Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons

Ginger Gaines-Cirelli

 

I don't know about you, but for a really long time now, it has felt like all of us have wandered into an episode, a long episode, of The Twilight Zone. Things feel weird. They feel creepy and deeply unsettling. We've had a rude awakening. The institutions and protections that are supposed to uphold our democracy, things like the rule of law, checks and balances, and respect for human dignity and decency, have never, of course, been applied equally. But right now they're being undermined at an alarming scale. Not to mention the upheaval in our nation's relationships with the rest of the world. Every day seems to bring some new outrage, some new threat, some new reason to wonder what on earth is happening.

And beneath the immediate turmoil is the complicated history of this nation, a history that includes extraordinary ideals and aspirations alongside slavery and genocide, exclusion and exploitation, and persistent patterns of injustice, patterns that continue to play out in our own time. All of this can be exhausting and disorienting and frightening, and sometimes it is hard to know how we're supposed to find our bearings, much less keep on keepin' on.

Which actually brings me to Jacob in our story from Genesis. Jacob is not having a particularly good day. When we meet him in the story, Jacob is on the run. His family relationships are, as we say these days, a hot mess. He has manipulated and deceived his way into receiving the birthright that had been intended for his older brother, Esau, and as a result, Esau has threatened to kill him. His mother suggests that he needs to get out of Dodge. His father then suggests he do so by going to Paddan-aram to take a wife from among their kinfolk there. Jacob, you see, is carrying a complicated history, part of which he has helped create. He's exhausted, displaced, and facing a very uncertain future.

As night falls on his journey, he stops to sleep in a place along the way. He takes one of the stones from that place, sets it near his head, and lies down. Now, nothing about this place was extraordinary. Jacob wouldn't have expected anything special to happen there. But that night he has a dream. He dreams of something like a stairway reaching from earth to heaven, with messengers of God ascending and descending upon it. And then God speaks to him in the dream, renewing the ancient promise made to his grandfather Abraham and his father Isaac: a promise of land and descendants, and a blessing that will extend not just to Jacob's family, but to all the families of the earth. And then God says something intensely personal: "I am with you. I will keep you wherever you go."

When Jacob awakens, astonished, he exclaims, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it."

Jacob's circumstances and history are unchanged as he wakes up. Everything is still the same. He still has a long and uncertain journey ahead. But Jacob recognizes, perceives, something he had not before: surely the Lord is in this place.

One of the fascinating details about this story is how insistently the Hebrew text returns to the word "place." Jacob comes to a place, takes a stone from that place, lies down in that place, and then awakens to discover that this place, this seemingly ordinary patch of ground, is a place of divine encounter. The place hasn't changed from the night before. Jacob's perception, his understanding, that is what has changed. All of a sudden, he was paying attention, and he was astonished.

This is really what we've been exploring together over these past five weeks. We've been guided by Mary Oliver's invitation to pay attention, to be astonished, and to tell about it. We've been considering the extraordinary human capacity for awe, and the way that awe draws us out, expanding our perception and our understanding of ourselves and of the world. As we come to the end of this series, I want to explore one more dimension of awe, what social psychologist Dacher Keltner describes as epiphany.

For us in the Christian tradition, Epiphany celebrates the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles, that dawning recognition that God's love reaches far beyond any boundary lines we would want to create. And that gets at what Keltner means by epiphany: those moments when our understanding of reality suddenly expands and we discover that we are part of something much larger than we knew before.

I've been wondering whether, even in the midst of what I'm calling our collective disorientation, something like this epiphany may be happening. Perhaps. I wonder whether we're being awakened to a realization that some things we've treated as essential to a good life are less substantial than we thought, while things we've considered optional side hustles are actually essential to our well-being. Things like collective effervescence and wild awe. Looking at the birds, considering the lilies. Things like transcendent music. Things like the mystery we meet at the table and in so many other places. Things like moral beauty.

These are not luxuries to enjoy when everything else is going well. These things we've been ruminating on and considering together are part of what makes us fully human, what sustains us, and what connects us to one another, to the world, and to God, to the something larger. I'm not trying to romanticize this moment, by the way. I'm certainly not suggesting that God has engineered our national turmoil to teach us a spiritual lesson. But I do wonder whether epiphanies are possible, even here, in this strange and unsettling Twilight Zone place.

Keltner says that one of the fundamental realizations people experience through awe is the recognition that I am part of something larger than myself. He goes on to document all the different ways people have tried to describe that experience. They use all kinds of words and phrases, things like "the fundamental it" and "the all." One person talked about becoming a "transparent eyeball." I don't know; it's in the book. Even those most skilled at describing the human mind, he says, sometimes find themselves simply gesturing toward the experience of being touched or surrounded or embraced by something. As I'm reading this in the book, my spiritual impulse is to blurt out (I have a tendency to occasionally blurt things out), "This is all the grace of God!"

I know not everybody would describe these experiences that way. But as a person of Christian, Wesleyan faith, I believe that when we are beckoned beyond our own navels and our own inward spin, and drawn outward toward a deeper, loving engagement with this beautiful, broken world, we are experiencing something of the Holy Spirit's activity. God's grace at work.

My proclamation is indeed one of faith, driven by the experiences of all the saints whose lives and teachings have testified to the God whose presence is not confined to the places we've designated as sacred. The God whose love and creative power are at work throughout creation. The God who invites us into relationship not only with God, but with one another and the entire world that God has made. The invitation from the beginning of time has always been to recognize that we belong to something larger than ourselves, the immeasurable love of God, and that we get to participate in it.

If you were listening to that magnificent prayer in Ephesians, this is really what the author is reaching for: that we might comprehend, with all the saints, the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ's love, that we might know a love so vast that it surpasses knowledge.

As I ruminated again on this prayer, I remembered a song I sang as a child. I learned it in children's choir at my church, and it's amazing how often it comes back to me. I'm going to see if I can start it high enough to sing the melody. Give me a second. I didn't get much sleep, so I'm kind of a firm tenor at this point.

[Sings the opening line of the song.]

I could sing you the whole song, but I won't. That line is it. The God whose love reaches beyond everything we can measure or imagine is also here. Right here, with me and with you. With us. In this place.

Not only Jacob's resting place, not only Foundry's sanctuary. This place is the United States of America in October 2026. This place is our deeply troubled world. This place is our communities, our neighborhoods, our homes, the places where we work and where we learn and where we struggle, where we try to make a life. This place is wherever people are frightened, wherever they're grieving, wherever they're trying to hold on to goodness and truth and beauty and hope, all held within the vastness of the unimaginable love of God.

Surely the Lord is in this place. Because God's loving presence cannot be confined to the places we expect to find it. God has not abandoned this world, and God has not abandoned us.

Almost every time, without fail, when I send us from this place, I say, "Go in peace, and go in power." The Ephesians prayer reminds us that the God who is with us in this and every place is able to accomplish far more than all we can ask or imagine, according to the power at work within us. There is power here in this place, at work among us and within us, in these people, in our gifts, in our limitations, with our complicated histories and our uncertain futures.

Last Sunday, we heard a story of how this power is already at work in this place. Those of you who were here heard this story of moral beauty, of people who helped reunite five children with their mother and father after both parents had been deported to Venezuela. At nearly every turn, our Foundry team encountered another obstacle: medical, legal, schooling, resources, travel. Again and again, people said it couldn't be done. And they just kept going. Where other people said there was no way, they said, "We will find a way." And those children were reunited with their parents.

This is not only a story of moral beauty that draws us into awe, which it does. It is also an epiphany, a revelation of God's presence and power already at work in this place. It's a testimony to what becomes possible when we recognize the people and the gifts already right here in our midst, when we understand that we are part of something larger than ourselves. And I pray that this is what these weeks of paying attention and being astonished have been preparing us for.

Not as a way to imagine some future when everything is finally settled and all we have are beautiful birds and lilies. This is not an escape hatch. We haven't been practicing and talking about all these things because we want to avoid the difficulties of the present moment. That's not been the goal. Instead, we have been thinking on these things because we're trying to live faithfully, right here, in this place. Practicing, paying attention, being astonished, seeing more fully, recognizing the sacred worth of one another, discovering possibilities we could not perceive before, and participating together in the work of love that God is already doing. That's what it's about. And when we do all of that, we're telling about it.

Jacob woke up that morning in the same place, with the same obstacles and the same circumstances. Life hadn't changed. The future was still uncertain. But when he awoke, he knew something he hadn't known before: surely the Lord is in this place. And because he received and perceived and began to know that, he could rise from his slumber and continue the journey.

And my beloveds, the truth of the matter is, so can we. And to that I say one big old "Thanks be to God." Amen.

Pastor Ben:

We also give thanks today for our over thirty folks who are gathered out in Rehoboth on the LGBTQ+ retreat this weekend, and we pray for their safe return this afternoon.

Friends, I have a little bit of sympathy for Simon in our story today. There’s so much happening in the world and in our minds. It can be really easy to miss a good story.

We get this part of scripture because the woman has experienced God’s grace, God’s justifying, forgiving grace, or at least has realized that it’s available. She is resting on the edge of new life, on par with the raising of the dead in the stories that precede this one. Her gratitude is shown in a response of tears and washing and anointing, because she knows she’s not bound by what was. She’s not held there by Simon or anyone else’s thoughts about her or what her previous reputation was. She is free and moving into something new.

And Jesus says to Simon, and to the others: pay attention. Be amazed at what is happening here. Tell about it.

There are plenty of stories out in our world that we can notice, and there is more than enough in the world to distract us from them. They can give us something to wonder over, or perhaps encourage or re-encourage our lives. We’ve been borrowing these last weeks from the new science of everyday wonder, and one of the chapters is about moral beauty: how others’ kindness, courage, and overcoming inspire awe. Stories of moral beauty land in our brains differently. They activate us in ways that shake us from our normal, self-focused modes of being. They help us to do better. And in the studies, it was shown that receiving or experiencing these acts of moral beauty were far more effective in helping us to do better than any teaching of abstract concepts or theories.

Well, friends, we have a story to pay attention to today. Alexa, who is a member of the Foundry family and has been working with our Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid team over these last months, is going to share with us the story of their work and journey.

---

Alexa:

Thank you, Pastor Ben. Good morning, Foundry.

At the beginning of February, when the city was frozen over, and I think you all remember those freezing days, I knocked on the door of a basement unit on the edge of DC. The window pane on the door was fogged up, and a little tiny hand wiped away the dew. They looked out at me. The person behind the door quickly ran away, and a few seconds later someone a foot taller opened up. He greeted me warmly, and as I stepped into the space carrying a few bags of clothes and food, he wrapped his arms around me. Then came more arms, and more arms, and more arms. And suddenly we were in a big group hug.

I had never met these kids before, but from that moment on I was devoted to them. I didn’t know them, and they certainly did not know me. But we would become connected. We would become indispensable in each other’s lives.

My story with these kids started eight months before that February morning, in these very pews. I was invited here by a wonderful friend, Denny Zheng. The sermon I heard during my first Sunday at Foundry spoke directly to me. Guy Cecil, talking about Foundry’s vision, said: we must give people a place not just to do something about the state of the world, but to be something in their own eyes. To sit in prayer, to sing a song, to volunteer, to attend a Bible study. Or, if you were like me for my first eight years at Foundry, to simply sit in a pew and listen to a good sermon and a really good hymn, so that God could speak to me and prepare me for what was next.

I listened to Guy’s words that day and felt at ease. I heard in his message that I could rest here, that I could recharge here. And through that resting and through that recharging, I could prepare myself for what was in store next. I stopped asking myself why I was suddenly attending church for the first time in many years, and instead started believing that I was here for a reason, a reason that would become more and more clear to me. I just had to be patient.

So I kept coming back, because I trusted this guy Guy. I came here to Foundry to enjoy a good sermon and a really good hymn, and to prepare for what was next. Most of all, I loved how being here made me feel, and how listening to this amazing choir made me feel as I walked out the door on a Sunday morning.

In January, Foundry announced that anyone interested could attend a meeting about supporting local immigrant families after service. Maybe this was the moment I had been preparing for. I didn’t think twice about attending. Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid, also known as MISMA, gave a presentation about their programs, and all throughout I kept thinking, when can we get started? MISMA was inviting us to participate in their Post-Detention Care program, created to support the families of immigrants detained by the U.S. government. A group of Foundry congregants signed up and committed to supporting a family.

This takes me back to that February morning. During that massive group hug, I started counting the number of kids I saw and introducing myself to them. Then out came a young woman, a caretaker. What was going on in that basement that very day was nothing short of a miracle. This was most definitely the moment I had been preparing for without knowing it.

Going even further back, let me first tell you the story of these children. In 2022, seeking hope and a better life for their children, the family immigrated from Venezuela to the U.S. The parents and their five kids walked through the infamous Darién Gap, losing boots to the mud, finishing the trek barefoot. Over four months, they crossed seven countries to arrive at the Mexico-U.S. border. Once in the U.S., the family sought asylum, work, and education, settling in DC and then later in Baltimore.

But one day while at work, the father was taken and detained by ICE. Overnight, the mother became the sole provider for what by then had become a family of six young children. Eight months later, harrowingly, while the mother was taking her kids to school, she was stopped by ICE. Her baby was taken from her and placed in the arms of her eldest daughter, who was eleven at the time. The mother was arrested and taken to a detention center. The kids were simply left. It was November, cold, and the kids were alone in an apartment in Baltimore. These kids were ages one, four, six, eight, eleven, and fourteen.

At the detention center, the mother managed to get in contact with family friends. The friends, a young Venezuelan couple with kids of their own, were living in a small space, and they took the kids in without hesitation. They didn’t ask any questions. From one day to the next, their household suddenly doubled. This put a lot of pressure on them. They had to work multiple jobs to keep everyone fed and clothed and safe through the winter. They became the caretakers, and they were completely unwavering in their love and dedication to the kids.

But the kids also stepped up as they knew how to. The eldest two fell into roles that they were comfortable with and that they knew well. Between them, they developed systems to make sure everyone was okay, and I often saw these systems at work. It was incredible. The eldest son did the cooking and cleaning. The eldest daughter took care of the diapers, the bathing, the clothing changes. And remember, these were eleven and fourteen year olds.

MISMA has a backlog of hundreds of families waiting for the Post-Detention Care program. As soon as we here at Foundry were connected to MISMA and connected to this family, we felt the urgency of the situation. As a team, we took on the kids’ immediate needs. Anna raised money at her office. Ari took the caretakers to Costco every two weeks for a big haul. Deborah scheduled and took the kids to doctor’s appointments. Katherine coordinated donations from you all here at Foundry. Michael helped send the mom items in detention. And I communicated with the caretakers and the mother in detention every day.

We also tried to keep it light, so we had a few outings with the kids to playgrounds, parks, the zoo, and even Chuck E. Cheese for the eldest daughter’s twelfth birthday. You also may have seen the kids attend Foundry a few times. They really liked coming. They loved the children’s worship and Rosa’s Cafe after service. On the way to church, the kids often would ask to listen to Christian music, and on the way home they were always asking to listen to Bad Bunny.

Every time I saw the kids, I was floored. No matter what we were doing together, they were loving, sweet, and really, really funny. The family deserved the best of us. We knew that, and we started to extend beyond the basic survival needs.

The kids had been out of school since their mother was detained in November. They had colds because of the cold. The landlord was pushing them to move out. The eldest daughter has epilepsy that had gone untreated and unmedicated since she last saw her mother. And looming over it all, we had the question: when and how will these kids reunite with their parents?

The path forward was uncharted. I reached out to countless immigrant rights groups and mutual aid networks. They had yet to encounter kids left by the government without both parents. We were repeatedly told that much of what the family needed was impossible to achieve.

That didn’t stop us here at Foundry.

We were told that without insurance, the kids wouldn’t be able to get physicals. All six kids ended up getting comprehensive doctor visits, with blood work and vaccines included. We were told there was no way to send the mother money in detention. We ended up being able to transfer money so that she could video call her kids and see their faces for the first time in months. We were told that without a parent in the country, enrolling the kids in school was impossible. Within three weeks of meeting the family, the five school-age kids were attending local elementary and middle schools. We were told that epilepsy treatment and an overnight EEG would cost thousands for one of the children. The hospital ended up covering one hundred percent of the $6,000 neurology treatment costs.

And finally, we were told that traveling to Venezuela with six minors who didn’t have IDs nor passports was impossible. This was our biggest hurdle yet. A little bit about me: I’m from Venezuela, and I hadn’t been to Venezuela in twenty-six years. So I didn’t have any evidence that things would work out. But somehow I was completely confident that they would. With that faith, I did everything in my power to find a path to travel with the kids and reunite the family.

Throughout the process, I kept coming here every Sunday I could. I kept coming to Foundry to find comfort and to recharge, just like Guy said I would. My worldview through Foundry became both urgent and optimistic.

What I did was apply for safe passage permits for all of us. These permits were issued by the Venezuelan government and would allow us to board a plane. We were all traveling without a passport, except the youngest, who was born in the U.S., and we got lucky: right before the trip we managed to get him a U.S. passport. So with a binder full of documents, on June 6th at 6:25 a.m., my cousin and I traveled with all six kids from Dulles to Panama City, and from Panama City to Caracas.

The day of the trip actually ended up being wonderful. We were prepared for all the worst things to happen. We had all the contingency plans in place. But we were met with simplicity and ease. All the work we had done beforehand, all the painstaking, difficult conversations, made sense. It made it so that this was an easy trip.

Against all odds, within twelve hours of saying goodbye to their caretakers in Maryland at Dulles Airport, they were back in their parents’ arms in Caracas.

The story doesn’t end here. I wish it would. But the story does not end here.

Only two weeks after the family arrived in Venezuela, two massive earthquakes struck the country. The family fled their building in downtown Caracas safely. They sheltered at a school in a neighboring city until the electricity was shut off. When they returned to their building, they found it very damaged and unlivable. They spent over a month hopping between the homes of family and church friends.

Meanwhile, I did what I could. I started a fundraiser to help them find stability and safety. After only about a month, thanks to many of you, we had raised enough money to buy the family an apartment of their own near their former building, on the first floor, which they required. We furnished it and helped with back-to-school costs. I’m thrilled to say that the family is now living in their own apartment, and that the kids start school next week.

This mutual aid work requires community. The great thing about community is that you don’t have to do it alone, and there are so many ways to help and support any given family. There’s something every single one of you in this church can do.

Thanks to Ari, who I see. Thanks to Lauren, Michael, Shara, Joanne, Andrew, Catherine, Deborah, Jackie, Pastor Ben, MISMA, PJ. I see my friends Marjorie and Laura, my parents, my girlfriend Anna. We were able to do what most people told us was outright impossible. The many contributions we received along the way made it possible.

Donating clothes and diapers is a way to support. Helping people drive around is also a way to support. Researching social services like food banks really helps. Notarizing documents. Scheduling appointments. Leveraging your network. Fundraising. Taking kids out for a fun activity. Lending the resources you have to others who are going through a hard time. That’s what made this possible, and there’s a way for everyone to contribute.

Through this whole process, I didn’t just give my own time and my determination. I ended up receiving more than I could have ever imagined. I was given so much love. I built a larger community than I could have dreamed of, and I got closer to my loved ones.

I also found something that I’m always seeking but find difficult and tricky to achieve. I found coherence. And I’m going to give you my personal definition of coherence. Don’t quote me on this, but my definition is: coherence is when what you feel, think, say, and do are all in sync. Coherence personally gives me peace and a lot of joy.

So thank you, Foundry, for connecting me to my coherence.

---

Pastor Ben:

Thank you, Alexa, for your work, for the whole team. Against the backdrop of what our country is right now, to step into a space to be generous and courageous and brave. To step on that plane, and just to go through the airport with the way things are right now. I was fully expecting a phone call saying that I needed to come to Dulles with my collar on, as if that would help. But that did not happen that way.

I saw the video of the kids. And you talk about God in the lowly places, and Isaiah: God’s in the basement. God’s there in the gathering back up of the giant group hug. God is there. God is there in the reunion in the airport. And God is there with all of us along the journey, as we try to figure out where it is God is calling us.

So we are so deeply thankful to you, to your whole cheering section and support group that is here today. Bonus points for Danny for inviting a friend to church. Invite a friend to church. Invite a friend. We have great friends. Invite a friend to church.

We’re so grateful to you, to everybody who helped on this journey. And we are thankful that even with what’s going on in our world, there are things that we can do to put good into the world.

May it be so for all of us. Amen.

When I was in seminary, I participated in a Liberation Theology seminar tour in South India. During those two weeks, we soaked up the beautiful, radical otherness of the culture. We learned from profound teachers who opened our minds and our hearts to new ways of thinking about theology and about Christian witness in a place where only 2% of the population is Christian.

We stayed primarily in Dalit communities, communities made up of those who were previously called “untouchables” in the Indian caste system. One night we stayed in a village of Dalit Christians. After a service filled with music and singing, the community poured out of the small church at the center of the village and began gathering. Imagine any given Sunday here at Foundry after worship, with groups gathered here and there outside the sanctuary. It was kind of like that. At a certain moment, we noticed that some kind of ritual seemed to be happening. People were gathered together, and members of the community were going around distributing something.

We didn’t know what was happening. Then someone came up to us and put some pea pods in our hands. They reminded me of what you might think of as edamame. We tried to ask what this was, but it was tricky since none of us spoke Tamil. One young man simply said, as best he could, “Peas for the people.” Or maybe he was saying “peace for the people.” We weren’t sure. But we wondered whether this was the way that this poor village celebrated communion. Everyone received the same simple food, and it was for all the people. Food and peace for all.

To this day, I don’t know exactly what was happening, and maybe that’s one reason I still remember it so clearly. There are experiences in life that resist being neatly explained. Something happens, and we know there is more going on than we can name. We feel ourselves caught up in something larger than ourselves. Throughout this series, we are exploring those experiences that interrupt our ordinary ways of seeing and remind us that the world is larger, stranger, more beautiful, and more interconnected than we usually remember.

Dr. Keltner writes about the way experiences of awe often lie at the heart of spiritual life. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Across cultures and traditions, people encounter what he calls a kind of fundamental “it,” something larger than ourselves that we may experience as God or mystery, spirit, sacred presence, or connection. We don’t always know how to explain it, but intellectual explanation is not the only way human beings know that something is true.

And I think there are few places where that becomes clearer than at the table we gather around today. Paul asks the church in Corinth, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?” The word translated “sharing” is koinonia: communion, participation, fellowship. Paul is saying that this is more than just remembering Jesus. Somehow, in this meal, we participate in Christ. And because we participate in Christ, Paul says, “we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” In what United Methodists call this holy mystery, we take a little piece of bread and we receive from the cup, and somehow this ordinary meal reveals something extraordinary about who we are. We belong to Christ, and therefore we belong to one another.

Jesus speaks of the same mystery in his prayer in John’s Gospel. He prays not only for the disciples who are with him, but also on behalf of “those who will believe in me through their word.” And that means us: all of those who came before us and all of those who will come after. Jesus prays, “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” I in you, you in me, they in us, we in them. Is there a Venn diagram for this? We can try to wrap our minds around this language of eternal, dynamic, life-giving, interdependent, indwelling love, but it’s the language of mystery. It is the attempt to describe a belonging deeper than proximity or agreement, deeper than nationality or culture or language, or even time itself.

On this World Communion Sunday, we are invited to pay attention to the vastness of this belonging. Today, Christians are coming to tables all over the world, in cathedrals and storefront churches, in tiny villages and crowded cities. People are receiving wafers and pieces of bread, wine and juice, or whatever is available. Perhaps somewhere, something as simple as peas. Peace for the people. They pray in languages we don’t understand. They sing songs we’ve never heard. Their lives may look nothing like ours. And yet we make the astonishing claim that there is not a “their” table and an “our” table. There is God’s table: one table, one bread, one body.

And the table stretches not only around the world, but through time. We share this meal with the generations who received it before us, with the saints whose names we know and the ones whose names we don’t. And one day, others will gather around the table when our own names have joined that great communion. There is more happening at this table than we can explain.

But the mystery of the sacrament is not only beautiful or sentimental. If there is one table, if there is truly a sharing in the body and blood of Christ, then here at this table with us is the innocent man suffering in El Salvador’s secret prison, and his mother, still praying to God for him to come home. Here at this table is the four-year-old who has been orphaned by AIDS because funding was cut off. Here is the toddler orphaned because their parents were killed in war. At this table, right here, are all the women around the world carrying the scars of sexual abuse.

To say that we are one body gathered at one table means the suffering of another part of the body is never just someone else’s problem. Paul was writing, after all, to a church divided by status and privilege, a community in which some had more than enough and others went hungry. Paul’s teaching here is not just a pretty mystery. It is a call to responsibility. And not just responsibility, by the way, toward those who call themselves Christian. Because we belong to Christ, we are responsible to attend to the suffering world that Christ loves.

Jesus shows us how to manifest the love of God: through mending the broken places in human lives and communities, through feeding hungry bodies, through restoring the outcast and setting people free. The small communities of Jesus followers in India showed us how their belonging in Christ called them to advocate for and serve any neighbor who was suffering. Their participation in Christ led them to bear witness to a love that breaks down barriers. I in you, and you in me, and they in us, and we in them.

I think about that Dalit village, people whose community had for generations been told that some were pure and others impure, some worthy and others untouchable. And there they were, passing food from hand to hand. Peace for the people. Peace for the people. Something simple for everybody.

This is a holy mystery of God’s love made manifest. We will never fully explain what happens here: how bread and cup join us to Christ, how Christ joins us to one another, how a little table here in Washington somehow becomes part of a table that circles the earth and stretches through generations. It’s more than we can explain. But what if we simply receive it?

The promise of the table is still food for the people, justice for the people, belonging for the people. Peace for all the people. Our invitation today is simply to pay attention to what this table reveals, to be astonished by the love of God that makes us one, and to tell about it not just with our pretty words and our songs, but with our lives.

May it be so. Amen.

This is a little different view from the one that I'm used to when I'm here. So welcome and thank you for the opportunity.

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. I love those words from Mary Oliver, and I love being here to talk about the music of our movement. Making music is an act of creation. What draws us to its sound? On this reconciling Sunday, we celebrate what we have learned from our music. You've heard some of it already this morning, and it really preaches.

It was really easy to write the sermon because the songs kind of do it for you. I will always be grateful to people like Julie and Rush and Mark Millar and the many others, who have lent their gifts to this movement. We associate music we like with where we were when we first heard the songs. Linda and I frequently talk about snack bar songs.

And what we mean is those songs from the 1970s that played on the jukebox in the Wesleyan College snack bar.

Every time we hear one, it brings back this image of this small college snack bar with a jukebox over in the corner that served the best bagels in cream cheese you will ever have. And where we made and met some lifelong friends.

More recently, my siblings and I have been going through my mom's belongings. We came across some records a few weeks ago that have to have been her mother's, because they weren't people my parents ever listened to. We laughed at Lawrence Welk and Charley Pride and other memories of things that we heard at my grandparents house. The image it brings is of 15 plus relatives in my grandparents five room house, most of us pre-teens, and lots of noise and laughter.

We pulled out the Kate Smith Christmas album to play this Christmas.

Music accompanies us throughout life. No matter the occasion, it gathers us in and holds us. It feeds our memories, offers solace, and provides great joy. It reminds us that we are not alone in a way that words cannot. It takes us out of ourselves and places us inside something larger, larger, a congregation, a movement, a denomination.

A people, and a promise. That feeling of being part of something larger than ourselves is what we call all. And this movement is no stranger to that. Or I don't know what Charles Wesley would have had to say about today's LGBTQ justice movement, but we Methodists should not be surprised that movements have a soundtrack. We inherited a theology that was sung.

Charles Wesley didn't simply write songs for people who already knew what God was doing. He gave people language to imagine the freedom that God was calling them toward as Methodists. Justice movement might just be a part of our DNA. So in Ginger sent me the theme and the scriptures for the day. I was kind of excited, but I also wondered how I could fit it all into one sermon.

I'm still a little worried about that. There's material for a sermon series in this scripture, so I took a step back. The first thing I did was write down everything that the music of movements, plural, meant to me.

And the one thing that stood out from all of that, from all of the words I wrote down, is the word connection. Because the music of a movement helps people, individuals, become a people, a people with a common vision and a common goal.

The music of the movement is part of the connection that I was just referencing. It teaches us to hear a future that is not here yet. For the reconciling movement. It was imagining a church where queer folks called the ministry could authentically respond to that call, and where same gender couples could be married in church sanctuaries by their pastors.

At foundry, we can celebrate that our own Reverend T.C. Morris or Morrow. Excuse me. Tse is serving her first appointment today. Her path from seminary to appointment was long, and I remember the year that she and Joey Heath Mason were told no. Linda and I were fortunate to be married here ten years ago, as gender just mentioned ten years ago this November.

Not everyone in all United Methodist churches was that fortunate. In 2016, after the 2024 General Conference. The knows are happening less frequently and we can be grateful for that. The texts we read this morning, taken together, are powerful, creating a kind of theology. In my words, that theology is remember, our stories, resist structures of oppression, belong and create something new.

The Psalm draws us in with its promise of new life. Sometimes we sing because something has changed, and sometimes we sing because we believe something must change. The invitation is to sing a new song. The music of the reconciling movement connects us through the hard work and exhaustion that movements bring, captures our spirits, gives hope, loves us, and has long provided the strength needed to keep going.

For some, that road has been over half a century long.

We sang. All are welcome. Before we were draw the circle wide. While the welcome was still narrowing. A place at the table while we stood on the other side of locked doors. I am a child of God. While this church was telling us we were less worthy, we sang The Future before the United Methodist Church was ready to hear it.

And we weren't always particularly patient. The letter to Ephesus was written to Gentiles, not to Jews. Verse 14 connects Jews and Gentiles in one group under Christ Jesus, breaking down a wall of hatred and hostility. Paul's, or more probably Paul's disciples letter, brings up an image of breaking down walls. But the author doesn't say that Christ convinced the people on one side to be nicer to the people on the other.

And it doesn't say that they formed a committee to study the wall, to see if it needed to come down or stay up. It doesn't say that they created a strategy group to refine legislation to get removal of the wall approved. He doesn't say that. They put up a sign that says, all are welcome on this side of the wall.

Paul says Christ broke down the wall. And then he says something that's even more notable. He talked about why did it to create one humanity, not a slightly improved version of what was already there, but something that was inclusive of Jew and of Gentile. So if you try to make a corollary to our movement, our wall was doctrine, policy, tradition, fear, being told we were welcome as long as we left part of ourselves at the door.

And finally, the all too familiar. Just wait one more quadrant and will help you get the language removed.

I think we heard that during my time for two quadrant.

Some of those walls came down in 2024. We celebrated. We're healing from the wounds of the last 50 plus years. The rest of the walls are crumbling. The hostility within and between parts of the church is crumbling with them.

The denomination has recently launched a new vision with three parts love boldly, serve joyfully, and lead courageously. The invitation from our Scripture today and from this new vision is to come into this place and let your presence change us. The welcome is extended from just. Hello. We're glad you're here to. Hello. We need you. The church needs your gifts, your voice, your experience, your theology, and your questions.

No matter who you are and God will delight when we are creators of justice, justice and joy. As we celebrate our reconciling anniversary this morning, our halls are full of LGBTQ plus Christians who have willingly shared their gifts, often within a local church or denomination that was unwilling to acknowledge their humanity, their full humanity. Yet we remain full of hope, joy and love, and willing to serve in other capacities for decades.

Our music has its roots and movements that have long been going on much longer. Every time I pick up the African American heritage him in a lot of Sunday, that foundry uses it. I know that the songs we sing will bring as much of a message to the world as the sermon that morning.

Movement. New music teaches us. It inspires us to continue showing up through the exhaustion and tears, reminds us that walls will crumble and that freedom will break through. There isn't a reconciling United Methodist, who can't name multiple Mark Millar songs, or who doesn't check to see if all the verses of a place at the table that is being sung that morning has all the verses in it.

For gay and for straight a place at the table a covenant shared a welcoming place, a rainbow of race and gender and color. For gay and for straight. The chalice of grace. It is exasperating at times to realize how freely LGBTQ plus Christians gave of their gifts, and how freely the church accepted those they needed or wanted.

But withheld the acceptance of others.

When Lindy and I were attending a church in Florida. They decided that as lesbians, we could not serve in leadership roles. It couldn't define a leadership role, but they decided we couldn't serve in one. They then decided that Lindy's leadership of the shut in ministry was not a leadership role, so she could continue leading that team. What that really meant was we tried for three weeks to find somebody else and nobody said they would do it.

So will you please keep doing this?

I wish I could tell you we were the only people who had experiences anything like that. But with the General Conference in 2024, God created in the United Methodist Church a new community in which the old divisions no longer decide who's welcome and who belongs. Congregations are admittedly still adapting and will be for a while. We're an institution, and it takes time to shift institutions.

Collectively, though, we are creating a church that cannot imagine itself without all of us. Instead of a church that welcomes all of us but only tolerates some of us, an authentic welcome is intentional, unstated, and stated visible part of the DNA of the congregation, not dependent on budgets or ministry priorities.

It doesn't tell the oppressed to wait just one more quadrennial or one more budget cycle, and will do something about it.

With the actions of the General Conference in 2024. The image of bringing down the wall became real. I can hear the lyrics to Marty Hogan's All are welcome. All are welcome. All are welcome in this place. And now the work must evolve. From extending a welcome to anyone coming through the doors. To creating a new church. One where the welcome is radical and authentic.

Connection gives us a strength to remember and name injustice. The courage to keep advocating for those on the margins and creates a community that makes us strong.
It makes me wonder what music will sing us into the future.

Our music is really already doing just that. We may need to write a couple new verses for some of our hymns, but our music is already doing that. We're still drawing the circle wide, and we always will be. There's not a point where we are going to check the box and be done. No matter how much we want to, that moment will never arrive.

The music of the reconciling movement has helped us remember who we are. Resist what denies God's love. Connect us to one another and imagine the church we have not yet become for over 50 years. So we're pretty good at this.

And look at thinking about the new song we need now. We should be asking us ourselves some questions. What does justice look like? We've been talking about it for 50 years, but what does it look like? What does reconciliation look like when we are helping create the church? So we're not just asking to be included. We're helping to build something new.
What does love look like when it isn't asking for permission?

Let that sink in. I and foundry my question for all of us is how will we engage in creating that new church?

We had a large impact on what got us here. But how will we engage in creating the new church?

When we open the service today, Ginger referenced Mary's song A Song of Liberation, about a reordered world. Mary's really singing about a revolution. Freedom is the promise, the hope for the future. Mary is still singing and we have much work left to do. The letter to Ephesians isn't just about tearing down a wall. It is also about building something new, creating a new thing, a new thing that cannot be built without all of us.

You cannot simply mean the same church with different paragraphs in the Book of Discipline. If it did. If so, all we did in 2024 was erase some paragraphs, some book. Then we have a new book.

But if the people who were once separated by the wall now build the church together, God will change all of us.

Foundry. For 31 years you helped sing this wall down. I am grateful for all of you. The wall did not crumble by itself. We all spent many long hours in strategy groups and legislative sessions. But I am grateful for this congregation. I'm grateful for the invitation to be here today.

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC September 20, 2026, the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. “Be Astonished” series.

Texts:  Psalm 19:1-4, Matthew 6:25-33                               

 

“The heavens are telling the glory of God.”

I love that phrase. It’s so poetic and so deeply true. The heavens are telling.

Day pours forth speech to day. Night declares knowledge to night. The whole creation, the Psalmist imagines, is engaged in this unceasikng testimony to the glory of God. And then comes this: “There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard.”

Creation is telling us something without saying a word. The sky is telling. The trees are telling. The oceans and rivers, birds and flowers, creatures we can see and creatures buried in the soil beneath our feet are telling.

The question is whether we notice.

Perhaps that is why, centuries later, Jesus says: Look at the birds. Consider the lilies. Pay attention. In fact, the words Jesus uses are stronger than our English translations sometimes make them sound. When Jesus says “look at the birds,” it’s an invitation to really look, to direct your attention toward them. And the word translated “consider” the lilies means something like observe carefully or learn thoroughly. This makes me feel better about becoming one of “those people” who have a collection of bird books and are constantly recording birdsong in the Merlin app to identify what birds are around.

Jesus says not just “look” or notice, but study the birds. There is something here for you to learn.

And notice who he says this to. Anxious people. People worried about what they will eat and what they will drink and what they will wear. People preoccupied with all the things that might go wrong.

Jesus doesn’t respond to anxiety with an argument or a philosophy. He instead gently redirects attention. Look at the birds. Consider the lilies. For Jesus, the birds and lilies aren’t simply beautiful distractions from anxiety. They are witnesses to a creation—including anxious humans!—held in the care of God. Pay attention, Jesus seems to say, and you may begin to notice not only the wonder of the world, but the faithfulness of the God who’s got the whole world in God’s hands.

Jesus teaches this way throughout the gospels. Pay attention to seeds and soil. Watch how yeast works its way through dough. Notice vineyards and fig trees and sheep and weather. Jesus moves through the world as though everything is shimmering with the possibility of revelation.

Which suggests that paying attention to creation isn’t a side hustle to the spiritual life. Paying attention to creation is part of how we learn to see. It’s a way we come to learn the wisdom, the love, and the care of God.

Annie Dillard, who died this past week, once described coming to a place where you say to the woods, the sea, the mountains: “Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive.”

What if awe begins there? Not with some extraordinary experience, but with stopping. With noticing. With allowing something other than our own thoughts, fears, schedules, screens, and preoccupations to claim our attention.

The psychologist Dacher Keltner identifies nature as one of the great sources of human awe. He calls it “wild awe.” And wild awe can certainly happen in spectacular places. Standing on the rim of a canyon. Looking across an ocean. Walking among trees that were ancient before any of us were born. Looking up on a clear night and suddenly comprehending—or failing to comprehend—how enormous the universe actually is.

But one of the things I appreciate about Keltner’s work is his insistence that awe doesn’t require a plane ticket. We can learn to notice astonishing things happening all around us. We live on a planet where bees use dance to give other bees directions to the next flower. Where crows remember human faces and teach their young which humans to avoid. Where ants beneath our feet build whole communities, carrying many times their own weight. Where birds somehow know when it is time to leave and where to go. Where tiny seeds split themselves open underground and reach toward light they have never seen. Where after a devastating fire, the earth grows flowers again.

“The heavens are telling the glory of God.”

They have been telling us all along. The question is whether we have stopped noticing.

And we have some good reasons for that. There is so much competing for our attention. So much designed to steal our attention. News alerts. Emails. Texts. Advertisements. The infinite scroll. Much of what draws our focus is what frightens or angers us. And I want us to be gentle with ourselves on this point—you know, it isn’t a moral failure to get hooked by upsetting things. Human beings are wired to notice threat. It has helped keep us alive. But if threat is all we notice, it begins to look like threat is all there is. If all I take in are the things that are falling apart, then eventually I begin to believe that falling apart is the truest thing about the world. If all I see is what frightens me, fear begins to determine the size and shape of my world.

And this, I think, is why the late Wendell Berry’s beloved poem “The Peace of Wild Things” resonates with so many people. He begins, “When despair for the world grows in me...” You know anything about that?

When despair for the world grows in me, Berry wrote, he goes out into the presence of the wild things. He lies down near still water. He looks up into the stars. And by the end he can say, “I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

The problems haven’t gone away. The world hasn’t suddenly gotten sorted.

Something has changed in him. His field of vision has widened. He has remembered that the thing causing him despair is real—but it is not everything that is real. This is such an important thread that we will pull through this entire series: paying attention to wonder, learning to notice—these aren’t ways of escaping the world’s pain. They are ways of refusing to let pain become the whole story.

Robin Wall Kimmerer says it beautifully in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: “Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

Awe helps us hold more than one thing at a time.

And Keltner’s research suggests that this does something important to us.

Experiences of awe can evoke what researchers sometimes call the “small self.” Honestly, I wasn’t a fan of this phrase when I first saw it. Because our faith certainly doesn’t teach that human beings are insignificant. You bear the image of God. You are beloved. Your life matters.

But I came to understand that the “small self” is connected to the spiritual practice of humility. There is a difference between knowing that my life matters and believing that I am the center of everything. Wild awe can remind us of the difference.

Stand under a sky filled with stars and you remember: I am small. And I belong here. Stand beside the ocean and remember: I do not control all of this. And I am part of it. Watch some tiny creature making its way through the world and remember: There are lives being lived all around me that have nothing to do with my agenda.

And researchers are discovering that this change in perspective has consequences. Awe is associated with greater feelings of connection. It can widen the boundaries of our moral concern—not only toward other people, but toward animals, plants, and the environment. It can make us more generous, more cooperative, more aware that we belong to something larger than ourselves.

We are earth creatures, given breath we did not create, dependent upon soil and water and sunlight and the labor and lives of innumerable creatures we rarely even notice. We are part of God’s vast, glorious, good creation.

And what a strange thing we human beings have done—to begin imagining that creation is simply the scenery behind the main stage, with us at the center and always in the spotlight.

Scripture tells the story differently. “The heavens are telling the glory of God.”

Creation isn’t scenery. Creation is revelation. Creation is our teacher, our neighbor. Creation is an astonishing gift. And when we begin to receive it that way, perhaps we also begin to live differently within it. Because reverence changes relationship. It is harder to treat as disposable something you’ve come to know as wonder-full. It is harder to think of the earth merely as a collection of resources when you have begun to perceive yourself as part of its beautiful, intricate community of life.

And perhaps it becomes harder to treat other human beings as disposable too. If awe teaches me that I am not the center, then that sets me in a different relationship with my neighbor. Perhaps I can hold my certainty a little more lightly. Perhaps I can become curious again. Perhaps I can recognize that my perspective is one perspective within a world vastly bigger than I can see. Perhaps wonder can loosen some of the fear and defensiveness that separate us from one another.

Allowing the experience of wild awe to soften the hard boundaries that grow up among and between people doesn’t mean we stop caring about truth or justice.

It does mean we remember our place in the vastness of creation and the human family. We are not insignificant nor are we all-important. We are not powerless nor are we all-powerful. We are beloved, responsible, and deeply interconnected with all beings and the whole creation.

Jesus says: Look at the birds. Consider the lilies. Maybe those aren’t just lovely illustrations for a sermon about worry. Maybe Jesus is giving us a spiritual practice: Learn to notice. Go outside and look at something long enough that it becomes more than background. Take a walk without filling your ears with something. Look up. Learn the name of a bird or the sound of its song. Watch clouds move. Notice the astonishing architecture of a leaf. Find water and sit beside it. Look at the moon long enough to remember that generations upon generations of human beings have looked at that same moon. Attend to something that does not need anything from you.

And perhaps, once in a while, allow yourself to be astonished. Not as an escape from this wounded world, but for the sake of your own well-being and for the sake of this beautiful, broken world.

Because we need people able to see beyond the crisis immediately in front of them and remember that God’s world is wider, older, stranger, more beautiful, and more resilient than any one terrible moment.

The heavens are still telling. Day to day still pours forth speech. Night to night still declares knowledge. The testimony has not stopped.

Maybe our practice this week is simply to learn to notice. Look at the birds. Consider the lilies. Slow down.

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

And discover what this beautiful and broken world has been trying to tell us all along.