Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons

Our Turn

Rev. Dean Snyder Scripture: Hebrews 12:1-3

Plenty Good Room

Rev. Dean Snyder

John 14:1-13

Our temples, synagogues, mosques and church buildings are theological statements. The ways we build our buildings communicate what we believe about God. Then the buildings we worship and meet in help to shape our theology.

There are temples and churches that communicate a stark and ascetic god. Unadorned. Somber and sober. Serious. Hard.

Jane and I worshipped in a church for a few years. The building reminded me aesthetically of what it must be like inside an ice cube. The temperature was fine. They turned on the heat. But the space looked and felt cold and hard and harsh anyway.

Until the bishop appointed as the pastor of that church a women with a sense of style. She found a stage and set designer who worked for a local theatre company in the congregation. With a couple thousand dollars worth of fabric and some paint, she turned that church sanctuary into a place of grace and beauty.

A few years later I was invited back to facilitate the meeting where the congregation voted to become a reconciling congregation. They’d been trying to get there for years. I think they could not successfully become a place of grace and inclusion until the space they met in communicated grace and beauty. That’s what I think.

I have loved every single Buddhist and Hindu temple I have ever visited. They are lush and sensual and rich and bright, as though God and the universe wants us to be happy and to love life and to be well and to do well.

I love European Cathedrals full of dramatic art about biblical and post biblical saints and sinners. They communicate a God who is present in the drama of the human story, your story, my story. They communicate a God who lives and loves, laughs and suffers, and even dies with us.

I love our sanctuary here at Foundry. When the sanctuary was redesigned in 1940, it was something of a scandal in Methodist circles at the time. The new red carpet and red pew cushions, the new center aisle, the new ornate chancel window full of historic Christian symbols, the new marble altar, the fresco above the altar with statues of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Moses and Paul, and the dramatic carving of Jesus, and the new pulpit with more statues.

Homer Caulkins says in the history of Foundry that he wrote that after the sanctuary was redesigned in 1940, one critic asked when Foundry was going to get incense, holy water and a confessional booth as well. (Castings from the Foundry Mold, p. 274). That was in 1940.

I love our sanctuary. I think that more than anything else, our congregation’s theology has been shaped by the window above the balcony. When this building was originally built in 1904 the youth group raised the money for that window and it was named the “Come Unto Me” window. I am sure all of those youth who held ice cream festivals and baked sales to pay for that window in 1904 have died by now. But their window is still here.

When the sanctuary was redesigned in 1940, the Christ above the altar was designed to mirror the message in the stained glass window above the balcony.

Come unto me. All are welcome here. All belong here. I love our sanctuary.

When we do our Mission Possible renovations, not much will happen here in the sanctuary – a new carpet, new pew cushions, some work on the organ we need to do, a new hearing assist system.

The big problem is the rest of the building. The rest of the building is old and tired and cluttered and crowded and confusing and just not very welcoming. The rest of the building.

The rest of the building is where AA and NA meet, and where day labors and restaurant workers come for English as a second language classes. It is where we make sandwiches for the homeless. It is where people whose lives are very hard come for clothing and birth certificates and comfort and to be treated decently. It is where the day laborer’s union meets. It is where we cook meals for people living with AIDS and cancer. It is where we send books to people in prison.

It is where we try to study the Bible. It is where our babies are cared for in the nursery and where our children and youth try to learn about God. It is where our depression and grief groups meet. It is where we meet to fight discrimination against LGBTQ people in the church. It is where we meet to organize to end homelessness. It is where we plan mission trips to Haiti. It is where we try to open the doors of the church wider to those alienated by church on Sunday evenings.

You know, when you are around here for a while, you stop noticing the way things look. It happened to me. When I first got here 10 years ago I was asking every week, can’t we fix these broken tiles in the floors? Can’t we do something about this elevator that’s breaking down every other month? Can’t we do something about the kitchen? Can’t we do something about the water stains in that wall?

But after a while you just get used to it. And you adjust your ministries and mission to the space you have. Instead of having space that serves your mission and ministry, you adjust your mission and ministry to the space you have.

So it is time we tackle the rest of the building. Because of Mission Possible we will have a new welcome center, new multipurpose spaces, a new modern accessible elevator, new banquet and lecture space, new multipurpose meeting rooms, new technology, a new boiler, electrical upgrades, fire suppression systems and –tada—we will have new rest rooms.

Here’s all I want to say this morning. Our building communicates our theology. Our building communicates what we believe about God. Our building helps to shape what we believe about God.

In God’s house, --the God we believe in-- there are lots of dwelling places. There is lots of good room. Everyone is welcomed. Everyone is included. It is a place of beauty and grace.

As we begin Mission Possible, we are doing theological work. When we build our new fully accessible elevator at the main entrance, we will be communicating what we believe about God. When we build our new rest rooms that everyone will be able to use with dignity from our homeless neighbors to presidents and senators, we will be communicating what we believe about God. We will teach our children what we believe about God.

We believe in a God who welcomes everyone, who makes room for everyone, who treats everyone with dignity and grace. That is what our new space will proclaim.

Community that Propels

Rev. Dean Snyder Ephesians 5:21-33

We have leaders who organize our scripture readers … different ones for different services. When one of our leaders who organizes readers for one of our services saw the Scripture lesson for today … the passage including the words “Wives be subject to your husbands,” she sent me an email saying “Really? Really?”

As part of our Propel series, we’ve been studying the Book of Ephesians. The passage you heard read is from what has become a very uncomfortable part of the Book of Ephesians called The Household Codes.

Usually we in the more liberal churches just pass right over this uncomfortable material and try to pretend it isn’t there. I am not sure that is a good strategy.

A couple of years ago we did a sermon series on the topic “What we can learn from scriptures we wish weren’t in the Bible.”

We took some passages that make us very uncomfortable for good reason and tried to sit with them long enough to get past our negative feelings to ask if there was something in them to learn from. If we understood these passages in the context of the norms of the society they were written in, was there something there that we could translate into our time and place?

We took the passage in the gospels where Jesus is quoted as saying that divorced people are not permitted to remarry. I remember when Methodists taught that. How mean was that? One strike and you are out. One marriage doesn’t work out and you are denied the joys and comforts of an intimate marital relationship the rest of your life.

But if we can acknowledge that this is not fair and start to ask where such a teaching came from and to understand it in the context of males having all of the power and women being powerless, you can begin to see that the point is to protect women from being discarded for a newer version, which was something men were tempted to do back in those days. And we can begin to acknowledge that divorce has a cost and that we need to pay attention to who pays the price.

Should divorced people be allowed to remarry? Of course. No question. We also need to pay attention to the personal and social cost of divorce.

Because we must reject the apparent superficial meaning of a particular scripture does not mean we can’t learn from it.

In that same series we looked at the first chapter of Romans where the Apostle Paul calls same gender attraction and affection unnatural. That scripture has certainly been used to oppress and shame LGBTQ people. But really now, how much can we blame Paul for not understanding that some of us by our birth and nature are gay? How many of us realized this 30 or 40 years ago?

Yes, Paul had faulty assumptions about same gender sexual attraction. He though same gender sex was a result of people being so obsessed with sex that they could never be satisfied and kept looking for bigger and bigger sexual thrills. So if you are gay, Paul wasn’t talking about you in Romans 1. What Paul is describing in that passage is not who you are.

If we can get past a simplistic superficial reading of Romans 1, we can begin to ask whether it is possible that some of us, straight or gay, are looking to sex for what we can find only in God. There may be something beneath the surface there worth thinking about.

I decided we should sit for a few minutes today with this portion of the household codes in Ephesians that tells wives to be subject to their husbands.

No one can deny that this passage has caused great suffering for women throughout the centuries.

There is no way to get past that without facing it. This passage of scripture has been used in oppressive, nasty ways and still is being used in oppressive, nasty ways today.

This is part of the reason we can’t spend six weeks studying the book of Ephesians and just pretend it isn’t there. We need to look it in the face long enough to conquer it and then ask whether there is any truth for us here beneath the superficial reading that has been so convenient for men over the centuries.

Some wives who have been harmed by husbands may not be able to get there, so let me say to you, no matter what Ephesians seems to say, we do not believe that wives should be subject to abusive husbands.

The thrust of the biblical story is toward justice, equality and inclusion for all people, women and men. The Bible was written in a patriarchal culture and that culture infects portions of the Scripture, but the thrust of the biblical story is toward justice, equality and inclusion for all people, women and men.

Jesus was a feminist. I have no idea if he was married or not, but the Jesus of the New Testament was amazingly empowering toward women. This would be true in our day, and was even more amazingly true in the patriarchal culture of the society in which he lived.

Scholars tell us that the household codes in Ephesians are actually in a strange way a testimony to the impulse toward equality that was part of the early Christian movement.

Some of you may remember that I told you that Ephesians is a late New Testament epistle. It was not really written by the Apostle Paul himself. It was written by one of Paul’s students in Paul’s voice after Paul had died, which was not an unusual practice in the first century.

Scholars believe the house hold codes were written because the Christian impulse toward equality was upsetting the communities around the churches and the leaders of the churches were trying to slow things down and conform more to the norms of the society to avoid persecution.

I get that. How many times have we here at Foundry said “Maybe we are moving too fast? Maybe we should slow down? Maybe we should take a step backwards or we are going to lose people? We’ve got this vision of inclusion here at Foundry but are we going too fast and too far for our denomination?”

I understand why the spirit movement toward equality got scary for this second generation of Jesus followers in Ephesus and why they decided they needed to act more traditional, to teach more traditional family structures. So more than other parts of other epistles and surely more than the Gospels, the teaching of the household codes in Ephesians accommodates the patriarchal family structures of the society around them.

We do that ourselves too more than we like to admit.

I do not want to whitewash Ephesians 5. This passage has been used in ways that have been horribly abusive to women. No question. I don’t want to move past that too quickly. This passage has been used in oppressive and nasty ways.

But if we can sit with it long enough to understand it in context, maybe we can see that the passage is really not about marriage but about the church. It is about living together as a congregation. It is about being a community of Jesus followers who are trying to figure out how to authentically live with one another.

And the deeper point of the passage is that followers of Jesus need to live together in a spirit of being mutually subject to Christ.

“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ,” Ephesians 5:21 says. That what got Deutero-Paul into this messy conversation about marriage in the first place.

“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” It is a great mystery, Ephesians says. Our relationship in the community of the church with Christ and with each other shares something of the same spirit as a marriage in which two people become one flesh. It includes both love and respect. It is a relationship of vulnerability. Being subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.

I think being the church in our time is hard.

We need to be aware of the injustices in the world that we inherit and participate in. We need to be aware of male privilege, white privilege, straight privilege, first-world privilege, able-bodied privilege, socio-economic privilege. We need to be aware of our internalized oppression that causes us to diminish ourselves and not claim our rights and equality. We have to be aware of all the things that divide us and make our relationships unjust.

And at the same time we need to be subject to one another. We need to be vulnerable to one another.

My friend Gil Rendle reminds me from time to time that diversity is harder. It is easier being a church that is all one socio-economic group, all one ethnicity, all one orientation … at least publicly.

But we don’t live in that world anymore.

So it becomes the task of the church to be aware of all the things that give us unequal power and to correct for them and at the same time be subject and vulnerable to one another. We need to be honest about our differences and at the same time love one another.

We have a ministry fair today, and we are encouraging everyone to take a step deeper into your call. Everyone of us is called to ministry. We are all called to be ministers and we are all called to be ministered to.

The purpose of our ministry fair is not to become busier, not to act more obligations and activities to our lives. It is to step more deeply into our calling so we can let go of what we don’t need to carry on our shoulders because it is not our calling.

What I want to say this morning is that in the ministry we do, our relationships with one another are maybe the most important thing.

We have affinity groups in this church, which is great. We need to spend time with others who share some aspect of our identity. We have a LBGT potluck, and young adult fellowship, and women’s retreat and young women’s prayer groups, a couples Bible study, and a group of men who play pool together.

But we also need to come to know each other in ways that help us learn that we are more than our affinities. We are all broken. We all are gifted. We all need a savior. We all saved by grace alone.

Years ago I was part of a group that did mission together and it included two people who rubbed each other the wrong way. One was a feminist women and the other was a man who wasn’t. They worked together a long time in the same mission group. Until one day they let down their guards and he told her what it was like growing up with a mentally ill mother and being married in his first marriage to a mentally ill wife. And she told him about having an abusive father. They both told me separately that they were never able to see each other the same way again.

We need to pay attention to our privilege. But we are more than our privilege or our oppression. We are all broken. We all are gifted. We all need a savior. We all saved by grace alone.

My hope for us is that we will learn to practice justice but most of all that we will learn to be ever more vulnerable and open with one another.

Becoming Loose by Being Tight

Rev. Dean Snyder Ephesians 5:15-20

Becoming Tight by Being Loose

Rev. Dean Snyder Ephesians 4:4-7; 11-16

Everyone is called to ministry. Everyone has spiritual gifts. Everyone has things they are particularly passionate about because of our unique life experience.

You are called to ministry, not just ordained clergy, not just church staff, not just board members. You have a ministry. There is someone who needs your ministry.

If you will take the initiative to live out your ministry it will propel your life to new levels, it will propel the lives of those you minister to. It will propel the church.

This is the theme of our propel series of sermons, small groups and classes.

To get at this theme we are studying the Book of Ephesians.

There are many kinds of gifts for ministry. You can find dozens of gifts listed in the New Testament alone.

The Book of Ephesians says that every congregation needs to have at least five gifts present within it.

Ephesians 4: 11 says: ‘The gifts God gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.”

Every congregation –if it is going to be effective at equipping and empowering its people ande serving the world needs people who have the gift to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers.

So we made up this flyer this week with short definitions of what apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers are.

Take a look at it with me.

Apostles are people who can cast a vision and lead others toward it. Often apostles are the people who initiate new ministries and missions and organize people to do the work. Sometimes they step in and revitalize existing ministries. They are leaders who know how to inspire and organize people.

Prophets are people who foresee and work for the just and inclusive world God wills. Prophets foresee God’s future for the world and communicate it. They have a strong drive toward social justice.

Evangelists are people who can invite and encourage others on their faith journey. Evangelists are not evangelists necessarily like Billy Graham. Evangelism is often a one-to-one mentoring of someone else in their faith and life path.

Pastors in this sense are not people who stand up front and preach. That actually might more often be apostles. Pastors in this sense are those who support others in their times of need. They provide pastoral care.

Teachers are people who teach. They can help other learn ideas and practice skills.

So these are the five basic and essential gifts which need to be present in every congregation for it to thrive.

Then we added another gift that was not explicitly named in Ephesians but which is especially important here at Foundry –music and the arts.

So we want to try an experiment here at Foundry today … something we’ve never done before.

We’d like you to pick what you think your number one spiritual gift is out of this list. Take a minute to think about it. It is a forced choice. If you just have these to choose from, which one of these comes the closest? It is just an experiment, not a permanent life decision.

Pick one.

Now, we’ve got some folk who are going to hold signs at various places in the sanctuary. When I tell you, I want to invite you to gather around your sign and talk to 2 or three other people in the group for three or four minutes about this topic: How did you first begin to realize that you had the gift to be an apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, teacher or artist.

This is going to be a little noisy but we are going to celebrate Holy Communion in a few minutes which will be very holy.

So please go to the sign that best fits you and share with two or three other people and I’ll call you back to attention in a few minutes. Go.

…

OK. That was energizing. (Get people’s attention) If you met somebody you’d like to talk to more, please share your contact information. Give your sheet to the person with the sign and you can return to your pew/seat.

We need at least these particular spiritual gifts to thrive as a congregation. Apostles need to lead groups and ministries. Prophets need to work for social justice. Evangelists need to invite and nurture others into our congregation. Pastors need to care for those going through difficult times. Teachers need to teach. And singers need to sing.

Without you exercising your ministry, our body will not be complete.

You cannot wait for someone to come and ask you to do something here at the church. You need to step out and exercise your gift for ministry. Propel yourself into ministry.

It used to be that we waited to do our ministry until somebody elected us to a church office. But God has already elected you to your calling.

So we are trying to loosen up and allow more freedom for everyone to exercise their ministry.

There is only one proviso. Your ministry has to build up the body of Christ. It has to build up the body in love. We will talk more about that next week.

But for today, we want you to think and pray about your gifts for ministry and how God might be calling you to step out in new ways. Think about this as we celebrate communion together.