Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons

Part III — We Know What We’re About · Calling as Public Witness

Date: August 16, 2026.   Text: Ephesians 4:11–1, Isaiah 6:5–8

Yongchi Rhie

 

Let me begin with a confession from someone I knew, and I suspect it's one that some of you share.

“For most of my life, I was a pew warmer. You know the type; maybe you are the type. I had my seat. Not just any seat; my seat, and heaven help the visitor who took it. I knew when to stand and when to sit. I could sing the first and last verse of any hymn and mumble convincingly through the middle. I knew exactly how long a sermon should go, and I would let the preacher know, with my eyebrows, when he had gone over. I gave the building the warmth of my body for one hour a week, and I called that church. I thought my job was to show up, to be moved when the sermon was good, to put something in the plate, and to go home. I thought the church was something that happened to me. Something performed for me. A service I attended, the way you attend a concert.”

And Paul writes to the Ephesians to tell us what the church actually is. Listen: “And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.” Did you catch what that does to the pew-warmer’s dream? It calls it what it is: a beautiful, comfortable, church-shaped lie.

Now listen closely, because there is a famous comma hiding in this passage, and that comma has done more damage to the church than almost any heresy I know. If you grew up on the King James Bible, you heard it read like this: Christ "gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ." Do you hear those commas? Three tidy tasks, all handed to the professionals. The clergy perfect the saints, and the clergy do the work of the ministry, and the clergy build up the body — and you, the saint, you sit in your pew and receive it.

But that comma is not in the Greek. Hear the difference. The King James, with its commas, gives the clergy three jobs: they perfect the saints, and they do the ministry, and they build up the body — three tasks, all landing on the professionals, while you sit and receive. But in the Greek there are no three jobs. There is one sentence that moves, and it moves in a single direction, and it turns on two little words. The first is pros — it means toward. Christ gave the apostles and prophets and evangelists and pastors and teachers toward one thing, and one thing only: the equipping of the saints. That is the whole job of the leaders. To equip. And then the sentence hands off to a second word, eis — it means for the purpose of. Equipped for the purpose of the work of ministry. Do you feel the current change? In the King James, the ministry stops at the clergy. In the Greek, the clergy are just the on-ramp — and the ministry flows on, past them, to you. The gifted leaders are not the ministers. They are the equippers. You are the ministers. The staff is not the church. You are. The building on this corner is not the church. You — the living, breathing, gifted, called people of God — you are the church. One little comma turned the whole church into an audience. And Paul, in the Greek, quietly takes it out.

And so this morning I have come to preach against a heresy. Not the heresy you're bracing for. Not a heresy about the Trinity: we'll defend the Trinity another day. Not the prosperity gospel, though God knows it deserves a sermon. Not complementarianism, not any of the usual suspects we love to argue about online. No. The most persistent heresy in the American church is quieter and far more comfortable than any of those. It is the heresy of passivity. The heresy of the spectator. The quiet, respectable belief that faith is something you consume rather than something you carry.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a name for it. He called it cheap grace. "Cheap grace," he wrote, "is the grace we bestow on ourselves … grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ." It is grace as a service you attend, grace with no summons attached, grace you can sit inside of and never be changed by. Against that heresy, against that comfortable, safe, spectator faith, the whole witness of Scripture rises up and says: no.

Look at the word Paul uses for you. "The saints." Hoi hagioi — the holy ones. And here is the good news buried in that word: you are not holy because of the work you do. You will never do enough work to become holy. You are holy because you have been made holy — set apart, washed, claimed — in the redemption of Christ’s cross. Your holiness is not your achievement; it is Christ's gift. Peter says it plainly: you are "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people." A priesthood — all of you. Not because you earned the collar, but because Christ tore the curtain. So when I call you a saint this morning, I am not flattering you and I am not burdening you. I am telling you your name. The one God already gave you.

 

Now hear me, because this can start to sound like a guilt trip and it is not. I am not asking you to become something you are not. I am asking you to own what you already are, and to let it be redefined. And I know that word can sting. So many of you have been “redefined” by a system that never asked — restructured, downsized, quietly shown the door. And when that happens, you feel it: lost, cast aside, no longer valuable, waiting for some new role, a new job, a new title to tell you who you are again. I am not going to stand up here and pretend that struggle isn’t real; it is real, and for some of you it is raw right now. But hear me: God’s redefining runs deeper than any of that. It does not wait on a title the world hands out. It names something about you that has already been claimed and honored by God — that you are a minister, that you are a saint, that your one ordinary life is already woven into the holy work of God. That is the kind of redefining that heals. And it invites you to stop living beneath your own name.

Because all of this equipping, Paul says, is "for building up the body of Christ." The body of Christ. Stop there with me. Now, I know exactly where your mind just went. The moment a preacher says "the body of Christ," every good churchgoer's brain jumps to the same passage — Paul's other letter, the one about the one body with many parts. You know the scene. Christ is the head, and the rest of us are the assorted body parts, and everyone's having a little argument.

The hand turns to the mouth and sniffs, "I don't need you." The foot is sulking in the corner, jealous of the eyes — because eyes sit up there in a place of honor and the foot spends its whole life down in the dirt, in the sock, in the shoe nobody wants to smell. The nose is having an existential crisis about whether it even counts because it's not an eye. It's a wonderful passage, and it's a little bit of a family squabble, and every one of us has been every one of those body parts. Some of us are the eyes on our good days and the foot on our worst. But hold that picture loosely for a second, because I don't want us to stop at the anatomy lesson.

What kind of body do you picture when you hear "the body of Christ"? It is not the glorious, weightless body of some ancestral heavenly being, floating serene above our troubles. And it is not merely our own ordinary body, fragile and failing and afraid. When I hear "the body of Christ," I think of the resurrected body. The body that went down into the cruelest, deadliest battle in human history, and came back. The body that conquered death itself.

And here is the thing I cannot get past: that resurrected body still carried its wounds. Christ rose, and he rose scarred. He kept the holes in his hands, the wound in his side. But listen, after the resurrection those scars mean something entirely new. They are no longer the receipt of an unjust system that tortured him. They are now the proof that the body survived; and Jesus holds them out to Thomas, the doubter, and says, "Put your finger here. Reach out your hand. Do not doubt, but believe." That is the body we are being built into. A body that carries its wounds without shame, and offers them to the doubting world as the very evidence that love outlasts death.

Which brings me to Isaiah, and to the most important thing I will say all morning about how any of us ends up doing the work of God. Isaiah is in the temple, and the whole place shakes with glory, and his first honest response is not "send me." It is despair. "Woe is me! I am lost. For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips." He knows he is not qualified. He knows the people around him are not qualified. And notice what God does not do. God does not say, "You're right, clean yourself up and come back when you're ready." No. One of the seraphs takes a live coal from the altar and touches it to Isaiah's mouth and says, "Your guilt has departed; your sin is blotted out." And only then, only after the cleansing, only after the grace, only after he is justified by a fire he did not light, then comes the question: "Whom shall I send?" And now Isaiah can answer: "Here am I. Send me."

Do you see the order? The commissioning did not come before the cleansing. Grace came first. You are not sent because you are qualified. You are sent because you have been called. And that means ministry is not a plan to you have to figure out; Ministry is presence. It is a cleansed and willing person saying, "Here I am." That's all. Here I am.

So let me talk about our body. About Foundry. We began this whole sermon series by saying: we know who we are. And to know who we are, we have to tell the truth about our whole body — the parts that make us proud and the parts we are still learning to confess. This is a body with a painful history of segregation. A body that shut down the ministers because of their skin color, a body that showed contempt when others demanded a seat on our table. And it is also a body embracing radical hospitality; it’s also a people who have planted gardens whose harvest they would never live to see, who practiced a sacred resistance rooted not in rage but in grace and in hope. Some of our story makes us proud. Some of our story we are still trying to admit out loud, still seeking reconciliation for.

There is the courage of public witness in this body, and there is the fatigue of fighting battles that never seem to end. And here is the gospel: all of it — the pride and the shame, the courage and the exhaustion, the scars and the survival — all of it is the body of Foundry. A scarred body. A resurrected body. Being built, Paul says, "until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ."

Now indulge me one moment, because my name has something to say here. In Chinese character, Yong means to melt and Chi means wisdom. So my name, "Yongchi" carries the sense of melting everything down and turning it into wisdom. And I stand in a church called Foundry. A foundry, you know, is the place where metal is thrown into the fire, melted past all its old shapes, and poured into a mold to be made into something useful. Friends, I don't think that's an accident. This is what God is doing to us. We are melted down by the fire of the Holy Spirit. We are cleansed by the same burning coal that touched Isaiah's lips. And then we are molded — poured, shaped, set — and equipped. Equipped to be the ministers for the holy work of the kindom of God. That is what a foundry is for. Not to admire the fire, but to throw ourselves into the fire, and to be made into something that gets used.

And what does the maker say when the tool is finally ready? He says: go. The last word of Jesus was not "stay," or “remember me”.  It was "go into all the world." But hear me: I am not sending you off to some far mission field across an ocean. You are not being voluntold to fill a gap because the pastors are simply too busy. No. Go where you are supposed to go. Go to your home. Go to your family, Go to your friends. Go to your workplace on Monday morning. Go to your support group, because they need to see you and you need to see them — both of you still refusing to give up. Go but with your role redefined by the mission of God. Go and preach — with your words, with your life. Go visit someone who is frightened and alone. Go to your city – and serve not the anxious little kingdoms of status and fear — but serve your Lord. The One who first cleansed your unclean lips, and anointed them, and then turned to you and asked, "Whom shall I send?"

So here is my invitation and what I am asking. Not a volunteer slip. Not a program. Not a signature. Something braver: I am going to ask you to name, out loud or with your body, where God has sent you. However you can — stand up if you’re able, or raise your hand, or simply call it out from where you sit. Just a word. Just the name of the place your feet already carry the gospel.

But before I give it, I need to say two things gently, because I know both are in this room. The first is for anyone who is visiting today, or still just getting to know Foundry. You may not have a ministry to name yet — you haven’t plugged in anywhere, and that is completely fine. You do not have to stand, you do not have to prove you’re ready, and no one is counting. Just be encouraged: God already calls you part of the body of Christ, exactly as you are this morning, before you’ve signed up for a single thing.

And the second is for anyone for whom this next moment may feel like an altar call — because for some of you, an altar call is not a warm memory. Maybe you were called forward once by a church that used the moment to shame you, to pressure you, to tell you that you were not enough or did not belong. Maybe the church is the very place you were wounded. If that is you, I will not pretend the wound isn’t real. But remember the body we are being built into — the resurrected Christ, who did not hide his scars but held them out: “put your finger here.” We are a body that carries its wounds without shame. Your wound from the church is not a disqualification; in the risen body it can become the very proof that you survived and still came back to God. You do not have to be unscarred to be sent. You only have to be here.

So don’t be shy. When the Spirit nudges you, name it — get on your feet, or lift your hand, or call it out from your seat. Prayer team. Stephen Ministry. ID Ministry. Welcome and greeting. Children’s ministry. Family ministry. Discipleship Ministry. Small-group teaching. The LGBTQ+ community. Social and Racial Justice ministry. Music. The altar and worship. The board and the business of this church. Books to Prison. Hospitality. Whatever it is, whoever you are — don’t keep it to yourself. Name it, because the body needs to see itself, and the body needs to hear its own members say, out loud: here am I.

Because you are not a consumer of grace. You are a carrier of it. So make your song louder. Make your community visible. Make your story heard. Let your prayer be lifted. Be loud. Be joyful. Be courageous. Be bold. Be loved — and love God and love your neighbor — all of it for the glory of the God who has already called you a holy one, and who is asking you, right now, in this room: whom shall I send? And your answer? Here I am. Send me.

We are the church. Now Here we are. Let's go.

Amen.

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, August 2, 2026, tenth Sunday after Pentecost. “We Know Who We Are”series.

​​​   Texts: Romans 15:5-7; Luke 19:1-10​​​​

 

For days now, I’ve been ruminating on what it means to say of Foundry: “No outsiders here…” The clear intent of the phrase is to suggest that no one will be turned away, ignored, left out, or treated as less than. It’s one of Foundry’s corevalues to “make especially sure that people who feel excluded elsewhere are welcomed and invited to be an integral part of our congregation.” As Guy preached so powerfully last week, our biblically-rooted convictions around inclusion, affirmation, equity, and diversity are clear—regardless of the critiques those convictions draw.

Our goal is to practice what we preach—to mean it when we say you are welcome here “no matter what.” As I study our texts for today it becomes clear that, to do that, we can’t rely on our banners outside or the words of welcome we repeat at the beginning of every service to carry all our welcome water. We can’t settle for our core values tucked onto a webpage to be the only communication of our commitment to cultivate a certain kind of community. We can’t get so comfortable that we forget what it is like to be a stranger in a strange land, or to forget that souls tend to be shy and that people carry wounds that are often invisible to the eye. To truly advance our goal of radical welcome, we need a more muscular strategy, theologically and biblically grounded, physically embodied, and embedded in the very DNA of our congregation. And our texts provide the guidance we need.

The few verses from Romans 15 that were read aloud today are a summary of at least two chapters of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. That community was experiencing deep tensions between Jewish and Gentile Christians—driven by disagreements related to Torah observance, holy days, and dietary practices. These issues were flashpoints for deeper questions: Who belongs? Whose interpretation of Torah is correct? What practices are central to our shared life? Paul writes to a diverse people who are all trying to follow Jesus. They have different backgrounds—some began as highly observant Jews and others as pagan Gentiles. But here’s the thing they have in common: they have all been welcomed “προσλαμβάνω (proslambanō)” by Christ. And because of that, Paul teaches, they need to welcome one another in the same way.

The question then, is how does Christ welcome people?

Our familiar text from Luke 19 helps us answer the question. For those who may not be familiar with the story of the “wee little man,” Zacchaeus, here’s some context. Just before our story Jesus has welcomed children his disciples tried to send away, taught a rich ruler what it would take for him to enter the kin-dom, and showed mercy to a begger at the roadside who asked Jesus to restore his sight.

Then Jesus enters the prosperous city of Jericho where his reputation precedes him. People know he is coming by. And Zacchaeus, a rich, chief tax collector wants to see him. Now to be a tax collector in that time and place was to be associated with the exploitation, violence, and ritual impurity of the Roman empire. A “chief” tax collector was at least in middle management—if not the CEO of collusion. All of that to say, Zacchaeus was not popular or trusted, but rather seen by the general public as an enemy and a threat.

The crowds must have been shocked when the CEO climbs a tree— high profile, wealthy men didn’t climb trees. Zacchaeus’ willingness to do so suggests something in him was already stirring. Jesus picks up on that and proceeds to invite himself over.

The text says, Zacchaeus “hurried down and was happy to welcome Jesus.”

The crowds were not so happy. Why is Jesus going in to share table fellowship with this sinner?

Because Jesus makes it his habit to welcome and befriend those whom others want nothing to do with. Children, beggars, the ill and disabled, women; and with those others judged as sinners—including rich tax collectors. Jesus puts it this way: “I came to seek out and save the lost.” And based on the whole story of Jesus, the “lost” include both those who inflict harm and those who suffer it. So which category of “lost” is Zacchaeus?

In one sense, he’s the one doing harm as he supports an exploitive and unjust regime. But the crowd has also written him off as unworthy of fellowship with Jesus and beyond the possibility of change. Jesus’ action creates an opportunity for transformation—not only for Zacchaeus, but also for those who have decided that he is nothing more than a hopeless sinner.

That day salvation comes because everyone is reminded that Zacchaeus is also a son of Abraham, a beloved child of God, worthy of mercy and care, capable of growth and change.

Jesus’ welcome is fueled by the love of God: love strong enough to receive each of us as we are, and strong enough to call us toward growth, change, and restored relationship. That means Jesus’ welcome is not a cheap welcome characterized as indiscriminate acceptance and “anything goes.” Nor is it conditional welcome that requires change as the price of admission. It is welcome offered not simply for comfort, but for transformation through God’s embrace and mercy.

So back to us, what does it mean for Foundry to say, “no outsiders here?”

We rightly celebrate that people who have been excluded elsewhere often discover a home at Foundry. But every church eventually develops its own insiders and outsiders. We instinctively know whom we trust. And, if we’re honest, we instinctively know whom we’ve already decided not to trust.

If Jesus were walking through Washington today who would make us grumble if they showed up to see him? Whose house would surprise and disturb us if Jesus said, “That’s where I’m going to dinner.”?

Part of the invitation for us is to consider if there are those we really want to remain “outsiders”—if there are limits to our welcome. //

That question leads us to something Fr. Greg Boyle says. After decades in Los Angeles accompanying gang members through violence, incarceration, and new beginnings, Fr. Boyle writes:

“Human beings…settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all.”

Our wildly inclusive God asks us to enter into kinship with all. Even when it’s hard. Through his journey with those whom others fear, judge, or write off as hopeless cases, Fr. Boyle knows something about that kind of kinship.

Paul doesn’t ask the diverse members of the church in Rome to agree on every matter of faith and practice, but to learn how to enter into kinship with one another in the manner of Christ. He asks believers to become more committed to welcoming one another than they are to winning every disputed argument.

Jesus creates space for people in Jericho to remember that even public enemy #1 is a sibling and a beloved child of God who is not beyond God’s capacity to save AND that they are also the “lost”—the recipients of harm, the grumblers, the judgy ones—who Jesus came to seek out—and who need some saving as well.

That is the pattern of Christ’s welcome. And it is the pattern our welcome is meant to follow.

Radical welcome—which is Christ’s welcome—is neither cheap welcome nor conditional welcome.

At Foundry, everyone is welcome. No matter what. No conditions required. //

But no one is welcome to deny someone else’s belovedness. No one is welcome to demean another child of God. No one is welcome to make this community unsafe for those Christ has welcomed. And no one is welcome to declare a person beyond God’s capacity to save while forgetting that we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).

The boundary, then, is not ideology. The boundary is love.

And that means radical welcome asks more of us than hanging banners and opening the doors. It asks us to notice who enters and still feels invisible. It asks us to cross the room, learn a name, make space at the table, and remain curious about a life we do not yet understand. It asks us to confront harm when it occurs—not because we have stopped loving the person doing harm, but because love refuses to abandon either the one being wounded or the one whose soul is being diminished by the wounding. It asks us to believe that transformation is possible, even in people we have given up on.

And perhaps most difficult of all, it asks us to remain open to our own transformation—to the possibility that Christ may expose the limits of our welcome, unsettle our assumptions, and lead us into kinship with someone we would never have chosen for ourselves.

This is the more muscular welcome to which we are called. Not mere politeness. Not tolerance from a safe distance. Not the pride of believing that we are already the welcoming people and everyone else needs to catch up. It is the patient, courageous, embodied work of becoming a community where strangers become neighbors and neighbors become siblings; where those who have been pushed aside are drawn into the center; where harm is named and interrupted; where repentance is possible; and where grace keeps making more of us than we believed we could become. The measure of our welcome is not whether people like us feel comfortable. The measure is whether people unlike us encounter the welcome of Christ through us.

That is a demanding call.

But it begins not with what we are able to accomplish. It begins with what Christ has already done. Christ has welcomed us. Christ has come looking for us when we were lost. And Christ has not given up on us.

So we do not practice radical welcome in order to prove that we are good people or the right kind of church. We welcome because we have been welcomed. We make room because Christ has made room for us. We enter into kinship because, through grace, Christ has already made us one.

“Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” Amen.

 

Benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

A sermon preached by Guy Cecil with Foundry UMC, July 26, 2026. “We Know Who We Are” series.

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, July 19, 2026. “We Know Who We Are” series.