trinity the father, the son and the Holy Spirit exist already in a loving, mutual, other-centered, dynamic relationship.

So the father loves the son, the son loves the spirit, the spirit loves the father.

They are like in this beautiful you know, some call it the great dance.

It's this beautiful Trinitarian, other-centered love, and the father, the son, has already given and received love Within the Godhead itself.

They didn't need anything else.

The Unitarian God was only one God, or like one, you know, not father, son spirit that God has to create in order to sort of fill the love need this God, though, doesn't.

This God lacks nothing, needs nothing, is short of nothing.

It knows all the things.

It already experiences this beautiful, loving relationship.

So, when this God creates the Trinitarian God it creates out of an abundance of love, here's another picture of that for you.

Yeah, beautiful.

So this God creates the share to give, to serve, not to be served, to meet other people's needs, not to have his needs met.

Does that make sense?

This God is secure, safe, loving, other-centered, mutual, already within God's self, and then it creates in order to give love, in order to meet needs not to be loved or to have his needs met.

This God is not insecure.

This God creates to give, by the way, one of the other main tenets of our faith.

You are somehow, some way, created in the image of this God, and I think it's partly this that we are also relational beings.

We're meant to give and receive love and join this beautiful great dance of the Trinity.

All right, fair enough.

Now, that being said, paul, about 20 years after Jesus is resurrected, paul writes in Philippians 2, he writes this.

So hang on, hang on tight.

Paul writes this.

He's encouraging the church in Philippi.

And Paul writes this then make my joy complete by being like-minded.

He's telling them how to behave having the same love, being in one spirit and of one mind, having unity amongst yourself as a church.

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, rather in humility.

There's that word again.

He's encouraging to be humble.

Do others above yourselves.

Let's be honest, nobody wants to do that.

Okay, he's telling you, be counter-cultural, not looking to your own interests, but each of you to the interests of the others.

He's crazy.

This is crazy.

Talk, paul, in our relationships with each other.

Here's the beautiful part have the same mindset as Christ Jesus.

Now check this out.

So Jesus comes onto the earth as Jesus of Nazareth around the first century, we think maybe 3 BC or somewhere in there.

But Christ as part of the Trinity has always existed.

So Christ has already been in existence.

He was like sort of the eternal Christ.

So the Son, father, son and Holy Spirit.

And John.

John writes in the beginning was the Word.

He calls him the Word, the Logos of God In the beginning was the Word.

The Word was with God.

The Word was God.

Then John tells us this Word becomes a human in Jesus.

But Jesus as the Word of God, the Logos, the Son of God, the eternal Christ, has always existed.

It wasn't like Jesus just pops up onto the scene as a human he does, but as the Logos of God, he's already been in existence.

So then Paul says hey, I want you guys to have the same mindset as Jesus.

Now here's what that word means.

The word mindset is the word phronesis.

Everyone say phronesis.

Phronesis basically means adopt the pattern of Christ, like whatever the Christ is doing, whatever Jesus does.

Adopt that pattern.

It's what it means to be a Christian.

We're going to follow Jesus, put his life into practice in our own way, time and space, of course, in 2024, and live like him.

We're going to adopt this pattern of living because it's fundamentally how the universe is ordered.

Okay, so here's what that mindset is.

It's who being in the very nature of God.

So Paul is now, listen, this is the first century.

Not many folks sort of had a Trinitarian idea of God, and for Jews they wanted to maintain a monotheistic view of God.

And now the earliest Christians began to worship Jesus as divine.

And Paul, emphatically, is saying this Jesus is actually God.

He says he's the very same nature as God.

The word there is the word morphae.

Everyone say morphae.

Now morphae, the same form as God basically means like that Jesus is the outward expression of some kind of inner essence, and so the unique qualities that make God God are present in the human Jesus.

So Jesus who, being in the very nature of God, he's God did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage.

So Jesus is equal with God, but he doesn't want to maintain that in order to take advantage of people or things.

Instead, go ahead for me, sarah.

Instead he makes himself nothing.

This is what Jesus does.

God in Jesus makes himself nothing by taking on the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness and being found in appearances of man.

There are parts of Jesus or God, whether that he has to leave with the Father and the Spirit in order to become a human.

So one of them is omnipresence.

Jesus is not omnipresent.

He begins to be localized.

Does that make sense?

So God sort of limits.

He empties himself of certain things that prohibit him from being a human in order to become lowly, like one of us.

And then they go to the cross.

He humbles himself by becoming obedient to death.

So Jesus submits himself even to death death on a cross, a scandalous way for a criminal to die.

Therefore, god exalts him.

Here's the idea Jesus, the eternal Son of God, the very substance in the being of God.

He becomes a human, just like you and me, and he doesn't see this equality with God.

He was equal with God.

He doesn't stop being God.

He maintains equality with God.

But he doesn't grab onto that to take advantage or to exploit.

Rather, he gives up a lot of these things his power, his superiority in order to kind of win us over or win us back to go to the cross and to die.

I love it.

Paul's writing this about 20 years after Jesus', resurrection, which means that this idea takes I mean, catches fire almost right away.

Some people think, oh well, it took a long time for this idea of the resurrected Christ, that Jesus was God.

It took a long time to kind of no, it was quick.

Now, in ancient Judaism.

That's really scandalous.

Greeks and Romans sure they can worship humans as God.

I mean, they did it all the time.

The seizures were God's, the rulers were God, but for Jews.

Jews would never worship a human as God.

Something happened that made these early Christians think that man from Nazareth was somehow the very nature of God.

It's radical.

It's why Christianity is like it caught fire so quickly, because it seemed like something really did happen there.

It was amazing, and so they began to worship Jesus as God.

So here's the deal God doesn't stop being God in Jesus.

He becomes a human, so he's fully human, but he's still fully divine.

Jesus never stops being divine.

I think I wrote this in a great quote up on the board here.

Oh, by the way, this is my drawing of Jesus.

Did you notice his sandals?

Oh, go back for me, sarah.

Let's let this wash over us just for a moment or two.

The sandals are my favorite part.

Romans 1, hebrews 1 says that he is the visible expression of the invisible God.

If you want to know what God, go back to it for me, sarah.

Sorry, All right, guys, and I can always quote a Roman使таit.

Back to the Jesus picture.

There we go when you want, if you want to know what God looks like, how he God is like, because how do we know what the Aetherian was like?

Look to Jesus.

Okay, now I'm ready, sarah, thank you.

Jesus never stops being divine.

Rather, this was a movement about what it really means to be divine.

This action of stooping low, becoming humble, taking on humility to the point of submitting himself to death, is what it means to be God.

This is unbelievably radical.

That Jesus does is that God does it.

It's not a decision to stop being divine, it's rather a decision about what it means to be divine.

This, you could say, is who God is.

God is a God who stoopes.

One theologian Says I love this about God.

God doesn't lower to over people.

He stoopes low and becomes humble.

Okay, back to the woman at the well.

Are you ready?

Okay, so I gotta show you a map here of Israel.

So here's a map.

Jesus is walking around and he has to go from the southern part of Israel, judea, up to Galilee, up in the north, and in doing so, the text tells us he has to go through Samaria.

Now, he didn't really have to.

He could have gone around it.

Many Jews did go around it, but Jesus goes through.

It says he has to.

Why, some commentators think?

Well, because the spirit was sort of forcing him, making him go into Samaria.

There was like something for him to do in Samaria.

By the way, in case you're wondering what, where are we in relation to the whole world?

Well, just so you know, go ahead, sarah.

The XL Energy Center is about 6,000 miles that way.

So next Thursday night, if you're gonna be there, they don't serve cake there.

Just so you know.

Oh, come on, that was gonna be dinah.

No one got the dinah joke.

Thank you, oh man.

Congrats to our Elk River Elks, the hockey team, taking on a dinah.

Go, let's go out, let's go.

Yeah, okay, he dinahs going down.

Just something, just saying Okay, back to the sermon.

Go, elks.

Congrats to Bjorn Peterson too.

Took seventh in state in the 500, so way to go, bjorn.

Good job, buddy.

Yeah, good job Jesus.

All right, good job.

Jesus has to go through Samaria Now.

He's tired and here's a picture of Jesus.

That day he was very tired, a lot of walking.

That day he stops at the local caribou on the way up to Samaria and it's very hot.

It's noon, it's about noon that day and he goes to a well, jacob's well.

It's an ancient, historic well.

There's a picture of Jacob's well and Jesus shows up there.

I like this drawing too.

It's pretty good.

Jesus shows up there.

Now it's about noon, which means it was really hot that part of the day, the hottest part of the day, so how you could fry an egg on the road in Samaria.

All right, that's probably my last one bud, and it's odd because most people who gather water from the well would usually go in the morning, and when he's there, a woman shows up to gather water.

A lot of scholars or commentators think that she probably shows up then because she's her life, as you begin to hear it, kind of unfold with Jesus.

It's full of all kinds of ostensibly and sexually scandalous things.

And perhaps a lot of folks think she was so ashamed to go when other women came.

She wanted to go alone, which makes me think.

I mean, have you ever been so ashamed?

You didn't want to gather with other people because your shame is just too great.

Well, she finds Jesus there, which is pretty cool, and Jesus shows up.

Now here's what you have to know about Jews and Samaritans.

Jews and Samaritans did not like each other.

So when Israel as a nation split in half around the time of King Solomon, israel as a nation splits in half and breaks in half and you have two kingdoms the north, which is called Israel and the south, which is called Judah or Judea, judah so we get the word Jew from, by the way.

So they weren't called Jews until this moment.

And when they break in half that northern section of Israel and around 722, they get conquered by the Assyrians and taken into captivity and hauled away.

It's devastating.

And when they do, they never they're taken because of their sin and they never repent of their sin.

The Bible never says they do.

Meanwhile, in the southern kingdom, in Judah, they get conquered in around 586, 587 BC by the Babylonians and they're taken, they're dragged out into exile as well.

They, however, repent of their sin and they get brought back around the time of Ezra and Nehemiah.

So the Jews, because of their repentance, they came back to the land.

They always viewed themselves as the true Jewish people of God.

Meanwhile, the northern kingdoms, they go back, they go to Assyria and they actually intermarry and they have babies with other sort of pagan nations and the Jews considered them to be half-breeds.

They never come back, never repent.

So the Jews always thought that they were the true people of God and there was this incredible tension between these two rival people, jews and Samaritans.

Here's a yeah, there's a picture of some tension.

There you go.

Us, no us.

In fact, during one of the Passover festivals, samaritans brought a bunch of bones and dumped them on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the capital of the southern kingdom, desecrating the festival and prohibiting them from worshiping, because it was ritually unpeer to worship that anymore in that space.

So what the Samaritans did?

They dumped bones all over it.

One great Jewish thinker named Rabbi Eleazar says this in the mission.

He says he that eats the bread of the Samaritans is like the one who eats the flesh of swine.

They did not like each other, these people, jews and Samaritans.

They had rival temples, rival homelands.

They were like rival factions of Judaism.

And Jesus sits down and a Samaritan woman, no less, walks up to the well.

And there they are Jew, samaritan, man, woman.

He's a rabbi.

And what does he do?

He asks her for a glass of water, or a cup of water, not a glass, he asks her for some water.

In doing so, jesus submitting himself to her.

Are you kidding?

If you're a Jew reading this, you're like what are you doing?

That's a woman, it's a Samaritan, she's unclean.

You're a rabbi.

You shouldn't even be talking to her, you shouldn't even be looking at her.

Jesus breaks from all these observant Jewish expectations because he's an unmarried man, she's an enemy of the Jews, she's a woman, she's an unclean Samaritan.

But in this moment Jesus puts on display remember the picture of Jesus.

He puts on a physical way, the character of God.

So watch how he treats her and you watch how God treats her, what God thinks of her, how God would interact with her.

Jesus puts on display God for her and they have this conversation and as it unfolds, her eyes begin to be opened and she begins to see him as Messiah, the one who came to see her or save her.

And she's like, so hyped, she runs and tells the whole village and she gives a sermon.

It's not a great sermon, I mean, it's short, so maybe it is great, it's short, it's great.

But she says, hey, come and meet a man who knows everything about me and is welcome to me anyway.

So she, by the way, this is why we love women preachers amen.

There are women preachers all over the Bible, so we're gonna have them here at Central Tomb.

So she preaches grace and the whole village converts.

They all come and they meet Jesus and they all convert to the faith.

It's crazy and this wonderful.

And they all say, hey, now we know that this guy's the Messiah, who's come to save the whole world.

How do they know that?

Because Jesus puts God on display.

He's the physical embodiment of who God is, and they immediately have clarity about what God is like and what God is doing and what they're being called to do.

I love it.

Mark 10 says this.

Mark says that Jesus writes this hey, world rulers lord it over their subjects.

By the way, not that dissimilar from today.

Okay, a lot of the things in the Bible are very true today.

A lot of the people in our world today are working hard and warring violently to lord it over each other.

That's what a lot of people are doing, and it's madness and it leads to all kinds of chaos and violence and resentment, bitterness and emptiness.

Jesus says instead, though don't let it be like that with you, with you, the ruler, the one in authority, must become a slave, because the son of man he said it himself came to give life, his life, as a ransom.

For many it's like look, I know everybody around you is working hard, and even as you hear this sermon, you're like Ryan, I can't let go of control or my superiority, my might, my power.

I can't do it.

I know, because everything in it is supposed to resist this way of doing it.

It's the low road we don't wanna take it, but Jesus is hinting at what the fundamental ordering of the universe looks like.

This is what it means to be a full human being, to be fully alive.

Otherwise we're stuck back in the garden desiring to have the knowledge of good and evil and warring, and end up in exile every single time.

Henry Nowan writes this.

I love this by Henry Nowan.

He says this hey, who wants to be humble?

Not me.

Who wants to be the last?

Not me.

You put me in a line.

I wanna be in the front of the line.

I wanna be in the loud wait forever.

Who wants to be like a little powerless, little child?

Not me.

I wanna be weak.

Who desires to lose his or her life, to be poor and mourning or hungry?

Yeah, not me.

Again, I don't do that.

Why would I wanna do that?

All this appears to be against our natural inclinations, he writes.

But once we see that Jesus reveals to us, in his radically downward pull, the compassionate nature of God, we begin to understand that to follow him I love.

This part is to participate in the ongoing self-revelation of God.

When you and I hang out with the poor, when we allow children in our space, when we visit the prisoners, when we befriend the elder single woman or whoever it is that's on the fringes of our society, the helpless, the outcast, the unlovable, whoever they are and you probably even have an idea in your mind of one person.

I go that, yeah, whenever we welcome them and visit with them, sit with them, are present with them, we are participating in the ongoing self-revelation of God.

Then now one writes this.

Next he says this the great mystery of God's compassion is that in his compassion and his entering with us in this condition of a slave, he reveals himself to us as God.

Friends, if you want to find God, look to the poor, look to the widows, the orphans, the refugees.

These people who are broken have nothing.

They're unlovable children, even little children.

You might just find God there.

His becoming a servant is not an exception to being God.

His self-emptying and humiliation are not a step away from his true nature.

His becoming as we are by dying on a cross is not a temporary interruption of his own divine existence.

Rather, in the emptied and humbled Christ, we encounter God.

This is who God really is.

So why?

I think you should be humble.

Seek the pathway of humility, give up your superiority One I just got Jesus tells us to.

So we want to follow Jesus.

Our mission here at Central is to follow Jesus together and we want to take on the mind of Christ that Paul writes about, adopt the Christ pattern.

All right, we want to follow whatever he did.

We want to try to be like that.

That's great.

Do that and try hard to do that.

Because when I emulate him and our mission is to follow Jesus together, create a place where people can belong and they want to serve our neighbors across the street and around the world.

So, yeah, that's why.

But also, we want to do this because God did it and it's revealing in the deepest way the logic of the universe that this is what it means to be fully alive.

If you want depth and profundity and meaning in your life, go and visit somebody in prison.

If you want to understand your place in the universe, go and read to kindergartners.

Go and volunteer to food shelf.

Go and give your life away, because in doing so you're tapping into the way that the universe is ordered.

St Teresa of Avila says this and I'll end with a story it says when one reaches the highest degree of human maturity, one has only one question left to ask how can I be helpful?

I'll say it again when one reaches, rather, the highest degree of human maturity, one has only one question left to ask how can I be helpful?

I've told this story before, but I love it, I'm gonna tell it again.

Back in the late 90s there was a debate about who should be the highest or the highest-picked quarterback in the NFL Draft.

It was like 98 and 99.

It was a debate between Ryan Leith, who was from Washington State, and Peyton Manning from Tennessee and the Colts of the first pick.

Peyton Manning, of course, would go on to play for the Broncos and win a Super Bowl for the Broncos, but back then they didn't know who to pick and it was like a debate.

Finally the Colts took Peyton Manning.

Ryan Leith went second to the San Diego Chargers and almost from the jump, ryan Leith's career just went on a downward spiral.

He just flamed out.

He had a lack of character and integrity, was a self-absorbed, self-centered egomaniac and blew it all really and flamed out in a couple years.

Then he got an injury after bouncing around and I think was prescribed opioids and got hooked on him because it numbed the pain a little bit.

Right we talked about this a couple of weeks ago and things went out of control.

He began to steal from his friends and loved ones and he began to steal from them and he gets caught and he goes to jail and in jail for an entire year he sits in his cell just self-absorbable, self-pity, self-loathing and self-hatred, and just pouted for a whole year, he says.

Then after a year, a guy comes a former, another fellow inmate and says hey, you're gonna come with me and we're gonna go to the library every day and teach these other grown men how to read.

And Ryan looks like do grown men know how to read?

I'm not doing that, no, no, these men, they don't know how to read and you're gonna help me teach them or else they're fine.

So they go every day.

And spending time with these men and submitting himself to these men and helping these grown men learn how to read sets Ryan free.

Now I don't know if he's a Christian or not.

I don't know Ryan and I've heard him talk.

I think he's wonderfully profound and wise, but I don't know what his faith is like.

But when he gets out of jail he opens up this program, this rehab program to help addicts and alcoholics.

He's like, hey, one of the key features of this program is gonna be and it's not up for discussion.

He's like, if you wanna be a part of this program, you have to go and serve other people, Because in serving other people that's how we find our own sobriety and freedom.

I'm like, ooh, that'll preach, because even Ryan is under.

He's tapping into the fundamental way the universe is ordered.

Central Lutheran church.

May you know that this beautiful relational God, the Father, son and Spirit, has emptied himself, become just like one of us and submitted himself even to a Samaritan woman in order to win people back to himself.

And if you wanna find God, go and serve others.

Amen.