Cascade Church Portland

Easter Sunday:: The Tomb Is Empty

Life can be a blur of commitments and obligations. 

We move from one day to the next with a humming buzz of routine.

Every once an a while something breaks the certainty of this week looking like last week and we are invited to ask some bigger questions about life. This is Easter.

What is the nature of death, loss and grief? Does God helps us avoid pain or is God giving us a path through it? How do we respond when all hope is lost? How are our expectations for God blocking our ability to experience God? 

And on the other hand, what do we do with unexpected hope, joy and grace? What does resurrection look like in our lives? What does Christ overcoming death mean for us?

Come and see the tomb is empty and that changes everything. 

Good Friday:: Stages of Grief

The Christian story walks directly through pain, suffering and loss. Good Friday is an opportunity to not walk around the difficulty of pain, but to sit in it and find that God is there with us. 

Death's Door:: Good Day to Die

Would you believe you were lovable if you didn't have people who loved you? 

Would you believe your life had value if you didn't have any accomplishments? 

Would you believe in yourself if nobody had ever believed in you? 

We usually can't separate who we are from what we've done or what we've received from others. We may know that we are more that who loves us, what we've done or what people say about us, but that's the constant feedback loop we're all stuck in. 

When things change in our lives we almost always need to recalibrate our identity. It's constantly getting informed by relationships, work, or the opinions of others. When any of those things change we are forced to go back to the place of discovering who we are. 

Jesus pushed into these kinds of places. Who are the disciples when they leave what they've know to follow him? Who are the Pharisees and Sadducees if they don't have all the answers? Who are the blind, lame or leprous once they are healed? Who is the rich, young ruler if he gives away his riches? Who are the disciples as servants instead of heroes? 

Death's Door:: Seeing Past the Shame

We do funny things when we allow our shame to overwhelm us. 

We cease being able to see other people, we cease to be able to interpret reality. 

You've had conversations with people deep inside of a shame cycle and their desctiption of reality is completely skewed. It distorts everything and can leave us feeling incredible defeated and attacked on all sides. 

A lot of our own shame centers around the lack of grace we extend ourselves. We expect to get people and situations right the first time and when we fail we beat ourselves us or place all the blame on others. Our expectations aren't met and that disappointment finds at home at our own doorstep or the doorstep of others. 

What if we grieved perfection? What if we grieved the lie that we have it all together? What if we met our own failings with the grace that Christ brings us instead of the scorn we often extend ourselves? 

Take a listen and wrestle with grace, grief and everything in between. 

Death's Door:: Get Behind Me

If you've ever been in a situation where you know that someone close to you is going to die, it can be an incredibly difficult and painful experience. Most of us have haven't done this a lot and we're not all together sure how we should engage with the process. 

If it isn't a quick experience you can feel yourself torn between praying and wishing for a faster and less painful passing and then guilt for wishing death upon someone. It's torture to feel that however you are responding in your grief is the wrong way. 

There's a swirl of emotions and most of us have to resist the temptation to not check out physically, mentally and spiritually. 

As a church we are getting closer and closer to Easter, which is a celebration of the shocking, unexpected resurrection of Jesus Christ. But before Jesus can rise, he must go into the grave. 

In the book of Mark Jesus warns his followers 3 times that he is going to die. We're going to look at these stories to see how Jesus is preparing his followers for a process of grief. It won't be easy and the acknowledgement that death and loss is coming is the first step in being able to properly grieve. 

Daniel:: Lion's Den

Are you ready for the mane event? 
The wait for lion's den story in Daniel has been quite the dramatic paws. 
It's worth the wait, and will leave you begging for roar. 
Sorry, but I do take pride in my lion puns. 

Let's be honest for a second. When you heard about a message series on Daniel at least some of you were thinking every Sunday, when are we getting to the lion part? A message series on Daniel without talking about the lion's den would be like going to a Journey concert and not hearing "Don't Stop Believing". 

Welp, this is the Sunday and it's going to be fun! The lion's den story is one of the more well known stories in the Bible and we want to view it in context with everything else that has happened in Daniel's life. It's a culminating event in his story and knowing where he has been informs a lot of how he got to the bottom of cave with a bunch of hungry lions. 

Whatever thoughts or ideas you've had about the story, I invite you to bring them to this message. We want to affirm, challenge and evaluate our assumptions surrounding how God works in difficult situations. 

Daniel:: But Even if He Doesn't

I grew up in a world where people had two different words for almonds. 

Almonds and Amonds.

It's a subtle difference and the joke was that they were almonds in the tree until they fell down and it knocked the "L" out of them. Now, it was so common where I grew up to hear these two terms interchangeably that I had no idea which term was the "normal" one. Before I left for college as a 19 year old I had to ask my Mom which was the correct one so I didn't make a fool of myself asking for someone to pass the "amonds".

Things that are very odd can become normal if everyone agrees to call it normal. This is why outsiders have such incredible value to any system. They are able to see the weird things you do that everyone has called normal for so long. 

This week we have Scott Erickson sharing with us from the 3rd chapter of the book of Daniel. It's a great look at an insane system called normal and three outsiders bringing the helpful questions to the community. They ultimately do an equally insane thing when they offer up their lives and safety for the sake of their convictions about who God is.  

Daniel:: Who's Informing Your Story?

Dreams are a lot like clouds. 

People see what they want to see when they look up into the sky and when they look into the dreams of the people around them. One of the things that is scariest is to share a dream you had with someone who has strong thoughts and opinions about what dreams mean. 

So I dreamt I was flying.                                            You probably need to quit your job. 

So I had a dream that I was drowning.                      Cut up all your credit cards. 

I woke up from this dream about a dragon.               Call your mother.

 While the certainty that some feel about interpreting dreams is a warning sign to me, I think it is safe to say that dreams are a sign that something is going on. In the book of Ecclesiastes it says;

A dream comes when there are many cares

Whether dreams are our subconscious working out our biggest problems, or our brain running threat simulations, it usually is a reflection of increased activity in life or exhaustion. 

This Sunday as we continue our Daniel series we're going to look at chapter 2 where Daniel is interpreting the dreams of the king. What kinds of universal truths can we pull from a story about a leader's dream from 1,800 years ago? (Ha! That's a fun sentence!)

More than you might think and I hope you'll join us as we explore the power of the stories that we tell ourselves while we are awake or asleep. 

Daniel:: Character in Chaos

In high school I needed to take 2 years of a foreign language to graduate. 80% of the school took Spanish. We were in California so it made the most sense to learn a language that you would be far more likely to use. So obviously I took 2 years of French.

My primary interest in taking French was satisfied on the first day when I learned to say the one phrase I took the class to learn.

Je suis un opérateur lisse.
I am a smooth operator.

I was positive that this was my ticket to endless dating possibilities.

You will surely be shocked to learn that I did not have a single girlfriend in high school. Please pick your jaw up from the floor.

My experience in French class was brutal. I had no real interest in learning the language and my education consisted of being given a packet at the beginning of the week, doing it in class all week and taking a quiz on Friday. My teacher quickly became a foe to be vanquished. If I could have led a coup d'état in class, I would have.

When my grade would reflect my level of investment in the class I would place all the blame at my teacher's feet.

She wasn't interested in actually teaching us the language.
She stifles my creative spirit.
She gives us unfair quizzes on subjects we haven't adequately covered.
She hasn't taught me the French art of mime even once.

What I experienced in that class is something that I've felt the temptation to do many times since then. Is something going poorly? Blame the person in charge. Anything that goes wrong couldn't possibly be a reflection of me, but a reflection of someone further up the chain of command.

This Sunday we are starting a brand new message series on the book of Daniel. My hope is that this series will help shine a light on the power that we have in life. I have found that the most terrible tyrant blocking God's best exists within me. Daniel shows a path for God's people that doesn't allow the circumstances or interferences from people with more power derail what God is building in our midst.

Safe To Be, Safe to Grow:: Advocacy

When my boys were very young we would sometimes go to play areas at the mall. 

It's a terrifying experience. The cutest toddlers and children were transformed before my eyes. They all became monsters bent on harming my boys. 

This isn't a matter of these other children being bad kids, they're just on a graham cracker and juice-fueled energy spree. As they would run free with sticky-fingers and dirty socks towards my soft-craniumed pride and joy I would become super protective. Shouldn't you be knocking over the sales racks at Macys or licking the glass at Cinnabon instead? The play area is for equally unstable little people crawling and softly bumping into one another, not 9 year old harbingers of doom made entirely of sharp elbows and knees. 

It's one of the little encounters that we have with justice every day. Someone cuts you off in traffic or says a nasty thing to you or someone you love on social media. This is not the way the world should operate. The mistreated and ignored people in our society should be valued and have their humanity honored. Decency and fairness should triumph over manipulation and deceit.

This Sunday we'll be looking at our fifth and final core value of Advocacy. At Cascade we define this value as; We fight injustices with those who have been treated insignificantly by individuals, systems or indifference. 

How does God call us to see and engage situations that are dangerous for people around us and care when we have every excuse not to care.