Jim Somerville, Pastor of Richmond’s First Baptist Church and Co-Founder of A Sermon for Every Sunday, talks about the importance of having a worldview, a “framework of understanding.” When he was a boy he used to play with Tinkertoys, those brightly colored sticks and spools you could put together in a thousand different ways. He compares his own framework of understanding to a Tinkertoy construction, and notices how agitated he gets when someone tries to change it. “Don’t mess with my Tinkertoys!” he says, meaning, “Don’t try to change my worldview!” But in Mark 10:35-45 Jesus asks us to “tear down our old frameworks of understanding…and put up new ones in their place.”
And we hate that.
Manuscript available: click HERE
Note: this sermon was originally released as B47: The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost, Year B (2021)