The First Sermon I Ever Preached

February 11, 2014

Dear St. Paul’s Family,

“Love  is a word that is easy to use but difficult to master.  The word  love  is tossed around frequently in everyday conversation.  ‘I love my dog.’ ‘I love Florida.’ ‘I love New York.’  Even ‘I love you’ many times loses its sincerity, and is said as often as ‘How’s the weather’ is asked.  But the Bible has its own definition of what exactly Love Is.”

During my recent visit with my parents in St. Petersburg over Christmas break, my dad asked me to sort through a box of items full of keepsakes from my youth that they had been keeping in a closet for twenty-five years.  It was a veritable treasure trove of memories stretching throughout my teenage years, including photographs, old classroom notebooks, awards, and mementos.

The one piece that immediately caught my eye was a document - a stack of hand-written notebook pages - yellowed over time but still as clear as they day I wrote it. I recognized it instantly, astonished at how I’d forgotten that I’d even kept it over the years.  The first line leaped out at me:   

“Good morning.  My name is Magrey deVega.”

It was the first sermon I ever preached, delivered in 1989 when I was a high school senior as part of Youth Sunday at Pasadena Community Church in St. Petersburg, my home congregation.  The youth took over the whole service that day, but the youth director, Nancy Gilson, gave me the illustrious task of delivering the entire morning sermon to the congregation.  Little would this eventual pre-med major have known that it would be the first of hundreds of sermons I would preach in the twenty-five years to follow. 

There is something to be said about seeing this first sermon, written with my own hand, since I had not yet owned a computer.  To my recollection, it is still the only time I’ve ever preached with a handwritten manuscript.  Finding it at my parents’ house after all these years was like probing into the innermost growth ring of my call to ministry, or discovering a baseline strata upon which layers of ministry would eventually be built.  

“Now without stepping out of my parameters of being a normal high school teenager and certainly not a renown theologian, I offer to you four “Love is” statements that you won’t find in 1 Corinthians 13.”

It was a sermon titled "Love Is," based on 1 Corinthians 13, a text that I would eventually preach in dozens of weddings and worship services.  It would be seven years before I would crack open a seminary textbook, listen to a New Testament lecture, or attend a preaching class.  I look at this first sermon now and think my flow was a bit uneven, my syntax a little choppy, and my exegesis on the text really quite sub-par.  But seeing those four points again brought me back to an earlier version of myself, reminding me of how God was preveniently teaching me love’s truest and deepest meaning, so that I could eventually share it with others:

Love is … Your Parents:   “You as parents have the potential to transform your child’s life and teach them more than they will ever learn in any textbook or homework assignment.  I encourage you to teach your children – more by example than by words – what it means to love.”

Love is … Yourself:   “When you’re a Christian, success is not measure by your honors, your clubs, your GPA, or your sports.  It is not measured by cars in your garage, the clothes that you wear, or the money in your pocket.  Success is measured by the giving of yourself to God so that He can use the abilities He has given you to touch the lives of those around you.”

Love is … a Gift:   “Take a look at our world.  There is a world outside the walls of our sanctuary that needs our love.  Our church youth group has been active in reaching the world.  I say that not to toot our own horn, but merely to show that this world of ours can be reached.  We’ve collected cans of food for the needy.  We’ve done a work project at an elderly person’s house.  We’ve had letter exchanges with teens in South Africa suffering under apartheid.  We are sending a youth mission team to Tennessee to work with needy children.  World outreach is a major way we can demonstrate the love taught in the Bible, the love we learn from our parents, and to demonstrate a love that is both self-sacrificial and world-beneficial.  Love is a gift.”

Love is … the Cross:   “Make no mistake.  It was not three nails that held Jesus to that cross.  It was love.  And in a world full of such torment, anguish, and fear, God gave the greatest demonstration of self-sacrificial and world-beneficial love:  the cross.  Not a cross of death, or shame, or anguish … but connect the points, and you get a heart:  It is a cross of love.”

I can’t tell you how timely it was for me to see these words again, as the flood of memories washed over me as if to remind me of my baptism.  And the question I posed in my very first sermon twenty-five years ago is still one worth asking, especially during this Valentine’s Day week: 

How do you need to experience and express what love is today? 

Maybe this Valentine’s Day, you can focus on embodying a kind of love for someone else that is more meaningful than candy hearts and cream-filled chocolates.  Maybe the love that you need to give is both “self-sacrificial and world-beneficial.”  And maybe it begins with your experiencing that very same love from God, revealed to us in Christ, that has been at work in you all your life, even since the days of your youth.   

Love, indeed,

Magrey  

The Rev. Magrey R. deVega

St. Paul's United Methodist Church

531 W. Main St.

Cherokee, IA  51012

Ph:  712-225-3955

Email:  mdevega@sp-umc.org