92.6K
Downloads
667
Episodes
Foundry is an historic, progressive United Methodist Church that welcomes all, worships passionately, challenges the status quo, & seeks to transform the world.
Episodes
Sunday Nov 09, 2014
Sunday Nov 09, 2014
Choose
A “State of the
Church” sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC as part
of the Financial Stewardship campaign, November 9, 2014.
Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
If Foundry disappeared tomorrow, what difference would it make? That is an important question for any organization to ask itself. And it’s a helpful question for us as we consider “the state of the church” today. What real difference does Foundry make? Having just completed more than twenty house meetings, attended by more than 240 friends and members of Foundry, I can say with some assurance several things in response.
- Foundry makes a difference through its people and through life-giving relationships.
- Foundry makes a difference through being and cultivating diverse, inclusive, community—through being a community where “All are welcome” means “ALL are welcome.”
- Foundry makes a difference through our worship of God—in soul-stirring music and intellectually rigorous, honest, and relevant preaching.
- Foundry makes a difference through hands-on service to the poor, the sick, the stranger and sojourner, and the vulnerable.
- Foundry makes a difference through commitment to social justice and advocacy for the oppressed in word and deed.
There is a place that Anthony and I like to visit—a retreat kind of place in the woods—and on its website they share a quote from a guest who says, “Even when I am not here, it makes me happy to know that a place like this exists in the world.” That is the kind of sentiment I have heard people express about Foundry. A guest who attended our recent Youth Sunday celebration remarked, “I sure hope this is what heaven is going to be like.” Just a couple of weeks ago, a young man said to me on his way out of worship, “I didn’t know this was possible.” There is what I have characterized as “a sweet spirit” that is palpable when we gather each Sunday. It is not something that can be plotted in a data point. But it is also not something that happens without cultivation. As we continue through this Bicentennial Celebration year, I am deeply aware of the lay and clergy leaders—those “historical saints” we celebrated last week among them—who have labored to create the kind of faith community that is, as Rev. Dr. Phil Wogaman described it, “open” to God’s leading and to God’s Holy Spirit. I was moved by Rev. Wogaman’s comment about his desire upon retirement, that the best gift he could receive would be for Foundry to continue to grow in service, faithfulness, and numerically—in essence to continue being and becoming God’s church in this place.
In some ways, this is what Joshua asked of Israel as he drew near to his death. That is the context of our passage today. Joshua succeeded Moses as the leader of the people Israel, leading them across the Jordan River and into the land of Canaan, the land promised to their ancestors by Yahweh. Today, we read from the last chapter of both the book and the life of Joshua. Joshua gathered together all the twelve tribes of Israel and reminds them of their tribal lore, the stories of Yahweh’s providential and liberating action on their behalf beginning even a generation before Abraham. And then Joshua, in a rather dramatic way, says in so many words, “And now you have a choice to make. I am going to die. Will faithfulness to the covenant with Yahweh die with me?” His edited, oft-quoted phrase is powerful: “Choose this day whom you will serve…as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” The gathered people are ready with their response, “We also will serve the Lord, for he is our God.” (Joshua 24.18b) Joshua follows up with a challenge, a reminder that this decision needs to be made carefully. There is a “cost of discipleship,” there are consequences for betrayal of the covenant. But the people respond two more times before the whole thing is over, affirming their commitment and their choice. “We will serve the Lord!”
Israel was in a time of great transition, a time of uncertainty about the leadership moving forward, a time when many of the big goals had been reached (they were over the river and settled in the Promised Land, after all), a time when what it meant to be Israel was, perhaps, less than obvious, a time when the idols of the culture in which they lived were prevalent and appealing. And now it was up to them to choose: would they continue to be and to become the people of the covenant, the people of Yahweh, the people called to be a light for all the nations? Or not?
Today we here at Foundry find ourselves in a very similar situation. We, like Israel, are in a profound time of transition. At this time last year, there was great uncertainty about the pastoral leadership moving forward. You knew Dean was going, but you didn’t know who was coming! And, while now you know who you’ve got, there remains uncertainty—even as, I hope, there is some measure of assurance—as we come to know one another as pastor and congregation. Just as Israel had come such a long way to enter the promised land, Foundry has come a long way in meeting many congregational goals—clarifying core values, growing our children’s ministries, developing a vision for and beginning to implement much-needed improvements to our building through the Mission Possible campaign, reforming our processes and strengthening accountability for management of church finances, and leading the denomination on issues of LGBTQ inclusion and marriage equality; but a clear vision for the future is still emerging. Just as Israel was surrounded and influenced by the idols of Egypt and of Canaan, we are surrounded by the idols of our own culture, the idols of wealth, status, privilege, and control. And today we, like Israel of old, have a choice to make: whom or what shall we serve? Will we continue to make choices that ensure that Foundry continues to be and to become the church that God desires?
I was struck by what Joshua says after he is assured by the people of their choice: “Then put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel.” The “heart” in the time these words were written was understood as the decision making center of the human person, the seat of mind and will. We understand the heart as the locus of our love. These two aspects are, of course, related. What we love affects our will, our choices, our priorities, our actions. What we love is the key. One commentator points out that even though we know in hindsight that the promise the people make in our story today—the promise to serve and obey Yahweh—was broken time and again by Israel over the years, in this moment of covenant-making, the people deliberately, reverently, discreetly and in the fear of God said “I do” to God. In other words, they were acting out of an eyes-wide-open kind of love.
Anyone who has lived in covenant relationship with another person (whether that covenant has been recognized by anyone other than God or not) knows full well that when you choose to be in relationship, you never know what your life together will bring. The future is always full of both hope and uncertainty. A certain future is not what leads people into marriage; it is love and commitment to work together toward a shared life. And for any relationship to last, it has to be chosen again and again, day after day, in so many concrete ways. That is true for a relationship with a person, with God, and with your faith community. You have communicated very clearly to me that you love Foundry. And today, I’m encouraging each one of you to let that love lead you to re-commit—to choose again or for the first time—to support Foundry through your prayers, presence, financial gifts, service, and positive witness.
We know that no relationship is spared from seasons or occasions of challenge, pain, and struggle. We know that every relationship has room to grow stronger, to go deeper, to become even more life-giving. This has been true of the relationship between and among the people and Foundry through all of its 200 years. It is true today. There are places of tension, disappointment, disagreement, and gaps that need to be filled. There are opportunities to connect more broadly and meaningfully both in fellowship and in mission. We can do better in the ways that we hear and respond to concerns and new ideas. We need to continue to work on strengthening our youth ministry. And, like every church I’ve ever been a part of, we not only need to improve our communications, but also to try to come to some measure of peace around the issue of clapping in church! These things are always going to be present in some measure in communities of faith. They are part and parcel of a large, dynamic, engaged congregation!
Over my years in ministry, it has been curious to me when folks decide that the way to bring change is to withhold their prayers, presence, financial gifts, service, or supportive witness. I understand frustration and dissatisfaction with certain things—I am as impatient as anyone when things aren’t working as well as they could! But it is through healthy engagement and grace-filled relationship that things change, not through disengagement or withholding. Those things might work in other areas of our lives, but that’s not the way things should be in the Body of Christ. I could make a case theologically and biblically for this, but the very pragmatic argument would suggest that if, for example, you believe more resources need to be devoted to a certain area of ministry, then withholding your own resources from the Body isn’t going to help bring your desired change to fruition. This just seems like common sense to me.
In a large, dynamic congregation, we will always have differences of approach and philosophy around budgeting, designation of resources, processes, practices, priorities and more. But you should know that my approach is to put more energy into supporting respectful, committed, positive engagement (I’m not saying uncritical engagement) and less into responding to negative, blaming, withholding behavior. Energy is fuel and what I want to fuel—and what I have heard that YOU want to fuel—is creative, respectful, engagement that seeks solutions to our challenges and to the needs of a hurting world.
And, friends, that is happening! The house meetings incorporated time for participants to share what is meaningful to them about Foundry and what they would add or change. I heard celebrations of our congregation and frustrations and critiques. This is healthy engagement. Today, we will engage this process further through what we call a “Holy Conversation”—a time when I will be sharing the results of the house meetings/listening sessions and then inviting further conversation and feedback as we, together, move toward a vision and goals for the future. You are invited.
The other place that I am seeing faithful engagement is through our early results from the “Stretch to Connect” pledge campaign. 94 Foundry folks have chosen to make a commitment to the work God is doing through Foundry ahead of the November 21st deadline. The total already pledged is $530,461, almost 28% of our goal for 2015. Of the 94 pledges, 56 were either increases or new pledges altogether. Of course there are always things that happen in life and so some folks had to make a smaller commitment this year. But the primary point is that they still chose to make that commitment to God’s work. Making a pledge/commitment is so important, not only for us as a congregation to be good stewards of each gift, but also for the spiritual benefit that making such a commitment can provide you, the giver. It’s like crossing the threshold from dating to engaged or from engaged to married. Commitment deepens the relationship. No matter the size of the gift, making a concrete commitment is akin to saying, “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord!” I give thanks for the leadership of all of those—including every member of our Management Board—who have stepped up in this way already. And I give thanks, too, for all who are prayerfully and carefully considering whether you will choose to make a financial commitment to Foundry and, if so, what that will be.
In this historically significant year for Foundry Church it is particularly poignant to remember the choices that have been made all along the way, the daily choices to show up and love and serve, the sacrificial choices to give and to forgive, and the momentous choices to risk safety for the sake of the vulnerable and oppressed, all the choices that have made it possible for ministry and mission to grow and flourish in ways that continue to change lives—the lives of others and the lives of each one of us here today. And now it’s up to us…to choose this day whom and how we will serve…
What difference would it make if Foundry disappeared tomorrow? The very good news is that it would make a profound difference. The even better news is that Foundry isn’t going to disappear tomorrow or the next day or the next. This is God’s church. And by God’s grace and the faithful, loving choices of us all, Foundry United Methodist Church will remain a beacon of faithfulness, vitality, radical inclusion, and the power of the Holy Spirit at work in the world, not just through its third century, but even until the end of the age…
Sunday Nov 02, 2014
Sunday Oct 26, 2014
Sunday Oct 26, 2014
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC October 26, 2014, the nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
Matthew 18:15-20
“The small man / Builds cages for everyone / He / Knows. / While the sage, / Who has to duck his head / When the moon is low, / Keeps dropping keys all night long / For the / Beautiful / Rowdy / Prisoners.”[i] I have been praying with this poem of the Sufi mystic poet, Hafiz, as I wrestled with our scripture from Matthew.
In that passage, we hear Jesus say, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” (Mt. 18.18) This is the second time in Matthew that Jesus speaks of “binding” and “loosing.” The first is when Jesus names Peter as the rock upon which he will build the church and gives him the “keys to the kingdom of heaven.” (cf. Mt. 16.19) This past week at my Yale Divinity School Convocation, I heard Dr. Margaret Farley point out that these texts have often been interpreted as giving the church the authority to judge others, particularly regarding whether a person would be given entrance into heaven.
If you look at what appears just before the passage we have heard this morning, you’ll find teachings about welcoming the vulnerable and powerless (children) into the Kin-dom of heaven; you’ll hear about not putting stumbling blocks in the way of those who would enter; you’ll hear that it is not God’s will that any of the “little ones,” the lost sheep, be lost. Just after our passage, we hear Jesus teach about forgiving seventy times seven and then he tells a parable about what happens when those who have been forgiven by the King don’t offer the same to others. So while some might interpret our text today as giving the church authority to kick people out or keep people out, it seems that the context of the passage tells us that to “bind and loose” has something to do with bringing people IN to the Kin-dom, not kicking them out, of forgiving people, not making them pay even more. It seems that Jesus isn’t giving the church authority to build cages for people or to be the gate-keeper of heaven, but rather is giving out keys to set prisoners free. As Dr. Farley suggests, Jesus’ real question is: “If you, my followers, don’t care for the vulnerable and forgive people then who will?”
In order to more fully understand what is going on in our text today, it is helpful to know that “binding” and “loosing” are rabbinical terms for “forbidding and permitting.” And the power to forbid or to permit was, in Jesus’ time, claimed by the Pharisees. Further, “‘to bind’ and ‘to loose’ [refer] to a practice of determining the application of scriptural commandments for contemporary situations… Jewish rabbis ‘bound’ the law when they determined that a commandment was applicable to a particular situation, and they ‘loosed’ the law when they determined that a word of scripture (while eternally valid) was not applicable under certain specific circumstances.
Matthew's Gospel is commonly understood as reflecting a close connection to the world of Second Temple and post-Temple Judaism. [During this time,] debates over [how to apply] the law to specific situations were common… For example, the question was raised whether one might be guilty of stealing if one finds something and keeps it without searching for the rightful owner. When is such a search required, and how extensive must it be? The Talmud states, ‘If a fledgling bird is found within fifty cubits of a dovecote, it belongs to the owner of the dovecote. If it is found outside the limits of fifty cubits, it belongs to the person who finds it’ (Bava Batra 23b).
To use Matthew's terminology, the decision was that the law (‘Do not steal’) was bound when the bird was found in proximity to its likely owner; one who keeps the bird under such conditions has transgressed the law and is guilty of sin. But the law is loosed when the bird is found at a distance from any likely owner; the law against stealing does not forbid keeping the bird in that instance.”[ii]
Throughout Jesus’ public ministry he got into trouble many times because other rabbis thought he “loosed” the laws in inappropriate ways…Like the time Jesus healed the bent-over woman on the Sabbath and the leader of the synagogue became indignant that Jesus had broken the law of keeping Sabbath holy. Jesus’s response was to point out that everyone cares for their animals on the Sabbath (leading them to water) so why in the world would it be wrong to care for a daughter of God on the Sabbath? (Luke 13.10-17). In this story, Jesus shows that the law, interpreted and applied the way the leader of that synagogue perceived it, was “bound” in such a way that the suffering woman would, herself remain “bound” (just like the animal would remain tied up and thirsty if not cared for). Jesus “looses” the law in order to “loose” the woman from her suffering. Jesus doesn’t ignore the law or dismiss scripture or counter its authority. The issue that Jesus highlights has to do with interpretation of the law, with discernment of the law’s intent, and the sphere of its application. Jesus’ primary interpretive tool is love. When asked, Jesus was clear that “all the law and the prophets” hang on two commandments: to love God and to love neighbor. (Mt. 22.37-40) Paul puts it this way in Romans 13.10: “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”
Today we hear Jesus give the authority that had always been claimed by the Pharisees to his own disciples, granting them power to “bind and to loose” just as HE did. To bind or loose a law for the sake of love and justice is the point. And yet, it seems the church in every age must wrest itself free from the temptation to use the power given by Jesus in the very ways that Jesus spent and lost his life critiquing. It is so tempting to hold others hostage instead of to set them free, to punish instead of forgive, to do only what “works for us” instead of sacrificing our comfort for the sake of making room for another. Whenever we make anything more important than the liberating love and forgiveness of God, whenever we place a barrier between a person and their ability to receive and enter into the freedom of life in God’s love, we find ourselves standing with those whom Jesus judged again and again. Jesus, after all, is not in the business of doling out cheap grace. Jesus does judge the self-righteous, the arrogant, the selfish, the hypocrites who lay heavy burdens of expectation upon the backs of others but do nothing to help them, the gate-keepers who presume to say whom God has deemed worthy to preach or teach or pray or lead or love.
Today we await word of the outcome of the Judicial Council’s deliberations regarding the fate of Rev. Frank Schaefer, the de-frocked and re-frocked United Methodist pastor whose crime was to perform the marriage of his son and his son’s partner who happened to be a man. This is one very painful and current example of the ways that scriptural interpretation and the issue of “binding” and “loosing” the law continue to challenge the unity, community, and integrity of the church. Many believe that our stance here at Foundry of full inclusion for all persons in the life and ministry of the church and for marriage equality is “loosing” the law of scripture and church law inappropriately. I say that it is fulfilling the law of God’s love, loosing only those bonds that have kept sisters and brothers from being able to take their rightful place in the Body of Christ and to be supported by the church in the truly human work of being and becoming and celebrating fully who they are created to be.
The tensions and disagreements among a diverse Body of Christ will not go away. But it is our responsibility to prayerfully and courageously take responsibility for the ways in which we apply the law, both in Christian community and in the public square, knowing that others will land in a different place. We are responsible to account for whether or not love guides our decisions and actions toward others and whether Christ’s love is our guide in discerning what policies and systems we create or support. How do we “bind” or “loose” the commandments of God so that the commandment is followed in the way that it is intended—which is always going to have to do with health, life, mercy, liberation, and loving, mutual relationships? If the baseline is “do no wrong or harm to another” how does this teaching affect the ways we might think about tax policy? Immigration? The death penalty? (just to name a few) How does this teaching affect the ways we apply the Mosaic law? How do we “do no harm” to those who continue to do harm to us? Jesus gives an example of putting the law of love in action in our passage today, showing how to deal with conflict, how to deal honestly and directly with one who has hurt you in some way (as opposed to bad-mouthing them all over the place). And if you are wondering about the admonition to treat those who will not amend their ways as “Gentiles and tax collectors” I believe it is instructive to consider how Jesus treated those folks (a tax collector was among the twelve). In our relationships and communities we have the responsibility to discern HOW to love others. “When Jesus talked to the Pharisees, he didn’t say, ‘There there. Everything’s going to be all right.’ He said, ‘You brood of vipers! How can you speak good when you are evil!’ (Mt. 12.34) And he said that to them because he loved them.”[iii] We too have to discern what the loving response will be in every situation. Anyone who is a parent will understand this well. There are times when love means discipline and there are times when love calls for embrace.
These days, battles rage over laws and their interpretation and applications—both in the secular community and within the community of Christ’s followers. But even when it is tricky to figure out the most loving word to speak or action to take, for God’s sake let the love of Christ be your guide and then take a stand and do something. Because loving others as Christ loves us is what matters most of all. LOVE is the key to the Kin-dom. Jesus’ love is the key that sets us free, that opens the door to life in God’s Kin-dom. And as those so liberated, Jesus gives us the joyful responsibility to go about dropping keys for other beautiful, rowdy prisoners…
[i] Hafiz, “Dropping Keys,” in The Gift:Poems by Hafiz, The Great Sufi Master, trans. Daniel Ladinsky, Penguin Compass Press, 1999, p. 206.
[ii] Mark Allan Powell "Binding and loosing: a paradigm for ethical discernment from the Gospel of Matthew". Currents in Theology and Mission. FindArticles.com. 02 Sep, 2011. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0MDO/is_6_30/ai_111696785/ COPYRIGHT 2003 Lutheran School of Theology and Mission
[iii] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993, p. 65.
Sunday Oct 19, 2014
Sunday Oct 19, 2014
Youth Testimonies: Charlie Nichols, Ling O’Donoghue, Caleb Gri-Abbott
Scripture: Hebrews 11:1-3, 6
Sunday Oct 12, 2014
Sunday Oct 12, 2014
Preaching: Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli, Senior Pastor
Scripture: Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16