Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons

Foundry's Favorite Hymns

Meditations led by Pastor Dawn M. Hand and Pastor Al Hammer at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday, August 9, 2015 with favorite hymns performed by Foundry's Choir as selected by the congregation.

You ARE

A homily preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC August 2, 2015, the tenth Sunday after Pentecost.

Texts:  Isaiah 58:1-12, Matthew 5:13-20                                           

Today’s Gospel comes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and consists of a fairly familiar set of teachings.  Not wanting to make assumptions based on this familiarity, I hit the books to try to discover what Jesus, as a Jew who lived when and where he did, might have been referring to when he spoke of salt and light…  And in my research, I came across a wide array of explanations and references to salt in the Jewish tradition.  My personal favorite is described as “salting the baby.”  According to one scholar, salt was used both by Hebrew women and others in nearby cultures to repel the presence of evil—sort of like using garlic to keep the vampires away.  So when babies were born, they were “salted” as a form of protection.  Being fairly skeptical about whether this explanation had anything to do with what Jesus is teaching in Matthew 5, I decided to ask a Rabbi friend if he could shed any light on how Jesus, as a Rabbi of the time, might have been referencing salt.  What I was given is a rabbinic commentary on this passage that confirmed what I was beginning to deduce:  during the period when Jesus lived, salt was used to preserve and cure food, making salt absolutely essential for the well-being—even the survival—of the world and its people.[i]  By referring to his disciples—to us—as the “salt of the earth” Jesus is saying that our lives are essential to the world.  Jesus teaches that his disciples are the element in the world that keeps the world wholesome; the disciples help preserve what sustains life—the beautiful, good, and true things of the world. 

 

What about light?  What might Jesus be talking about when he tells his listeners that they are the light of the world?  The prophetic tradition, especially Isaiah, calls God’s people to be “a light to the nations.” (Isaiah 42:6, 49:6, 60:3)  In today’s passage Isaiah gives some instruction about what that means.  To be light in the world, according to Isaiah, is to be merciful to folks who are suffering, to be generous with what we have in support of those who don’t have enough, to do whatever we can to set people free from the things that keep them from really living, to try to do the right thing in difficult situations at work and at home, to keep good priorities, to be present and supportive of our families, to allow ourselves to be inconvenienced for the sake of others’ needs, to stand up for those who are hurt or weak, and to choose to speak words that build up other people instead of words that tear them down. (Isaiah 58:6-7,9)  When Jesus says, “You are the light of the world,” he is saying that we, his disciples, are those who live in the world in these ways…we are those who shine light into the world.

 

The teachings of the Hebrew Bible speak of God’s Word as light—“thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” (Psalm 119:105)  My Rabbi friend shared with me that Rabbinic tradition teaches that the Torah, the Hebrew Bible (Jesus’s Bible), is also compared to salt,[ii] as that which preserves what is necessary for life to thrive and be sustained.  Torah is salt and light.  The disciples of Jesus are salt and light.  I believe it is this connection that helps us understand why Jesus goes on to talk about fulfilling the law and the prophets.  The disciples of Jesus are salt and light in the world as they live as ones preserved and guided by the salt and light of Torah, of God’s Word. 

 

For me, the most striking thing about Jesus’ teaching today is that he says to those who would follow him:  “You ARE the salt of the earth…You ARE the light of the world.”  There is no condition placed on these things.  Jesus is saying that this is our nature, how we are made—we are made to be salt and light in the world.  The rabbinic tradition confirms this ; the Talmud teaches that the question “if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?” is purely rhetorical.  Salt CAN’T lose its saltiness.[iii]  Salt is salt.  You ARE salt, you are the element in the world that helps preserve the good, the beautiful, and the true things of this world.  Lights of a city on a hill cannot be hidden—light is light, there for all to see.  You ARE light, you are agents of God’s love, mercy, and justice.  This is who we are created to be:  salt and light. 

 

But the rhetorical question must have been asked to make a point. Perhaps Jesus—in asking about salt that isn’t being “salty”—is, in good prophetic fashion, speaking about the ways we betray our true nature, acting in ways contrary to what we are made for.  Isaiah speaks of our “rebellion,” and calls us out for the ways that we serve our own interests, oppress workers, quarrel and fight and “strike with a wicked fist,” the ways that we “point the finger” and speak evil of others.  We know all too well that evil, violence, and injustice are rampant in our world, our country, our city. We know our complicity. But the prophetic call of Jesus—and Isaiah before him—is to turn away from what is destructive, to turn away from all that is counter to the ways of God, to turn away from anything that keeps us from being who we really are, to turn toward God, to be like the prodigal child who had wandered so far from home who—all at once—“came to himself” and remembered who he was and whose he was, remembered that he could go home. And when we turn and return to God we will find healing, refreshment, and sustenance for ourselves—like a watered garden, like a spring whose waters never run out.  If and when we turn to God, then God’s grace fills us more and more and we are given strength to claim our true nature, to live out of our true purpose; and then—using the words of Isaiah—we can be light that we are for others, we can be healers of the breach and restorer of streets to live in. And-oh!-doesn’t our world need healers of the breach and restorers of streets to live in?

Each one of us is created by God to be salt and light... As unique children of God no one can be salt and light in the world in exactly the same way.  YOU are salt and light as only you can be.  Where is God giving you an opportunity to heal the breach that exists between the rich and poor, between races, between political parties, between members of your family? Where is God giving you a chance to help this “city on a hill”—Washington, DC—shine its light more justly?  Think for a moment about how you have already been salt and light in the world—in your workplace, your community, your church, your family—about how God has worked through you to help someone else, to provide for someone, to guide, to care, to heal, to show mercy, to communicate love… 

 

You see, you ARE salt and light.  We can try to live as those who are created for something else; we can forget who we really are and what we’re made for; we can try to hide who we really are as God’s strong, graced, courageous, beloved children.  We could try to hide our light under a bushel basket, but why would we want to?  Why do you suppose would we want to?

 

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[i] Mishnah Soferim 15.8

[ii] Maseches sofrim 15:8

[iii] Talmud Bekhorot 8b

Who Is Jesus Christ Today?

A guest sermon preached by Dr. Peter S. Hawkins at Foundry UMC on July 26, 2015.

 

In a letter written from a Nazi prison, dated roughly a year before his death in April 1945, pastor-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked a friend, “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” Posed by someone else, or even by Bonhoeffer under different circumstances, such a question might seem merely rhetorical, one that had an answer ready-made and already known  -- like the worn-smooth responses in a catechism. Worse yet, the question might even seem like a visiting preacher’s sermon title.

 

But the fact that Bonhoeffer asked what he did from prison, and in the face of certain death, means that there was nothing merely “rhetorical” about it. Let’s pretend for a moment that he’s asking it of us, on a day when Foundry Church is welcoming new members. How might we answer him? Surely it would not be with church-speak or with anything second-hand. The traditional formulations of the ancient creeds he already knew; they wouldn’t speak to his present need, whatever their truth; nor would the controversies of modern theology that he knew all too well, with their inevitable spinning of intellectual wheels.  No, when Bonhoeffer wrote his letter and posed his question, he was in crisis. Any minute there would be the knock on his cell door, the transport to the concentration camp at Buchenwald and, finally, the walk to the gallows at Flossenbürg. He knew his end was near; therefore he needed an answer, and needed it now. “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?”

 

Roughly two thousand years earlier, John the Baptist posed more or less the same question to Jesus’ followers; like Bonhoeffer, he also did so from prison.  He wanted them to ask the Rabbi, “Are you the one who is to come or are we to wait for another?” (Matt. 11:3). In this case, the questioner was no scholarly pastor-theologian but rather a fire-and-brimstone preacher impatient for Israel’s ancient prophecy to be fulfilled, for a Deliverer who would enlighten the “land of deep darkness” in which he and his people lived. In Herod’s jail and under sentence of death, John embodied centuries of messianic expectation and with it, centuries of impatience: “How long, O Lord, how long?” Stuck behind bars, however, he had to send other people running. There was no time to waste. He needed to know if today was the day -- if Jesus was the one.

 

If ever there were an occasion for a direct Yes, this would have been it. But instead of answering straight on, Jesus points away from himself and toward the world he and John share, a world in which the blind have come to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to walk, the dead to live. Rather than say who he is, in other words, he points instead to what has happened because of him.

 

Is this a sly way of laying claim to messianic identity without claiming it outright? Probably. But his turning away from himself to others also suggests something else. If you want to know who Jesus is you must first see and hear and feel the broken world around you, and then recognize him in the midst of that world’s healing. Who is Jesus Christ for us today? He is the restoration of sight, of hearing, of mobility, of life. There is simply no proper noun that will sum him up: he is all verbs.

 

But maybe he is also the question itself, the one that keeps on being posed, and for which no answer is finally adequate. Why else, after all, would each of the synoptic gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – place at their center the same moment when Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is (Matt. 16: 13-23, Mk 8:27-33, Luke 9:18-22)? By this point in their time together so much had already happened: miracles of every kind, sermons on the mountain and on the plain, conflicts with religious leaders, powerful demonstrations of spiritual authority. And yet after all this, as the disciples made their way toward yet another village in Caesarea Philippi, Jesus asks them not only what strangers think he is all about, but what they make of him. It’s all very well that some in the crowd think that he is John the Baptist come back from the dead – or, from centuries before, a Elijah or Jeremiah or one of the other prophets. But he insists on going personal: He asks, “But who do you say that I am?” (Matt 13: 13)         

 

His pointblank question is, of course, meant to put them on the spot, to provoke an honest response. When Peter gives it – “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (v. 15) – he offers the answer on which the church is built. But just as vital as the answer is, I think, the question itself, “But who do you say that I am?” It’s important that Jesus asks this not at the beginning of his relationship with the disciples but well down the road, and indeed not far from the end. It is as if to know who Jesus is means having to ask about him again and again; it means accepting the fact that you can never quite “get” him; it means acknowledging your need to know him for yourself and today.

 

And maybe it also means asking the question of his identity outside of church -- asking it in prison or on the road; in a hospital corridor or on the Metro – asking it anyplace where you find yourself in need or at a loss; anyplace where the answers are not already lined up in size-place and waiting for you to choose among them. It may mean that you need to step out of line, away from piety, and at a distance from all the received wisdom you have inherited.

 

What if, perhaps only for a moment, you let go of the bearded man in the stained glass window holding a lamb. Let go of the “personal” Lord and Savior you could never quite get into your heart no matter how hard you tried. What if you put to the side, respectfully, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, Christ the King and Christ the Liberator, the one who “is named Wonderful, Counselor, Prince of Peace” (Isa. 9: 6), the Man of Sorrows, even Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Man for Others.” What if you risked asking Bonheoffer’s question for yourself, “Who is Jesus Christ for me today”?

 

Given human nature, it is most likely that we take such a risk only when driven to it: in prison, or in the corridor outside a beloved’s hospital room, or in our own hospital room. And yet it doesn’t necessarily have to be the dire situation that makes a person bold enough to ask the biggest questions without expecting the familiar answers. Sometimes such a moment of truth comes in the midst of ordinary time.

 

Take my own experience, for instance. In the late 1970s I was at the beginning of my teaching career at Yale Divinity School and visiting New Haven friends who were housesitting in Stonington, Connecticut. Our absent host was the poet James Merrill, a friend of my friends, who was in the process of writing what would become, by 1982, a three-part, 560 page epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover. Crucial to its composition was a homemade Ouija board that became the stage for sessions of serious play undertaken by Merrill and his partner David Jackson, not only on their own but often in the company of friends. Together the two men, plying the improvised board with an inverted Blue Willow teacup, would contact spirits in an afterlife that may only have been their conjoined imagination. Night by night, and over the course of forty years, they conjured a community of figures that included favorite poets, parents, deceased friends, and a host of other spirits who “showed up” on the board from --  where? Whatever one makes of its origins, the monumental poem that emerged from this is like nothing else in literature (although Dante’s Divine Comedy does come to mind).

 

Needless to say, the friends with whom I was visiting – both of whom were poets – took their housesitting as an opportunity to imitate the Master: Where was that Ouija board? For three days of the weekend I watched the two of them sitting across from one another at Merrill’s dining room table. Each touched lightly the up-turned teacup, whose handle served as a pointer to one place or another on the board. Taking turns, they asked their questions. In response, and to my utter incredulity, the cup shuttled purposefully, quickly, between vowels and consonants, commas and periods, the words “Yes” and “No.” One of them took down the barrage of letters and symbols with his spare hand, a line of script that later would be divided into words and sentences. It all happened too fast  for me to think that they were able to make it up the spot.  But what else could they be doing?

 

As young poets, my friends predictably brought questions to the Ouija board about the writers they loved (some of whom they managed to contact, or so it seemed!). For my sake they asked about Dante, but without result. In his case, a door slammed shut: he was, as the board spelled out, “TOOHIGH.” I was stunned. If this was the unconscious taking over, it was definitely better than anything we had come up with in graduate school! But oddly enough, despite my literary training and passion for poetry, it was not really about literature that I wanted to know.

 

Throughout the weekend I watched them, dumbfounded, as an observer. By Sunday evening it finally got to be my turn. Didn’t I want, they asked, to try the board myself? Of course for three days I had been waiting for the invitation; but I was also fearful of what it would mean for me to put my fingers on the upturned teacup and then let go. Wouldn’t this be King Saul and the Witch of Endor all over again – a forbidden consorting with familiar spirits, a defilement with wizards and mediums? (We al know how that turned out!) Besides, what if they ever heard about this at Yale Divinity School? Goodbye tenure!

 

Beginning to sweat, I sat myself down at the table, joined one of my friends at the board, put my hands on the Blue Willow cup, and shut my eyes.  After a little while the cup began to move in slow circles, though without apparent direction from my friend and with absolutely no help from me.  Then he said, “OK, Peter, what do you want to ask?” To my embarrassment I found that despite three days of waiting for my chance, I had not actually formulated anything. I was there on the board, a teacup under my fingers, and nothing in mind. Until all of a sudden I realized that there was, in fact, only one thing I wanted to ask --  a question I had never asked before, which was so deeply buried in me that I was astonished once I heard myself put it into words. It was as if in that moment I was discovering something about myself I didn’t know, some hunger. I opened my eyes and heard myself ask, “”Who is Jesus Christ?”

 

The cup stopped tracing circles and then began to dart quickly (as if with a mind of its own) to the letters H,  E,  I, S, T, H – moving faster and faster until I could hardly keep up with it, but not so fast that the friend playing scribe couldn’t copy down the letters and then decipher the message they formed. “Who is Jesus Christ?” I had asked. And the answer? “HE IS THE LENS IN THE DARK BOX.”

 

Can any good thing come off a Ouija board? I should not previously have thought so. The whole business was the parlor trick of another generation become, in the crazy seventies, a pastime of poets who were out of my league. And yet, one Sunday night almost 40 years ago – with a teacup under my fingers and sweat pouring down my face – my natural skepticism, my Episcopalian rationality, my scriptural trepidation all met their match.  I couldn’t dismiss what I had learned about myself, let alone about Jesus Christ, as either the work of demons or mere “hoodoo voodoo.” Rather, I was taken someplace where I wouldn’t otherwise have gone on my own. I was blindsided by the Holy Spirit.

 

Not that I should have been entirely surprised by the weirdness of the context, for isn’t the Word of the Lord invariably spoken in impossible situations and inappropriate places: to an ancient couple and an old woman’s barren womb, in a death valley crowded with very dry bones, to a girl in a nowhere like Nazareth, at a public execution? Is anything too absurd or too embarrassing for the Lord?

 

Or is anything too metaphorical? Are any of Jesus’ names other than mysteries spelled out in letters, concealed in syllables and symbols? John the Baptist wonders if he is the “one who is to come.” Peter confesses him in one Gospel to be the Messiah, in another to be the Holy One of God. For others he was Master, Rabbi, Son of David, Son of Man, Son of God,  King of the Jews, “the lily of the valley, the bright and morning star, the fairest of ten thousand.” And what did he call himself (with echoes of the divine “I am that I am” (Exod. 3:14)? “I am the bread that comes down from heaven,”  “I am the light of the world,” “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

 

But for me, having asked “Who is Jesus Christ?” in a highly improbable setting, he is first and foremost the lens in the dark box. He is the imaginable focus who enables me to imagine an unimaginable God. He is the human prism in whom a transcendent divine light becomes a set of shoulders overturning a table of moneychangers, a finger writing in the dust, a back being scourged, a voice in extremis crying out the words of a psalm. He is an aperture, an opening up of a darkness I cannot fathom. He is at once God’s question and God’s answer; he is the lens in the dark box.

            But who do you say that he is?

            Who is Jesus Christ for you today?

 

God Has A Dream

Guest sermon preached at Foundry UMC Sunday, July 19, 2015 by guest preacher Rev. Dr. Alton B. Pollard III, Dean and Professor of Religion and Culture at Howard University School of Divinity.

Scripture:  1 Peter 3:15 -  “Always be ready to give an account … of the hope that lies within you.”


“In spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream.”
Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr.


“God says to you, ‘I have a dream.  Please help me to realize it.’”                             - Archbishop Desmond Tutu

 

I am honored to bring you greetings from Howard University School of Divinity where it is my privilege to serve as dean.  Foundry UMC and Pastor Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli, it is good to be with you this morning.  I was humbled and surprised by the invitation to serve as an “Outstanding Preacher” for your “Summer in the City Series.” I find strength for my journey in your uncommon dedication to building beloved community in this your bicentennial year.

My wife Jessica and I moved to Washington, DC, eight years ago.  We quickly learned that the District of Columbia is really the Districts of Columbia, a city administratively divided into four quadrants and filled with demographic fault lines as well, where urban development has long been a means to human displacement and power and privilege, dominance and division, inequity and disparity, systemic and strategic neglect, amid the scandal and controversy of federal taxation without representation are the order of the day.

Renting a house in the city, Jessica and I witnessed the changing landscape, what many call progress: the uprooting of established homeowners and renters, many of whom were Black and elderly, and the arrival of earnest young people, most of whom were white, and ready to take their place.  The many open houses we attended – all at prices beyond our means – reflected the neighborhood “renaissance” and population shift.

The history of DC’s urban makeover dates back to the late nineties, as a once vibrant center city vacated and boarded up, was once again made ready for business.  For the first time in generations, an infusion of development dollars poured into the District.  Traditional family dwellings were converted to luxury apartments and condo units.  Abandoned Victorian houses were renovated and Brownstones restored.  The construction of new houses grew commonplace.  Entire city blocks gave way to microenterprise. Growth and expansion was everywhere – almost. Black Washingtonians were largely excluded from the preferred lending practices and opportunities now widespread.


In July 2011, Chocolate City unofficially became Caramel City per the U.S. census and the New York Times:

This city, the country’s first to have an African-American majority and one of its earliest experiments in black self-government, is passing a milestone. Washington’s black population slipped below 50 percent this year, possibly in February, about 51 years after it gained a majority.

There is a common and self-congratulatory refrain that the United States is a post-racial society.   The election of a two-term Black president and the popularity of the first family, on most days, are pointed to as evidence that we have overcome.  Yet events of late from Florida (Trayvon Martin), New York (Eric Garner), and Ferguson (Michael Brown) to Baltimore (Freddie Gray) Houston (Sandra Bland) and Charleston (the Emanuel Nine) serve as stark reminders of what we already know.  In communities and municipalities, suburbs and rural contexts, from sea to shining sea, racism is deeply and distressingly entrenched.  Across the District of Columbia, the root causes of Black anger are not hard to find: from the exploding costs of renting or owning a home to troubled and closing public schools, from the spread of private schools many families cannot afford to chronic disparities in health care, from the epidemic of HIV/AIDS to endemic poverty, from police arrest strategies and youth incarceration patterns to structural unemployment assigned to select neighborhoods, precincts and wards.

Meanwhile, civic amenities known to cater to newcomers proliferate - street cars, zip cars, rideshare, bike share, Segways, dog parks, green parks, green grocers, corner bistros, and restricted parking, especially on Sunday morning – these may yet and still cause a riptide effect that exposes the raw racial, ethnic and socio-economic fault lines among us.  Congressional veto power over the DC city budget and taxing authority only heightens the sense of distrust, that urban redevelopment and human displacement are really one and the same.  Bi-partisan obstructionism and market forces dictate the new reality.  Socio-cultural, political and economic, gentrification has many guises.  Racism, America’s original sin, lives on.

Today there is as much talk about the unsettled state of affairs in our churches as there is in our communities, how to secure the future for our children and our children’s children, how to meet the needs of our families and our elders, and how to care for the least, the lost and the last.  Tragically, our houses of worship, without regard to faith mirror society’s mistrust and territorialism.  The largest reservoir of the un-churched are those who were once potential believers but who finally despaired of finding spiritual, moral and holistic fulfillment in communions where love, justice and compassion do not prevail.  To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the church became its own worst enemy, defenders of the status quo rather than beacons of hope, unable to dream God’s dream for God’s people everywhere.  Memberships are in decline and congregations are in trouble.  Indeed, families and communities are in trouble everywhere.  Despite our human messiness, our calling as the people of God remains the same, to be faithful to the vision of One who is loving and just and a world where all of creation is set free. 

God has a dream for us, a world and a way of life that embraces all people – black, brown and white, and every background, condition and circumstance – if we are only courageous enough to accept it.  God calls us to proclaim the good news that leads to the transformation of our time.  God calls us to be drum majors for justice and agents for peace.  All too often, our lack of compassion confounds the disinherited of the world.  Our unwillingness to love confuses God’s people.  It disenfranchises them.  It sends them away.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. reminds us in Stride Toward Freedom (1958): 

Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men (and women) and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion. 

 

Today many of our nation’s citizens continue to suffer the indignity of social pathologies not of their making.   There remains a culture of death and disprivilege and disparity visited upon persons who are more often than not Black, brown and poor and children, young women and men.  In every city, suburb, and hamlet too many residents contend on a daily basis with all manner of inequity from racial profiling, unjust sentencing laws, and overwhelmed teachers to hostile civil servants, voting restrictions and disinterested social service providers.  Others still, who are same gender loving, who are bisexual, transgender and queer find that because of matters of the human heart, for reasons born of sexual affection, because of whom they love and are loved, stigma and hate companion their lives and their sentence is to be silenced or turned away by the household of faith.   Many of us, struggling with the frustration and alienation of this world, with our own shadowy and unfulfilled existence, with a kind of frenetic emptiness inside, are simply unable to make sense of life at all.  Some of us choose to violently turn on one another, take the lives of others, and sometimes end our own.  Rather than confront our contemptuous jailers, our physical and psychological chains hold us captive. 

Ecclesiastes tells us that change is inevitable.  Multicultural, bilingual, gender diverse, interreligious, telecommuting, and beautifully human, We the People of the United States are in the throes of birth pangs.  How will the church respond?  Will we hold steadfast to old and familiar patterns of the Christian faith, of winners and losers along the lines of religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sex and social class?  Will we rely on spiritual platitudes and Christian clichés to placate us?  Will we speak about reality unrealistically in order to convince ourselves that we have done enough?  Will we sacrifice the beloved community on the altar of social conformity?  The most entrenched evils of our day – bigotry, poverty, violence, rape, homelessness, unemployment, mass incarceration, anti-immigration, homophobia, global warming, genocide, child abuse, and human trafficking – await our deepest response.  Are we ready to establish by grace and through faith a new and better world, a more just and inclusive one?  Do we care enough for each other, for ourselves, for creation, for God, to act?

Through the years and across generations, there have always been those who in the time of crisis found ways to be resourceful, to mobilize, to advocate, to create moral and social networks based on their belief in the infinite worth of every human being everywhere.  These are they who have demonstrated with a surpassing faith the capacity to entertain our better angels, to help us overcome our own worst fears, to advance the common cause, to advocate for the poor and dispossessed, to agitate for justice, to wage preemptive peace, to build a common humanity under a friendly sky, to beat swords into plowshares, to turn spears into pruning hooks, and to make the rough places plain; to engage in the kind of transcendent hope and prophetic advocacy that saves peoples lives and helps to make us whole. 

Dreaming dreams and seeing visions, the fervent prayer of the people of God everywhere is for a better country and a better world.  God’s dream for the church is that we build a more just and generous and loving community, that we overcome the great social barriers of our day with our very hearts and deeds and lives; that we embrace the infinite possibilities of the divine and expand the imperfect meaning of our democracy; that we transform ugliness and greed, poverty and squalor, alienation and disharmony, violence and hate into their glorious counterparts of beauty and holiness, fulfillment and security, equality and tranquility, love and life.  Foundry UMC Church let us continue to covenant together, to reconcile together, and cultivate the qualities of love, forgiveness, humility, generosity and courage that will save our people’s lives.  It is our sacred truth:  We, all of us, belong to each other.  We are of one blood all.  We are sisters and brothers.  We are one family.  And God believes in us.  Amen. 

 

Embracing Our Destiny

A sermon preached by Bishop Thomas Bickerton as part of Foundry UMC's Outstanding Preacher Series on Sunday, July 12, 2015.

I.                  When I was a boy I was a little, short fat kid.  What that often times meant was that my aspirations did not match up very well with my reality.  My aspiration was to be a great athlete.  My reality was far different from that.

 

II.                Some of the most humiliating experiences I had in relationship to my reality not being compatible with my aspiration had to do with my greatest love in all of sports, baseball.

 

In fifth grade, I was old enough to play what we called back then “Bronco League.”  On the day of the big draft I found myself at East End playground with my buddies.  The draft started with coaches looking over the stands and selecting players that they either knew or looked the part.  Mike, then Steve, then Phil, then Joe were all selected.  Near the end of the draft I still sat on the bench.  Finally, at the end of the draft, each coach could pick two more players.  The coach nonchalantly looked into the stands and said, “I’ll take him and him,” and walked away with his other prized players.  I was the next to the last person picked in the draft.

 

I did not realize at the time that I had been drafted onto the best team in the league.  The rules were quite different then.  There were no rules about having a guaranteed place on a team or a requirement that every player had to play a certain amount of innings. If you didn’t make it, you were cut.  And if you didn’t cut it, you wouldn’t play.

 

I was the last player who made the team.  For two years I sat on the bench inning after inning after inning.  In two years I had only one at bat.  I walked and was later thrown out.  At the awards ceremony celebrating our season ending victory, I was called forward to receive my trophy.  When the coach handed it to me, someone shouted from the crowd, “Why is he getting one, he didn’t do anything to deserve it.”

 

I sat on the bench.  I was never asked to play.  The perception was that because I was a little, short, fat kid I couldn’t play.  I didn’t look the part of the accepted norm.  I was, for two seasons, just him, the one who was picked because someone had to be.  I didn’t look the part so I never got to play the game.

 

III.             What a sad and depressing way to begin a sermon on this glorious Lord’s day.  Yet, my childhood experience is somewhat reminiscent of the manner in which life unfolds even in this second decade of the 21^st century.

 

We live in what is a very judgmental environment.  People are so often and so easily placed into categories, judged for their behaviors, and criticized for their decisions.  It’s a “my way or the highway” existence in many ways.  Either you agree with me or you are wrong, and if we can’t find a way to agree I reserve the right to just take my marbles and go home.

 

We are put into preconceived boxes:

·         I don’t like the way you look

·         I don’t care for the way you act.

·         I don’t approve of your choices.

·         And if I have to, I’ll pick um, “her and him” and be done with it.

 

IV.             What a sad and depressing way to begin a sermon.  But lest you get the feeling that the story ends here, along comes this passage of scripture from Ephesians.  In the original Greek these eleven independent verses are one long sentence that some have described as an explosion of praise that is, by design, intended to give the original reader in Ephesus, and the modern reader in today’s context, an idea of what God is up to in this vast world of ours.  This is a poetic exultation that calls us to bless the God who blesses us.  We may be, by the interpretation of some in the world, relegated to the end of the bench with no worth or ability, but we play a far more important role based on God’s activity and intentions.

 

V.                This one big, beautiful sentence has a series of sermons built in that need to be proclaimed.

 

Ephesians says, “God chose us.”

 

We have been adopted into the family and God has taken great pleasure in doing so!  God’s will is associated with pleasure.  God’s will for your life and for mine is associated with joy, pleasure, and happiness.  This is good stuff:  God’s will for your life is something good, not something awful or something to be dreaded, or something to be criticized.

 

 

 

 

 

We are, through our baptism, claimed, called and loved with a love that will not let us go.  It is the reason we baptize infants in our church – before a child can ever say “I love you God,” God has already proclaimed love for that child.  It is why we have an open table at Holy Communion.   In the masterful liturgy that we use, we invite everyone, member and non-member alike, to join us as we receive a gracious reminder that God so loved the world that he sent Jesus to point the way for how we were to live. 

 

VI.             Ephesians says, God has blessed us. 

 

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” (verse 3)

 

 What that means is that we are beneficiaries of what God is up to in the world.  This doesn’t mean that we are sitting on the bench watching the action on the field.  It means that we are right in the middle of God’s action happening all around us.  We have been lavished with redemption, forgiveness, and an inheritance that is eternal in nature.

 

We are blessed to enjoy this intimate relationship with God and enjoy all of the benefits attached from being a member of God’s family.  It’s not that we have chosen God – it is that God has chosen us.  We are a part of the family.

 

VII.          Being chosen was something that continued to overwhelm the Apostle Paul.  He was a murderer, an oppressor of Christians, a judger of others.  He was one of those people that put people in boxes, judged their behaviors, and condemned their choices.  Yet, out of that evil behavior, God called this man and transformed him into the likeness of Christ.  Paul could never get over it.  God said to Paul, I want you to be a part of my family.

 

I don’t know about you but when I sense that I am wanted I am affirmed and lifted up to new heights of possibility.  It reframes everything and enables me to see myself and others, neighbor and stranger, friend or foe in a new and fresh light.  It builds my confidence and improves my gait. We have been chosen for the team and God did it enthusiastically.

 

When you and I feel as if we are claimed and loved, we become keenly aware of how blessed we are.    How have you been blessed? 

 

·         A joyful baptism at this font. 

·         The joy you found in providing a helping hand to someone in need.

·         A relationship that has clarified and defined the true meaning of love in your life. 

·         A time when someone freely forgave you for something that you had done wrong. 

·         A memorial service that reminded you of a deep-seeded faith which proclaims our belief in something more than just this life.

 

VIII.         But here’s the real kicker.

 

Ephesians says, God Destined Us.

 

What does that mean?  To claim our destiny is to answer a simple question:  “What are you going to do with what you’ve got?” 

Paul says that we have obtained an inheritance and that we are destined as God’s children to live for the praise of God’s glory.  That may be the hardest part of the story.

 

A few weeks ago when the merciless shooting of persons took place at Emanuel Baptist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, we all stood in disbelief at how innocent people were killed while attending a bible study.  This racially driven hate crime stirred the blood of many.  All eyes have been on Charleston.  Would this become yet another Ferguson or New York or Baltimore?  But some curious things have taken place. 

·         On the day after the shooting, people refused to sit in preconceived groups but gathered as one people in a service of prayer.

·         At the initial hearing for the shooter, family members of the victims called for him to repent.  They spoke of forgiveness and processing this atrocity with faith.

·         Later that weekend, persons from all ethnicities and walks of life gathered to form a human chain across the bridge leading into Charleston as a sign of unity and resolve. 

·         In his eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney on June 26, President Obama made grace the central theme:

o   The grace family members of the victims embodied in expressing forgiveness for the killer.

o   The grace that the city of Charleston and state of South Carolina displayed in coming together in the wake of the massacre.

o   The grace God bestowed in transforming a tragedy into an occasion for renewal and hope.

 

Peace and grace, prayer and the struggle for reconciliation has been the foundation upon which the difficult conversations about unjust racism has taken place.  Rather than violence, they have prayed.  Rather than retaliated, they have taken the high road.  It could be argued that they are living for the praise of God and have claimed their destiny as children of God who will say with faith the unbelievable words, “Nothing will be able to separate me from the love of God through Christ Jesus our Lord.”

 

IX.             How many times have people like you and I been put into a box, judged and scorned, sinned against and been made to feel less than the child of God that we were created to be?  And how many times have you and I been tempted to lash out in response and react to those injustices with unjust behaviors of our own? 

 

We are called to claim our destiny – you and I are created by God, claimed by God, and loved by our God with a love that will never let you go.  Claim it and use it as a the strength you need to live and witness for the praise of God’s glory.

 

Those that attack us hope that we will retaliate and thus prove the fallacy of our faith.  But ordinary people like Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King rose to greatness when they claimed their inheritance as children of God and used that inheritance to witness to the enduring power of God’s grace at work in their lives.  You and I have not only received grace.  We are called upon to live by it as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The writer of Revelation put it well.  One day, God will usher in a new day

 

“See, the home[a] of God is among mortals.

He will dwell[b] with them;

they will be his peoples,[c]

and God himself will be with them;

he will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

(Revelation 21:3-4)

 

X.                These are tough and challenging days, to be sure.  We wonder what the will of God truly is and we struggle when we see actions and behaviors that demean others and cause harm.  It is hard to endure and in the midst of the struggle there is the very real temptation to wonder where we fit in the big picture of the world.

 

 

XI.             Every year in Western Pennsylvania we host a series of personal visits to our Conference Center by those enrolled in local church confirmation classes.  In PA, a student gets a day off from school in order to attend a confirmation related activity.  During the day, we plan a series of events at the Conference Center.  As a part of the day, I have 30 minutes sitting on the floor with each confirmation class in a free for all session of conversation and sharing.  During the winter/spring we will have anywhere from 1,200-1,400 confirmation students coming through our center.  It is totally exhausting.

 

Last year, I talked with the kids about what I do and how I do it. 

·         I explained to them that in the midst of all the things I do, sitting on the floor with them is among the things that I cherish the most. 

·         I told them that in the midst of all that they face, making this decision about how much God fits into their lives would be their most important decision. 

·         I affirmed with the kids that I realized it was tough being a teenager in the 21^st century: lots of choices coming their way and lots of forces competing for their energy. 

·         I acknowledged that it was tough growing up and that many of them, no doubt, were facing peer pressure and bullying in person and through social media.

·         I summarized my remarks by calling each of the kids by name and saying over and over to them that they mattered to God, to their sponsors, and to me. 

·         I talked to them about the claim placed on their lives at their baptism and that God loved them with a love that would not let them go. 

·         I told them that they mattered.

 

At the end of the day on one of the Confirmation Tours, I was packing up some things to take home with me.  I was totally wiped out from a long and exhausting day.  All of a sudden there was a soft knock on my door.  Looking up there was a head of a confirmation student peaking around the corner at me.

 

This little guy spoke up, “Bishop, we are getting ready to leave.  I wanted to thank you for spending some time with us.  Thanks for the book bag and for the snacks.  I really had a great time.”

 

I assured John that I too had had a good time and that I was glad he and his class came.  I told him that he was always welcome and that any time he was in the area he should stop by.  He nodded his head and disappeared.

 

Before I could gather up my things and head for the door, John’s head peered around the corner once more. 

 

“Bishop,” he said, “I just wanted you to know – you matter too.”

 

There was nothing more I needed in that moment. 

 

Frankly, there is nothing more I need in the journey of life. 

 

I made it a point to tell the kids that they mattered but the biggest reminder I received was that I mattered too.

 

I wondered on the way home how my life would have been altered if my baseball coach had said those words so long ago or if my teammates had said something like that when I received my trophy.  I turned out okay but missed opportunities to bless someone on the journey can have dire consequences for some. 

 

An opportunity not missed by a confirmation student for his bishop.

  

XII.          So, here we are.  At times we are regulated to the bench and wonder whether or not we have a place on the team.  We live in a judging world, a place that seems God-forsaken at times.  Fingers are pointed, accusations are made, judgements are leveled.  It wears us out, deflates our fragile egos and demeans our sense of self-worth.

 

There are fingers pointed at us all the time and it has a way, at times, of just wearing us out.  And when we are all spent of energy, sitting worn down on the side of the bench, there is another finger pointed at us.

 

And in the midst of it all, you ask me to come and preach.  What do I have to say that will make any difference?

 

You matter.