Sep 13th: Let Me Be A Light: A Practice for this New Season , with Rev. Dr. Steven Koski.

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Let Me Be A Light: A Practice for this New Season , with Rev. Dr. Steven Koski. Series: Celebrating Goodness. A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: Romans 12:21.
Feeling the rush of fall and the weight of a busy world? This week we explore how ordinary acts of goodness can quiet the noise and bring real hope. Pastor Steven Koski shares stories of Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry and Gloria Steinem to show how simple, daily choices, like offering a kind word or a helping hand, can change lives. Join us Sunday, in person or online, to discover a practice that lets you be a light in the everyday.
Transcript:
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Imagine spending 80 years on this planet, writing more than 3000 songs, winning 11 Grammy Awards, 10 Country Music Association awards, countless nominations, 55, top 10 hits, and at the end of your life, no one talks about any of that. Instead, they talk about the kind of person you were, how you loved people, how you loved people, well, how you stayed true to yourself, how you were generous and championed others and inspired them to do the same. How you didn’t judge people, but welcomed them, accepted them as they were. How you preach the gospel with your life and used words only if necessary, if that’s not what it means to live a good and Christ centered life. I don’t know what is. Friends, this is the weekend. Our calendars shift gears from the slower rhythms of summer to the busier cadence of fall. You know, we begin this fall the way we, we seem to begin every fall. not quite ready to trade. Sandals for schedules. A little unsure what the year ahead holds, you know, and frankly, hungry, hungry for something to, to ground us before the busyness takes over. So I, I wanna give us a compass, not a five point plan, uh, just a single word and a single practice to carry us through this next season.
Speaker 0 00:01:45 Goodness. The apostle Paul writes it really plainly in Romans 12. Do not be overcome. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with goodness. Not by matching outrage with outrage or cruelty with more cruelty or, or noise with louder noise or stress. With even more stress. Overcome evil with goodness. That has always been the whole strategy, and it is without question, the harder path. You know, Dolly Parton put it in her own plain spoken way. She said, we can’t just hope for a brighter day. We have to work for a brighter day. Love too often gets buried in a world of hurt and fear.
Speaker 0 00:02:47 So hope, hope alone isn’t the assignment. The assignment is work the daily unglamorous work of, of keeping hope alive, of digging love out from under the hurt and the fear that keep trying to bury it, because here’s what nobody tells you about. Goodness, goodness. You know, it isn’t soft. It’s, it’s not naive or, or the same as looking away real goodness, the kind, the kind of goodness that Jesus lived and, and died. Practicing that kind of goodness takes courage. It really takes courage to stay, to stay tender in a world handing you reason after reason after reason, to harden, to keep believing. Strangers deserve welcome.
Speaker 0 00:03:51 You know, anybody beca anybody can be cruel. Cruelty is cheap. It’s goodness, the courage of goodness that costs something. You know, this has really been on my, on my mind because it’s been an unusual season for losing good people, people who lived that kind of costly goodness. In two weeks, in just two weeks, we’ve said goodbye to Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry, glorious Steinem, three, three very different lives who shared the same through line. None. None of the three built their legacy on judgment. All three chose again and again and again to use their own unique gifts to overcome evil with goodness.
Speaker 0 00:04:54 I mean, you know, Dolly’s story, or, or think you do, but ask people what they actually loved about Dolly Parton. And almost nobody starts with the music. They start with the Imagination Library, a program she began as a tribute to her father, who never learned to read, so that no other child would grow up without a book they could call their own. By the time Dolly died. That idea, that simple idea, had grown into more than 332 million free books mailed to children across five countries. One book a month from birth until kindergarten. 332 million times a child opened a mailbox and found out someone thought that they mattered enough to send them a story, to send them an invitation to dream. You know, they mentioned how when a pandemic sent people scrambling for someone to blame, and Dolly Parton saved lives by quietly funding early vaccine research at Vanderbilt University. She invested over a million dollars in science because she knew it would help, not because it was popular or political, or they mentioned that when wildfires burned her neighbor’s house, Dolly paid their rent until they could get back on their feet.
Speaker 0 00:06:46 And they mentioned that she never used her faith and her faith was deep. She had a strong faith, but she never used her faith to draw lines around who belonged and who didn’t belong. You know, she once told the graduates at the University of Tennessee that if you truly care about people, you’ll stop judging them and start seeing something, something worth appreciating in every soul you meet. Now, that’s not a throwaway line. That’s a whole theology to guide your life. Wendell Berry Window Berry lived that same conviction from a farm in Kentucky instead of a stage in Nashville. For 60 years, Wendleberry wrote about slowing down enough to notice the sacred ground beneath you, and how the love of place and the love of people are the same discipline. He once prayed in a poem that he wrote, I know that I have life only insofar as I have love.
Speaker 0 00:08:06 I have no love, except it come from the help me please to carry this candle against the wind. You know, window berry never needed a microphone. The si the size of Dolly’s, he just kept noticing and tending the sacred that was in front of him for six decades without needing anyone to notice. and glorious Steinem, Gloria Steinem spent that same span of years demanding that half the human race be seen, heard, validated, taken seriously, not through hatred of anyone, but through the harder work of building rooms where more people had a seat at the table. You know, long before it was fashionable, Gloria saw the same goodness in Dolly, she named Dolly Parton, one of Ms. Magazine’s, women of the Year in 1987, Steinem Road. If feminism means each of us finding our unique power and helping other women to do the same, Dolly Parton certainly has done both friends who knew Steinem well say that her, her greatest gift was, was her listening in a movement that could have curdled into bitterness. For good reason, she kept choosing to widen the circle instead of narrowing it. A songwriter, a farmer, poet, an activist, they wouldn’t have agreed on everything, but all three understood what Jesus keeps teaching us. Goodness is not the absence of strength.
Speaker 0 00:10:14 Goodness is strength aimed at healing instead of harming, which is why I wanted to talk about this on, on this particular weekend, right about now, kids all over our community are heading back to school. New backpacks, stiff shoes, the mix of excitement and dread on that first day walk to the bus stop. Every backpack represents somebody’s decision to invest again, to believe again in a child’s growth. A teacher caring for 30 kids in a small classroom who aren’t his or her own, a parent sacrificing for their child’s future. I mean, that’s exactly what Dolly understood when she started mailing books to children 30 years ago. Every child, every child deserves someone in their corner believing that they are worth investing. In this fall, our own churches making that same decision as our classrooms fill back up and our teachers and volunteers show up to sit on the floor with our kids as we recommit Sunday after Sunday, to their formation, to their wellbeing.
Speaker 0 00:11:40 When we do that, we practice exactly the goodness Paul was talking about. You don’t overcome evil with goodness by by winning an argument. You do it by handing a child a book, a Bible story, a safe place to ask questions. A safe place where they can be uniquely themselves and the steady message, the consistent message that they matter. And it doesn’t stop with our children. This is the invitation for all of us this fall to care more deeply for one another, to really pay attention and, and to notice who’s struggling to let this community be a living example of the goodness we’re asking the world to choose.
Speaker 0 00:12:44 So here’s the practice, the practice I wanna offer us for this, this new church here for this fall season, not from a theologian, but from Dolly Parton herself. She said, each morning, every single morning, I always ask God to work through me and to let me be a light of some kind and help in this world. That’s the whole spiritual discipline, not a five-year plan, a daily surrender. God, work through me today. Let, let me my unique self, let me be some kind of light. Let me help somebody try it out this fall. You know, try it out before the stress and the outrage of the day get their hooks in you.
Speaker 0 00:13:46 The call of Romans 12 is not to stop caring, it’s, it’s to care more deeply and to refuse to let our caring turn into cruelty. You don’t need 11 Grammys to do this. You need what Dolly had. What? What Wendell Barry had. What? Gloria Steinem had a willingness to choose tenderness on ordinary Tuesdays to judge less welcome more. And to believe that generosity matters, even if nobody writes it down. Find the good in everybody. Make room at the table, especially for those excluded. Notice the sacred right in front of you. Leave things a little better than you found them, and each morning, ask God to work through you and let you be some kind of light
Speaker 1 00:14:51 And some kind of help in this world. That’s the invitation waiting for us this year. Friends, we cannot do all the good the world needs, but the world desperately needs the good each one of us can do in our own unique way. May it be so.