Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons

Life Essentials: Sleep

Rev. Dean Snyder

Psalm 121:1-8; 127:1-2

The United Methodist Church has two official sacraments. They are? Communion and Baptism.

The official definition of a sacrament is that it is “an outward sign of inward grace, and a means whereby we receive the same.”

So Communion is an outward act --eating and drinking—through which we appropriate (we get) some of the grace of God.

Baptism is an outward sign –water—through which we appropriate the grace of God when we are baptized and every time we remember our baptism.

Both of our official sacraments have a long history on which they are partially based in Judaism. Communion has a history in the Passover Seder meal.

Baptism has a history in the Jewish practice of Mikvah or ritual bathing.  Next Sunday, as part of the sermon, Dawn is going to interview Naomi Malka. Naomi is a staff member of Congregation Adas Israel here in DC and her job title is Ritual Coordinator & Mikvah Director. She trained as a Mikvah guide at Mayyim Hayyim which is a Mikvah center and school in Newton, MA. She has developed a program for her synagogue called “Bodies of Water” for Jewish women and girls ages 10 and up to learn about Mikvah as a tool for positive body image and healthy decision making from a Jewish perspective.

So she is going to share about bathing rituals within the Jewish tradition as we think about baptism and washing as a Christian sacrament.

The other interesting thing is that Naomi has never been to a Christian worship service before. So next Sunday would be a good Sunday to pay attention to ideas in our service and hymns that might seem anti-Jewish. You know that Christianity began as a Jewish movement within Judaism. And eventually the traditional establishment Jewish people and the more fringe Jewish people who followed Rabbi Jewish had more and more tension. Some ideas got in the Bible which sound anti-Jewish unless you realize this was a family fight. Who knows that there are some things I can say about my family that you can’t say about them without being offensive?  So when Gentiles started repeating what Jews had said about one another it became anti-Jewish and supported anti-Semitism. 

So we need to be real careful today how we repeat the Scriptures. I know not everybody likes this but we are followers of someone who said to treat other people the way you’d want them to treat you.

So I know you will treat Naomi with respect next Sunday and be attentive and hospitable and warm because that it the kind of people most of you are.

I think it will be a great learning experience.

Now, Communion is not the same thing as a Seder. The ritual and its meaning has evolved, but understanding the Seder helps us understand some of the connotations of Communion.

Christian baptism is not the same thing as the Jewish Mikvah. For one thing we are only baptized once because Christian baptism never wears off. But I think understanding something about Mikvah may add to the richness of our understanding of baptism.

While we have two official sacramental, there are many activities in our lives that are sacrament-like or sacramental. They are ordinary life essentials --things we do every day-- that are signs and means of the grace of God. 

We are talking about a few of these during Lent this year and the life essential I’d like us to think about today is sleeping. Sleep is a sign and means of the grace of God.

Until someone sent me an article on Facebook, I did not know that last week was National Sleep Awareness Week. I did not even know there was a National Sleep Awareness Week. At the beginning of the week the National Sleep Foundation issued its annual poll and study. This year the poll focused on sleep and the family and it discovered that children sleep better when parents establish rules, limit technology and set a good example.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science had a special session with professors from Harvard and elsewhere on the science of sleep and dreaming.

There have been lots of good articles around as to how important good sleep is to our health and vitality and articles about what we can do to sleep better: things like having a regular bedtime, not watching anything with a screen for 2 hours before our bedtime --we should not not sleeping with our ipads-- not drinking alcohol during the two hours before bedtime, doing something that makes us sweat at least ½  hour every day.

You can find out all those things easily enough. The problem isn’t a lack of access to information about what we ought to do to sleep better, is it? Not in my experience.

So I want to think with you not so much about the how-tos of sleeping better, and I know that some of us struggle with physical and psychological sleep disorders that require medical attention. If you suffer from a sleep disorder, please see a physician.  What I say this morning is not going to address medical sleep disorders

But I do think that sleep can be sacramental. It can be a sign and means of God’s grace. God’s grace can cover us while we sleep.

I want to start with two statements just a few chapters apart in the Book of Psalms. Psalm 121 says “[The One] who keeps you will not slumber. [The One] who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” God does not sleep, the Psalmist says.

Just a few Psalms later Psalm 127 says that if God doesn’t sleep, we should. Psalm 127 says that sleep is a gift to us from God because God loves us.

Listen to Psalm 127:2 “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for God gives sleep to God’s beloved.”

Let me read it again: “It is in vain (useless, futile, a waste of time and energy) that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for God gives sleep to God’s beloved.”

Everybody who works in Washington, DC, should have this verse of Scripture Psalm 127:2 tattooed on the back of our hand so it is the first thing and the last thing we see day and night when we sit down at our computers:

“It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for God gives sleep to God’s beloved.”

Or try it the way Eugene Peterson translates it in The Message:                 “It's useless to rise early and go to bed late, and work your worried fingers to the bone. Don't you know [God] enjoys giving rest to those [God] loves?

God enjoys it when you sleep well.

I want to suggest three ways sleep is sacramental – a sign and means of grace.

First: sleep is an expression of faith and trust in God. When we go to sleep we give up control and trust God to run the universe without our help for a few hours. It is an expression of faith that God can manage without us telling God what to do.

The Book of Psalms is the best book of the Bible on sleep. Psalm 4:8 says: “I will both lie down and sleep in peace; for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety.”

Psalm 3 “O Lord, how many are my foes! … But you, O Lord, are a shield around me … I lie down and sleep; I wake again, for the Lord sustains me. I am not afraid …” (Psalm 3: 3-6)

The Book of Proverbs is good too. Proverbs 3 “Do not be afraid of sudden panic, or of the storm that strikes the wicked; for the Lord will be your confidence …  If you sit down, you will not be afraid; when you lie down, your sleep will be sweet.”

Whether or not someone is explicitly religious or not, lying down in bed and letting go of our striving and work and control is an act of faith.

So sleep is sacramental because it is an act of faith and trust in God.

And it may help for us to make this explicit, to have a going-to-sleep ritual. Maybe a Psalm we repeat when we turn off the light: “I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you O Lord, make me lie down in safety.”

Or maybe we think back through our day and offer the day hour by hour and trust God with it.

Or maybe we thank God for the day behind us and for the opportunities of the day ahead.

Some ritual that helps us remember that all of life is a gift from God and that sleeping is an act of faith.

Sleep is sacramental because it is a sign and a means of trust.

Number 2, sleep is sacramental because it is an act of allowing grace to permeate beneath our conscious selves into the wild and insecure places within us.

All day long we spend our energy suppressing and repressing the parts of our deep unconscious selves that we don’t like and don’t want others or God to know about.

As the poet Karl Sandberg said: There is a zoo in me.  There is a wolf in me. There is a fox in me. There is a hog in me. There is a baboon in me. There is a mocking bird in me. O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart …

There is a zoo in me and all day I work at being a zoo-keeper.

I’ve got all this stuff in me –, anger, jealousy, lust, fear, insecurity, anxiety  – and I spend all day trying to repress and suppress and hide it and overcompensate for it, but at night when I enter REM sleep, I give up control of even my unconscious and the animals come of of their cages

Here’s the grace I can experience in REM sleep-- I may discover that God doesn’t just love the kindly, friendly, caring, selfless, competent, self-assured person I pretend and try to be all day long. God also loves the messy, selfish, needy, angry, rude, scared-to-death little boy inside me that I only let out in Stage Three sleep in my dreams.

A couple of days ago I had a dream in which I was assigned to teach a crowd of r for a day and they would not stop talking and listen to me. A man, maybe another teacher, came up to me and told me that he was a friend of Chuck Hilty. Chuck’s friend said to me “Chuck tells me everybody listens to you when you are in the pulpit.” But in my dream I can’t get anybody to listen to me and Chuck’s friend just stands there with a smug look on his face.

Inside of me is an insecure Dean who thinks nobody would want to listen to me if I weren’t hiding inside a pulpit.

And if I listen to my dreams and incorporate them into my conscious awareness I can experience the grace and love of God for not only the me Chuck Hilty thinks I am –or that my unconscious thinks Chuck Hilty thinks I am—for the Dean who can’t get a group of teenagers to stop talking to each other to pay attention to anything.  

REM sleep – when our  unconscious self is most likely to emerge in our dreams—can be a time of g healing and deep grace when we can  reincorporate repressed parts of ourselves into our conscious lives that make us more whole. On and off over the years I’ve kept a dream journal. It is an experience of grace and healing to sit with those journals and let God love the zoo in me.

The third way that sleep can be sacramental is that it embodies and models the rhythm of well lived life.  

Proverbs 6 says we can sleep too much. Proverbs 6:

“ Go to the ant, you lazybones; consider its ways, and be wise. Without having any chief or officer or ruler, it prepares its food in summer, and gathers its sustenance in harvest. How long will you lie there, O lazybones? When will you rise from your sleep?”

Ecclesiastes 5:12 says:  “Sweet is the sleep of laborers, whether they eat little or much; but the surfeit [the excess] of the rich will not let them sleep.”

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached a sermon on sleep. Sermon 93 of the Standard sermons entitled “On Redeeming the Time”  for you Wesley scholars in the congregation.

The first part of Wesley’s sermon is about how he understands we are all different but he is skeptical of people who say they need only a few hours of sleep a night. He says he has never known a person  who can do well for more than a short time with less than at least six hours of sleep. Don’t try to sleep too little, he warns.  

The second half of the sermon he warns people about not sleeping too much.

Because we need a rhythm of life that includes both receiving and giving, resting and working, being and doing. 

There is a way both sleep and work are sacramental. We receive grace when we let go and rest. We receive grace when we serve God and others and the world in our work.

So perhaps it might also be good to have a morning ritual. Just as we trust ourselves at night to God’s care and grace, to begin a new day by committing our work to God and God’s kingdom.

My fear often is that we contemporary people of faith try to squeeze all of our spirituality into one hour in church a week. So I want to suggest that if we turn your sleep into an explicit act of faith, an act of trust, and act of opening ourselves to grace and acceptance of our deepest selves, and if we offering our working days to God’s service, perhaps then we can actually do what the Apostle Paul tells us to do – to pray without ceasing.

Life Essentials: Breathe

Rev. Dean Snyder

Genesis 2:4-8
John 20:19-22

Let me say a word about the series we are doing during Lent. It is part of our overall “Strengthening our Core” theme.  Our overarching theme is how we can be strong, healthy, and well-balanced people of faith and a strong, healthy, and well-balanced congregation. The people at my gym tell me that you become stronger, healthier, more balanced by strengthening your core.

This particular series for Lent we are calling Life Essentials:  Basic things in life that are important for physical and emotional health … things like breathing, eating right, sleeping, bathing, exercising, crying and laughing.

Here’s our thesis:  that the ordinary essentials of life can be means through which we may be touched by divine graces.

The church explicitly says this about two daily essentials of life- bathing and eating. The United Methodist Church has two official Sacraments – baptism which is a bathing ritual and communion which is an eating and drinking ritual.

Part of the meaning of these sacred rituals is to say that every time we bath, we can remember that we are spiritually made clean by the forgiving grace of God in Jesus Christ. Every time we eat and drink with one another, we can remember that we are spiritually feed and nurtured by God and by the communities of grace and acceptance that we are part of.

While we only have two official Sacraments, there are many aspects of our ordinary daily lives that are sacrament-like or sacramental. They are ordinary, mundane activities of life through which the grace of God can flow into our lives.

We’ve come up with a list of 7 of these to focus on in sermons for Lent and Easter Sunday. Our staff actually brainstormed a longer list but these are the ones that we decided to focus on. Breathing, eating, sleeping, bathing, exercising, crying and laughing.

We want to start out with one of the most elemental, basic elements of life …. Breathing.

 To get us started on thinking about how breathing can be an experience of divine grace, Pastor Dawn is going to have a conversation with Candice Audrey who is a teacher of  Kundalini yoga, a form of yoga that includes a lot of breath work to release spiritual energy within us.     

[Dawn interviews Candice who leads the congregation in simple breathing exercises.]

Some of the ideas I am going to share this morning are from a video by Rob Bell called Breathe. I encourage you to watch it. Google Rob Bell Breathe and you will find it.

 There is a story in the Bible about when God called Moses from a burning bush to send him to lead the Israelites from slavery to freedom. During the conversation between Moses and God, Moses asked God “If I am asked, who should I say sent me? Basically, he asked God “What is your name.”

God answered by saying four letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In English they would be the letters YHVH. This is an unpronounceable name because there are no vowels in it. Scholars have added vowels and so we pronounce it Yahweh. And we add some other words often to translate it “I am who I am.”

Some ancient rabbis believed that vowels and extra words should not be added. They said that the four Hebrew letters would be pronounced “Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh” and that this was actually meant to represent the sound of breathing.  They argued that the name of God was the sound of our breath.[i]

What if the old rabbis were right? What would it mean if the name of God is the sound of us breathing?

Now go to Genesis. The book of Genesis begins with this statement:  “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” Genesis 1:1-2

The Hebrew word translated “Wind from God” is the word Ruwach which has more than one meaning. It can be translated legitimately as either wind, spirit or breath. The New Revised Version says a wind from God swept over the waters of chaos.  The King James version said the spirit of God swept over the face of the waters. The Knox translation says that “over the waters already stirred the breath of God.”

If K nox was right about the writer’s intent, is it possible that creation began by God breathing and that the “Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh” of God is what began to bring order out of chaos?

Now jump ahead in Genesis a chapter of two. Our first Scripture reading for today from Genesis says that God fashioned adam (the Hebrew word for human being) out of the dust of the earth and then breathed into adam’s nostrils the breath of life; and adam became a living being.  

It is the breath or spirit or wind of God entering into the pile of dust that is adam that gives adam life.

What if God is somehow intimately related to your breath and my breath? Psalm 150 says “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.” What if God is somehow in the breath of all life?

In our second reading from the Gospel of John, the risen Christ walks through the locked door of the room where the disciples were hiding for fear they might be crucified too and Jesus breathes on them and says: “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

What if the Holy Spirit comes into us and goes forth from us like our breath?  What if the way the Holy Spirit is passed on is when someone who is filled with the spirit breathes it on me and I breathe in the Holy Spirit and then breathe it into someone else?

It is fascinating to read about breathing. Apparently most of us are shallow breathers. We breathe air into our lungs instead of into our stomachs. We hardly ever become really full of fresh air.

One of the reasons for this is because to become full of fresh air we need to exhale all of the air inside of us. We can’t take in what we will not let go of.

And apparently the more anxious we become the more we want to hold on to the air already inside of us and our breathing becomes more and more shallow.  The cure sometimes to anxiety is to pause and focus on taking deep breaths. Letting go and trusting it we let go there will be new air, fresher air, to take its place.

We can’t take in fresh air without letting go of the old air.

Which is almost like saying that we cannot take in new life unless we are willing to die to our old lives.

I think the breath of God, the Spirit of God, may be like breathing. From the moment we enter this world from our mothers’ womb and breathe our first breath, God’s spirit is entering us to give us life and life abundant. I think the spirit of God dwells in everyone who has breath. I think God wants us to breathe God’s spirit in deeper and deeper and deeper.

In physics and engineering there is a kind of problem students are asked to solve that is called a Fermi problem. Fermi problems are problems about probability.  One of the most famous of Fermi problems students get assigned to solve is called “Caesar’s breath.” Has anyone heard of this?  

The problem is to determine how many molecules of Julius Caesar’s last breath you and I are in all probability breathing right now.  A long complicated mathematical process is used to determine this. The answer is that each of us is breathing at least one molecule of Julius Caesar’s last breath right now.

Apparently if the physicists are right, we are all breathing the same molecules that every living being has breather throughout all of history. We breathe the same molecules every living being before us  has breathed --- from Jesus Christ to Hitler..  

And we breathe the same molecules of air that every other human being alive today on planet earth breathes. If you have someone that you have such strong feelings about that you don’t want to breathe the same air they do, you are going to have to stop breathing to accomplish that. We all breathe the same air – not in a general sense but concretely. .

And those who follow us here on earth after we have stopped breathing will breathe the very same molecules that are giving us life right now.

And the stories of the Bible say that God is somewhere in this. It is God who gives us breath and who gives breath to all life. Breathing is sacramental. It is a means of grace. With every breath we receive grace. Each breath is a way grace enters our lives.

I want to encourage you this week to take one, two, three minutes each day this week – maybe at the beginning of end of your day, maybe at the most stressful time of your day, to be conscious of your breath. To breathe deeply.

And to maybe recite in your mind as you breath the words: “Breathe on me breath of God. Fill me with love divine.”

 

 

[i] Referenced by Rob Bell in a video at http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3d5q6_nooma-breathe-014_creation

Transfigurations

Rev. Charlie Parker

Exodus 24:12-18 & Matthew 17:1-9

No manuscript

When the Magic Fails

Rev. Dean Snyder

1 Kings 19:1-18

 

The Bible names 42 kings who served as the kings of Israel and Judah during Old Testament times. Other than David and Solomon and a couple kings of Judah, the Bible does not speak favorably or positively about any of them. 

But of all the kings the Bible criticizes, no king is criticized more than the 7^th king of Israel after Solomon: Ahab, son of Omri. I King 16:30 says that Ahab did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel before him.”

One of the things Ahab did was to marry a Phoenician woman named Jezebel, one of the most hated women of the Bible. Do not name your daughter Jezebel. You can name your cat Jezebel but not your daughter.  

Queen Jezebel worshipped the god Baal –the most popular god of the middle east—and she was determined to rid Israel of the worship of the god the Israelites called Yahweh, which means I Am Who I Am.

Jezebel built a great temple to Baal in Israel, she built an altar to Baal in the palace, she brought 450 priests of Baalism into Israel to convert all of Israel to her religion and to eradicate the worship of Yahweh.

The book of First Kings in the Bible, chapters 17 to 19 tells the story about an absolutely amazing person in Israel … a prophet and miracle worker named Elijah. Elijah seemed to be the one person in Israel willing to take a strong public stand in opposition to Queen Jezebel’s program to eradicate the worship of Yahweh from Israel.

Elijah was stunning. Absolutely  amazing.

He was smart. He was brash. He was fearless. He made miracles happen.  

He was magic.

Baal was a weather god. People prayed to Baal to protect them from bad storms and to grant them rain and fertility for their crops.

Elijah decided to show Queen Jezebel and her priests who was really in charge of the weather. On Yahweh’s behalf, he declared a drought in the land of Israel, and it stopped raining for three years. No rain or even dew in the morning for three years.  

Take that, Baal.

For part of that time Elijah lived with a widow, and because she fed Elijah, her flour barrel miraculously never went empty even when others were starving. When the widow’s young son died Elijah raised thim from the dead. Elijah was a miracle worker.  

After three years when the drought ended, Elijah challenged the priests of Baal to a contest.

He and the priests would both built altars to their respective gods. They would each sacrifice a bull on their altar and pray for fire to come down from heaven and consume the sacrifice.

The priests of Baal went first.  They sacrificed their bull and prayed for fire from heaven. No fire came so they prayed louder and louder and still no fire came. They cut themselves and cried out in pain, still no fire.

Elijah was something.  He stood there jeering, mocking the priests: Maybe you should shout louder. Maybe your god has wandered away. Maybe your god is on vacation. Maybe your god is asleep. Elijah invented trash talk.

No fire came for the priests of Baal. .

Then Elijah sacrificed his bull. He had people fill four barrels of water and soak his altar. He had them fill the barrels again and soak the altar even more. He had them soak it a third time.

Then he spoke his prayer up to heaven and fire came from heaven and consumed the bull, the altar, the stones setting next to the altar, and the pools of water.

Elijah ordered the priests of Baal killed.

Elijah knew no fear. He could not lose. He was the mighty miracle worker of the Lord God Yahweh who could stop the rain and call down fire from heaven. Elijah was a winner.  

It is a heady experience. To be willing to take on every battle for God and right. To be willing to fight to the end. To be a winner for God.

But overnight something changed in Elijah. It happened literally overnight.

Queen Jezebel sent a personal message to Elijah that she swore that he soon would be as dead as her prophets. In spite of all the miracles that had happened, all of the manifestations of God’s power that he had seen and been part of, Elijah suddenly became fearful, full of fear, and he ran for his life.

Elijah lost his confidence. He lost his faith. He lost his boldness.  For Elijah, the magic died.

He ran for 30 days and then hid in a cave like a scared child. The mighty miracle worker of Lord God Yahweh hid in a cave like a frightened child.  

In the cave, a Word came to Elijah. The Word told him to stand at the entrance of the cave because the Lord God Yahweh was about to pass by.

Elijah stood at the entrance to the cave. A hurricane passed by, but God was not in the hurricane. After the hurricane, there was an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake, there was a fire but God was not in the fire.

After the fire there was shire silence.

And God was in the silence.

Elijah – who had trusted in power and might and miracles and magic—discovered that God was not in the hurricane or the earthquake or the fire but in shire silence.

He also realizes for the first time that he is not alone. There are 7,000 others in Israel who have not bowed their knees to Baal.

He turns from being a solitary hero to become a part of a faithful community of followers of Yahweh.  

Carlyle Marney was one of my heroes when I was a young preacher. It has been 36 years ago already since Marney died of a heart attack in 1978.

Marney was a Southern Baptist preacher who advocated for racial justice and equality for women and respect for other religions. He was surely one of the first Christian ministers to speak out against homophobia in an address and article he published in 1966. 1966!

After serving for many years as pastor of Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, Marney retired at a relatively young age.

From the study I’ve done of his life, I suspect he’d gotten a little tired of the constant struggle. I suspect he also gotten a little tired of the sound of his own voice. He’d been preaching for a long time. I suspect he felt as though maybe the spark was gone … that he was just saying the same things over and over again.

He retired to a piece of land on Wolf Penn Mountain in North Carolina.

He said he thought that if he could just get out of the fast paced, demanding, conflict-driven life he was living, that God would speak to him again in a new way. There would be a new word for him from God. He said he thought if he could just get some time and space on Wolf Penn Mountain (these are his words) he said he “reckoned God would begin to jabber at him.”

Instead, he said, like Elijah at the doorway of his cave, all he heard was shire silence.

As though there would be no new word from God until we had done what God had already told us to do – to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly.    

Marney spent the rest of his life counseling pastors who had been worn down and beaten by the battles within the mainline churches that began in those days. He invested the rest of his life in the 7000 others who had not bowed down to Baal.

I am glad for every word God wants to speak. I am glad for every miracle and mighty work that God wants to do.  

But I suspect times come when God just decides to be silent and God waits for us to speak. I suspect times come when God decides just to be still and God waits for us to do miracles and mighty acts of justice.

This past season we’ve been studying stories of strength and weakness from the Bible. And if there is one statement that would sum up all the stories we’ve looked at –from Jacob to Ruth and Naomi to King David and Solomon to Elijah-- I think it would be a statement made by the Apostle Paul in Second Corinthians. Paul wrote:  “When I am weak, then I am strong … for the Lord’s power is made perfect in weakness.”

Paul writes that the Lord said to him: “My grace is sufficient for you because my power is made perfect in your weakness.”

So it may be that when we are weak and afraid and broken and most dependent on grace that is when we are really strong.

On His Way Rejoicing

Rev. Dr. Candace Shultis

Acts 8:26-39