Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons

Forgiveness - December 12th, 2021

“Forgiveness”  

A sermon preached by Rev. Will Ed Green for Foundry United Methodist Church Sunday, December 5th, 2021 

What would you do if you were you were really free? Free from things that trip  you up, habits and attitudes that keep you from really living life fully? Free from guilt  and shame that keeps you rooted in past wrongs and old regrets? Free from believing  something you’ve done makes you less worthy of God’s love or capable of doing of  God’s kin-dom work?  

On this second Sunday of Advent, John’s good tidings of God’s forgiveness come  to us from an unexpected place. Not halls of earthly power where past wrongs are  adjudicated by corrupt court systems. Not pulpits of religious power where divisions  between right and wrong and welcome and unwelcome are laid down. No, God’s word  comes from to John in what the Scripture calls ‘eramos’ the deserted places, the  wilderness. Places which represented vulnerability and risk, which existed outside the  realms of what was tame, safe, or familiar. These are good tidings find us in places we  don’t expect to find them.  

Once invited to the wilderness we’re called to us to ‘metanoia,’ or to change our  minds, the word translated here as repentance—and in the verses proceeding the ones  read today—doesn’t mince any words in demanding it. This isn’t a simple sojourn for a  quiet picnic in the woods. It is a spiritual experience which invites intentional  examination, one in which things that limit our perception and insulate us from truth are  stripped away. We’re called to confront the truth about who we are. The truth about how  we live. The truth about how both of these reflect—or do not—the values we profess. 

Now. Let me pause lest you think I’m going to go all “Sinners in the Hands of  Angry God” you here. Centuries of bad theology have left us associating repentance with  street-corner preachers proclaiming our impending doom and destruction. But Luke’s  ‘metanoia’ isn’t about shame, and it’s certainly not about damnation. It is a free gift of God’s grace—the kind John Wesley called ‘justifying grace’—that invites us to confront  and honestly address the spiritual and emotional baggage that weights us down in life so  that we can we can move more freely in our relationship with God and with others.  These good tidings aren’t just about confrontation, they are the promise of  transformation.  

John’s baptism of repentance is the first step on a journey of ‘afesis,’ the word  translated as forgiveness. It literally means ‘a release from bondage, a letting go of the  former things as if they’d never happened at all.’ If these are good tidings of  confrontation, they are also good tidings of invitation. An invitation to freedom from  anything that prevents us from receiving the hope of God’s love and our call to be that  hope made alive for others in the world.  

Luke echoes the ancient words of the prophets Isaiah and Malachi—each of whom  themselves wrote from wilderness places at wilderness moments in the lives of God’s  people—offering hope that our present realities and possible futures are not bound to, or  by, our previous mistakes. Even in the wildernesses of our sin and brokenness, where our  lives are full of trip hazards like regret and shame and constant detours caused by habits  and ways of thinking we know we need to change, God comes to be with us. Helps us  face, without fear or shame, the fact that we don’t always get it right. That we’re fallible.  That we fudge up.  

And then, get this! God helps us clear up that clutter that’s clogged our paths.  Grants us grace to map out a new way, to change our minds about the directions we’ve  been journeying and sets us on a new path where we are free to live more freely and fully  in the light of God’s love. These are good tidings of freedom and hope.  

The question is, I suppose, whether or not we’re really ready to receive them. I  grew up in a family system where we were really good at apologizing for every little  transgression. Quick to say I’m sorry, in no small part I’m sure, lest someone hold our error against us, but also in the firm belief something fundamental about who we were  was broken.  

But forgiveness, the kind we receive today, turns this relational economy on its  head.In a world where we’re pre-conditioned to keep score, where Santa’s making a list  of who’s naughty and who’s nice, we learn quickly how to define ourselves by the worst  we’re capable of. God’s promise of, as the old hymn puts it “grace that is greater than all  our sin,” means that we loose a vital part of how we’re taught to judge ourselves and  others in the world. It’s easy to say I’m sorry. And it can be so much harder to believe it.  

This week I returned to my long-time spiritual companion Henri Nouwen for  insight into what good tidings the word ‘forgiveness’ might hold. He points out that the  real work of forgiveness begins only when we first allow ourselves to be forgiven. “It is  very hard to say,” he writes,“Without your forgiveness I am still bound to what happened  between us. Only you can set me free.” He goes on, “That requires not only a confession  that we have hurt somebody but also the humility to acknowledge our dependency on  others.” 

I remember a Christmas some 20 years ago when my siblings and I all got  chocolate malt balls in our stockings. Midway through the afternoon we realized my  younger brother was missing…along with all the chocolate balls. So we began to  frantically search the house not really clear which one we wanted to find more.  Eventually we found them both together, my brothers feet sticking out from underneath  his bed and, when we pulled him out tinfoil and chocolate covering his face as he  frantically shoved every piece of candy he could grab into his mouth. 

My mother, ever ready to teach us a lesson, invited us all into the living room.  After a stern talking to about not taking other peoples things she told my brother that we  were going to forgive him once he apologized, and it would be like it never happened.  Immediately he burst into tears, and when she calmed him enough to speak, he told her he didn’t want to be forgiven. If we for gave him, that meant he'd have to forgive us  someday too. 

I think of him there now, face still glittering with foil and tears running down his  cheeks, befuddled at the idea that we weren’t going to hold this moment over his head— except for the occasional sermon illustration—any more than he could hold our wrongs  against him over ours. Sick to his stomach, not only because of the chocolate, but perhaps  

because there was nothing he could do to fix what he’d done—there was no way we were  getting the chocolate back—and that meant he had to rely upon someone else to receive  it.  

That’s the thing about these good tidings of forgiveness that can be so hard to  grasp. We don’t earn them. We can’t buy them. No amount of keeping score or stock of  our past wrongs, no amount of self-loathing and regret will somehow make us worthy of  them. They simply are. Flowing into the wilderness places of our lives where we’ve  become lost wandering down roads of past wrongdoing and regret. Into the backroads  and byways we’ve built to protect ourselves from our need for others or from confronting  the fact we are—despite our temptation to occasionally believe otherwise—masters of  our own destiny. 

But Emmanuel, God with us, forgives freely and with no other purpose but to  set us free. And does so, over and over again, no matter how many times it takes,  until we’re able to really receive that gift. So we gather, lighting candles to brighten  the gloom of the wildernesses in which we wander. We come to the table,  proclaiming “in the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven,” to help us remember  that Our God meets us in our wilderness places, amidst the tangled messiness of our  lives. Invites us to face the facts of our past mistakes, our old hurts and long-lived  resentments, not to shame us our drive us to different behavior through guilt, but to help  us lay them down and walk away. To trust that we are in fact who God has said we were since the Spirit hovered over creation’s waters, beloved.

And when it’s hard, the old lies of naughty and nice, of worthlessness, of fear,  creep in, God gives us grace, sanctifying grace, new each day, that is big enough to hold  the truth of our brokenness and possibility of our becoming whole. You are beautiful. You  are beloved. You are worthy of freedom. And there’s nothing in this world—no power, no  preacher, no denomination or political party—that can change that fundamental truth God  has baked into your being.  

It is not lost on me that here, at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in Luke chapter 3,  the path laid out begins with forgiveness. With freedom from our sin so we’re able to  participate fully in what Christ is up to in the world, so that “all flesh can see the  salvation of God.” Everything else Jesus does, all the miraculous signs and wonders, all  the moments of teaching and reprimand, every table overturned and belly filled, begins  with the belief that God, by God’s grace and with our assent, “forgives our sins.”  

Advent is not simply a season of waiting. It is also an invitation to holy  preparation. To go with boldness into the wilderness places of our lives, to examine  where we’re getting tripped up or bogged down or detoured. And to let God to come and  do what God does best. “Come, thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free.  From our fears and sins release us, let us find our rest in thee.” What would you do if you  were you were really free? This Advent, my hope of us—for you and for me—is that we find out.  

Amen. 

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Nearness - November 28th, 2021

Nearness

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC November 28, 2021, Advent 1.

Text:  Luke 21:25-36

“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” // Perhaps it seems strange to begin an Advent series on “Good Tidings” with these apocalyptic words. Where is the good news here? 

We will get to that. But first, I want to remind all of us that our text today is part of a longer passage in Luke 21 of apocalyptic writing. Apocalyptic is a specific genre within the Bible. The word “apocalypse” is derived from a Greek word meaning to “uncover, disclose, or reveal” something—an unveiling. Apocalyptic writing tends to focus on “end of the age” or “end times” and is often thought of as “doom and gloom”—understandable, I guess, based on what we receive in our text today… “distress…fear, and forboding.” At its most basic, however, apocalyptic is meant to wake us up, to remind us that things will change, that something is going to happen, that something—or someone—is drawing near. 

And so it makes some sense that we’d be given a text like today’s at the beginning of the season of Advent, the annual time of preparation for the coming of Christ. The word “Advent” derives from the Latin adventus, which means “coming,” “arrival,” “approach,” or “appearance.” The emphasis at this time of year is often on what has already occurred, the coming of Christ in baby Jesus who grew up and showed us what God’s love and justice look like in human flesh. But on the first Sunday of Advent, we’re reminded that there is another promise yet to be fully realized: the coming of Christ into the world in a new way that embraces all peoples and all of creation, the fulfillment of our prayer that the Kin-dom appear in all the earth as in heaven. 

In the years following Jesus’s death, some early Christian communities, living under tremendous persecution and the despair caused by events like the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, expected the world as they knew it to end at any moment, they expected Christ to come again with cataclysmic flashes of lightning and all the rest. Yet, as time passed and the injustice and oppression of the world continued, that expectation began to fade. Christians had to learn how to wait, how to not give up on the whole thing, how to remain a people of hopeful expectation in the tension between the historical events of Jesus’ life and the desire that God’s realm be fulfilled on earth. 

This is the tension we find in our text today from Luke. We, like the earliest Christian communities live in the in-between time, wondering “How much longer, for crying out loud?!” But really the emphasis in our scripture is less about providing a timetable of events and more about what to do, how to be, every day. We are encouraged to remain awake and alert to what is happening around us, to pay attention to what is happening in the created order, to pay attention to the fear and distress among the nations, and, as we do so, not to allow ourselves to get dragged down into the worries of this life (Lk 34) but to remember that in moments of turmoil, danger, and upheaval, God draws especially near. The implication of the text in its context is that we are to keep the faith in the midst of fear and exhaustion and worry—and that means not just thinking faithy things, but concretely responding to what’s going on in and around us in ways that align with the Kin-dom of God, that embody the words of Jesus. You know, doing justice, practicing hesed (lovingkindness or unearned love), and walking humbly with God… 

The call of Jesus is for us to be a people of active faith and hopeful expectation in the time in between the reality of a difficult now and the hopeful vision of the promised Kin-dom come.

But sometimes life eats away at our ability to remain a people of hopeful expectation. Sometimes it’s hard to be hopeful that we as individuals or as a people can grow and change, that the world can be different, or that all that seems so helpless and hopeless can be redeemed. Our Gospel today doesn’t pretend that human hearts are untouched by the worries of this life; and yet it still calls us to hope. And so, though we find ourselves often expecting the worst, we gather as a people, at the beginning of every new Christian year, to expect the best, to experience again the ancient tale of One who came into the world to save it, the one who came to show us that our hope is not in vain. Thousands of years have passed and still we cry out, “Come, thou long-expected Jesus.” We gather this week and the next three weeks to find the courage to hope. We walk into, literally, the darkest days of the earth’s cycle, trying to have our eyes and hearts open to the light we believe is coming—not just looking back at what God has already done in Jesus, but looking at what God is doing and will yet do.

It’s curious to me that so much of our collective energy in response to apocalyptic revelation of what God will yet do has tended to be fearful. It makes sense that if we know we’ve fallen off the wagon of trying to love God and neighbor, the words we hear today can unsettle and nudge us to make some changes. I imagine that a lot of the fear is the result of bad theology that characterizes God as a smiter rather than a savior. If you think that the character of God is that of a bully or someone who delights in punishing you for any failure then standing before that God in the future is fearful indeed. 

But think for just a moment about being in an airport to pick up a loved one…you check the arrival monitor, you figure out what baggage carousel is the place to wait, and then you watch, aware of all the other persons streaming by, but anxiously anticipating the familiar gait, the familiar face of your beloved. What we’re told today is that the one who is coming into the world then, now, and in the future is a familiar face, the face of the One who loves you most of all, the face of the One who is always working for your good and for good in the whole world. 

Here is the good news today: “Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” The one who is coming is not some avenging stranger, it is Jesus, the Christ who’s been with you all along, who knows you and loves you and wants nothing more than your highest good. We need not fear or hide our faces in shame or insecurity, but rather we are told to stand up and raise our heads because God’s redeeming love and presence is drawing near. The loving, redemptive presence of Christ gives us grace to persevere in hope, to remain aware, to keep from falling into despair in the face of our own struggles and failures or in the wake of COVID mutation after mutation and midst fears and injustices of every kind. Our text brings us good tidings that our redeeming God is near.

The story we tell isn’t that Jesus came once upon a time, gave us a great annual holiday, dropped some wisdom, left the building, and abandoned us until some future pyrotechnic event. Christ is adventus, is arriving, every day.

Perhaps when Jesus says “when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near” it means that in every moment of distress in our lives, a door opens for us to enter the Kin-dom, to embody the way of Jesus such that the Kin-dom is made real in that moment… Imagine a portal that is always there and all it takes for the portal to be unveiled is for us to stay awake and alert to Christ’s presence and receive the grace we’re given to respond with love, care, and justice instead of as impatient, distracted, fearful jerks. You know the Kin-dom is near when you’re given an opportunity to reach out to hurting ones, to be a companion with those who are nurturing new life or grieving in the face of death, to celebrate with siblings when justice has been done and to mourn at the pain of justice denied. You know the Kin-dom is near when the oceans roar and signs in the earth show distress, and you can do something to participate in God’s work of mending the earth. And let me be clear, it’s not just in the big events of the world that the Kin-dom “portal”—the Kin-dom opportunity—is near. It is there at the kitchen table, as you tuck the kids in to bed, on your daily commute, all along the path of your daily rounds. In this in-between time, today and every day, Christ is arriving through the presence of Holy Spirit to inspire, agitate, and encourage us, and to help us live and love and choose and give as citizens of the Kin-dom of God even in the mundane and murky moments. 

So be alert. Pay attention. Raise your head. Look for the familiar face, the familiar presence of Christ. Look for the ways that God is at work—even in small ways. Remain open to the nudging of Spirit always providing what you need to keep faith, hope, and love, to do what is needed, what is just, what is truly yours to do for the Kin-dom. Bask in the light that has already come and cling to the hope that someday—probably when you’re busy making other plans—the unfinished, unfilled promises and possibilities of your life, your relationships, your church, our world, will be fulfilled and redeemed…fully.  And…finally!

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Pursued in Love…Always - November 21st, 2021

“Pursued in Love…Always”

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, November 21, 2021. Reign of Christ and Consecration Sunday, “Prepare the Table with Justice and Joy” series. 

  Texts: Psalm 23, Revelation 1:4b-8

Over the past seven weeks, we have been guided by the Lord, our shepherd, in Psalm 23. And on this last Sunday of the Christian liturgical year, the last Sunday before Advent, and the day often celebrated as the Reign of Christ or Christ the King, we receive the final verse of the Psalm. The familiar-to-many King James Version reads: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.”

Years ago I learned that the verb translated “follow” is more intense in the original Hebrew: “Surely goodness and mercy shall pursue me…” This is not only an image of these graces passively lurking about or showing up here and there. It’s that God’s goodness and mercy “will run after me and find me wherever I am!” It strikes me that this is where we began the journey, with the ancient image of God, not as a conquering king, but as a humble, strong, shepherd and the affirmation that God is with us, no matter what. 

When I was a teenager, our youth camp worship would use “sing along slides” to guide our singing of a variety of songs, including pop songs. As I prepared for today, meditating on this profound promise of God’s loving presence, I was transported back to evening worship in Miller Hall at Canyon Camp and again heard God in the distinctive form of Cyndi Lauper’s voice: “If you're lost you can look and you will find me/ Time after time/ If you fall I will catch you, I'll be waiting/ Time after time.” 

The Lord, our shepherd pursues us, time after time, wherever we are and no matter how we got there. And, if we are willing to follow, God’s goodness guides us into places of beauty, green places of nourishment, still places of peace, places where our soul may be restored; God’s goodness guides us on roundabout paths that get us where we need to go, guides us through the valleys of life, makes sure we eat something when we are overwhelmed with fear, danger, or grief, and tenderly loves us, anointing us as valued and called.

An important word in verse six is the word translated “mercy,” in Hebrew it is hesed, and usually is translated “lovingkindness.” Rabbi Harold Kushner thinks of it as “unearned love.” Unearned love. God’s goodness and unearned love pursue us… What an extraordinary challenge to the culture in which we live. 

The common wisdom is that nothing in the world is free, that we have to look a certain way, act a certain way, have certain things to be loved. We have to have this to get that. How many children are taught—implicitly or explicitly—that they are bad, wrong, worthless, unlovable because they don’t meet their parent’s or teachers’ expectations? How much energy flows into trying at every age and stage of life to earn or prove or buy our worth and lovability? How much money gets made by clever people who exploit our insecurities with the lure of “miracle” products and schemes? How often do lives full of potential get coopted and corrupted by gangs—on the streets or in the lunch room or in the marbled and paneled halls of power? The exploitation in all these things depends on human insecurity, on the lie that any one of us is unworthy of love, goodness, and mercy. 

And when everything we’ve tried still leaves us feeling unloved or devalued, we can fall into all sorts of destructive things. Our own insecurity can trigger an impulse to knock others down so we can stand over them, our boots on their necks, to feel bigger or like we have some power. Our own insecurity makes us turn on ourselves in self-loathing and on others with envy and resentment, all out of self-defense for our wounded hearts. Whether or not you figure out how to navigate the worldly macro or micro accounting of earned interest in who you are, it is a struggle to believe that there is any such thing as unearned interest, unearned love. In this world, the relational economy is so often quid pro quo, based on exploitation, or simply governed by run-of-the-mill human brokenness. 

But God’s economy is altogether different. The Lord, our shepherd—as we’ve been singing these past weeks—is the king of love not the king of empires or courts or councils or turfs. And the Kin-dom of God doesn’t require three forms of legal documentation where all the names exactly match for entry. Because God knows your name and loves you and wants to be close to you! Kin-dom economy with a shepherd in charge is truly different than what we’re used to. Jesus didn’t test people’s theological knowledge or work history before giving them food. Jesus didn’t pay the latecomer less than the first to clock in. Jesus didn’t play with the devil’s shiny advertisements for comfort, prestige, and power. Jesus didn’t do violence or execute people, Jesus allowed himself to be publicly executed so that we might finally recognize that buying “peace” or “justice” with another human life yields neither peace nor justice. Jesus didn’t raise an army, Jesus raised lives. Jesus embodied God’s love and revealed again and again that only love has the power to bring about the healing that will truly set us free.

The Lord, our shepherd, pursues us not to blame or test or bully us. God pursues us because God loves us and wants to be with us, to help us, to give us what we need to live lives filled with beauty, meaning, justice, and joy. God’s love for you and for me is absolute and it is unearned. God, in love, is always present, always reaching out and waiting for your heart to open wide to receive the overflow. 

As the sheep of God’s pasture, as citizens of Christ’s Kin-dom, we are taught that we love because God first loved us. All our acts of goodness and lovingkindness, all our acts of justice and unearned love, all our acts of generosity and care, all our acts of praise and thanksgiving are in response to God’s abundant grace. As we, like a cup, receive and are filled with God’s goodness and unearned love, we overflow in acts of gratitude, justice, and joy. 

Because God prepares the table for us, we prepare the table for others. And, by God’s grace, our offerings will create the best “pot luck” ever! By God’s grace overflowing in generosity, we will set a table with love of God and neighbor as the centerpiece, a table that is anti-racist, fully inclusive and affirming, creative, committed, courageous, and full of friendship, support, and laughter; we will set a table big and wide enough so that everyone has a place. On this Consecration Sunday, we’re reminded that God gives us everything, holds nothing back, pursues us in love, time after time, so that you will have life and so that we as the people of God called Foundry can prepare the table with justice and joy. What will you return in gratitude?

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Abundance! - November 14th, 2021

“Abundance!”

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, November 14, 2021. “Prepare the Table with Justice and Joy” series. 

Texts: Psalm 23:1-5, Mark 12: 38-44

“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.” 

Last week, I noted that the psalmist shifted from speaking about God to talking with God. And verse five continues in that direct communication and in a very personal way. I want to invite us to draw near to the metaphorical table God prepares and to explore each part of what we find there.

God prepares a table for us…

Think for a moment about what it takes to prepare a table for others… Or think about what it’s like when someone prepares a table for you that makes you feel cared for: your needs are known, allergies remembered, favorites waiting… things have been done to make room for you and anyone or anything you need to bring with you—a partner, child, accommodation for any physical needs… A table prepared with love is filled with beauty, bounty, thoughtfulness, and reflects generosity of time and resources. Now think about what this: God prepares a table for you. Imagine that table in your mind’s eye…

In the presence of my enemies… What’s that about?

It’s not about showing off, not about “my God loves me and not you” or about winning a prize and lording it over our enemies… It’s about God’s care and protection and sustenance even in moments of challenge and danger. In the midst of things, feelings, temptations, or persons that threaten us, God provides for us. When we are eaten up with fear or worry over broken relationships, when we feel alone, misunderstood, under attack, or simply not being able to receive what we need from others, God makes sure we eat! God sustains us. God prepares the table that gives us what we need. 

We may be given a listening ear. It may be a “come to Jesus” talk we’re given at the table. It might be some humble pie we need to consume. It might be extra protein to build our strength or soup to heal an illness. It might be comfort food to soothe our weary soul or broken heart. God’s table is abundant with grace sufficient for every need.

God anoints my head with oil…

In India I was invited into the small home of a new friend in the Dalit village where we stayed overnight. After being there a short time, the woman asked if she could do something with my hair. She poured perfumed oil over my head and then adorned my hair with a flower garland. In ancient Indian sanskrit, the word sneha means “to oil,” as well as “to love”—and to oil another’s hair is a tradition of bonding. What I was offered that afternoon in India was such a generous gift, an act of hospitality, a tender loving act, an honor. 

In the Bible, anointing is associated with honor of a different kind. It has to do with chosenness—as a king, queen, or messiah (“anointed one”). But its more general connotation is that the one who receives the oil is simply special, designated for greatness, called to do something big. 

Holy oil is used by many Christian traditions at the moment of Baptism or Confirmation, a ritual act that hearkens back to the biblical stories and, for Christians, connects us to our calling to follow God’s anointed one, Jesus.

At the table prepared for us by God, God anoints our head with oil! Us! You and me… not just one of us, ALL of us… we are identified by God as special, as those called to be and to do something big, what only we can. We are special in the eyes of God, valued and beloved. //

[move to table and pour water into chalice, overflowing to small bowl, overflowing to larger bowl…]

“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil…” In these opening words of verse 5, the psalmist affirms that no matter what other people think of you or do to you, God provides for you, sustains you, values you, calls you, and loves you.

No wonder the next line is “My cup runs over!” This is a metaphor for gratitude, an awareness of the fullness of what is given. The abundance of God’s table, God’s provision, God’s grace, and God’s love is more than can be contained.

Sometimes in our lives we can get caught in a glass half full, glass half empty debate… When we’re overwhelmed and weary, the glass can seem not only half empty, but all the way empty… It’s easy to lose the larger perspective. Psalm 23 calls us back to that larger vision.

Rabbi Harold Kushner says, “Much of the time, we have as little control over the events of our lives as we do over the weather. But as with the weather, we have a great deal of control over the way we choose to see those events and respond to them. Reading between the lines, we can infer that the author of the Twenty-third Psalm did not have a life free from pain and problems. He has had to confront enemies. He has known the feeling of finding himself in the valley of the shadow of death. He can praise and thank God for all that God has done, not because life has been easy but precisely because life has often been hard and God has seen him through the hard times. If his eyes are dim with age, he thanks God that he can still see…If people close to him have died, he is grateful to have known their love. For the psalmist, the issue is not whether the cup is half full or half empty. Because he has learned to see everything in his life, including life itself, as a gift, his cup of blessings overflows.”  

Kushner goes on to remind us of the story from 2 Kings 4 in which a woman begs Elisha for help because her husband has died leaving her and her children with many debts. She says she has nothing to eat, but only one small jar of oil. The prophet tells her to gather as many vessels as possible and to pour the oil out. Her children gather jars and vessels from the community and the woman pours. The oil keeps flowing until the last container is filled. Rabbi Kushner says, “Our ability to enjoy God’s blessings is more a function of our capacity to receive them than of any limitations on God’s ability to bless us.”  There is no limit to God’s goodness and desire to bless us. Do we have the capacity to receive all that God desires to give? 

I love connecting this verse from Psalm 23 with the story of the woman and the oil. It not only provides another example of God’s desire to provide for us, but also reminds us that when members of the community offer what they have, God’s blessings continue to flow. The communal contribution of jars and vessels allowed the oil to continually be poured out, collected, and then used for food and for anointing—to save not only the woman and her children, but to sustain and bless others! It was only when there were no more jars that the oil stopped flowing.

Early in this series, I said that there is no reason for us to struggle to sustain the ministry and mission of Foundry. There is such abundance among us. It only requires that each of us truly give as much as we can, even if it seems that our very best is just a small jar of oil or worth only a widow’s mite. Every year, I share with you that I never ask you to do anything that I’m not willing to do myself. I give to Foundry well over a tithe (10%) of my net pay and increase what I give every year, even if it’s only a little, as my commitment to grow toward a tithe of my total compensation. This is a stretch and a spiritual discipline for me, a way of concretely putting my trust in God and demonstrating my gratitude for the overflowing gift and grace of God’s love and activity in my life and in and through Foundry.

God prepares a table for you and for me and for us as this Foundry family. The abundance of the table is amazing. There is no need for us get caught in fear about our cup being half empty. God’s blessing flows into our lives in so many ways and as we allow those blessings to overflow in gratitude and generosity, our contributions provide the means for others to be blessed in all the ways that happen through our shared mission and ministry. As we draw the circle wider, as we welcome all to the table, as we prepare a table as Foundry with justice and joy, God’s abundance will not only fill our communal cup, but will overflow. What can you offer to make it so? What will you return to God in gratitude and love? How will you help prepare a table big enough to receive all that God wishes to share?

https://foundryumc.org/archive/prepare-the-table-with-justice-and-joy

Shepherded Through the Valley - November 7th, 2021

“Shepherded Through the Valley”

A meditation shared by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, November 7, 2021, observation of All Saints Sunday. “Prepare the Table with Justice and Joy” series. 

  Texts: Psalm 23:1-4, John 11:32-44

I don’t know how old I was the summer my Nana decided to give me a penny for every verse of the 23rd Psalm I could recite from memory. Each day of my visit, I was asked to add another verse. And the version of the Psalm I was given to memorize was the King James version: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” As a little one, I was uncertain why I’d say “yay” about walking through a place that sounded scary and sad. And I had no clue what it meant to say that God’s rod and staff comfort me. I didn’t know then that the King James translation likely mistook the Hebrew word tzalamut which means “deep darkness” for the two words tzal mavet meaning “the shadow of death.” But there is something in the poetry of the King James that captures something so profound, so true that I believe its deepest meaning got through to my child’s heart anyway. In fact, it is in this verse that we really get to heart of this Psalm. 

The poetic phrase “the valley of the shadow of death” paints a picture of deep valleys where the light of the sun is blocked by the mountains all around, leaving nothing but shadows. In that shadowy place the Psalmist says “I fear no evil”—not that there is no evil, but there is no need to fear. Why? “Thou art with me.” 

In the places of our lives that are overshadowed with fear, uncertainty, confusion, pain, and grief that brings us to our knees, our God is with us. Perhaps amid a life-threatening diagnosis for yourself someone has shown up so that you weren’t alone. Or maybe when a loved one is awaiting test results, is critically ill, or has died, you’ve experienced a person just being there with you in whatever state you’re in, tacitly giving permission for you to be however you needed to be…available to do something or nothing, to talk or to be silent. In my experience, the “being there” is the most important thing. The Psalmist experienced God in just that kind of way. In this verse, the writer shifts from talking about God the shepherd, to conversing with the Shepherd who is with them and who will guide them through the valley. 

In such deep darkness, finding our way over the mountains or through the valley can feel impossible. We can’t imagine ever feeling the proverbial warmth of the sun again. In that space, there are sometimes persons in our lives who know just how and when to gently remind us that the shadows need not be our dwelling place forever, those with the sensitivity to understand how to nudge us to shift, to take a step. The Lord, our shepherd, is present with us in the deepest darkness, God’s rod and staff—assurance of God’s justice and God’s compassion—comfort and help us in that place. And God is like that sensitive friend who nudges us a the right time. The Good Shepherd doesn’t desire that we remain in the places of suffering, pain, and grief. 

Of course, it is part of being human to travel those paths—at least if we have any love within us. We will find ourselves in the valley of the shadow of death at one point or another because human life is fragile and precious and it hurts when we come to our end or when those we love die an earthly death and are no longer part of our experience here. Jesus wept at the pain of death and at the suffering that death caused for those he loved. For those grieving the loss of a child, a partner, spouse, parent, sibling, dear friend, it can feel like we are shut up in the grave with the one we love. I know some persons who really struggle to not allow their whole lives—their own identity—to be defined by the loss they have suffered. For many others, to contemplate moving out of the shadows of grief feels like dishonoring the one we love; we may worry that we’ll forget or lose them if we move out of the valley.

Rabbi Harold Kushner explains that this is “why the Jewish calendar asks [adherents] to pause five times a year, on the four holiday seasons and on the anniversary of a death, to remember those whom we have loved and lost. It is a way of giving us permission to go on with our lives without having to fear that we will forget, that we will leave precious but painful memories behind.” Our annual All Saints celebration is one of those days in our Christian tradition, a time to give thanks and to remember those whose lives have enriched our own. It is a sad time, particularly for those whose grief is fresh, but also for all of us as we think about how much we miss our loved ones. 

But it is also a time of joy for the profound gift of loving and being loved, of learning from and being inspired by those we remember. And this day, as Kushner suggests, can be a reminder that we can go on with our lives, that we aren’t forgetting our loved ones. We have permission to live, to allow God to help us move through the valley and step into a new stretch of our life’s journey. Think about how you want your loved ones to live following your own departure from this life. Isn’t it a beautiful gift to imagine that your life can inspire others to keep loving when its hard, to keep going when the shadows are long and the terrain rocky and steep? Do you want your loved ones to remain stuck, to lose themselves, to stop living when you die?

Rabbi Kushner observes that the author of the 23rd Psalm was one who “knew from personal experience what it feels like [to be] in the valley of the shadow. But…also knew that the valley is a temporary lodging, not a permanent home…[They came to learn that God’s role is not to protect us from pain and loss, but to protect us from letting pain and loss define our lives. The psalmist turned to God and God worked a miracle. The miracle was not that a loved one came back to life. The miracle was that the psalmist found their way out of the valley of the shadow. And that is a miracle.”

In our Gospel today, Jesus came to the place of death and grieving. He was present with his dear friends and shared in their pain. And he did a miracle that revealed the power of God’s love to bring life out of death, new creation out of the place of grief. Jesus calls all of us out of the place of grief and shadows. Not when others thought it was the right time, but when God knew it was the right time. 

As we remember this day, calling the names of those we love and see no more, may we also hear Jesus calling our names, inviting us to honor the loves we have known by stepping out again and again into a new day, feeling sunlight on our face, facing the future unafraid. Because the Lord is our shepherd, and even when we journey through the most painful places we need not fear, for our loving God is with us, we are assured of God’s justice and compassion and, while the shadows grow long and threaten to overtake us, the promise, always, is that morning is coming. And “joy comes with the morning!” (Ps 30:5) 

https://foundryumc.org/archive