Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons

Being the Friend of the Friends of Christ

Rev. Dean Snyder

Acts 10:1-17

Thanks to our youth. We had three youth mission trips this summer– our junior highs gleaned with the Society of St. Andrews, our senior highs served with the Appalachian Project, then some youth, college students and adults did a study trip to Turkey.

I want to say a word of thanks to the adults of this congregation who serve with our youth in many different ways all year long. Some teach Sunday youth classes, some serve as chaperons on retreats or mission trips, some support our youth choir, some serve as mentors with our confirmation class. If you have served as an adult supported of our youth ministries please stand so we might see who you are.

Here is our goal. There should be five adults supporting youth ministry for every young person active with our church. One of our goals over this year is to grow adult hands-on support of youth ministry.

And I want to thank our parents who devote the time and energy to get their youth here to church and who support their involvement in worship, study, retreats and mission. Would our youth parents please rise.

Theresa Thames and Dawn Hand have developed the best youth ministry plan I have seen in my years at Foundry. Either Theresa or Dawn or both have been at every youth event during the past year. So I want to thank Theresa and Dawn for their commitment to our youth.

Copies of our youth ministry plan are on the internet. We have a few hard copies for those who don’t have internet access in the office. There is a letter from our Foundry board about their support for youth ministry. I want to also thank for our board for its engagement in our youth ministry plan and the work they are doing to make sure our plan is strong and well implemented.

So thanks to everyone.

Yesterday I did something I have never done before since I was appointed pastor of a church for the first time 45 years ago. I did a baptism at a wedding.

Kathleen and Lou Ann met and fell in love six years ago before same sex marriage was legal in DC. They felt called to become parents and applied to adopt a baby. When marriage became legal their social worker told them that changing their marital status might delay the possibility of adoption so they put off getting married and put it off.

Then they decided maybe adoption wasn’t going to happen so they may as well go ahead with the wedding. The attended one of our preCana weekends, set a wedding date and almost as soon as they did they got a call that said a baby was going to be available to adopt. So just this past week the adoption was completed, yesterday we had the wedding, and during the wedding we did something I’d never done before in 45 years of ministry, we baptized Ava during her parent’s wedding. 

So I want you to be aware that the struggle for marriage equality continues in the United Methodist church. It has just been announced that the Rev. Frank Schaeffer of Iona, Pennsylvania, will go on trial in a church trial for conducting his son’s same-gender wedding six years ago. The trial will be held at Camp Innabah retreat center in Spring City Pennsylvania Nov. 18 and 19th. Some of us need to be there. All of us will need to be in prayer for Frank and his family and Zion United Methodist church of Iona.

Prayer

I have just a few additional words this morning.

We are focusing each Sunday on Foundry’s core values which you will find on the last page inside your bulletin. Today, as our youth have already discussed, our core value is diversity. We celebrate diversity.

For several years I was responsible for congregational development in the Baltimore-Washington Conference. We had a number of cases where the demographics around Methodist churches were changing. The traditional white anglo church in the neighborhood would be decreasing in numbers and resources while there might be a new language congregation –Korean, Hispanic, Indiazn, African—emerging.

So one of our strategies was to have the new congregation share the same building with the traditional anglo congregation. This way the new congregation could help with the expenses of maintaining the building.

When there was difficulty making this work there was always one room the two congregation had the most trouble sharing. Turn.

Apparently traditional anglo people eat food with very little aroma.

In the book of Acts, when the spirit of God decided to end the separation between Jew and gentile, one of the hardest parts of the new era was getting people to share the same kitchen.

Because their reading of the Bible at the time was so narrow and literal, the Holy Spirit had to speak to the disciples in dreams to get them to understand that God’s goal was one humanity who live together, prayed together, and ate together. 

He gave Peter a dream in which all of the non-kosher foods of the world appeared and a voice form heaven in his dream told Peter to eat it.

Peter said I’ve never eaten shrimp, I’ve never eaten bacon. I’ve never eaten anything unclean or profane.

The voice said, Don’t call unclean anything that I have made. Nothing and no one I have made is profane.  

I want to say a word of thanks to Sarah Stiles and Mark Abe picnic.

Being the Hands of Christ

Rev. Dean Snyder

Luke 10:25-37

There was a classic experiment done several decades ago at Princeton University. It involved dozens of students at the Princeton School of Theology.

The students were assembled in one building and told they had to go to a different building, and give a talk one at a time. They were put into two different groups, and each told a different topic that they would have to talk about.

On their way to give a talk one at a time, each one of them came across a person in need … a stranger slumped in an alley, semi-conscious, groaning. Someone obviously in trouble.

A majority of the students did not offer help of any kind. A majority of the students did not even stop to check on the person. And they were not just any students...they were seminary students. They were studying to become pastors.

They were given one of two topics that they would have to speak on. One group was told that they would have to give a talk about different jobs that a seminarian might like to take. The other group was given a Bible passage to read and then told that they would have to preach a sermon on that Bible passage. The Bible passage they were given was the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Here’s one of the shocking findings of the experiment. Students, seminarians preparing to be pastors, who had just studied the parable of the Good Samaritan and were on their way to give a sermon about the parable of the Good Samaritan were no more likely to stop to help a hurting person slumped in a doorway than people who were not thinking about the parable of the Good Samaritan at all. Apparently it is not just studying the story about the Good Samaritan that causes people become one.

What was the bottom line finding of that study was? Princeton Seminary is a Presbyterian Seminary so the obvious finding is that Presbyterian seminarians are inferior to Methodist seminarians.

No. The implication is that it is easy for there to be a gap between what we practice and what we preach.

Right now we are taking a few minutes each Sunday to look at our Foundry core values. You will find them on the last page of your bulletin. Today we are spending a few minutes on the third core value: We serve God by serving others. The second of Christ’s greatest commandments is to love each other. We make personal commitments to work with people in our neighborhood and around the world.

Each Sunday we talk about ways that we try to live out each value.

Today I want to say a word about our Walk-In Mission.

We have a team of volunteers … servants really … who give hours each week to serve people in our community who have been mugged by life. One of the big things they do is to help people get copies of their birth certificates so they can get IDs because if you don’t have an ID you can not get a job, you can not get help, you may not be able to get a place to live. But the Walk-In mission also gives people who need them clothing, sandwiches prepared by Sandwich 1000. Referrals to other services.

One of our Walk-In volunteers is Alan Stewart who is here at this service.  Alan worked with a quiet, soft-spoken young man who was new to DC from Texas.  He’d had his wallet stolen and had no ID whatsoever.  Because he had grown up in the Texas foster care system, he had no relatives to sign for his birth certificate.  Alan worked with this young man for two weeks to do the paperwork requirements to get his ID.  Sometime later, Alan met this young man coming out of the Safeway with a huge smile on his face.  He told Alan that he had his ID and that things were finally falling into place for him.

So we are thankful to all of our Walk-In volunteers. Alan Stewart, Ron Schoolmeester and Joan Williams who runs our clothing closet. Jane Northern. If you have any questions about how you might become involved, talk to one of these persons.

But Walk-In is only one way we live out the value of serving God by serving others. If you go to our ministry team page on our websites you will find many ways to serve. The question is – Is this value of help others a pathway that would help you grow spiritually and as a follower of Jesus at this particular [time in your life. That is what we are inviting you to think about each Sunday as we talk about each of our values.

Here is what the Princeton experiment really discovered. A majority of students, seminary students preparing to be pastors, did not stop to help even after studying the parable of the Good Samaritan.

The only variable that made it more or less likely for a student to stop and help was how hurried they were … how much time they had been given to prepare their speech and to get to the building where they had to give it. They found that students who were given more time and who were less hurried were much more likely to stop to help.

So the question for many of us in the busy lives we lead is Will we do what we have to do to make time in our lives to practice what we say we believe?

Seeing through the eyes of Christ

Rev. Dean Snyder

Galatians 3:23-29

Gal 3:23 Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. 24 Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. 25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, 26 for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. 27 As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise.

 

Several years ago when our daughter was living and teaching in Guatemala and we were visiting her, we spent a day with David Young, a member here at Foundry, who was working in the U.S. embassy in Guatemala at the time. We traveled to the far north of Guatemala to the mountains  to meet with a group of Methodist pastors and leaders there.

They were native people who spoke a native language so we needed two translators …. one to translate their language into Spanish and another to translate Spanish into English for us. It was a slow, long, good conversation.

Their Methodist church in this particular community had a number of congregations. They had a medical clinic and a dental clinic and schools and a housing repair program and more.

During the conversation, I asked the pastors if they had grown up Methodists. The answer was no. Why had they become Methodists? I asked.

Through the slow process of dual translations, the most senior pastor answered that they had become Methodists because the other churches there focused only on saving souls.

It is important to care about souls, he said, but Methodists also care about minds, bodies and spirits. We wanted to be part of a church, he said, that cares about life here and now as well as after death … that cares about health, education, and community as well as the salvation of the soul.

All the others in room energetically nodded their agreement and they felt so passionately about it that they began to talk faster  than the translators could translate.

They knew why they were Methodists.

The Methodist movement that began in early 18^th century England was influenced by a Presbyterian preacher named George Whitfield. Whitfield was a great orator, and he drew large crowds. He was an early practitioner of something the British called field preaching … which was preaching in an open field to whatever crowds would come.

It was George Whitfield who talked his Oxford University classmate and friend John Wesley into joining him in field preaching to the coal miners of Bristol.

John Wesley was not the orator that Whitfield was. But John Wesley had a vision Whitfield did not have.

In addition to seeing souls to be saved, Wesley saw minds to be educated, bodies to be healed, and spirits to be liberated from addiction and shame.

The Methodist movement that Wesley built did not focus on preaching alone. It also focused on literacy, on education, on vocational training, on health education and health clinics, on support groups (some say the precursor to AA), and even on micro-lending to help people start small businesses.

This is what Methodism is at its best … new life and new possibilities for the whole person, soul, mind, body and spirit.

We are studying our Foundry church values right now.

Our board spent a year listening including our leaders day earlier this year when 70 or so leaders of ministry teams and small groups gathered to talk about what makes Foundry …. Our core values.

The board developed eight core values which you will find on your bulletin and on our website.

So we are looking at each core value and we are looking at our ministries teams that actually do the ministry of living out our core values and we are inviting everyone to think and pray about joining a ministry team that will support your growth in faith and discipleship.

Last week we  talked about how our life together is shaped by the way Jesus showed us the heart of God. We want to learn to think like Christ.

Today our core value is humanity.    The core value says: “We honor humanity as well as divinity. We believe all people are children of God, and we treat them that way.”

There are two things I want to suggest about this value.   

The first is that it is good to be human and all that comes along with being human. One of my favorite passages in the Bible is from Hebrews, chapter 2, which says because we are flesh and blood, Jesus took on flesh and blood so that he could be in community with us. And then Hebrews adds: “It is clear he did not come to help angels but the descendants of Abraham [and Sarah]. (Heb. 2:  14-18)

Our human condition, our human bodies, our human minds, our human spirits are not bad things that we should be ashamed of or want to escape.

Christ wanted every human being to thrive as a human being. To be physically healthy. To be intellectually alive. To be enthusiastic about life. To be part of meaningful community. To have the opportunity to contribute to the larger whole.

It is good to be human.

Much of the ministry we do here at Foundry is intended to help people do very human things like eat, wash, have a place to live, and a community to be part of.

All of human life – birth, growth, learning, sexuality, reproduction, work, love, politics, commerce, industry, struggle, aging … it is all good!

We do not want to become angels. We do not want you to be an angel. We want to live human lives in human community with Christ who became human so that he could hang with us. He did not come to turn us into angels but to teach us how to be fully human. 

We care about human existence on earth … the quality of life available to every person.

So the first part of the value is that we honor humanity … yours, mine, theirs. You don’t have to be an angel. It is okay to be human.

The second part of this is that we see every human being … every person … as a child of God. In Christ’s eyes, there is no foreigner.

Our scripture from Galatians this morning talks about the relationship between baptism and inclusion.   

I want to say again this morning a word about the Methodist understanding of baptism and why we practice the baptism of children as well as adults. I think this is an important symbol.

Some churches do not baptize children. They practice what they call believer’s baptism. You can only be baptized if you publicly affirm that you believe in the teachings of the faith. Young children ==babies—obviously cannot recite the Apostles’ Creed.

The symbolic meaning of believers’ baptism is that  we begin life outside the circle and, when we reach maturity, we need to decide whether we will step into the circle or not.

John Wesley taught Methodists to baptize children because he believed we all begin inside the circle. He taught that we might choose to step outside it, which is an interesting theological debate.

But we all begin inside the circle. We baptize babies because we all are inside the circle. You don’t do something to get i9nsidre the circle. We all begin already inside the circle.

Some of the ministry teams here at Foundry that best articulate this core value of honoring our humanity and seeing the child of God inside each one of us are our support ministries.

I want to mention this morning three support groups or networks here at Foundry.

One is our Depression Support Group where people who have experienced depression meet to encourage and support each other. Logan Alley (9:30) Amy Van Arsdale (11:00)

 We also have a Transition and Loss support group for people experience loss and grief. You can ask Jeffrey Dietterle (9:30 and 11:00)

We also have a Cancer Support Network -- Chuck Hilty (11:00) 

Last Lent, we were having a series of interviews with people engaged in ministry here at Foundry. On Easter Sunday Chuck Hilty shared a testimony about his experience with prostate cancer. After the service, Greg, a visitor from Ohio who happened to be in town and heard our bells and came to worship with us, approached Pastor Dawn and shared that he had prostate cancer and was going to have surgery in the coming weeks. Dawn connected Greg  with Chuck. Folk form our cancer support group rallied around Greg and provided support through emails, cards, and calls. Greg actually came back to Foundry in June and brought his family with him. He wanted to his family to meet the cancer support group before he went to surgery.

If you have experienced depression or loss or cancer, considering joining one of these ministry teams.  If there is a support group you’d like to help begin, let Pastor Dawn know.

We are all children of God. Each one. We share a common humanity. Each one.

The first property that Methodist owned was a vacant building in London. It had been a cannon ball factory and there had been an accident, an explosion, and the building had sat empty for many years.

John Wesley and the Methodists bought it and repaired it. For 38 years it was the center of Methodism.

John Wesley wanted a factory because he did not just want to have space for worship.  The building included a chapel, but it also included a free school, a dispensary, an almshouse for poor widows, and a loan society, and more.

Because John Wesley and the Methodist care not just about saving souls but also about saving minds, bodies and spirits.

Oh, the name of that building where Methodism started, the old canon ball factory? It was called the Foundry. Foundry Chapel.

Traffic Flow

Rev. Dean Snyder

Luke 14:1, 7–14

When we moved to Washington, a friend warned me: “Driving is a competitive sport in Washington.” 

Three or four months later when I ran into him I said: Driving is competitive in Washington but it is not a sport. There is nothing sporting about it. It is just raw competition. The name for this is not sport but war.

Driving in the DC area is war.

Jesus could have told the parable we heard this morning this way:

When you are diving in the District of Columbia, and you think it is your turn to merge into a slow moving line of traffic, don’t try to force your way in. Others may just decide that it isn’t your turn yet and that you are being too pushy and they will just force you to wait even longer. You will be frustrated and embarrassed; they will be frustrated and angry.

Instead just sit in your car with a big friendly smile on your face trying to make eye contact with each driver in line until one of the cars voluntarily stops and invites you to merge in. This way both you and the other driver will feel good and be happy. 

The parable Jesus actually told went this way: When you are invited to a banquet, don’t take the seat of highest honor. Someone more honorable may show up and you will be asked to move so he or she can have your seat. You’ll be embarrassed and you’ll have to take whatever seat is left. Instead sit in last place and the host will invite you higher.

Now the thing to notice is that this is a parable.  Luke 14:7 says “When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable.” This is a parable.

A parable is a simple story meant to communicate profound truth.

So Jesus’s teaching here is not really about party etiquette. He is not playing the role of a Henry Higgins teaching people proper social behavior.

As soon as Luke uses the word parable he wants us to understand that there is a profounder truth here than meets the eye.  

Just as when Jesus told the parable of the sower and the seed, he was not teaching a lesson in agriculture … (Luke 8:5f)

Just as when he told the parable of mixing yeast and the flour to make a loaf of bread, he was not teaching a lesson in the culinary arts … (Luke 13:21f)

Just so, this is not just a lesson about how to act at a banquet.

This parable is about how to live life. If we can understand it, it should have within it truth that we can apply to every aspect of our lives:  not just social etiquette but truth that we can apply to how we live as family members; how we treat our spouses and partners; how we parent; how we conduct ourselves at work; what kind of neighbors we are; how we conduct business; how we relate to the homeless; how we conduct our spiritual lives; and even how we drive in the district.

What is the deeper truth Jesus is trying to teach here?

Here is what I think Jesus was teaching us –

First, that recognition is important. Being recognized and honored for who we are, our gifts, abilities and achievements is important. Everybody deserves and needs to be recognized.

Christianity sometimes has strange ideas about humility. We think it means never getting credit for who we are and what we do … that it means giving all of the honor and glory to God and not receiving any honor or glory ourselves.

A pastor I know in a branch of the Christian church where this is emphasized tells me that in his church there was a singer with a very strong voice. Whenever she sang a solo and someone complemented her on the solo after church, she would say, “It wasn’t me; it was Jesus. Just give Jesus the honor.”

He said that when she would say that to him, “It wasn’t me, it was Jesus,” he started replying, “Oh, no, it wasn’t that good. It was very good, but if it had been Jesus it would have been way, way much better. “

We all need and deserve recognition for our being, our abilities, our work.

It is also often why we strive to do well in what we do; why we strive to excel. So that who we are might be recognized and be honored.

It is an awful thing when people, even groups of people, are not recognized and honored for their contribution to the greater whole … when a group of people are diminished.

This is why a group of people who have been diminished rather than honored will march on Washington. It is a way of saying, ”stop ignoring us, stop diminishing our importance, recognize us, honor us.”

This is why a group of people will have a pride parade. Stop ignoring us, stop diminishing our importance, recognize us, honor us.

This is sometimes why a child will act out in school or an employee will act out at work. Stop ignoring me, stop diminishing my importance, recognize me, honor me.

Martin Luther King, Jr. called it the drum major instinct. “We all have the drum major instinct. We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade,” Dr. King said.

In telling this parable, Jesus recognizes the need within all of us for recognition. We all want to be honored.

But he also gives a warning.

Like any other good thing, like food, like drink, like work, like money, like sex, we can become addicted to recognition and honor.

We all need it but we can come to need it too much. We can come to need more and more recognition and honor.

So Jesus’ advice is to come to the banquet and take a lesser seat until the host notices you and invites you forward.

Smile and try to make eye contact with every driver until someone lets you in line.

This is what the March on Washington was … smiling and making eye contact. This is what a pride parade is: Smiling and making eye contact.

This is what somebody asking you for money on the sidewalk might be. What may be at stake is not money but recognition. Just recognize my existence. Just honor my being.

Communion is a ritual of recognition and honor. Everyone is invited; everyone is served. Everyone receives. We all take our turn. Those who consecrate receive after everyone else has been included.

Communion reminds us that there is a place at the table for each and every one.

Construction, Detours, and Road Blocks, Oh My

Rev. Dawn M. Hand

Luke 13:10–17

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