Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons: Recent Episodes
Foundry UMC DC
Foundry is an historic, progressive United Methodist Church that welcomes all, worships passionately, challenges the status quo, & seeks to transform the world.
FINDING WONDER
A Guest Sermon by Cassandra Lawrence at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday July 14th, 2024 as part of the "Upward Focus, Outward Bound" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: GENESIS 1
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HOW’S YOUR LOVE LIFE
A Guest Sermon by Rev. Johnsie Cogman at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday July 14th, 2024 as part of the "Upward Focus, Outward Bound" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: LUKE 10:27
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RADICAL HOSPITALITY
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday July 7th, 2024 as part of the "Upward Focus, Outward Bound" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: ROMANS 12:2-5, 9-18, MARK 6:1-6
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Love Flowing Up
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday June 30th, 2024 as part of the "Upward Focus, Outward Bound" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: PHILIPPIANS 2:1-11, MATTHEW 18:1-4
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Free and Unbound
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday June 23rd, 2024 as part of the "Upward Focus, Outward Bound" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: MATTHEW 20:1-16
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Seeds of Love
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday June 16th, 2024 as part of the "Beloved" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: PSALM 92:1-4, 12-15 MARK 4:26-34
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Bold Love
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday June 9th, 2024 as part of the "Beloved" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: 1 JOHN 4:7-21
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No Greater Love
A Guest Sermon by Guy Cecil at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday June 2nd, 2024 as part of the "Beloved" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: PSALM 139:13-18 & 2 CORINTHIANS 4:6-10
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Varieties of Gifts
A Sermon by Rev. T.C. Morrow at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday May 25th, 2024 as part of the "The Power of So That" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: 1 CORINTHIANS 12:4-11
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Like a Fire
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday May 19th, 2024 as part of the "The Power of So That" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: ACTS 2:1-21
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Chosen Family
A Sermon by Rev. Kealani Willbanks at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday May 12th, 2024 as part of the "The Power of So That" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: JOHN 17:6-19
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Love One Another
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday May 5th, 2024 as part of the "The Power of So That" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: ACTS 10:44-48; JOHN 15:9-17
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A Time and A Place
A Guest Sermon by Michel Martin at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday April 28th, 2024 as part of the "The Power of So That" Series at Foundry.
Today's Guest Preacher:
Michel Martin is a host of Morning Edition on NPR. Previously, she was the weekend host of All Things Considered and the Consider This Saturday podcast, where she drew on her deep reporting and interviewing experience to dig into the week’s news. Outside the studio, she has also hosted “Michel Martin: Going There,” an ambitious live event series in collaboration with Member stations. Martin has also served as a contributor and substitute host for NPR news magazines and talk shows, including Talk of the Nation and News & Notes. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Martin graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College at Harvard University in 1980 and earned a Master of Arts from the Wesley Theological Seminary in 2016. Michel has been a longtime Foundry member, along with her family, Billy, Aminah, and William.
Scripture Text: PSALM 22:25-31 AND 1 JOHN 4:7-21
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Sacred Resistance: The Work For Climate Justice
A Message from Deborah Bombard & Sidra Siddiqui at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday April 21st, 2024 as part of the "The Power of So That" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: JOHN 10:11-18
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Enfleshed
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday April 14th, 2024 as part of the "The Power of So That" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: LUKE 24:36B-48
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This Life Revealed
A Sermon by Rev. Jonathan Brown at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday April 7th, 2024 as part of the "The Power of So That" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: ACTS 4:32-35; 1 JOHN 1:1-2:2
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A Hidden Wholeness
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Easter Sunday, March 31st, 2024 as part of the "Reaching For Connection" Series at Foundry.
Scripture Text: JOHN 20:1-18
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Unanticipated Connection
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Palm Sunday, March 24th, 2024 as part of the Lenten Season at Foundry.
Scripture Text: PSALM 118:1-2, 19-29, MARK 11:1-11
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A Dangerous Commitment
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday March 17th, 2024 at Foundry as part of the "Reaching For Connection" Special Music Series.
Scripture Text: JOHN 12:20-33
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Wildlife Sanctuary
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday March 10th, 2024 at Foundry as part of the "Reaching For Connection" Special Music Series.
Scripture Text: PSALM 107:1-3, 17-22. NUMBERS 21:4-9
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Ultimately Only One
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday Mard 3rd, 2024 at Foundry as part of the "Reaching For Connection" Special Music Series.
Scripture Text: JOHN 2:13-22
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What Life Do We Save
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday February 25th, 2024 at Foundry as part of the "Reaching For Connection" Series.
Scripture Text: MARK 8:31-38
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Love. Struggle. Connect.
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday February 18th, 2024 at Foundry as part of the "A Dream Deferred" Series.
Scripture Text: MARK 1:9-15
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View From The Mountaintop
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday February 11th, 2024 at Foundry as part of the "A Dream Deferred" Series.
Scripture Text: MARK 9:2-9; 14-19
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Uplifting
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday February 4th, 2024 at Foundry as part of the "A Dream Deferred" Series.
Scripture Text: MARK 1:29-39
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Becoming Maladjusted
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday January 28th, 2024 at Foundry as part of the "A Dream Deferred" Series.
Scripture Text: MARK 1:21-28
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Facing Our Flaws
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday January 21st, 2024 at Foundry as part of the "A Dream Deferred" Series.
Scripture Text: MARK 1:14-20
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When God Whispers
A Guest Sermon by Rev. Dr. Donyelle McCray at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday January 14th, 2024 at Foundry as part of the "A Dream Deferred" Series.
Scripture Text: 1 SAMUEL 3:1-20
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Offering Gifts
A Sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday January 7th, 2024 on Epiphany Sunday at Foundry.
Scripture Text: MATTHEW 2:1-12
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Un-Wrapped Up
A Sermon by Rev. Jonathan Brown at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday December 31st, 2023 at Foundry as part of the Advent at Foundry Series
Scripture Text: LUKE 2:22-40
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The Perfect Gift
A meditation by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday December 24th, 2023 at Foundry as part of the Christmas Eve Service at Foundry.
Lesson Text: LUKE 1:26-35, 38. LUKE 2:1-20
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The Aniticipation
A meditation by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday December 176th, 2023 at Foundry as part of the Advent at Foundry Series
Scripture Text: ISAIAH 61:1-4, 8-11
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The Preparation
A sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday December 10th, 2023 at Foundry as part of the Advent at Foundry Series
Scripture Text: ISAIAH 40:1-11
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The Search
A sermon by Rev. T.C. Morrow at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday December 3rd, 2023 at Foundry as part of the Advent at Foundry Series
Scripture Text: MARK 13:24-
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Stress Isn't Your Fault
A sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday November 26th, 2023 at Foundry as part of the "Who's Living Who" Series
Scripture Text: EPHESIANS 1:3-6, 11-12 The Message
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Slow Your Roll
A sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday November 19th, 2023 at Foundry as part of the "Who's Living Who" Series
Scripture Text: COLOSSIANS 2:2-4, 6-7 from The Message
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The Magic Trick
A sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday November 12th, 2023 at Foundry as part of the "Who's Living Who" Series
Scripture Text: GALATIANS 5:1
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Love is Strong as Death
A meditation by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on All Saint Sunday, November 5th, 2023 at Foundry.
Text: SONG OF SOLOMON 8:6-7 ROMANS 8:31-39
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The Law That Gives Life
A sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday October 29th, 2023 as part of the "Reunite and Renew" Series at Foundry.
Text: MATTHEW 22: 34-40
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Imitation
A sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday October 22nd, 2023 as part of the "Reunite and Renew" Series at Foundry.
Text: 1 THESSALONIANS 1:1-10, MATTHEW 22:15-22
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Finally, Siblings
A sermon by Rev. Ben Roberts at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday October 15th, 2023 as part of the "Reunite and Renew" Series at Foundry.
Text: EXODUS 32:1-6, PHILIPPIANS 4:4-9
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A Hard Page To Turn
A sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday October 8th, 2023 as part of the "Reunite and Renew" Series at Foundry.
Text: MATTHEW 21:33-46
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Poured Out
A sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday October 1st, 2023 as part of the "Reunite and Renew" Series at Foundry.
Text: EXODUS 17:1-7, PHILIPPIANS 2:1-18
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Remember!
A sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday September 24th, 2023 as part of the "Family Matters" Series at Foundry.
Text: EXODUS 16:9-15, PSALM 105:1-6, 12-27, 37-45
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A Family Miracle
A sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday September 17th, 2023 as part of the "Family Matters" Series at Foundry.
Text: EXODUS 14:19-31
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Family Supper
A sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday September 10th, 2023 as part of the "Family Matters" Series at Foundry.
Text: EXODUS 12:1-14
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Leader of the Family?
A guest sermon by Rabbi Steve Weisman at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday September 3rd, 2023 as part of the "Family Matters" Series at Foundry.
Text: EXODUS 3:1-15
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Found Family
A sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday August 27th, 2023 as part of the "Family Matters" Series at Foundry.
Text: EXODUS 1:8-2:10
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Family Reunion
A sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday August 13th, 2023 as part of the "Family Matters" Series at Foundry.
Text: GENESIS 45:1-15
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Family Drama
A sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday August 13th, 2023 as part of the "Family Matters" Series at Foundry.
Text: GENESIS 37:1-4, 12-28
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A Gift To Be Opened And Explored
A sermon by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday August 6th, 2023 as part of the "Lessons From the Journey" Series at Foundry.
Text: ISAIAH 55:1-3, 6-13, JOHN 10:9-10
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Abundant Not Knowing
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday July 30th, 2023 as part of the "Lessons From the Journey" Series at Foundry.
Text: GENESIS 28:10-19A
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The Journey To Idle and Blessed
A sermon preached by Rev. Jonathan Brown at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday July 16th, 2023 as part of the "Lessons From the Journey" Series at Foundry.
Text: LUKE 12:22-32
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Uncomfortable
A sermon preached by Rev. Jonathan Brown at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday July 16th, 2023 as part of the "Lessons From the Journey" Series at Foundry.
Text: LUKE 10:25-37
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One Letter Off
A sermon preached by Rev. Ben Roberts at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday July 9th, 2023 as part of the "Lessons From the Journey" Series at Foundry.
Text: GENESIS 1:27, 31
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The Great Deception
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday July 2nd, 2023 as part of the "Lessons From the Journey" Series at Foundry.
Text: PSALM 46, PHILIPPIANS 4:4-9
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Learning To Be At Home
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday June 25th, 2023 as part of the "Lessons From the Journey" Series at Foundry.
Text: LUKE 15:11-24
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Playing After Dark
A sermon preached by Rev. David Argo at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday June 18th, 2023 as part of the "Lessons From the Journey" Series at Foundry.
Text: EXODUS 32:1-4, 33:7-10
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The Duality of Pride
A guest sermon preached by Michael Hill at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday June 11th, 2023 as part of the Pride Sunday at Foundry.
Text: MATTHEW 9:9-13, 18-26
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Dusk and Dawn
A guest sermon preached by Guy Cecil at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday June 4th, 2023 as part of the Pentacost Series.
Text: MATTHEW 28:16-20
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Pentacost - The Season Premier of God's Ongoing Work in the World
A guest sermon preached by Byron Thomas at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday May 28th, 2023 as part of the Pentacost Series.
Text: ACTS 2:1-17
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We Know What to Do
A guest sermon preached by Bishop LaTrelle Easterling at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday May 21st, 2023 as part of the "Day by Day" Easter Series.
Text: JOHN 17:1-11
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The Unknown is Now Known
A guest sermon preached by Rev. Dr. Cynthia D. Weems at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday May 14th, 2023 as part of the "Day by Day" Easter Series.
Text: ACTS 17:22-31
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Choose Joy, Because Happiness Is Not Enough
A guest sermon preached by Bishop John Schol at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday May 7th, 2023 as part of the "Day by Day" Easter Series.
Text: PHILIPPIANS 4:4-7
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Day By Day...
A sermon preached by Rev. Dr. David Argo at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday April 30th, 2023 as part of the "Day by Day" Easter Series.
Text: HEBREWS 12:1-2, JOHN 2:1-16
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Walking the Talk
A sermon preached by Katy Hinman at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday April 23th, 2023 as part of the "Day by Day" Easter Series.
Text: LUKE 24:13-35
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What is at Risk?
A sermon preached by Rev. Kealani Willbanks at Foundry United Methodist Church on Sunday April 16th, 2023 as part of the .
Text: I PETER 1:3-9
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The Earth Trembles Still
A sermon preached by Bishop Hope Morgan Ward at Foundry United Methodist Church on Easter Sunday April 9th, 2023.
Text: MATTHEW 28:1-10
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Listening to God in the Dark Instead of the Crowd
A sermon preached by Lydia E. Muñoz at Foundry United Methodist Church on Palm Sunday April 2nd, 2023. "Holy Darkness" Lenten season series.
Text: MATTHEW 21:1-11
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Finding Life in the Dark
A sermon preached by Lydia E. Muñoz at Foundry United Methodist Church on March 26th, 2023. "Holy Darkness" Lenten season series.
Text: JOHN 11: 1-45
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Learning to See in the Dark
A sermon preached by Lydia E. Muñoz at Foundry United Methodist Church on March 19th, 2023. "Holy Darkness" Lenten season series.
Text: JOHN 9:1-41
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Finding Water in the Dark
A sermon preached by Lydia E. Muñoz at Foundry United Methodist Church on March 12th, 2023. "Holy Darkness" Lenten season series.
Text: JOHN 4:5-42
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Questions in the Dark
A sermon preached by Lydia E. Muñoz at Foundry United Methodist Church on March 5th, 2023. "Holy Darkness" Lenten season series.
Text: JOHN 3: 1-17
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Led Into The Darkness
A sermon preached by Lydia E. Muñoz at Foundry United Methodist Church on February 26th, 2023. "Holy Darkness" Lenten season series.
Text: MATTHEW 4:1-11
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Getting Back Down The Mountain
A sermon preached by T.C. Morrow at Foundry United Methodist Church on February 19th, 2023. "The Good Life" sermon series.
Text: MATTHEW 17:1-9
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The Inner Life
A] sermon preached by Ben Roberts at Foundry United Methodist Church on February 12th, 2023. "The Good Life" sermon series.
Text: MATTHEW 5: 21-26
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Turning Towards Justice with Joy
A guest sermon preached by Cassandra Lawrence at Foundry United Methodist Church on February 5th, 2023. "The Good Life" sermon series.
Text: MATTHEW 5:15-20
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The Prophet and the Waitress
A guest sermon preached by Guy Cecil at Foundry UMC January 29th, 2023. "The Goof Life" sermon series.
Text: MICAH 6:1-8
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What About That Night?
A guest sermon preached by Rev. David Argo at Foundry UMC January 15th, 2023. "The Goof Life" sermon series.
Text: ISAIAH 9:1-4, MATHEW 4:18-22
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A Picture of a Beloved Community
A guest sermon preached by Enger Muteteke at Foundry UMC January 15th, 2023. "The Goof Life" sermon series.
Text: JOHN 1:29–42
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Let It Be
A sermon preached by Rev. Ben Roberts at Foundry UMC January 8th, 2023. "Baptism of the Lord" sermon series.
Text: MATTHEW 3:13-17
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Jesus' Babysitter
A sermon preached by Rev. Ben Roberts at Foundry UMC January 1st, 2023. "Wonder" sermon series.
Text: MATTHEW 2:1-12
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What Gift Do We Bring?
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC December 25th, 2022 Christmas Day At Foundry.
Text: JOHN 1:1-14
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Wondrous Love
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC December 11th, 2022. "Wonder: Advent At Foundry" sermon series.
Text: MATTHEW 1:18-25
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Wondrous Joy
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC December 11th, 2022. "Wonder: Advent At Foundry" sermon series.
Text: LUKE 1:46B-55
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Wondrous Peace
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC December 4th, 2022. "Wonder: Advent At Foundry" sermon series.
Text: MATTHEW 3:1-12
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Wondrous Hope
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC November 27th, 2022. "Wonder: Advent At Foundry" sermon series.
Text: MATTHEW 24:36-44
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Power To Be Humble
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC November 20th, 2022. "Power" sermon series.
Text: LUKE 23:33-43
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Power To Persevere
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC November 13th, 2022. All Saints Sunday.
Text: LUKE 21:5-19
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Power To Believe
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC November 6th, 2022. All Saints Sunday.
Text: EPHESIANS 1:11-23
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Celebrating A Future With Hope
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC October 30th, 2022. “A Future With Hope" series.
Text: LUKE 10:25-28
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Envisioning A Future With Hope
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC October 23th, 2022. “A Future With Hope" series.
Text: ACTS 2:38-47
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Cultivating A Future With Hope
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC October 16th, 2022. “A Future With Hope" series.
Text: 2 TIMOTHY 1:1-2, 5-7; 3:14-15
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Claiming A Future With Hope
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC October 9th, 2022. “A Future With Hope" series.
Text: LUKE 17:11-19
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Perceiving A Future With Hope
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC October 2nd, 2022. “A Future With Hope" series.
Text: LUKE 24:13-16, 28-35
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Why It Matters
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC September 18th, 2022. “Mosaic, Piecing It Together" series.
Text: LUKE 16:19-31
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Shrewd and Faithful Care
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC September 18th, 2022. “Mosaic, Piecing It Together" series.
Text: LUKE 16:1-13
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Missing Pieces
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC September 11th, 2022. “Mosaic, Piecing It Together" series.
Text: LUKE 15:1-10
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How Much Does This Piece Cost?
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC September 4th, 2022. “Mosaic, Piecing It Together" series.
Text: LUKE 14:25-33
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Worms With Jobs
A sermon preached by Ben Roberts at Foundry UMC August 28th, 2022. “Let There Be Joy” series.
Text: JONAH 4
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The Luckiest Prophet Ever
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC August 7th, 2022. “Let There Be Joy” series.
Text: JONAH 3
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Well, Well, Whale
A sermon preached by Jonathan Brown at Foundry UMC August 7th, 2022. “Let There Be Joy” series.
Text: JONAH 1:17-2:10
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Lighten Up!
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC August 7th, 2022. “Living The Questions” series.
Text: LUKE 24:36-43
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Can You Take Your Possessions With You?
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC July 31th, 2022. “Living The Questions” series.
Text: LUKE 12:13-21
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How Much More Will God Give?
A sermon preached by Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC July 24th, 2022. “Living The Questions” series.
Text: LUKE 11:1-13
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Lord, Do You Not Care?
A guest sermon preached by Stacey Cole Wilson at Foundry UMC July 10th, 2022. “Living The Questions” series.
Text: LUKE 10:38-42
Stacey Cole Wilson is the Executive Minister of Beloved Community for the Baltimore-Washington Conference of The United Methodist Church. She is a wife, mother, ordained minister, igniter of social change, and a champion for human rights. She received a call into ministry as a youth and is a believer that the greatest gift of God is unconditional love. Before joining the Conference Staff, Dr. Wilson served as the Lead Pastor of Good Hope Union UMC in Silver Spring, MD (2012-2016), the Pastor of Mount Winans United Methodist Church in Baltimore (2007- 2012), and as the Associate Pastor of Linthicum Heights United Methodist Church in Linthicum, Maryland (2003-2007). As a writer and minister, she has received national acclaim for her prayers and litanies published in the award-winning Africana Worship Book; and, she has been honored to receive and share the Word of God nationally and internationally for the glory of God and upbuilding of the nations. She has served as Wesley Theological Seminary’s Commencement Preacher/Speaker at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., Princeton University Chapel’s Guest Preacher for their Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Service of Recommitment, and United Theological Seminary’s Distinguished Doctoral Alum of the Year. As an ardent believer in education and community service, Dr. Wilson serves on the Board of Governors for Wesley Theological Seminary, is an executive member of the Northeastern Jurisdiction United Methodist Volunteers in Mission (NEJUMVIM), is a member of the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and is a founding member and chaplain of the Female Clergy Support Group of Maryland among many other committees, boards and agencies. Stacey earned her undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Morgan State University and has worked professionally as a Senior Analytical Chemist specializing in Petroleum and Materials Characterization via Mass Spectrometry, X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF), and X-Ray Diffraction (XRD). She has earned a Master of Divinity degree from Wesley Theological Seminary and a Doctor of Ministry degree from the United Theological Seminary with an emphasis on Collaborative Community-Church Partnerships. She is a distinguished Foundations of Church Leadership Duke Divinity Fellow, Lewis Fellow, Lewis Community Leaders Fellow, Transition in Ministry (TiM) Excellence Fellow, and was a participant in The Joseph Engle Preaching Roundtable (3 Yr. Program) at Princeton Theological Seminary in NJ. She is the daughter of Gary and Pearl Cole; wife of International Music Producer and Pastor Wayne Wilson; and, mother of two great joys in her life, Ava, and Christian Wilson.
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Who Is My Neighbor?
A guest sermon preached by Reverend Bryant M. Oskvig at Foundry UMC July 10th, 2022. “Living The Questions” series.
Text: LUKE 10:25-37
The Reverend Bryant M. Oskvig, an ordained elder of the United Methodist Church, has been working on university campuses since 1998. He received his Master of Divinity from Boston University, where he also earned an MBA in Public/ Non-Profit Management. Rev. Oskvig is now completing his doctoral studies focused on the Black Christian mysticism of Howard Thurman and personal moral awakening at Wesley Theological Seminary where he was also a Lewis Fellow in the center of Congregational Leadership. Rev. Oskvig, known as Rev. O on campus, served in a number of United Methodist congregations in New York, Massachusetts, DC, and Maryland prior to full-time campus ministry. He further has been involved in the broader United Methodist Church having served in leadership on administrative councils and committees. Rev. Oskvig was elected by his peers to serve as delegate to the Northeast Jurisdictional Conference, and he has participated in several conversations and gatherings across the United States about LGBTQIA+ belonging, white supremacy, and the future of the United Methodist Church. Having come to American University in 2019, Rev. Oskvig was confirmed as the 11th University Chaplain and designated as a Scholar in Residence for the Department of Philosophy and Religion. Rev. Oskvig is responsible for animating the broadly inclusive Methodist spirit as a founding principle of American University. He does this through engagement in conversations and worship experiences connected to the Christian identity and through raising awareness and sensitivities to the needs of the many different religious and cultural traditions represented at American University. Rev. Oskvig is married to Dr. Devon R. Oskvig who is a Program Director in the Division of Neuroscince at the National Institute on Aging, where she oversees a large federal program of basic science and clinical research studies. They have four children, who swim, hike, and eat ice cream.
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Isn't My River Better Than Theirs?
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC July 7th, 2022. “Living The Questions” series.
Text: 2 KINGS 5:1-14
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Where is the God of Elijah?
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC June 26th, 2022. “Living The Questions” series.
Text: LUKE 9:51-62
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What Is Your Name?
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC June 19th, 2022. “Living The Questions" series.
Text: PSALM 42 & LUKE 8:26-39
https://foundryumc.org/archive/living-the-questions
A More Beautiful Question
A sermon preached by Rev. Will Ed Green
Text: ISAIAH 43:1-2, 5-7, 14-21
https://foundryumc.org/archive
A Sermon by guest preacher Rev. Dr. William Barber II at Foundry UMC June 5th, 2022. First Sunday of Pentecost.
Text: ACTS 2:1-21
https://foundryumc.org/archive/
The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is the President and Senior Lecturer of Repairers of the Breach; Co- Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral Revival; Bishop with The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries; Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary; and Senior Fellow at Auburn Seminary. For more than a quarter century, he has pastored the Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Goldsboro, North Carolina. Since Rev. Dr. Barber began his ministry at Greenleaf 29 years ago, the church has sponsored efforts that have led to more than $12 million of community development, in addition to welcoming all into the body of Christ. He is the author of four books: “We Are Called To Be A Movement;” “Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing;” “The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and The Rise of a New Justice Movement;” and “Forward Together: A Moral Message For The Nation.” Rev. Dr. Barber is also architect of the Moral Movement, which began with weekly Moral Monday protests at the North Carolina General Assembly in 2013 and revived under the banner of the Poor People’s Campaign. In 2018, Rev. Dr. Barber helped relaunch the Poor People’s Campaign — which was begun by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others in 1968 — with an historic wave of protests in state capitals and in Washington, D.C., calling for a moral agenda and a moral budget. Rev. Dr. Barber has been arrested 17 times for nonviolent civil disobedience. Millions of Americans have participated in Poor People’s Campaign events over the past three years. A highly sought-after speaker, Rev. Dr. Barber has given keynote addresses at hundreds of national and state conferences, including the 2016 Democratic National Convention. He has spoken to a wide variety of audiences including national unions, fraternities and sororities, drug dealer redemption conferences, women’s groups, economic policy groups, voting rights advocates, LGBTQ equality and justice groups, environmental and criminal justice groups, small organizing committees of domestic workers, fast food workers, and national gatherings of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and other people of faith. Rev. Dr. Barber gave the homily at the 59th Inaugural Prayer Service for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. He spoke at the Vatican in 2017 in response to Pope Francis’s encyclical “‘Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home,” and he was invited again to speak at the Vatican in 2021, at a conference hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. On June 18, 2018, Rev. Dr. Barber spoke before the 5th Uni Global Union World Congress to more than 25 countries and was added to the Black Achievers Wall in the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, England. He has had 10 honorary degrees conferred upon him. Rev. Dr. Barber served as president of the North Carolina NAACP, the largest state conference in the South, from 2006-2017 and served on the National NAACP Board of Directors from 2008-2020. A former Mel King Fellow at MIT, he is currently Visiting Professor of Public Theology and Activism at Union Theological Seminary and Senior Fellow at Auburn Seminary. Rev. Dr. Barber is regularly featured in media outlets such as MSNBC, TIME, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, and The Nation Magazine. Rev. Dr. Barber was named one of BET’s 100 Entertainers and Innovators in 2020, and he is a 2019 recipient of the North Carolina Award, the state’s highest civilian honor. Rev. Dr. Barber has also received the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center’s Beloved Community Award, and the Puffin Award.
When You Don’t Know How Long The Wait Will Be
A sermon preached by Rev. T.C. Morrow at Foundry UMC May 29, 2022. “Resilience for Times When…” series.
Text: ACTS 1:1-11 & LUKE 24:44-53
https://foundryumc.org/archive/resilience-for-times-when
When Our Plans Get Messed Up
A sermon preached by Rev. Kelly Grimes at Foundry UMC May 22, 2022. “Resilience for Times When…” series.
Text: Acts 16:6-15
https://foundryumc.org/archive/resilience-for-times-when
Resilience for Times When You’re Not In Control
A sermon for Foundry UMC, - Rev. Ben Roberts
Acts 11:1-18 – 5/15/2022
There are numerous aside from the point takeaways for this passage. For instance, God wants you to take naps and eat snacks. It's okay to eat bacon. Wonderful and good as they are just not the point.
This 5th Sunday of the Easter season the author of Luke Acts continues to tell a story of an expanding early church community. In this passage what we are being treated to is a recounting of the conversion of Cornelius and his household. Peter’s version here given as he says “point by point” is offered to the believers at the church in Jerusalem. Any story of a conversion or out pouring of the Holy Spirit in someone's life should be an immediate cause for celebration. But this isn't a celebration, it's more of an interrogation.
There is a distinction noted about the communities involved. In this case the distinction is noted in the passage as circumcised or uncircumcised believers. That is, those following laws and rituals including dietary restrictions physical observance and those who do not. The Israelites and the gentiles within an expanding Christ follower community. But the interrogation doesn't feel necessary if it was just a matter of did you or did you not do the ritual? Instead, the questions are rooted in long standing traditions involving the identity of those to whom God comes. Peter's actions in dining with and staying with this gentile household is a real cause of concern for believers’ whose identity, assurance, and to some extent control is tied up in the observances of purity practice.
In seeking to be generous, I’m not sure it can be overstated the significance of Peter transgressing norms in this story and perhaps that’s part of why a story of a single household takes up almost a chapter and a half of Acts. Karl Kuhn, a Professor of Religion at Lakeland College puts it this way in a commentary for this week; “such purity norms reinforced for Israelites their identity as a people set apart to serve God, to honor God’s Torah, and to receive God’s deliverance. Purity codes for many Israelites…emerged from and reinforced Israelite understandings of how creation, humanity, and daily life were to be ordered, or “mapped out.” They reflected essential elements of their worldview that defined their role and place as the people of God.”[1] Once more those norms were predictable, outlined, taught from birth, they were somewhat manageable and Peter himself adhered to them.
Peter reports how he argues with a voice in his vision telling him “kill and eat.” In verse 8 he recounts how three times he pushed back on what he’d been shown and told, “by no means, Lord, for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.” Not only this, but in Chapter 10 he also double-checks the people who were sent to fetch him essentially saying, “Y’all know there’s rules about me coming to your house, right?” But all the same, Peter knows he’s not the one in control of the situation and has been sent out to bring the good news. Comforted or spurred along on some level by an answer from heaven saying, go without hesitation, “make no distinction between them and us,” “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
But still, and not without good reason the believers in Jerusalem encountered I imagine all manner of unsettling feelings when they first received the story: anger, betrayal, fear, uncertainty. And based on some of the Greek words used in the text, possible reactions include meddlesomeness or seeking an altercation. I’m not sure I blame them either because frankly from their view things were out of control and possibly perilous for their own wellbeing.
It's almost a little too simple this story. Sort of the biblical version of 1/2 hour sitcom. Main characters are introduced conflict emerges quick solution is found and everything is wrapped up in 1 1/2 chapters. It sounds rather nice as a way to get past the entrenchment of us versus them thinking.
With no shortage of factional conflict all around us these days, I'd very much appreciate a quick solution and movement toward celebration and reconciliation. Sadly, it seems the propensity to leverage religious practice against one another as justification for conflict or controlling others has not abated much at any point in history. Even now we are being told that a justification for Russia's fratricidal invasion in Ukraine is for the protection of “ethnic Russians,” but also for the defense and preservation of a religious orthodoxy which ascribes no tolerance or acceptance of LGBTQIA+ persons in society (specifically noted parades) neverminded being welcomed in the church. Of course, there are other false justifications and there are many more layers to the conflict, but it is nonetheless the leveraging of us vs. them thinking to enact violence against those who are otherwise just your neighbors.
Similar ideas related to purity and orthodoxy have brought our own denomination to this point of division where rather than invite the stories of the work of the Spirit in people’s lives, we’ve drawn our lines and actively sort ourselves into camps. Some of the simplistic religious justifications have been framed as differences related to biblical interpretation, but there is of course at play issues of power, of finance, and of control. I have been very aware of my own lack of a generous spirit on this whole matter of late. Based on repeated histories I’m sure we too are not immune from being pitted further against one another nor immune from some seeking to leveraging these same justifications to enact violence against each other. Indeed, we see it from individuals and groups, but we now draw more lines around larger camps, and it saddens me. As that happens, I invite myself to be aware of my own reactions of us and them thinking and want to guard against being so walled-off, I might miss what Spirit is doing beyond my lines.
And we know there’s not just one violent conflict happening in the world with religious justifications at the fore. We know that it’s not just the UMC experiencing separations along ideological lines. We know our fragile political realities in this country are fraught with seemingly deepening synthetic tribalism and racism drawing and separating the population out into us and them.
It's a lot to try and bear and very little of it do we have control over directly. It’s unsettling at best and too often dangerous, but there are forces at work in the world that some feel more than comfortable leveraging for their own gain. Whether the root is fear or greed. Or whether it’s a matter of feeling one’s identity tied to specific rules and practices. Or if someone feels they must separate out or attack because their own relationship or favor with God depends upon it, this approach of us and them lends itself to destroying peace within if not between one another.
Now let’s be clear, there are things worth fighting for. There are times it’s necessary to separate out for safety of vulnerable communities (spiritual, mental, physical safety). The caution in this is not so that we accept harm or injustice in the world. I think there’s a call in here to be pliable with the at times necessary lines drawn, so that we don’t wall ourselves off so completely or deeply we forget that God exists beyond those walls too. Not only does God exist beyond whatever US we’ve fallen into, but Spirit does work there as well. And can even do it with them.
Step by step, the passage says in verse 4, Peter explains to the believers in Jerusalem what had taken place. It was necessary because they seem to be very twisted up about the situation, they criticized him. What were you doing Peter? You know you’re not supposed to do that? Feels like there’s an undercurrent of “you’ve put yourself at risk” or worse “you’ve put all of us at risk.” We had this thing all figured out and now you’re breaking all our rules.
Enter Peter’s defense; “I know, I tired, multiple times I tried to refute the voice God sent to me in a vision. Told the Lord all about how I don’t eat unclean things. Three times in fact. All the same the word came to me, do not call profane what I have called clean.” Peter accredits himself, “I know the rules,” but then must find a way to shake the community out of their us them box because they’re about to miss it. This whole interaction is only happening because they already knew what had happened, but we’re shown the first reaction isn’t celebration, it’s trepidation.
He pulls them back from the brink not with a harsh return of chastising, but points them to the work of the Spirit at the house. What’s been called the “Gentile Pentecost” took place as Spirit was poured out upon Cornelius’ house as Spirit had been pour out on others. Making no distinction between us and them. Verse 17, “If then God gave them the same gift [given] to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” They were silenced, then they praised God.
Not bad Peter, pulling the group back from the brink by pointing to the work (or blaming) the Holy Spirit. And it’s true, she doesn’t really check with anyone, as Pastor Ginger says, Spirit will do what Spirit’s going to do.
Two things here, first; Peter does not tell the story “step by step.” There are a number of details in chapter 10 that are left out of this recounting. Primarily that this whole thing started by Peter going to pray…getting hungry while attempting to do so…and falling into a nap…I mean a trance… he took a nap. But maybe, I was prying and fell asleep because I was hungry isn’t the message the church needed that day.
Second, I don’t love the English translation in verse 18; “they were silenced.” Little too harsh for the situation and misses something about what happened in the space. Though, there are a number of people or groups I would love to silence with a recounting of the work of the Spirit, I think there’s something else in here for us. It’s a little more than not speaking or not making noise; the Greek here, hésuchazó (hay-soo-khad'-zo) has additional uses including to cease from altercation, leading a quite life, a mental condition of awe, and even to refrain from, not just speech, but work and meddlesomeness.
It's fun, but I think my favorite this round was from the French translation I work with, “[at this word those listening] “retrouvèrent leur calme.” They found their calm. I love that, lost sight of my calm for a minute, Peter and Spirit helped me find it.
Part of the calmness likely comes because there is recognition that their identity (including important acts and rituals central to the practice of their faith) and their relationship with God isn’t subsumed or at risk because of what happened with the gentiles. Instead, the reminder of the baptism by water and the Spirit. That we’re incorporated into a larger family. Rev. Dr. Choi Hee An puts it like this, [the community is a place where believers share “the same whatever we have and they have together. … After we share what we have and what they have, we become them, and they become us. Our individual cultures are not erased, but we and they become one, in the sense of living with one another in mutual respect and support.”[2] The invitation to life goes further, thanks be to God.
I know the purpose of the story is to show the expanding early church and the ways the early Christians were figuring out life together. Balancing a melding of traditions or no traditions at all and a joining of diverse groups into one. Try as I might, I do still read into this the similar acts of established groups within churches or congregations who see new people arriving and joining and reacting in less than hospitable ways. It does make me wonder about our denomination and the ways our polity seeks to exclude even those people for whom it is obvious Spirit is active and poured out in their life and ministry. Who are we to hinder God?
I’ve tried to be generous with the group in our story and imagine what it must be like to feel out of control or as if something is being taken away from you because of what someone else has. But I also feel a strong impulse to just say, “can’t you perceive what’s happening here. The evidence. The active of God, the good work and fruit of the faithful? Get off your privilege and make room on the bench.” They should get some credit though, because at least they question what was happening rather than simply saying over and over, “but they’re gentiles!” And trusted relational leadership in Peter helps them along, knowing they’re not in control, to discover and not miss the ongoing work of God in the world.
It's also unlikely the author of Luke-Acts intended to offer strategies of spiritual and communal resiliency in these verses. Nonetheless, they are present.
There’s a reminder that the church in Jerusalem is part of something larger. That the baptism by water and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit connects them across all manner of lines.
They are connected to a larger purpose. They are a community of mutual support and care. What they have is shared with others and what others have is shared with them. That even when things happen beyond their control (scary, sad, or wonderful) they are incorporated into a community that bears with one another through all those things.
In a spiritual sense, Peter reminds them the work of God in the world continues. Spirit doing what Spirit does to draw people into life and the love of Christ. These are all things that help a community and individuals build resiliency in the face of stress and trauma: a sense of purpose, acts of service, spiritual practice, relational connections.
Part of resilience for times that are stressful or beyond our control is taking better stock of what is in our control. You will not control Holy Spirit. While we can assume the work of Spirit will be positive, any situation beyond our control can be questioned. We can situate it within a rubric of the fruits of the Spirit. Are these things or my re-actions to them making me more joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle. Or am I practicing self-control within my reaction? There are things in the world that we can control even as the world itself and many events of life and community remain far beyond our grasp.
Within our church community we can exercise some of those healthy things to make us more resilient as we bear with one another. There are spaces for service, for learning and expanding skills, for retreat and rest, and places you can both help care for others and get care for yourself. The prayer ministers and the care teams to name a few. You can engage in a larger purpose, to share broadly the love of Christ and extend in the place a radical welcome for whomever Spirit brings through the door. In your relationships that I pray you will continue to build out with one another, you can share the work of the Holy Spirit in your life and in others. I think one of the best things Peter does in this story is to show where Spirit has been at work in wondrous ways helping the community to find their peace and their praise. May we in days that are difficult find the same.
https://www.foundryumc.org/archive/resilience-for-times-when
When You Don’t Want to Get Out of Bed
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC May 8, 2022. “Resilience for Times When…” series.
Text: Acts 9:36-43
https://foundryumc.org/archive/resilience-for-times-when
When You Get Knocked Down
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC May 1, 2022, third Sunday of Easter. “Resilience for Times When…” series.
Text: Acts 9:1-20
It’s fun to discover unlikely Easter songs. Some of my faves include “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” by Charles Wesley, “I’m Coming Out” performed to perfection by Diana Ross, the Gloria Gaynor classic, “I Will Survive”—and the one that hit me this year: British band Chumbawamba’s 1997 earworm, “Tubthumper” with the repeated lyric: “I get knocked down but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down.” That’s a resurrection song—a resurrection resilience song. A quick online study revealed that a member of the band said the song is about “the resilience of ordinary people.”
Lord knows it doesn’t take long in life to “get knocked down”—in one of the many ways we might interpret that phrase: to be bullied, to lose something or someone we care about, to fail at something we tried hard to accomplish, to keep hitting obstacles and walls as you try to make progress toward a goal, to be humbled by a difficult task, or “taken down a notch (or many)” by someone who names a way we’ve hurt them or done harm to others.
It’s that last one that knocked Saul of Tarsus down. Saul—who most of us know as Paul the apostle—began as one virulently opposed to Jesus and the disciples of Jesus’ Way. Saul was born to Jewish parents who possessed Roman citizenship, a privilege passed to their children. He was highly educated in Jerusalem, likely under the tutelage of the famous Rabbi Gamaliel. And he brought his considerable skill, privilege, and passion to the work of persecution. Saul was present and affirmed the murder of Stephen (Acts 8:1) and was clear in his mission to hunt down Jesus’ disciples with violent intentions. (9:1)
With this clear itinerary Saul sets out for Damascus and on the way—according to almost every artist who’s imaged this moment—Saul is knocked off his horse on the road by otherworldly light—a common symbol throughout scripture, along with fire and cloud, for the presence of God. Saul, and those traveling with him, are aware of a voice who turns out to be none other than the risen Jesus. “Why are you persecuting me?” Just as Saul had never been able to perceive who Jesus was or welcome what he reveals and offers, in this moment Saul doesn’t physically “see” Jesus but only receives the message. The encounter leaves Saul not only unable to see Jesus, but to see anything. Whether this detail means to signal metaphorically Saul’s moral incapacity to perceive the error of his ways, was simply a result of encountering God’s presence and power (“blinded by God’s glory/shekinah”), or whether it was understood by the author as divine punishment is unclear. But regardless, Saul’s perception is completely messed up—so much so that he goes, with assistance, into Damascus and fasts and prays for 3 days.
While Ananias doesn’t get knocked off a horse like Saul, he also gets knocked down, humbled by a dangerous call from God. Saul’s reputation preceded him and Ananias—a disciple of Jesus—knows he is a clear target. But Ananias is called by God to seek Saul out and lay hands on him—a ritual act that, in scripture, is often a sign of healing, blessing, call, and affirmation of gifts through the power of Holy Spirit.
Imagine for just a moment that you are Ananias. (If it helps, imagine not Saul but a present day, murderous despot in the scenario) You are a disciple of Jesus who’s been trying to faithfully follow the Way even midst violent persecution. You know this guy wants to kill you. You know what he’s done to others. You learn this murderer is the one God chooses to do important Kin-dom work. And you are asked to help make it happen. If I were Ananias, I would have some big feelings. But Ananias, the one who began his response to God saying, “Here I am, Lord,” does what is asked. He goes to Saul, greets him as a member of the family, and blesses him. (9:17 “Brother Saul”)
What happens next is given little texture in the story, but I can only imagine what it must have been like to witness such a conversion. Was it the faith, courage, and open arms of Ananias that were the tipping point for Saul? Some Spirit-fueled epiphany that Ananias and other disciples were not soulless enemies, but fellow children of God? Was it the experience of being shown mercy by Jesus? Whatever it was, Saul was baptized into a new life. And Ananias witnessed the power of God’s mercy and love in the life of even one such as Saul.
What can we learn from Saul and Ananias about resurrection resilience for the times when we get knocked down?
Notice that Saul spends three days in prayer and fasting and Ananias engages in conversation with God, naming his concerns and receiving guidance for his discernment. It sounds so basic, but when you feel most alone, most ashamed, most confused or afraid—God is with you, loving you, ready to spend some time with you, and to help you. When you get knocked down, turn to God, bring yourself into God’s presence, ask your questions, throw your tantrums, cry your eyes out, or just feel the strength of Mother/Father God holding you.
And listen. Pay attention to the message or discernment you receive in prayer. In the story for today, clarity about how to go forward comes quickly. That isn’t often the case in our lives. But it does come when we remain aware and attentive that God is up to something in us and through us—and that God wants to help us. In my experience, proverbially “getting up” after being knocked down can sometimes be a very slow process. It is difficult, holy work to heal from grief or trauma, to truly receive God’s grace and release from guilt and shame. It takes time and is holy work to allow God’s grace to work in new ways in us that set us on a new course. Healing and change take time and intention.
Turning to God provides the grace we need for resilience when we’ve been knocked down. In prayerful encounter with God several things are possible:
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God will help us be honest about what has happened. We can rationalize things, we can fall into old patterns of self-blame, we can take too much or too little responsibility, or try to ignore whatever has knocked us down. But in the presence of God, there’s nothing you can hide—what you did or didn’t do, what you are or aren’t responsible for, what does or doesn’t matter most, and on it goes. If you are open, God will reveal to you the truth. And ALL of the truth is bathed in God’s love and mercy.
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God will help us learn what we need to learn from the experience and will help us get up. Part of this is to recognize our need and seek out and connect with people and other resources that will give us strength to rise and keep going. A few examples: You can love and rely on both Jesus and your therapist. You can receive grace from God and support from church, friends, or a social service agency. You can practice receiving God’s love, others’ love, and self-love.
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God will help us engage differently in the world as a result of God’s guidance through the struggle. At the very least, we will be aware of how awful it is to be knocked down and perhaps more perceptive to others having that experience. We might even focus more on offering others a hand to get back up instead of piling on with disdain, judgment, or indifference.
If there are things we need to change in our own behavior or perspective so that we stop doing harm to others or to ourselves, God’s grace will indeed help us. //
Of course there are those in the church—both in the pews and in the pulpit—who continue to use their power and privilege to persecute others and do harm. Photos of Putin lighting his Easter candle as the Russian Orthodox Patriarch presided in a pristine, ornate sanctuary won’t let us forget… Saul’s persecutions were religiously driven or at least religiously rationalized. But today we are reminded that even for Saul, new life and the opportunity to use his powers for good and not for harm became possible. If it can happen for Saul and those like him through the ages, it most definitely can happen for you.
And there are also powerful images of Orthodox Christians in Ukraine celebrating Easter last weekend. An image of a family with young children walking alongside barricades on their way to a service, people of all ages lined up in front of a bunker in a bombed out city with their traditional food baskets to be blessed, an Orthodox priest blessing Easter cakes at a humanitarian aid facility… These images of Christian hope in a time of war are, for me, powerful reminders that turning to God, relying on the love and grace and community of God and God’s people can help us keep going even in the worst moments of life.
You will get “knocked down” in life, sometimes in unimaginably painful ways, but with God you’ll always be given grace—and companions on the journey—to help you get up again. There’s nothin’ gonna keep you down. Thanks be to God.
https://foundryumc.org/archive/resilience-for-times-when
Resurrection Resilience – You’ve Got Friends in Low Places
REV. DR. JAMES HARNISH
Text: ACTS 5:27-32 & REVELATION 1:4-8
Today’s Guest Preacher: The Rev. Dr. James A. Harnish (Jim) retired after 43 years of pastoral ministry in the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church. He was the founding pastor of St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Orlando and served for 22 years as the Senior Pastor of Hyde Park United Methodist Church in Tampa.
Jim is the author of more than 20 books and Bible studies including “A Disciple’s Path” and “Extraordinary Ministry in Ordinary Time.” His most recent book is “Finding Your Bearings: How Words that Guided Jesus Through Crisis Can Guide Us.” He was a Consulting Editor for “The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible” and a contributor to “The Wesley Study Bible.”
He served on the General Board of Discipleship and the General Commission on General Conference, and as a delegate to General and Jurisdictional Conferences and World Methodist Conferences in England, Brazil, Kenya and South Africa. He is a facilitator for the Florida Conference Institute of Preaching and a member of the Board of Visitors at Duke Divinity School.
He and his wife, Martha, live in Longwood, Florida. They have two married daughters and five grandchildren in Florida and South Carolina. He blogs at www.jimharnish.org.
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The First Day
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC on Easter Sunday April 17th, 2022.
Text: LUKE 24:1-12
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The Broken and The Beautiful
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC April 10th, 2022. “Roots of Resistance” series.
Text: LUKE 19:28-48
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A Strengthening Word
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC April 3rd, 2022. “Roots of Resistance” series.
Texts: JOHN 12:1-8
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Orchestrated Sermon Sacred Tenderness: Love, Home Sacrifice
An Orchestrated Sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC March 27, 2022. “Roots of Resistance” series.
Texts: Luke 15:1-3, 11B-32
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Untwisted Perspective
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC March 20, 2022, Third Sunday in Lent. “Roots of Resistance” series.
Texts: Luke 13:1-9
From a recent article in the New York Times highlighted the news that people in Russia are receiving about the war in Ukraine. “The narrative disseminated online through state-run and unofficial channels has helped create an alternate reality where the invasion is justified and Ukrainians are to blame for violence.” For many in Russia, this is the only story they receive, the only perspective given for what is happening. In our own context, we have more perspectives to sort through than we can manage. If we’re wise, we are careful about the mix of our sources for news of the day, finding some semblance of balance about what’s really going on.
But a balanced diet of perspectives doesn’t keep us from losing the most important one. As people of faith, there is always a larger perspective, a more profound frame through which to read the headlines. And it’s easy to lose that larger vision and “get twisted” in our perspective. I believe that keeping a nuanced faith perspective in times of crisis and challenge is among the most important spiritual practices we can nurture. Without it, we become unmoored from the story of God’s mercy, compassion, justice, and love. We lose the assurance that we are part of a great cloud of witnesses who continue to participate with God who is always at work for good in the world. We forget that we have a responsibility to participate in God’s good work. And that, as in every other time of crisis, from the beginning of all things, God will help us.
The classic liberal protestant notion is that we should read the newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other; that is, read the headlines of our lives and of our day with a Spirit-led, Jesus-focused lens so that we might find some guidance about how we are called to respond.
Today our Gospel gives us an example of how Jesus reads the news. Jesus responds to two headlines of disaster: both were news stories of people who died unjustly and tragically, one in a political massacre and the other through a tower collapsing. One way our ancestors—and many in our modern world—try to make sense of these painful and confusing events is by assigning cause and effect. For example, those folks who were brutally killed by Pilate must have been worse sinners than others or must have done something to deserve that kind of punishment. According to this way of thinking, if you are killed unjustly or randomly or tragically, it’s your fault. God is punishing you.
Jesus reads it differently, saying, “do you really think these people were being singled out because of their sins, or that they died because they’re worse than anyone else? Of course not!” With both examples, Jesus unequivocally denies the cause-effect nature of the deaths. But there is also a “but…” But if you don’t repent, if you don’t change, then you can expect consequences. When Jesus says that unless we repent, we will perish just as those in the Biblical examples did, he is not saying that God is out to get you and is going to make you a victim of some awful tragedy if you don’t shape up. After all, he has just rejected that kind of response. So what is Jesus talking about?
Just before what we receive today in Luke, Jesus teaches about the need to trust God and to live a life according to the love, care, mercy, justice, and humility of the Kin-dom of God (Luke 12:13-48). Jesus tells the story of a rich man building bigger barns to store his crops and then dying with no “treasure stored in heaven.” Jesus teaches about attendants who need to be ready, keeping their lamps lit, as they await the bridegroom’s return. Jesus teaches about the servants who have been given responsibility for their master’s possessions, but who are cruel and frivolous and thoughtless; the master will show up when they least expect it and will see what they are doing (or not doing). In all of this, the teaching is: do what matters most today; live a life of deeper trust and surrender today; do justice today; be prepared to meet your maker, be ready to come face to face with God. This is what leads up to Jesus’s reaction to the news in our passage today.
The people who perished died in different ways—one was an act of brutal violence the other a “natural” catastrophe. The thing that both scenarios have in common was that the deaths were not expected—they came upon people unaware. When Jesus says that unless we repent, we will perish just as those in the Biblical examples did, it seems to me that the point is that no matter how long we live and no matter how we die, we might very well come to the end of our days without being ready to go.
Perhaps some folks will hear this as a fearful message. But it is really an invitation. Jesus is calling us to repent—to turn away from—anything that keeps us from living each day as one who is “ready to go,” as a person who has their relationships cared for, who has as little unfinished business as possible, as one who is living a life they wouldn’t be embarrassed to lay before God.
Jesus encourages us to “read the news” of crisis or challenge in our lives and world not with an eye to placing blame, finding a scapegoat, and identifying upon whom our vengeance should fall (common responses!). Instead, Jesus wants us to take responsibility for our own selves. We are challenged to respond to the injustice, pain and need in the world with honesty and conviction about what we can or should do, about where things need to change in our own lives, about what we need to learn from what has happened so that we might incorporate that learning into our lives.
Jesus follows up the questions about untimely deaths with the parable of the unfruitful fig tree. A couple of notes about fig trees: fig trees absorb an especially large amount of nourishment and therefore can drain the earth of nutrients, depriving other plants of sustenance. Further, according to Levitical Law (Lev. 19:23), fig trees were given three years’ growth in order to become “clean.” We are told that the gardener has been looking for fruit on the tree in question for three years. That means it’s been six years and this tree has produced no fruit. It is alive, but it’s not doing anything much or being anything much. It’s just taking up space, wasting the soil. Japanese poet and Christian peace activist, Toyohiko Kagawa wrote:
I read
In a book
That a man called
Christ
Went about doing good.
It is very disconcerting to me
That I am so easily
Satisfied
With just
Going about.
The fig tree is “just going about” and, therefore, is in danger of being cut down before it has really lived the life it was created for. This tree, all of a sudden, becomes a symbol of us in all the ways that we waste our chance to flourish, the ways we live that may leave us at our end not being “ready to go.” But does the tree get destroyed by a vengeful God? The story Jesus tells here is one of grace. The tree is not destroyed, but rather is given a second chance and more—it is given “fertilizer,” given what it needs to be able to bear fruit.
As we confront difficult realities in our lives and in our world—imagine reading the news through the lens of the Jesus who tells this and so many stories of grace, who reminds us that every day—every moment—of life is precious and an opportunity live with love and care. Read the news with the Jesus who came to preach good news to the poor and to set the prisoners free, who broke religious rules for the sake of love, who crossed all the boundaries of race and tribe, who hung out with those whom others despised, the Jesus who was himself unhoused and an asylum-seeker from a murderous political tyrant. Read the news with the Jesus who loved children, who railed against the tyranny of empire, who saw the gifts and potential of every person, who practiced what he preached, who forgave even those who had betrayed, denied, and killed him. As we “read” the painful and troubling headlines of our lives, look through the eyes of Jesus. Doing so will not only highlight the need for repentance in our lives and in the world, but it will also ground our response in the grace and mercy that flows from God’s self-giving love. God’s grace and mercy enfolds us through every circumstance of our lives, giving us strength and courage to persevere, to change, to hope, to go about doing good, to live each day “ready to go.” And that is Good News after all…
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Fear Met With Love
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC March 13th, 2022. “The Roots of Resistance” series.
Text: Luke 13:31-35
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A Strengthening Word
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC March 6th, 2022. “The Roots of Resistance” series.
Text: Luke 4:1-13
You're a Firework!
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC February 27, 2022. “Shine On!” series.
Text: Luke 9:28-43
You’re a Firework!
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC February 27, 2022, Transfiguration Sunday. The last sermon in our “Shine On!” series.
Text: Luke 9:28-43
It is common on Transfiguration Sunday for preachers to focus on what the disciples experience on the mountaintop—the way Jesus’ face and clothes “dazzlingly” change and the appearance of Moses and Elijah talking to Jesus about his upcoming “departure.”
But today I want to focus on the next part of the story, what happened when they’d come down from the mountain. Evidently, while Jesus was busy praying and preparing for his exodos (ἔξοδος, Greek for departure or death), a man brought his son to the disciples who’d remained in the valley, desperate that they should save the child. But they couldn’t do it. Jesus was, to put it lightly, disappointed—in a way that may seem harsh. After all, disciples of Jesus aren’t…Jesus. I’ve often heard it’s not fair to say that we are expected to live, love, or serve like Jesus since Jesus had the whole “God-human” thing going for him. But that’s a cop out.
Because Jesus was clear that his disciples were to follow directly in his footsteps. At the beginning of the chapter we read from today you’ll find, “Jesus called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal.” (Lk 9:1-2) And then, when more than 5,000 people who’d gathered to hear some good news and receive healing got hungry, the disciples wanted to send them away. But Jesus said to the disciples, “you feed them.” And in the chapter following our story today, Jesus appoints 70 more to go out and proclaim the Kin-dom and heal! (Lk 10:1,9)
Recently as part of my spiritual practice for Black History Month, I’ve been drawing inspiration from the wisdom of Marian Wright Edelman, human and children’s rights activist, founder and President Emerita of the Children’s Defense Fund, and a part of the Foundry family for many years. She says this: “A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back—but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.”
In this moment when a new war has broken out, racial, economic, and environmental injustice continues to thrive, divisions grow wider and more fortified, and shadows of helplessness and hopelessness threaten to overtake us—the voice of God speaks from a different kind of shadow, the overshadowing cloud at the mountaintop, and calls us to listen to Jesus! And again and again, in a variety of ways, Jesus says to us: It’s up to you. YOU are called to proclaim in word and deed the good news of God’s Kin-dom and to be an agent of healing grace for bodies and spirits. Jesus knew he was not long for this world. He knew he would be gone. And he started saying it early: it is up to you! You feed them. You heal the suffering children… You proclaim love and justice… You stand up to the bullies and tyrants… You heal, mend, and make gentle this bruised world. Jesus honors disciples through the ages, honors each one of us saying, “I’m going away—don’t wait for me to come down the mountain or wait for me or any other leader to return before you get to the work that is yours to do. You are made to reflect the life of God, to embody the love of God, to shine with the courage, peace, and hope of God just like me.”
On this transfiguration Sunday, we see a “dazzling” Jesus on the top of the mountain. The word translated “dazzling” is the Greek exastraptó which means “to flash or gleam like lightning, be radiant.” And all the stories surrounding this mountaintop moment reveal to us a very important truth: Jesus isn’t the only one made to dazzle, to gleam like lightning, to shine. We who follow Jesus can try to make excuses, but we are given grace to live, love, and serve in the way of Jesus.
To reflect the life of God and truly dazzle in the way of Jesus doesn’t just happen. That has been a theme for our reflection since the beginning of January. We began this season of Epiphany focused on the light of the star that shines on our path as we seek the Holy One. I said, “The nearer you are to the beating heart of God’s love and life, the more you will ‘come alive’ (as Howard Thurman says), the more you will shine with God’s love.” We gathered the next week to remember our baptismal covenant, and to celebrate that by the grace of God we are siblings of Jesus, part of the “Beloved” clan, and incorporated into the mighty works of God’s saving love and mercy in the world. And each Sunday following, we have reflected on the practices that make up our covenant with one another in this community: prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness. We have been reminded that all these practices are ways we grow in grace and in capacity to live, love, and serve like Jesus. We don’t do any of it alone. Spirit empowers and guides us, and we support one another on the way.
I’ve been hearing from some that having been separated from congregational life and the habit of regular worship, things feel strange upon return, the weirdness of what we do and how we do it (compared to everything else in the world) is set in stark relief. I’ve been told that folk find themselves asking whether there’s any point to regular engagement in a spiritual community. What possible difference does it make in a moment of tragedy and madness such as this one? I understand this. And I wonder what I’d be feeling and doing were I not in the role and vocation I inhabit.
But I must say that the Wesleyan way of personal and social holiness and transformation, of disciplined practices with an emphasis on grace, of insistence upon authentic connection with others who share the path—this Way of living faith, hope, and love makes a difference. It can be a life-sustaining resource in moments when we are on the edge, in grief, or suffering. It can form and inform persons who understand that it’s up to us to carry and shine the light of God’s love and justice in our lives and in the world—wherever we are and through whatever means are available to us. It can strengthen us to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves. I am persuaded that our life together matters, our communal witness matters, our best efforts—even when we aren’t at our best—matter.
I know this may feel exhausting since the realities of the world are so heavy. The disciples didn’t think they could do what they were called to do. They didn’t realize yet that we have all been made to dazzle, to “gleam like lightning.” And as I’ve struggled myself over the past weeks (and months) to hold on to Jesus’ call to be brave, to be hopeful, to be and to share myself fully with and for others, to keep showing up and doing what I can where I can, I’ve drawn energy and encouragement from a song and video released by Katy Perry almost 12 years ago but timeless in its message. It feels to me like Gospel:
Do you ever feel like a plastic bag Drifting through the wind Wanting to start again? Do you ever feel, feel so paper thin Like a house of cards One blow from caving in?
Do you ever feel already buried deep? Six feet under screams, but no one seems to hear a thing Do you know that there's still a chance for you 'Cause there's a spark in you
You just gotta ignite the light, and let it shine Just own the night like the 4th of July
'Cause, baby, you're a firework Come on, show 'em what you're worth Make 'em go, "Oh, oh, oh" As you shoot across the sky
Baby, you're a firework Come on, let your colors burst Make 'em go, "Oh, oh, oh" You're gonna leave 'em all in awe, awe, awe
Jesus calls us and gives us the grace to be a firework, to dazzle. “It’s always been inside of you, you, you. And NOW it’s time to let it through.” The world needs us to shine. And Jesus believes we’re able. So what are you waiting for? Shine on together, my friends, SHINE ON!
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Kin-dom Economy
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC February 20, 2022, the seventh Sunday after Epiphany. “Shine On!” series.
Text: Luke 6:27-38
Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, “You owe me.” Look what happens with a love like that: it lights the whole sky.”
This poem attributed to the Sufi poet Hafiz is a beautiful illustration of what Jesus says in our Gospel for today. Again and again, Jesus names things that, according to the world, would expect or require a certain “payback.” In the world, if someone hurts you, hurt them back. If someone speaks ill of you, you give your version of a smear campaign right back. If your property is taken, take it back. The worldly relational economy is tit for tat, an eye for an eye, an economy of gifts only on loan, always with fine print, an economy of debts to be paid and always with interest.
But, as Pastor Kelly pointed out last week, in Jesus’ sermon “on the plain” what Jesus says is directly counter to worldly expectations. Not only does he teach not to seek “pay back” for harm. He says love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Like the sun who never says to the earth, “you owe me…” This is a whole different economy. This is a Kin-dom economy.
These provocative teachings of Jesus can easily get twisted. And “turn the other cheek” and “love your enemies” have been used to encourage persons in abusive relationships to stay and continue to take the blows. That is not the point and it must always be spoken aloud when these verses are shared in public. Jesus isn’t saying that to be a good Christian you have to be a doormat for abusers or remain in a life-threatening relationship. Jesus is teaching an ethic of love based on the love of God for us. This ethic of love calls upon each of us to claim their own sacred worth, voice, dignity, and agency such that we know we deserve to be treated with gentleness and care; AND, when we’ve been hurt, to not “go low” by retaliating in kind. But to “go high,” maintain dignity, and choose not to return evil for evil, hate for hate, or violence for violence.
It’s also easy to twist these teachings of Jesus such that we focus on the “reward” that’s promised. Upon quick review, it may sound like Jesus is saying that if you don’t judge other people, they won’t judge you; or if you don’t condemn others, they won’t condemn you; or if you give, without expecting anything in return, you’ll get it all back because you’ve been so good. But let’s be serious. You can hold your tongue, work hard to be gracious toward others, give generously of yourself and your resources to other people and they can turn around and betray, hurt, and judge you. Sometimes others might do unto you as you’ve done unto them. But so often in the world, it’s harm that gets reciprocated. Mercy, generosity, and kindness, aren’t as regularly given back. So what do we do with that?
Notice in verses 35 and 36 that the reward isn’t coming from other people. The reward comes from the grace of God present and active in you. The reward for following the teaching of Jesus is that you aren’t living beneath your dignity. Or, said positively, the reward is that by allowing the love, generosity, and mercy of God to be manifest in your life, you are reflecting God, you are being merciful as your Mother/Father is merciful, you are living as the child of the Most High that you are.
This is among the powerful insights Howard Thurman illuminates in his book, Jesus and the Disinherited. Thurman is painfully aware of the ways that Christian teachings about heaven, forgiveness, love and the like can sound like a call for Black Americans and others with their backs against the wall to stay there, to forgive their oppressors 70-times-7, and wait for liberation in the great by and by. But Thurman is insistent that Jesus’ teaching is “a technique of survival for the oppressed” and calls for “a radical change in the inner attitude of the people.” Thurman claims that “anyone who permits another to determine the quality of [their] inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to [their] destiny.” When others “go low,” what do you allow that to do to your inner attitude? This focus on the inner attitude is not about disconnecting from the real suffering and injustice of the world, but is rather a way of not being utterly destroyed by it. It is a way of maintaining dignity and agency when everything around you wants to steal or destroy those sacred gifts. Thurman highlights Jesus’ teaching that, regardless of our outward circumstances, we have agency of our inner attitude. Our inner attitude affects our outward response and action.
Over the past number of weeks, through both sermons and witnesses from siblings in the Foundry family, we’ve been focusing on the spiritual practices that are part of our covenant as Foundry UMC. These practices are all ways that we attend to, nourish, strengthen, and form our “inner life” and attitude. You don’t just wake up one day and have the inner resources to persevere in peace, love, and dignity in adversity. You can’t just click your ruby slippers and grow in love or capacity to trust. Because everything in the world around us trains us for retaliation, for defensiveness, for quid pro quo.
Part of John Wesley’s genius was creating a system and method to assist human spiritual growth, to create spaces and intentional community where people like you and me can regularly put ourselves into the flow of God’s unending grace, love, and mercy and, as a result reflect more of God in our lives. Practices and partners with whom to share the journey are key. We need one another. Prayers and scriptural reflection, presence in worship and small groups, generosity and faithful financial stewardship, service of all kinds, and being and sharing a witness to God’s grace are practices we promise to share as part of this beloved community. Foundry is only as strong as these practices among us. When any one of them is neglected, the strength and vitality of our communal life is diminished. Over the past number of years, we have worked to systematically strengthen the resources that help us practice and live out all the parts of our shared covenant.
As part of that work, the Foundry Board has set as an ongoing priority that we work to deepen our understanding of generosity as a spiritual practice and to increase awareness of the ways that we can practice faithful financial stewardship. I like to remind us that financial giving is one of the most profound ways we practice Jesus’ Kin-dom economy instead of the worldly economy. The worldly economy is transactional, an economy where the Sun would throw the moon in debtors prison and jack up the interest rates just because it was possible. There are some who bring this way of thinking about giving into faith community. They figure that if they are giving, they should get to stay in control. “I’ll give, IF…”
But part of the spiritual practice of giving is to loosen our grip. When we give to support the shared life, mission, and ministry of Foundry, we do so in relationship with one another. It is an interaction, not just a transaction. As a member of the Baltimore-Washington Conference delegation to General Conference, I’ve been engaged in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training. Our trainer, Dushaw Hockett, highlights this distinction between interaction and transaction. Interaction is being in mutual relationship with someone we perceive as a sibling and fellow child of God. Transaction is using someone, more like a thing, to try to get what you want or think you need.
When we give, it’s in the context of mutual, covenant relationship. We allow our gift to flow into the community of which we are part and within which we have a voice and agency. We can participate in crafting and creating vision and mission. But the gift we make isn’t ours to control. It isn’t given to hold the community hostage. It isn’t about only getting what we ourselves need. It’s about creating community that provides for the needs of the whole family as much as possible—and that then reaches out beyond the family to do justice and kindness in the world.
The spiritual practice of generosity in financial giving is risky. It can make us feel vulnerable and afraid that we won’t have enough. So much in the world’s economy trains us to be afraid and to do whatever we can to assure our own comfort and sense of safety. The Kin-dom economy—the upside down way taught by Jesus in the sermon on the plain—encourages us to practice being uncomfortable and vulnerable for the sake of others, for the cause of love and justice, for the common good. It encourages us to trust that, together with God and one another, we will always have enough.
Just look at what happens when our gifts shine with the love, grace, and generosity of God. They give light to the whole world!
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Rooted In Love
A sermon preached by Rev. Kelly Grimes at Foundry UMC February 13th, 2022. “Shine On!” series.
Texts: Luke 6:17-
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Cast a Lifeline
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC February 6, 2022, the fifth Sunday after Epiphany. “Shine On!” series.
Text: Luke 5:1-11
“Evangelism is a good word with a bad reputation.” I love this line from A Disciple’s Path Companion Reader. It goes on, “The term has been so abused by slick preachers and manipulative politicians that people inside the church are afraid to speak it and people outside the church run for cover the moment they hear it.” Isn’t this true? The word “evangelical” carries so much baggage in our country it’s difficult to remember that the word evangelism comes from the root word meaning “good news.” To be “evangelical” in its unsullied form is simply to share good news.
Because of evangelism’s well-earned bad reputation, some may feel an impulse to willfully avoid the part of our covenant promise to faithfully participate in the ministry of the church not only by our prayers, presence, gifts, and service, but also by our witness. I think for many of us, however, we understand this piece of our discipleship as “walking the talk,” that is, “proclaiming” or sharing our beliefs and values through our actions. This is a core part of Christian witness. It’s summed up in the quote attributed to St. Francis: “Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.”
We “walk the talk” both as individuals and as communities. What we do and how we are as a community says a lot to other people. The way we share life and set priorities is a critical part of our witness, what theologian Douglas John Hall calls “ecclesial body language.”
And in conversation about our Gospel story for today with my friend and mentor, Rev. Jesse Jackson, he emphasized the responsibility we all have as individuals. He reminded me that God didn’t send a document or an email, God sent a person. And as disciples we are called not just to admire Jesus, not just to worship Jesus, but to follow Jesus.
In our Gospel, Jesus didn’t send those anxious to receive the good news of God a press release or as an article about the good work of his congregation, Jesus showed up in person among the people. A key piece of witness is showing up where people need to receive some good news.
Jesus shows up and asked a certain person, Simon Peter, to take him out a little way in his boat, and from there he shared with the crowds. When he’d finished speaking, Jesus got Simon further involved, simply by asking him to do what he already knew how to do: “Let down your nets for a catch.” Simon had no reason to believe that there would be any fish. He had no reason to believe there was any point to casting his net. But he humored Jesus and let down the nets. The unexpected happened, the nets were filled, and Simon is moved to confess his sinfulness. I find this part curious. Why is this Simon’s response?
It makes me think of so many people who don’t believe they are worthy of notice, worthy of good fortune, worthy of others’ confidence, worthy of others’ love. I can hear Simon Peter thinking, “I don’t deserve this bounty. I haven’t earned it. I’m not worthy of your praise or attention for this work, Jesus.” Might that have been part of what is happening here? I think of the heartbreaking lyric from an old Sting song about a transgender sex worker who says, “And no, it’s just not in my plan / For someone to care who I am.” I imagine there are so many in a variety of contexts who sing that song.
Simon had no reason to believe Jesus would care who he was, no reason to believe he would be invited by Jesus to put on Rabbi Jesus’s yoke and follow him as a disciple. The way things worked in those days meant that if Simon had what it took to follow a Rabbi he would’ve already been in graduate follow-a-Rabbi school and wouldn’t have taken up the family trade as a fisher. According to the ways of the world, Simon Peter had little power and limited options.
But Jesus showed up, recognized that Simon Peter had the resource Jesus needed to do his work (a boat), honored and encouraged Simon’s fishing skill, then called him to apply that skill in a new direction, to “fish for people.” Jesus said, in essence, you have gifts that can be used for the work of the Kin-dom. You are worthy of this call. You are important to God and loved by God. Jesus threw this unlikely fisher a lifeline, an invitation to step more fully into his giftedness, purpose, and place in God’s family.
This is the piece of our own witness that we may sometimes miss: invitation. We are called not only to share God’s liberating love with others through our presence and our action, but also invite them to explore and experience it for themselves.
You and I, like Simon Peter, are called to follow Jesus and to “fish for people.” That doesn’t mean that we manipulate, trap, or hook people, it means we cast a lifeline to those who need one. We’re not asked to be someone we’re not, to be inauthentic, or to insert some testimony in awkward ways. We’re not asked to force anything or try to change anyone’s mind. We’re simply asked to not only be aware of others’ physical needs such as food, clothing, housing, and safety, but also to remember that people are searching for meaning and purpose and belonging and hope and friendship and love. Some people who seem to have everything are looking for those last bits. And many of us find in our faith and faith community some or all of those life-giving gifts. We have good news to share! And you never know how a simple invitation might change everything for someone. Our assumption that people aren’t interested or will be hostile could keep us from being agents of God’s prevenient grace in another person’s life.
If we not only admire Jesus, but truly follow Jesus, our witness will be both life changing and world changing. We know that Simon Peter’s life was changed forever; but it wasn’t just about him. Simon Peter became part of a community of friends and disciples who tried to follow, teach, and serve in the way of Jesus. That work was imperfect, but Spirit and grace fueled. And, as the story goes, the public witness of the first Christian communities provided a powerful vision and invitation into a new way of living together, grounded in the love, mercy, justice, and generosity of God. Their communal “body language” was a beacon of hope.
We may choose to avoid the word “evangelical” because it is so twisted in our time. But in our words and our actions, as individuals and as faith community, we are called to follow Jesus, to fish for people, to cast a lifeline, putting the net of our hearts and lives down deep into all the hopeless, cynical, wounded, weary places where people have no reason to believe that emptiness can be filled, that meaning can be found, that they can be loved, or that things can be different or good or life-giving. As we respond to the call, we will experience and share the bounty of God’s grace that always emerges in Spirit’s wake. And isn’t that good news
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Loving Presence
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC January 30, 2022, the fourth Sunday after the Epiphany. “Shine On!” series.
Texts: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, Luke 4:21-30
Do you have to “go to church” to be a Christian? Evidently there was quite the robust conversation on this topic amongst our last confirmation class. There are at least a couple of solid responses. First, I would pose a follow up question, does showing up for worship and other church activities on a regular basis make you a Christian? If, by Christian, we mean (as we say in our Baptismal liturgy) “a true disciple who walks in the way that leads to life” then the answer is a resounding, “no.” Going to a church makes you a Christian as much as going to a garage makes you a car. It is quite possible to be a card-carrying Christian whose life has little resemblance to Jesus—and perhaps even does damage to Jesus’ good name.
The story of what happens when Jesus goes back to his “home church” in Nazareth is a good example. Jesus reminded them that God’s prophetic work focused on those considered “outsiders” or “other,” implying this would be the case for Jesus’ ministry as well. The hometown crowd couldn’t stand the thought that he wouldn’t just share his gifts with them, they were enraged at Jesus’ implication that the miracle of his love would be offered to people whom they deemed enemies, to people they despised. When Jesus went to his home church to visit the adults with whom he had grown up, perhaps folks who had taught him the Torah, and played with him as a child, perhaps adults whom he had admired…what happened? They didn’t just damage his name, they tried to kill him. They had somehow missed the part in scripture about caring for the stranger and sojourner, doing justice, and walking humbly with God. They wanted what they wanted for themselves, were looking out for themselves.
But, as Jesus points out and models, the Judeo-Christian story provides a stark contrast to this human tendency. The story we tell is not just about us as individuals, not just about “me.” It’s about “WE.” Our faith is all about relationships, it involves caring about more than just my own needs or desires, it involves being part of a community, it involves attending to the needs of the most vulnerable ones in God’s creation. These relational, communal, other-focused aspects of the faith are not peripheral to our practice of Christian faith. They are at the very core. And here is where we get to another response to the confirmands’ conversation. In short, “there is no such thing as solitary Christianity. Being a follower of Jesus means being in community with other followers of Jesus. We can be…spiritual without the presence of other people in our lives, but we cannot be growing disciples of Jesus Christ without the encouragement, guidance, wisdom, and accountability of other disciples.”
I often talk about the community of the church as the “lab” or training ground for the rest of our lives. It is in our faith community that we get to practice mercy, compassion, leadership, courage, speaking up, holding our tongues, sharing our gifts, honoring others’ gifts, and all the rest. The 1st letter to the Corinthians was focused on helping that congregation get clear about where they needed to do better in their practice. As Pastor Ben pointed out last week, Paul is speaking to the ways that some gifts were being valued more than others, some people being valued more than others. Paul encouraged them to practice a more excellent way of living in relationship and community, the way of love. We practice when we are present with one another.
Weekly gatherings for worship are our most regular, broadly shared communal experience of relating to God and to one another. For those who are new among us on any given Sunday, what they see, hear, and do as part of our worship tells them a lot about who we are and what we’re about. For those of us who worship as Foundry regularly, everything we do in worship is an occasion for rehearsing our faith. One writer says that “the repeated patterns and practices of Christian worship over time shape us in ways of being with God and one another. In the repeated patterns and practices of Christian worship, we are formed and fashioned into the values and vision of the gospel.” “Repeated patterns and practices,” it is suggested, are necessary in order to be formed into the shape that more closely resembles the Kin-dom of heaven.
Think of a body-builder: if he wants to change the shape of his body to emphasize certain aspects of his physique, then regular, repeated patterns and practices are required. The same movement, over and over, builds strength and definition. If we want our lives to look a certain way, to have particular characteristics and reflect particular values, then repeated patterns and practices—disciplined habits—are required to help our lives take that shape. We might also think about a sports team. Individuals can practice the fundamentals on their own, but the team won’t play well together or accomplish its goal unless each person is consistent in team practice and utilizes each team member’s different strengths.
The repeated patterns and practices of Christian worship, meant to be lively and life-giving can certainly become formulaic, boring, and, well…deadly. The founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley, was deeply concerned that the Anglican Church of which he was a part had devolved into empty ritualism, seemingly cut off from the life-transforming power of the Holy Spirit. His response was to organize small groups to study the Bible, pray, support one another in the faith, hold each other accountable, and serve the poor. These small groups provided a context within which folks were reminded of what they were doing, nurtured a faith that was really connected to their everyday life, and deepened their relationship with the God they worshiped when they showed up on Sunday morning. Wesley remained an Anglican priest his whole life and always expected members of the small groups within the Methodist societies to worship at their parish church, bringing their spiritual awakening with them into the pews to enliven the ritual with a vital and living faith in a living God!
Our spiritual heritage as United Methodists, therefore, is rich with a model for small group community, with worship patterns and practices of the Anglican Church out of which we grew, and an intentional focus on the movement of the Holy Spirit who is always at work in our daily lives and in our worship to challenge, transform, inspire, and make us new.
There is a basic pattern and movement of our worship—gathering in prayer and praise, being encountered by the Word of God, responding to the Word in acts of faith, generosity, sacrament, and commitment, and being commissioned and sent forth. Within the basic pattern, those of us who plan worship may add something creative or different at the prompting of Spirit. And in any given week, something may happen “on the spot”—something unplanned or uncontrolled. The regular pattern and practice of communal worship creates the trusted “container” in which Spirit can move in surprising ways.
I will never forget the Ascension Sunday when, after preaching a sermon inspired by an image of Christ dancing into heaven, I planned to have my friend sing the song “I Hope You Dance.” I knew I would invite the congregation to respond during the song, but wasn’t sure what form that response would take—whether it would be an invitation to pray at the altar or in the pews, or—well, I just didn’t know ahead of time. When the time came, I simply invited folks to respond however they wanted to…they could pray, they could just ponder, they could dance, whatever. And, lo and behold, people got up and started dancing together, right there in church!
Communal ritual—whether in worship or participation in a small group—helps create trust that allows taking risks like that. It’s also important because of its consistency. It helps us remain in relationship to God and to one another through the varying conditions of our lives and the inconsistencies of our feelings and moods; this is why I encourage those who are grieving—or those struggling in their faith—to get back into regular worship or connection with their small group as soon as possible; the ritual helps provide something constant, a place to be held. It has also been said that ritual practice is necessary for us because of our persistent amnesia—our forgetting who we are, whom we live for, and why. And so we gather in small groups to share what’s real in our lives and to receive encouragement, support, and prayer for the journey. We are present with one another in worship to pray, listen, and ponder, to sing our praises to God, to speak words full of poetry and mystery that call us to remember the story, to remember who we are and who God is and why we are here anyway—that it’s not all about me or just looking out for Number One, that there is something larger of which we are a part and that there is hope for our lives no matter what the circumstances.
Perhaps the most poignant example for me of the power of communal ritual to form and shape us and to become so much a part of us that it lives in our bones is the experience of praying and singing with folks who suffer from Alzheimers Disease or dementia. Somehow the Lord’s Prayer, the favorite Christmas carol—whatever was repeated and enlivened through the rituals of the Church for that person—those things remain when so much else is lost. The disease can’t touch that part of them; they can still recite those prayers… Those rituals live in very deep places in us. They form us; and they remind us who we are even when so much else of our lives is forgotten.
And, of course, the thing that matters most of all in life is the love we give and receive. Cultivating relationships, caring for one another, sharing life in all its complications, and highs, and lows, working shoulder to shoulder for things that matter, laughing, crying, and persevering together—this is the heart of it all. Our worship and our intentional connections in relationship with one another in small groups, classes, ministry teams and committees provide the place for us to practice living faith, hope, and love. Only when we’ve been at it awhile, will we be able to create enough trust to do the really difficult things and work together in ways that truly honor every gift and member. It is in these contexts we are formed and grow in the love and compassion that reflects the life of God revealed in Jesus.
Do you have to “go to church” to call yourself a Christian? No. Do you need to be part of intentional covenant community—even with all its challenges, needs, disappointments, and foibles—to be fully shaped and formed over the course of your life in the perfect love of God in the image of Jesus? Well… yes. The good news is that God’s faith in us, hope for us, and love for us abide. And that loving presence will guide your steps…and always on a path that leads to life.
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A sermon preached by Rev. Ben Roberts for Foundry UMC
January 23rd, 2022
"Shine On" Sermon Series
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2022-01-16
Guest Preacher Bishop Marcus Matthews
Retired Baltimore-Washington Conference
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An Exchange of Vows
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC January 9, 2022, The Baptism of the Lord. “Shine On!” series.
Texts: Isaiah 43:1-7, Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
Some of you may be familiar with the phrase “setting intention.” The core of Christian Centering Prayer (a meditative form of prayer) is to set your intention to be present to God. For those of you who practice yoga, you will know that as you begin, the invitation is often to “set your intention” for your practice that day. In other words, as you move through the practice, what do you want to work on? What do you want to hold in mind? What is your intention? For me the language and practice of “intention” has become so important in my life. I want to be intentional about my living, my choosing, my priority-setting, my loving.
In our United Methodist wedding liturgy, immediately following the welcome, is something called the “Declaration of Intention” in which the persons being married are asked to affirm things that sound like traditional marriage vows. It’s a part of the ceremony that often elicits questions during preparatory conversations with the couple. It’s not always clear why this shows up so early in the service. The backstory of this part of the ceremony is that it replaces the old “who gives this woman to be married” part—a practice grounded in patriarchal understandings of women as property, as persons without their own agency or voice. In our current service, those standing at the altar say right up front that no one is forcing them to get married and that they have chosen the person they’re marrying. That’s what those “vows” are all about. They are clearly stating their intention to freely enter into union with the person who stands beside them and to share the joys and sorrows of the relationship no matter what the future will hold.
The parents and families and the whole congregation are also asked to affirm their blessing and support—their intention for their own relationship with the couple.
Whether it’s in prayer, a spiritual practice, or entering the covenant of marriage, our intentions are what we want to try to do or to be. And the truth is that we never know how things will play out in an unknown future. But in these key moments of our lives, we set our faces toward the vision we seek, with as much clarity as we can muster, and then…we try.
Today is traditionally known as “Baptism of the Lord Sunday.” Many congregations, Foundry among them, include on this day an opportunity to reflect upon and participate in a reaffirmation of our baptismal covenant. For those of us who are baptized, it was either the intention of our parents when we were infants or our own intention as youth or adults to enter into the covenant of Baptism, into a more intentional relationship not only with God but with the people of God in the Body of Christ.
And today, on this Baptism of the Lord Sunday, we stand at the banks of the Jordan River, that historically powerful place of crossing from the wilderness into the promised land, that flowing symbol of passage from one life into another and we witness Jesus baptized by John.
What was Jesus’ intention when he wandered into those waters? Why was Jesus Baptized? Luke doesn’t tell us. But in Matthew’s account (3:15) Jesus states his intention is “to fulfill all righteousness.” Whenever we receive the word “righteousness,” think: “right relationship.” Some will disagree with me on this, but I think Jesus could have avoided the river Jordan, that he could have chosen not to pass through those waters into the life for which he was created, that he could have avoided his responsibility to fulfill “right relationship” and, instead, used all his considerable mojo to live whatever life he wanted. But, as the one who shows us what perfect love is and does, he humbly offers himself to John’s hands.
In most Christian circles, we believe that Jesus came into the world as the Christ, as the very heart of God. His Baptism didn’t necessarily change him—it didn’t zap him into being the Christ. Rather, Jesus’ baptism was and is an affirmation and confirmation of his true identity, a revelation, a further epiphany for us that this one is our Lord, the one who shows us how to be truly and fully human in the image of God. Jesus’ intention was to live fully in his identity, to be in loving and just (“right”) relationship with God and others; and he chose to pass through the waters of the Jordan. As he emerged, Spirit descended upon him and led him into the wilderness for 40 days and nights where Jesus wrestled with the devilish voice, prayed, fasted, and prepared for his new, public life and ministry.
I was reading from the UM Book of Worship in preparation for today and was struck afresh by these words: “The Baptismal Covenant is God’s word to us, proclaiming our adoption by grace, and our word to God, promising our response of faith and love.” Through our Baptism, we are adopted by God and brought into the Christian part of God’s family, incorporated into God’s own life, enfolded into God’s love. This doesn’t mean that we are outside of God’s love prior to our Baptism—but rather, that at our Baptism, like Jesus, our truest identity is affirmed and confirmed, namely, that we are beloved children of God. This is God’s word to us: I am your God and you are my Beloved. More of God’s intention is clarified in Isaiah 43:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.
…you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you…
As you pass through the waters, as you affirm and reaffirm your covenant with God, you are invited to acknowledge and celebrate that you ARE a beloved child of God, a sibling of Jesus, part of the Beloved Clan. This truth invites a joyful response. It invites us to make our own declaration of intention for who we will try to be and what we will try to do in relationship with God, with the whole human family, and within the Christian family.
But just as in our understanding of marriage, God doesn’t force you to do anything. You are not coerced to respond. You have agency and voice. If you were baptized as an infant, that act was an affirmation of the truth of your belovedness and identity within God’s family. Those who brought you for Holy Baptism weren’t “speaking for you.” They affirmed their own faith and stated their intention to raise you so that you could know God and God’s love. You have a choice about your response every day after your Baptism. You can use your own mojo any way you choose. You can choose what kind of relationship you will have with God and with others. You choose your response to God, your intention.
As we gather on this day following the one year anniversary of the insurrection at our nation’s capital, I’m newly reminded how important it is for us to be clear both about our intention and the impact of our choices. I’m newly reminded how twisted versions of Christianity are woven into a long-standing, violent, white nationalist narrative and agenda in our country whose agents are rarely if ever truly held accountable for the harm inflicted. I’m reminded of the ways that the name of Jesus is coopted for the purpose of division when in truth Jesus’ witness modeled creation of community that crossed all boundaries and tore down dividing walls between people of all ages, nations, and races. I’m reminded of the stunning perversion of Jesus into one who marches with gun-toting bullies and supports self-serving greed. Because scripture is clear that, while Jesus clearly had power, charisma, and wisdom he chose not to throw his weight around and lord over others (unrighteous relationship), but chose instead to humble himself, to enter into the same waters of Baptism that we share, to face the wilderness and its many temptations, to journey in community and solidarity with all in need, to welcome and raise to leadership those whom others rejected or ignored, to insist upon both personal spiritual devotion and public social justice, to care for both souls and bodies, and to persevere even unto death for the sake of love. Jesus reveals for us the perfected image of God in human form—and all of us, in all our various gender identities, orientations, skin colors, nationalities, religions, and abilities are made in the image of God.
Today I want to remind us that if we take them seriously, the ancient words of our Baptismal covenant provide powerful words of intention for us for the living of these and all our days. First, we acknowledge there is evil in the world and that we ourselves fall short of God’s vision and so we repent. We affirm the power and freedom we’re given to resist evil, injustice, and oppression and to do what is right. We believe and have come to know that Jesus is the one who can show us what right relationship looks like and so we put our trust in Jesus and seek to follow.
God’s word to us is love…forgiveness…freedom…power. What is your word of response to God? What will be your true intention? Your answer makes a difference. And God’s grace will be with you as you try.
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On the Path
A homily preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, January 2, 2022, Celebration of Epiphany, “Shine On!” series.
Text: Matthew 2:1-12
One of the things I’ve heard myself say to countless persons in various challenging contexts over the course of my ministry and particularly the past couple of years is: “Things are not always going to be this way. You’re not always going to be where you are right now. It’s a journey…” This is not only a pep talk, it’s a theological assertion and a statement of Christian faith. Because the story we tell is that God is with us, receives our cries, and brings us through suffering and struggle to a new place of freedom and life. From slavery to promised land, from tomb to broiled fish on the beach with friends, the story is consistent. God’s saving love and grace is assured.
This message has been key in the ongoing global pandemic and especially in the moments when many of us—either personally or collectively—have felt so profoundly stuck. Of course, we all know, really, that things change in our lives. Some of the changes are beyond our control. And some, we have agency to affect. And regardless of how changes happen in or around us, we always have the choice of how we’ll respond. How we choose to respond to new realities or challenges sets us on a particular path, puts us on a particular trajectory. It’s important to choose wisely.
At the beginning of a new calendar year, it is tradition for many to give thought to what kinds of changes they want to make in their lives. I have a love/hate relationship with new year’s resolutions. But the idea of it is frankly pretty good. If you’re going to change one way or another, it is wise to consider what direction you actually want to travel. Where are you trying to go? What are you trying to do? What steps can you take to move in that direction?
I’ve been thinking about this myself and I’ve decided I want to be like Betty White or Archbishop Desmond Tutu or Dolly Parton or José Andrés. There are others I could name, but these are currently front of mind. The point is that I’m thinking about legacy—about the story of my life I want others to be able to tell, about how I wish to be remembered as one who lives in the days we’re currently living. I’m thinking about what our lives mean in the larger world. And it’s not that we have to be famous as these I’ve named are. I also want to be like my Dad who is not famous at all. Fame is not the point. All of those I’ve named seem to have clarity about who they are and what gives their lives purpose and meaning. Dolly Parton describes what I’m after saying, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” This kind of living makes an impact. Betty White said, “Everybody needs a passion. That’s what keeps life interesting. If you live without passion, you can go through life without leaving any footprints.” And the first lines of Howard Thurman I ever encountered many years ago are these, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” // Whether known by a few or known the world over, the people whose lives make the deepest impact are those who have come alive.
I’m convinced that the closer we are to the source of life, the more we “come alive.” The closer we are to the heart of all that is, the more strongly our own heart will shine. And the Epiphany story we tell today, in its most broad terms, is a journey story on the path that leads to closer connection with the heart of God, with the life of God, with the love of God. The wise ones who came from afar in search of the prophesied new king, trained in the art of astronomy. I imagine it was their passion. And when they saw something changing in the sky, a herald of a promise, they made their journey, through danger and uncertainty, guided on the path by a star. They knew who they were, they had practiced their discipline, and they moved forward with intention to discover and honor the newborn king.
The truth is that we don’t know how many magi there really were, exactly where they came from, or what they hoped to gain from their encounter with Jesus. But whoever they were, their actions formed the kernel from which the ancient celebration of Epiphany springs. It is a celebration that reminds each of us to search for the holy one, to let nothing deter us on the way, to draw near, to offer the gifts of our lives, and then to be enlivened by the love of God revealed in Jesus. The nearer you are to the beating heart of God’s love and life, the more you will “come alive,” the more you will shine with God’s love.
And the world needs people who have “come alive.” But you may feel stuck and dull and exhausted today. And you may think you don’t have anything left to offer. And in a time like this with so many challenges, you may be tempted to think there is no point to trying. And it may seem difficult to believe that things will ever be different than they are today. But there are those who have shown us how to shine with the love, peace, and power of God even in the midst of overwhelming pain, injustice, and despair. The late South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu is one of those people. He said, “Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” You see, you don’t have to feed whole nations in the midst of a crisis like José Andrés, you just need to keep doing what you can. When the injustice and foolishness of the world threaten to overwhelm you, do your little bit of good and help overwhelm the world. A legacy, a life that makes a difference in others’ lives, doesn’t happen all at once. It is created along the way, little bit by little bit, choice by choice, response by response. And as we enter this new year, know there will be things that try to distract you and lead you into places of fear and danger. But also know God will guide your steps, will help you do your “little bit of good” day by day, will help you discern when to hold steady, to take a break, or (as with the magi in our story) to change course for your own safety.
Things are not always going to be this way. You’re not always going to be where you are right now. You and I are on the path. God is with us, receives our cries, and brings us through suffering and struggle to a new place of freedom and life. From slavery to promised land, from cross to resurrection. From faraway places to the intimate, life-renewing presence of God’s love in Christ Jesus. God’s saving love and grace is assured on the path. Whether by the light of a star, the witness of others’ courage, good humor, perseverance, and generosity, or the simple encouragement of a loved one, God will guide us, go before us, and help us get to the other side.
Archbishop Tutu’s affirmation of faith, set to music by John Bell, are where I’ll end. May this song be our traveling music for the journey of 2022:
Goodness is stronger than evil; Love is stronger than hate; Light is stronger than darkness; Life is stronger than death; Victory is ours through Him who loves us.
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Great Joy For All
A Christmas Homily shared by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC on December 24th, 2021.
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Luke 1:39-45
Rev. K.C. Van Atta-Casebier
A Sermon for Foundry UMC
12.19.21
Let’s Pray. God, for Your wisdom and revelation and hope, we pray now. Amen.
Well, this is a very embodied story, a story of two pregnant women. While I hope I have done faithful work to make this story both accessible and gentle, I do want to offer this word, keep watch over your heart. Breathe deeply and take breaks if you need to.
Have you ever felt like you just knew something? Call it intuition or spiritual connection or universe electricity or just a well developed gut. Recently I answered a phone call, and I just knew what was waiting on the other end before the other person had spoken a word. I’m sure many of you have had moments where you felt Spirit pointing to something with about a thousand neon lighted arrows. As if to say, RIGHT HERE. This is the thing. This is your next step. Or take this path or this leap. Slow down. Breathe deep.
Occasionally in the noise of it all, that divine voice of inner wisdom can get absorbed into the frequency of our environment. For this reason, I can hear my gut best when I am quiet and still, and when I allow my body to sink into itself. But not only is it difficult to hear, sometimes it can be hard to differentiate between what we are hearing from our inner truth and (I’m going to put this bluntly) downright mind tricks. Dangerous lies. And when my mind dupes me, I cope by spending a lot of time in a hypercritical flurry of preparation - pre-grief, pre-anxiety, pre-leading, pre-stress, pre-organizing, pre-worrying. And while yes, some of these things can be immensely helpful in the event of a crisis, the truth of the matter, even though it may be hard to see it, is that sometimes things work out. Even after you’ve stopped believing, even in the face of all of your preparatory grief or stress. Even if just for a moment. Sometimes, in the most unlikely circumstance what we get instead of a tragedy is a blessing. A humble God, a willingness to learn, a love that wins again and again, healing from trauma - a little bit at a time, survival, an unexpected miracle, a star in the night sky, a brave mother.
A few years ago I was sitting in a surgical waiting room, the kind where every half hour or so a surgeon will come in and announce a name. The family members to whom that name belongs will approach the doctor, and right there in the waiting room they tell you the fate of your loved one. I listened as a surgeon came in, announced the name, “Lisa,” and waited for the family to approach. I saw from across the room, a woman start to gather her things and get up. She comes running over to the doctor. The doctor says, “Are you here for Lisa?” “Yes,” the woman replies. And then I watched as this doctor struggled to make sense of their relationship,
all while holding the most precious information of this woman’s life. Are you her friend….or her sister...or an aunt? As he continued to struggle, I saw the pain in her eyes. “No, I’m her wife,” she said quietly. The doctor then told her that her beloved Lisa was going to live, that he had gotten all of the cancer with clean margins. She wept openly as she wandered back to her waiting room seat. Something within me said, “Go to her.” I tried to fight this urge with all of my might. I was there for my family. I was not there in any official capacity. But still, the energy stirred. “Go to her,” it said. I could feel my shoulders tense, my abdomen tighten, my breath quicken. Something dared me to move. And it always feels like a dare, really. Because there is always something at stake - even if it’s just our comfort. So I went, but not before I had a tug-of-war in my head or what I have begun to call - indefatigable mind sparring. Eventually, my gut won. And this was clear because before my mind could catch up, I was already walking toward her. I asked if I could give her a hug, and apologized for the doctor. She said, “I’m just so glad she’s okay. And I’m not sure what made you come over here, but I am so glad you did. We drove many miles to come have this complicated surgery done by the best surgeon we could find. I have felt so alone.” She asked why I was in the waiting room and offered kind words of support. We talked until it was time for her to go see Lisa in recovery. Through tears we said goodbye.
“Go to her,” is what I imagine Mary heard from within her. An 80 mile, harrowing journey to look her dear cousin in the eye and say, “me too.” When she arrived, I can only imagine their exchange. Did an angel come to you, too? Was it scary for you, also? Look at us, just a couple of outcasts, seemingly unable or incapable of hosting life…and yet here we are looking into
each others eyes and feeling in our bodies the most impossible thing of all…that in the fullness of the unlikelihood of these circumstances…one thing is TRUE. For now, it seems to be working out. Mary and Elizabeth had both a human and divine connection. They really saw each other. The divine within Elizabeth recognizes the divine in Mary. The life within Mary sees the life within Elizabeth. And at that moment, I don’t know this for sure, but I hazard a guess that they weren’t trying to anticipate or help or advise or fix or teach. I think Mary and Elizabeth sat there with their umbilical connection - feeding one another presence and goodness and solidarity and hope.
I think I always thought this story was about the baby, or in this case, babies. I thought that my Mothering and my Motherhood gave me a unique entry point into this story and the Gospel as a whole for that matter. And for many years I have said that it is a shame that we don’t talk about infertility and childbirth and pregnancy in the church….primarily because in the story that is upon us, that is LITERALLY how God comes to us. And in its specificity, it is true. The story is about a young pregnant mother and an older unlikely mother and their babies and exchanges of blessings… but what if that's not the whole story? What if it’s not actually about the baby? At least not yet. The story of the baby is coming soon, but it's not here. And babies and birth are sometimes an inaccessible and painful story for some of us. So, let's not skip ahead. Let’s stay right here with Mary and Elizabeth for now. Take a break from the preparation and the “what ifs”, the mind sparring, and all that tinsel. Just sit right here with me for a minute. Listen, women and birthing people. Listen, men and non-birthing people. Listen, those who are struggling with fertility. Listen, those who don’t have kids by choice or by circumstance. What if the blessing isn’t just the baby? What if the good news, the fulfillment of the promise, the
blessing… isn’t actually about our ability to bear children at all? What if it’s about our ability to bear God? The kind of bearing where the divine They rests in love and in shared life, all while conjuring our brew of inner knowing. And I have a few questions. If we know we’re all God bearers, can we be kinder to ourselves? Maybe speak to and about ourselves in ways that honor our belovedness? Can we see the blessings kept in us? Can we see them in one another? Can we stop trying to control others' bodies because we’re not really great at controlling our own? Can we stop laying claim to others bodies? Can we know, as Mary did, that we are God bearers? And then can we sing as Mary does, holy and unabashedly?
But not that one song… Mary, did you know? No offense to the Gaithers…or actually definite offense to the Gaithers for writing perhaps the most Biblically unlettered song ever. Did Mary know? Yeah, Mary knew. She knew deep in her soul. She knew with her eyes and her arms and her legs and her abdomen. She knew in her body. And despite what everyone had likely said about her body, it was God’s dwelling place. And the same is true about us. Our bodies are God’s dwelling place. Our insides are remarkably capable to bear not only the name of Christ, but the ACTUAL CHRIST. And it would be great if we continue to speak kindly to them and about them and to create safe space for Emmanuel. And when we feel a holy nudging in our inner knowing, may we follow it, if necessary, all the way to the outskirts of town to find the blessing of human and divine connection so strong that we actually feel God leap within us.
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Renewal
A meditation shared by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC on December 12, 2021, the third Sunday of Advent. “Good Tidings” series.
Texts: Zephaniah 3:14-20
I have a plant that is dear to me because it was a memorial gift received for my father’s funeral service six years ago. It was small enough that I could carry it home with me on the plane. This plant is very good at telling me when it needs water. Its leaves begin to look thin and droop, unable to remain upright due to lack of their most vital requirement. As soon as I give it a drink, the response is dramatic. The plant is restored right before my eyes; the water renews its strength.
Perhaps this image first came to mind as I reflected upon the words of the prophet Zephaniah because among all the good tidings from our text, the part that most struck me is, “God will renew you in his love.” At the end of this long year that has felt strangely short, I am painfully aware of how thin my resources are, how difficult it is to “keep my chin up” as daddy would say, how I often feel droopy like my plant when it’s thirsty. I’m aware of my own need for renewal—and I know I’m not alone. I observe frayed relationships and grieving families and whole communities grappling with trauma and anxiety. I’m aware of colleagues in ministry and school teachers and medical professionals who are burned out to the point of walking away from their vocations. I’m aware of the weary ones who continue to try to carry the banner for racial, gender, and economic equity and justice, for common sense gun laws, for access to education and health care and so much more. I’m aware of children and youth falling behind the learning curve and grappling with spikes in anxiety and depression. And, mercy, just think of the communities destroyed in minutes from tornadoes this week and all those still recovering from fires, floods and other increasingly intense natural disasters as a result of climate change. // “God will renew you…” Those are words I need to hear.
The original audience needed these words as well. Zephaniah prophesied in Judah during the early years of King Josiah, around 640 BCE and before the king’s reforms address the mess Israel had made of things. Much of the short book (only three chapters) is searing judgment upon Israel for idolatry and syncretism (1:4-6), complacency (1:12), corrupt leadership (3:3-4), and injustice (3:1, 5). And yet quite abruptly the message shifts. The last word of the book—the way Zephaniah’s prophecy ends—is what we receive today: “Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!” And why the rejoicing? Because “The Lord has taken away the judgments against you…the Lord your God is in your midst…God will renew you in his love…God will deal with all your oppressors…will save the outcast…will bring you home…”
Picture it in your mind’s eye…a whole community—weighed down with the human mix of guilt, fear, anxiety, weariness, apathy and all the fruits of injustice—everyone drooping and weak, parched for what is most needed... and then news arrives that God is on the way and will not destroy, but save them. Like a drink of cool water, mercy and help and relief and guidance and love flow into the parched places. God’s love renews them all.
The end of Zephaniah feels a little bit like a stock photo, the old Deus ex machina, the knight in shining armor, Tammy Wynette “standing by her man.” It feels too easy, a bit contrived, a predictable ending to God’s love story.
But I gotta say, right now, predictable love stories are giving me life and not a small measure of joy. Whether it’s Hallmark or Lifetime or Netflix or wherever, I’m quite happy to spend some time with completely overused plot points like two romantically challenged characters who meet, realize they’re destined to be together, encounter a series of problems meant to separate them, and by the end are wrapped in each other’s arms. Or two people meet and immediately think the other is awful only later to discover that arguing with each other is better than any conversation with anyone else ever. Or two people who usually don’t get along agree to pretend they are together to satisfy family expectations or make an ex jealous and, well, you know how the story goes…
And I’ll quickly say that the renewal I get from 90 minutes of contrived plot points and charming country Christmas villages with quirky characters is NOT because I lack for love in my life. It’s because sometimes you just need to experience the predictable love story, to be reminded that desire for love is universal, that to love and be loved is life-giving and joy producing. And, of course, there’s the side benefit of shutting off large parts of your brain so that it can get a little break. That is renewing in a whole other way.
Today and throughout this season, we receive again the familiar story of God’s love affair with us. It goes something like this:
God loves us and provides guidance and resources for our lives to flourish; we blow God off in one form or fashion doing harm to others and ourselves in the process; God sends prophets and teachers to try to get our attention; and when we make even the smallest turn toward God, create even the slightest opening in our heart to God, God rushes in with grace and love and compassion and forgiveness. Rejoicing ensues and the credits roll… And then people create a series of sequels that have a very similar plot.
The rejoicing isn’t because we’re off the hook, but because we realize we’re loved “even while we are yet sinners.” (as our communion liturgy affirms) // In my experience, water is sweeter when I’m parched. Mercy and forgiveness are cause for humble rejoicing when I know I’ve messed up. Assurance that I’m not alone and that I’m loved is nice enough when I am feeling strong, but that assurance is new life and strength when I’m feeling weak. Good tidings are only good when we know we stand in need of them…
And the good tidings of Zephaniah’s prophesy reminds us that renewal is God’s desire for us. God knows what we need. We are assured that as we respond to God’s love, strengthened to try to do and be better, to live together in peace with justice, to care for others as we care for ourselves, God is in our midst as our advocate and guide, our protector, and the one who loves us best.
So rejoice!
The plot twist, no longer such a twist for those who’ve seen the movie before, is that we aren’t the only ones singing for joy. In verse 17 it is God who is rejoicing! “God will rejoice over you with gladness, God will renew you in his love; God will exult over you with loud singing!”
God’s love story may have a predictable ending. But it never gets old. For God so loves the world that, well, you know how the story goes (cf. John 3:16-17). Let’s rejoice that in these holy days we receive the story and God’s amazing grace… again.
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“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
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”
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!”
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?
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“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)
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“Are We There Yet?”
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, October 31, 2021, the twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost. “Prepare the Table with Justice and Joy” series.
Texts: Psalm 23:1-3, Mark 12:28-34
We are taking our time on our journey through the 23rd Psalm. Two and a half verses have taken us 4 weeks and we’ll get through the final three verses by Thanksgiving. Today, we are in the middle of the journey, verse 3b: “God leads me in right paths for His name’s sake.”
We live in a culture that isn’t always so good at taking our time. Waiting is generally not high on our “favorite things to do” lists. The path we tend to want is one that gets us where we are going as soon as possible. I think about how excited I am when my navigation app interrupts regularly-scheduled programming to announce I could save 4 minutes by taking a different route! Yes! Of course I want to do that!
I often wish God was more like my navigation app. I wish I could plug in my preferred destination in life and get not only turn-by-turn guidance, but an ETA. Over the course of the pandemic, I reflected much about the extreme disorientation caused by not knowing how long a thing is going to last. Early on it was how long do we have to stay in quarantine and when will there be a vaccine? Then how long until we can safely gather in worship? When will it be safe to sing without masks? How long until our children will finally be vaccinated? Added to that, of course, are the questions about when our nation might finally grow the collective moral spine to put into policy and practice the high ideals we profess in our words. How long will it take to not just talk about but truly live “liberty and justice for ALL?”
If God the good shepherd is leading us on a path, I want both the illustrated picture with turn-by-turn guidance AND an estimated time for when we’ll reach the longed-for destination. Whether the uncertainty and waiting is related to pandemics or relationships or vocation or clarity of direction or spiritual growth or health or whatever, the not knowing how long is beyond difficult. …I hear my brother, sister, and me as children in the back seat on one of our many trips to Arkansas or Texas to see our grandparents—you know the refrain: Are we there yet? How much longer?
Where is God with the directions for how to accomplish what we’re trying so hard to do and to get us to the finish line? Where is God with the time-saving option to get us where we want to be? Because we want to get there NOW.
Rabbi Harold Kushner says, “There is a story in the Talmud about the traveler who asks a child, ‘Is there a shortcut to such-and-such a village?’ The child answers, ‘There is a shortcut that is long and a long way that is short.’” Kushner then shares that the Hebrew phrase in verse 3b is more complex than can be easily captured in translation. He says “right paths” “literally means ‘roundabout ways that end up in the right direction.’” So, as the child says, there may be shortcuts or “easier” paths to our destination, but they could end up taking longer, being harder, and costing more in the end.
I was curious about Kushner’s translation of “right paths” and discovered that the Hebrew word translated “path” (בְמַעְגְּלֵי־—ma’aglei –mah-gaw lah) literally means a circumvallation, an entrenchment—or figuratively, a wagon track. And the word shows up in biblical stories as the “circle of the camp.” Some resources translate the word simply “in circles.” Kushner’s nuanced Hebrew helps us understand that the “path” is not a straight line from point A to point B. It has a circular tendency, is a “roundabout way that ends up in the right direction.” It is “dug in”—not in the sense of stubbornness, but of being an intentional path, a worn path, a path with a purpose. //
Today we celebrate Holy Baptism. This is not the beginning of God’s love in Lillian-Pierce’s life, but it the beginning of an intentional journey as part of the Body of Christ, the church. It is the beginning of a life-long path, a long and winding road of learning and growing in God’s love and grace. Every person’s journey is deeply unique and the promise is that God is with each of us to guide us. Everything we go through from the highest joys to the experiences that, in the moment, we find unbearably painful, disappointing, or even dull are all things that shape and form us and can provide us with resources for living more wisely, with greater self-awareness, humility, and strength. Our commitment to one another as Foundry family is that, at every age and stage of our lives, all along the “roundabout” path of our lives, relationships and resources will be available to nurture, explore, and sustain our spiritual journey. No matter what.
And just as with any one person, every community of faith has its own unique twisty, turny journey of growth and development. For more than 207 years, through challenging seasons, moments of conflict or tension, big decision points, times of great change and times when it seemed nothing much was happening or we were just getting through—in and through all of that, God has been at work, guiding and calling and offering opportunities for the people of Foundry to be curious, to wonder, to wrestle with things, to learn and to grow as a congregation. Foundry Church has been in the midst of culture change for many recent years, seeking to be adaptive and responsive to the shifting landscape of the world, to the experiences of persons around us, and the needs of this generation of the Foundry family. To be a midwife of new life through culture change in congregations is the work God has given me again and again. The work is messy, surprising, and not accomplished in a day, a year, or even several. While there are signposts along the way for those who know where to look, culture change is a largely unmapped sojourn of unknown duration—often through wilderness places—where I inevitably join the chorus of God’s people who’ve long cried, “How long, O Lord? Are we there yet??” As with our lives, the promise—and my personal experience—is that, when we truly seek God’s guidance, the Good Shepherd, who is always at work in our midst, will bring us around to an experience of greater health and flourishing. God will get us where we need to go. There will likely be construction delays, accidents, and a variety of other things that will slow our roll to orange or red…but God will get us through.
It often feels or appears that things aren’t moving or changing at all. The “circular tendency” of the “right path” can simply leave us feeling like we’re going in circles, stuck in cycles that will never really change. Recently, I’ve heard more than one reaction to reading Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital expressing some level of despair over the way that the more things change, the more they stay the same. And I remember a conversation with a close friend who expressed frustration that he seemed to be going in circles, thinking he had made some progress but then grappling with the very same issues over and over again.
The spiritual practice of traveling the labyrinth path is instructive here. The labyrinth is not a maze, a puzzle, or a trap, but are rather a continuous path that twists and turns, eventually leading to the center. There are no dead ends. It is a circular journey that continually invites you to meet yourself at the same place, yet not quite. It feels that you are going in circles as you find yourself meeting a familiar issue again, but with every revolution, the path is taking you deeper toward the center of the circle. Every revolution changes you because you have taken another turn. And even though you can’t perceive it, you have come a long way. One of my mentors, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., is good at reminding all of us that the challenges to achieving racial equity and justice are the same as always, but significant things have been achieved, things have changed, we are dealing with the same issues, but at a whole new level. With each revolution, we grow closer to the center we seek. //
It has been interesting to see how the Gospel passages from the lectionary have paired with our focus text from Psalm 23. Today, we receive from Jesus the words that give shape to Foundry’s mission and vision, the words of the “great commandment”—to love God with all we are and to love our neighbor as ourselves. The center of the Gospel is simply this: love. The center into which God guides us “in roundabout ways” is love. The right path is love. Loving God and neighbor is not a short-term project or a simple, obstacle-free line from point A to point B. It is not without its wilderness places and unknowns, its conflicts and disappointments. Loving God and neighbor requires work and commitment, grace and forgiveness. It is the work of a lifetime, learning to love as God loves.
Are we there yet? By God’s grace and with the guidance of the Good Shepherd, we are on the path of love, humility, compassion, mercy, and justice in our lives and as Foundry Church. And so, on that path, even when we don’t know how long it will take or what to expect, we can receive with assurance the words spoken by Jesus to the scribe: You are not far from the Kin-dom of heaven.
Are we there yet? God, our shepherd, guides us on right paths…we are not far. So for God’s sake, for our neighbors’ lives, and our own, let’s keep going.
“More Green, Less Noise”
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, October 17, 2021, the twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost. “Prepare the Table with Justice and Joy” series.
Texts: Psalm 23:1-2, Mark 10:35-45
“…one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green…” This line from J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Hobbit has inspired a refrain in the Gaines-Cirelli household over many years, a phrase that is invoked like a prayer or a prophetic rebuke in moments when surroundings are harsh or grating on the nerves. “More green. Less noise.” I suppose one could say it’s nostalgic or naïve. But regardless of that, it is what I so often desire. More green. Less noise.
And so I love the line from Psalm 23 that is our focus today as we journey line by line through that Psalm in this series.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. The Lord makes me lie down in green pastures; and leads me beside still waters;
The landscape traversed by the Hebrew people from which the Psalm emerged is diverse—from rocky desert to mountain to seacoast. And there are lovely broad valleys and places where green spreads out like a blanket. The good shepherd knows the terrain, knows when and where we need to be guided from one place to another—and chooses to bring us to green pastures and still waters.
Rabbi Harold Kushner begins his reflection on verse two by telling an amusing story of a boy who asks his father why the sky is blue and the grass is green.
Of course there are those in this congregation who could answer the boy’s questions quite precisely from a scientific perspective. But even if we don’t know those answers, Kushner goes on to suggest a fairly simple answer from a theological point of view, namely, the reason the sky is blue and the grass is green is because God made a world God knew we needed… Not just a world that produces sustenance for our bodies, but a world that provides suitable habitats for different creatures, a world that gives comfort and delight.
But what do blue and green have to do with any of that? He spends a bit of time talking about how different colors evoke different emotional responses. “Remember that light is a form of energy. Light reaches our eyes in waves of different frequencies per second, creating different levels of intensity. For bright colors, red and yellow, the waves are longer and hit the eye with more strength, even as taller, longer ocean waves hit us more forcefully…Darker colors, the blues and greens, emit shorter waves and strike the eye more gently.” And then makes this observation, “God has colored [the] world in predominantly calming colors, blue sky, green leaves, blue-green water, brown trees, colors that calm rather than excite.” And for our siblings who don’t see colors, there are other aspects of creation that are similarly delightful and calming…the feeling of a breeze or a warm body snuggled up to us, the sounds of birds, a purring cat, water flowing, the rustle of leaves, the smells of fresh cut grass, wet earth, flowers, wood smoke.
We know that the elements of our planet can be harsh and dangerous as well. But there’s a reason people yearn to be outside in nature—any nature! I remember when I lived in New York City, after a long, cold winter, I took a walk on the first warmish, sunny day of spring and was astonished to see that Central Park’s Sheep Meadow was literally covered with people. The Lord (or something!) had made them lie down in that green pasture—and you could barely see the green of the pasture for all the people! God made a world God knew we needed…
And have you ever noticed that line in the Psalm, “[The Lord] makes me lie down…”? I think I’ve always thought of verse 2 as mostly about food and water, as a shepherd leading the sheep to pastures and streams for nourishment. But what I’ve come to appreciate is that it’s not only that God has created a beautiful planet to nourish us with food, but also to help us rest, to find calm in what can be stormy waters of life. One translation of verse two reads, “You let me rest in fields of green grass. You lead me to streams of peaceful water.” (CEV)
Many poets and other writers have the created world as their primary inspiration and study. One of those is Wendell Berry, farmer, poet, philosopher, prophet. Berry writes these words in his poem “The Peace of Wild Things”:
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
God has given us this beautiful creation, not only as a source of food, as raw materials to consume and manipulate, but as a doorway into rest, delight, grace, and peace. //
Several things converge around this Sunday when it just so happened that these lines fell open for our reflection… October 4th is the traditional Feast Day of St. Francis, who is known for love of all creation and creatures, climate and environmental justice legislation is a centerpiece of current debates in congress, and preparations are underway for a UN Climate Change Conference happening in Glasgow the first couple of weeks of November. Some fail to see any connection between Christian faith and the climate crisis. I remember back in 2015 Pope Francis was catching all kinds of grief for his “green agenda.” Some of those opposed to the Pope’s environmental justice advocacy believe “that climate change is being overhyped or that human activity is not a factor and that remedies may do more harm than good…Others simply believe that Francis…should not [weigh] in on issues that touch on technical and scientific matters that some contend are still debatable.”
Of course the fiercest debates around environmental issues often come to a head when there is a lot of money to be made and/or the promise of jobs. I have had conversations with close family members (remember I come from Oklahoma and Texas, after all) who argue that careful engineering and maintenance of things like off-shore drilling and fracking are not necessarily bad for the planet, but rather it is only when companies try to do things on the cheap or without care that harm is done. My goal is to keep an open mind and to try to see things from a variety of perspectives. I know that my family members (and others like them) want to care for creation even as they advocate for practices such as those mentioned. But when we add up those things together with mountaintop removal coal mining, deforestation, polluted groundwater, loss of wetlands, greenhouse gas production, paving everything in sight, and Lord knows what else, I can’t help but think that we are, collectively, being driven first and foremost not by a balanced sense of forward looking stewardship of both human and environmental needs, but by the short-term money to be made from coal, development, oil, agribusiness, and more.
There are folks here today who have a much more nuanced and complete understanding of the environmental, economic, social, and political issues involved in all of this than I do. But I simply want to remind us of a very simple truth. Regardless of your views about particular practices, our Judeo-Christian faith specifically calls us to a deep and intentional connection with all of creation. In his focus on environmental stewardship, Pope Francis is not, as one particularly mean-spirited writer suggests, being “an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist”; he is being a Christian. Christians are not only called to be caretakers of the world, its earth, air, water, and creatures, but we are also reminded that we are, ourselves, part of the creation. God has created a beautiful world to provide for all we need, body and soul and has given us as the human creature a place and role within the interconnected beauty and order of things. The Christian understanding is not different from the Native American wisdom reflected in the words of Chief Seattle: “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.” The truth is that the human creature has harmed the web. God has given us green pastures and still waters, but as we have seen, droughts dry up the pastures; waters rise and overwhelm as a result of our lack of care. We cannot assume that green pastures and still waters will always be there.
Last week, Foundry Board President Todd Mullins mentioned that environmental justice is part of our vision and agenda for 2022. It’s not new—we have solar panels, a rainwater garden, we recycle, and have drastically reduced single use plastic and paper consumption, but we are committed to taking things to another level of sustainability through projects in our physical plant, consciousness raising for practices in our personal lives, and advocacy in the public square.
More green. Less noise. With God’s help and our shared commitment and generosity, we’ll do our part in mending, sustaining, sharing and enjoying the gifts of green pastures and still waters so that all might be nourished by the good gifts of creation, so that all may “rest in the grace of the world and [be] free.”
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“Tell Me What You Really, Really Want”
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, October 10, 2021, the twentieth Sunday after Pentecost. “Prepare the Table with Justice and Joy” series.
Texts: Psalm 23:1, Mark 10:17-31
A story is told of a minister who sat at the hospice bedside of a woman near death and, failing to find his own words, began to recite the 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…” The woman stirred and summoned the energy to whisper, “But pastor, I do want!”
I imagine there are many for whom this will resonate. The woman in the story wanted to be made well, to get to experience more of the life and love and relationship that she would be leaving behind. Does Psalm 23 teach that we aren’t supposed to want like that? What does “I shall not want” actually mean?
Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book on the 23rd Psalm entitled The Lord Is My Shepherd: Healing Wisdom of the Twenty-Third Psalm is one of my companions for our journey over the coming weeks. Rabbi Kushner points out that the familiar Elizabethan English used in the King James Version doesn’t mean “I shall not desire anything.” Kushner says “the intent of the Hebrew is more accurately captured by more recent translations, with words like ‘I shall lack for nothing’…[or] ‘The Lord is my shepherd, what more do I need?’ The issue of whether I desire things beyond that is beside the point.”
Last week, I noted that the image of God as a good shepherd lives deep within the spiritual imagination of our religious ancestors. And the memory of God leading the Hebrew people out of slavery and providing manna in the wilderness folds into that image of a faithful, ever-present God who guides us through and provides for our needs. When you read the story of that wilderness time, you see that the people struggled to appreciate manna. They remembered all the food back in Egypt, the land of their captivity and, well, they wanted that. But the thing is, God led the people out of slavery and into freedom and made sure they had what they needed to survive. It is understandable to want spiced meat and vegetables and not a mystery substance likely scraped off a tree. They didn’t get what they wanted but they did not want for sustenance.
Let’s be clear: God is not a genie in a bottle; God is not an ATM; God does not exist to give us our way right away, but rather to guide us in God’s way that is discovered in an unfolding kind of way over time. God doesn’t just give us what we want, but works all day long to help us receive and share the good we need.
Also, it is common and perfectly OK to get angry at God about the way things are—in our lives or in the world around us. We can have feelings about how creation is created, how humans have free will and choices, how everything experiences cycles of birth, growth, diminishment, and death. We can shake our fists at the heavens because of suffering and strife. We can cry out saying, “If the Lord is our good shepherd, why do we want for peace, for justice? Why do we want for an end to poverty, pandemics, and environmental degradation?
Perhaps you’ve heard the one about a human who asks God, “Why do you allow poverty, suffering, and injustice when you could do something about it?” And God replies, “I was about to ask you the same question.”
We can have feelings about what we have or how things are, but God has in fact given us all we need. We have been given this beautiful planet, created in ways that are intricately interconnected and interdependent. The planet, well-tended and respected, provides all we need to thrive. We have also been given one another—a wonderfully diverse human family—each one with unique talents, skills, gifts, and insight. We are made to live in community, to care for one another and to share with one another and, in so doing, assure that all have what they need.
Perhaps it helps to think about it this way, when the Lord is our shepherd, we shall not want… Because if we are being guided in God’s way of life, we will be good stewards of the earth and grow healthy food that can feed hungry bodies instead of some other bottom line. When the Lord is our shepherd, we shall not want because we will understand that we are one human family, created to care, share, and provide for one another. We will both desire and choose in ways that assure ALL have what they need, that ALL have enough. Together, we can be the answer to prayer.
As I prepared these reflections for today, I received an email from the Poor People’s Campaign that said: “As those with power and wealth continue to debate whether our nation has the resources to meet the needs of all of its people – with talk about debt ceilings and budget and infrastructure bills – we will continue to denounce the lie of scarcity amidst great abundance, and keep building our movement to end poverty once and for all.”
You will likely have encountered at some point along the way, the idea of a “scarcity mindset.” A scarcity mindset perceives there isn’t enough time, money, or other resources for what is needed. It can be in response to a true lack of sufficient resources. Certainly there are those who do not have enough money or support to thrive. Others may have enough or more than enough but still maintain a scarcity mindset out of fear. “What ifs” can really do a number on us. What if I lose my job? What if someone in my family gets sick? What if, what if, what if can lead to fearful obsession with not having enough.
In either case, the focus on the need to have more money or to protect our money affects our overall perspective and our literal brain function and, as a result, our choices and actions.
In our Gospel text today, we encounter a rich man who was clear about what he wanted. He wanted to figure out how to inherit eternal life. The man is functioning within a market economy mindset: “What will it take to get this other thing that I want?” Jesus’ response is to recite the last six commandments of the Big Ten. He doesn’t name the first four—which have to do with our relationship with God—but rather, focuses on the last six, which are all about our relationship to our neighbor. And Jesus edits one of the commandments—evidently just for the benefit of this man before him. In verse 19 of our passage, instead of “you shall not covet” Jesus says, “you shall not defraud.”
The thing that made folks wealthy in Jesus’ day was to own property, so we can assume that this rich man had lots of property. Folks gained more wealth by acquiring the land of debt-defaulting neighbors (foreclosures?); therefore, it is also reasonable to assume that those who had lots of property had gained that wealth at the expense of the poor. In fact, the Greek word for “defraud” literally means “to keep away from someone, to deprive, to take away what rightfully belongs to someone else.” To follow the commandment as Jesus presented it would mean that the man has to give back what doesn’t really belong to him (Brueggemann’s definition of justice)—that he would have to acknowledge that the goods of the earth are unequally distributed and then do something about it. Jesus calls the man to do just that, to let go of what he doesn’t need, and to follow Jesus. The man refuses, the only time in Mark where someone refuses to respond to Jesus’ call.
This story not only impacts the life of the man who walked away from Jesus, it impacts the larger community as well. As one scholar writing about scarcity mindset says, “When we feel that money and goods are scarce, we start to think of our neighbors and fellow citizens as competitors rather than teammates united by our shared humanity. When we believe that the economy is zero-sum, we also come to believe that helping another person comes at our own expense. Helping our fellow humans escape poverty, debt, and misery becomes a disservice to the wealthy, rather than an expression of compassion and justice at the foundation of a society of equally free and valued people.”
Scarcity mindset makes us believe there is not enough to go around. But that’s simply not true. There is enough if we don’t destroy or squander earth’s resources. There is enough if we share what we have. There is NO REASON that children in this country or any of our siblings should be going hungry or not receiving healthcare or having access to clean water and secure housing. If we wanted to invest in solutions to care for the poor, the planet, and the common good as much as we want to focus on spaceships and weaponry (just two examples), the creative, innovative brilliance present all around us would figure out how to get things done and there would be enough money to make it happen.
If the Lord is our shepherd, we will want to do everything we can to assure that ALL have what they need, that ALL have enough, that ALL have a place at the table.
We can blame God for whatever…or allow ourselves to get caught in a scarcity mindset… or we can give thanks that God has given us one another, this beautiful world, and all sorts of ways to tend and mend, to care and to share. As we think about preparing a table here at Foundry that draws the circle wider and makes sure that all have enough, just think about the abundance that is among us and all around us. Some of the best tables I’ve ever experienced have been potlucks, when people all bring their best dishes to share. If each one of us simply contributes what we can, if each one of us brings out very best to the table, there’s absolutely no reason we should struggle to exceed our goal and have the resources we need. As we continue to build relationships and partner with others in our city, we will find ways to assure that there are not two cities—one that has enough and another that doesn’t—we will find ways to house our neighbors instead of evicting them from their tents—we will find ways to assure that all our neighbors’ needs are met. The Lord is our shepherd, so let’s not only really, really want to prepare a table that leaves no one wanting, let’s do what it takes to get the job done.
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“Humble, Strong, Sure”
A reflection preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, October 3, 2021, the nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost. “Prepare the Table with Justice and Joy” series. World Communion Sunday.
Texts: Psalm 23:1a, Mark 10:13-16
“The Lord is my shepherd.” These five words hold so much. Because the Lord, our shepherd, holds you and me and the whole world.
An image comes to mind from my travels to the Holy Land at the beginning of 2020. It is of a young Bedouin boy, his arms filled with just one sheep. As our group traveled around Israel and Palestine, it was powerful to see the Bedouin shepherds with their flocks on what looked like mostly dry, rocky hills. The images of the 23rd Psalm took on new meaning the more I observed the landscapes from which that Psalm emerged. Much of the terrain is dangerous, weather unpredictable, water and food sources hidden or scarce, predators always around. Shepherding can be dirty work, dangerous work, exhausting work, lonely work.
The ancestors of the Hebrew people were all nomadic, moving with their flocks to find sustenance, sometimes in the broad, green valley of places like the Galilee, and in times of drought, further afield. And that memory persists in the spiritual imagination of the tribes of Israel, the memory of the shepherd doing whatever was needed to tenderly care for and protect each little lamb. Our spiritual ancestors imagined God not as a king, but as a humble shepherd. Rabbi Harold Kushner writes, “To say ‘the Lord is my shepherd’ is to say that we live in an unpredictable, often terrifying world…But despite it all, we can get up every morning to face that world because we know that there is Someone in that world who cares about us and tries to keep us safe.”
It is a primal thing, the yearning for someone to make us feel safe in a dangerous world and cared for in what can be an everyone’s-too-busy-to-care, impersonal world. We humans try to get those needs met in all kinds of ways, some of them healthy and others, not so much. Even the best humans at some point along the way will hurt, disappoint, or not be present with us when we need them. But what we are offered in our faith tradition is assurance that the Lord, our shepherd, is present with us every single moment of every single day of our lives—and present with patience, compassion, mercy, and love, no matter what mess we may have made of things. The good shepherd is always with us trying to protect us and lead us to the things that nourish, sustain, and bless our lives.
A good shepherd also seeks out those who are in dangerous places, the wounded ones, the ones who’ve been led astray. It doesn’t matter how or why they are where they are, the shepherd still cares, will find them, and attend to their needs. Each and every sheep is cared for; all are loved and worthy to be scooped up and held. Jesus modeled this with the little children whom others would have ignored or excluded.
When we are safe and secure, we may forget. But when we find ourselves wounded or lost or being pushed aside or excluded, the promise is that God will remember us and draw near to help. We will be among those enfolded and held in the shepherd’s humble, strong, sure arms.
A day ago, I noticed that a colleague with whom I went to seminary, Rev. Otis Moss, III of Trinity UCC in Chicago, is starting a new sermon series entitled “I am Not Okay.” It struck me in a deep place as resonant with my own thoughts of late. A couple of weeks ago, in my midweek “Ponderings” on Facebook, I shared reminders about how our current experience of prolonged struggle of various kinds through the pandemics of 2020 and 2021 are taking a toll on every one of us. The stress and confusion and isolation is landing on our bodies and souls in some kind of way. And we may forget that how we feel or react in any given moment right now is likely affected by this larger reality. We may forget—because it’s been going on so long—that human systems are not MADE to sustain these levels of uncertainty, danger, and trauma for such long periods of time. My message was a simple reminder that it’s OK to not be OK and an encouragement to be gentle with ourselves. We need to remain aware of the context we’re in and be mindful of how we’re reacting to things. Because I don’t think anyone is really OK right now; I don’t think we’re “fine.”
The new series we begin today, is a journey through the 23rd Psalm. Every week through November 21st, the sermon will take a line from the Psalm as the focus for study and reflection. We will have opportunities to reflect on the ways God has brought us this far through these challenging years and to commit our support for what God will do in and through Foundry in 2022 to help us care for others as God has cared for us, to prepare the table for others as God has prepared the table for us.
We begin with the simple, profound assurance that the Lord is our shepherd. We will discover as we journey together through our study of Psalm 23, that its primary message is not that we’ll be free from the experience of pain or loss or difficulties in our lives. But rather that we will not have to experience anything in our lives alone. Because, as John Wesley affirmed in his dying breath, “Best of all, God is with us.”
The Psalmist wrote from a deeply personal place of relationship with God. But let’s be very clear. This Lord is not just “my” shepherd or your shepherd or Christians’ shepherd or Jews’ shepherd. The Lord is our shepherd and the shepherd of all. God has the whole beautiful, broken world in God’s hands. As we prepare to gather at the table God has prepared for us on this World Communion Sunday, I think about that Bedouin boy shepherd, arms full. I think about the Bedouin shepherds I observed, guiding their flocks through dangerous terrain to find sustenance, sometimes in unseen places. I imagine God as our shepherd, arms full with all the people in all the places all around the world gathered at the Communion table prepared by God. I think of all those who gather around different kinds of spiritual “tables.” I think about all who are suffering or lost, those whose suffering is hidden to others, those whom others ignore or devalue…I think of all these who are watched over and sought out by the Lord, our shepherd, who is determined that not one should be lost, that none will be excluded from the compassion, love, care, and grace of God.
As we draw near to the table God prepares for us, a table where we are nourished in forgiveness and in love, remember that at this table we are created and called to be the Body of Christ for the world, to follow in the way of the good shepherd who labors in love to tend for each and all. Today, I encourage you to really listen to the words of the Great Thanksgiving prayer. Let’s gather at the table today, with all God’s people everywhere, and truly give thanks for the bounty of love, mercy, and grace God has showered upon us all; let’s give thanks for the encouragement and nourishment to keep going; let’s give thanks for the grace to participate in God’s work of love and justice and compassion; let’s give thanks for the humble, strong, and sure presence of the Lord our shepherd.
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Psalm 84:1-4 (5-12); Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29
Rev. K.C. Van Atta-Casebier
A Sermon for Foundry UMC
9.26.21
Let’s Pray. God, for Your wisdom and revelation and hope, we pray now. Amen.
Splash! A little jarring at first, for both me and the water, but when the water settles, it begins to envelop me in what feels like a hug with no added pressure. Then an immediate, unencumbered deep breath with no resistance, no pain. It's the moment I long for - breath accompanied by relief. After the breath comes the desire to test the water, to see if it encourages movement or would prefer for me to stay in my place. Predictably, it always encourages movement. It always invites me forward. And after the movement comes the rest. And oh, does the water encourage rest. It holds steady as if to say, “Take all the time you need, I’ve got you, and I’ll be here when you’re ready to move again.” Eventually though, the time does run out. I have to find the nearest ladder, and pull myself out of the pool. It’s hard, not just because of a lack of desire, but because (and I’m sure you’ve noticed this as well), pulling yourself out of the water requires extra strength. The water grabs onto you, almost trying to pull you back into communion with itself. “No! Don’t go,” the water says. Inevitably, the first feeling and connection I have with my body after swimming, is a deep and primal need. THIRST. Now, I do need to confess that I am typically a thirsty person. I have “beverage needs” as the Foundry Youth and I call them, and you will likely never see me without a ridiculously large sized container of water. Swimming, though, exacerbates my thirst, because as it turns out, spending time in the pool can actually dehydrate you. As time goes on, I not only experience that kind of primal thirst, but also an itching desire and thirst to be back in the water. To feel held, relieved, and encouraged to move and to rest. Over the last few months of obligation, difficulty, and to be transparent, a dip in my mental health, swimming has sustained me.
To set the scene for our text, we actually have to set two scenes. In our first scene, the Israelites are emboldened to express their hunger and thirst by this rag tag rabble, said to be a group of Egyptians who tagged along with the Israelites out of Egypt. They begin to express a hunger for sustenance beyond the miraculous manna that God has provided for them. Specifically they wanted the fish, melons, cucumbers, leeks, onion, and garlic that they were fed back in Egypt - a meal that was remembered as free, except that it wasn’t free at all. It actually came at a great cost, the cost of their freedom. Moses hears the people weeping at their tents. I imagine it as this guttural expression of another very basic human need - food. Moses, overwhelmed by the communal despair, addresses God by saying (and I’m paraphrasing), “Why am I the one carrying this burden? Did I conceive these people? No, YOU did. I can’t carry the weight of this need. It is too heavy. DO SOMETHING.” And as we enter the second scene, God basically rebuts saying, “No, you do something. Go grab the seventy elders and bring them to the tabernacle tent.” And in our second scene, Moses does just that.
And in the tabernacle tent, God takes some of the Spirit saturated in Moses and places it on the seventy elders, and they begin prophesying. Then word gets back to Moses that 2 of the elders weren’t in the tabernacle, but they were prophesying anyway. Joshua is very concerned. And Moses says, “Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit on them!" (v. 29) This is firstly a tale of revised memory. Perhaps we revise our history because it is too painful to confront. Maybe we do it subconsciously. I’m going to talk briefly about pregnancy and want to offer this word. If you feel that this might be something that could cause you pain, please keep watch over your heart. With my first pregnancy I had this nifty little thing called hyperemesis gravidarum, which they should really just call “misery with a side of misery.” It caused me to have all day, all month, all pregnancy illness. There wasn’t a day in my first pregnancy where I didn’t vomit, including the day I gave birth. I lost a total of 50 pounds over the course of my pregnancy with Kash. And I insisted I wouldn’t have another child because of how miserable the first experience had been. I even wrote a journal every day so that if I ever even thought about trying again, I would have a first hand account to convince me otherwise. And lo and behold about 2 years later, and after reading my pregnancy journal, I began to remember that it “wasn’t that bad.” And I won’t go into detail, but I will tell you that my pregnancy with Riggins was even more difficult. And as an aside, both were of course totally and absolutely worth it. The Israelites have not only misremembered their time in Egypt, but it seems they've also forgotten about God’s work and provision that got them where they are and the blessing of manna they have now. For example, in their exodus, when met with an obstacle of a huge body of water, with an opposing army at their back, God provided a way. And it's worth noting that this way isn’t around the water, or by another path, the way that God provided is THROUGH the water. And yet, even as water is poured from their faces, and as they thirst, they can’t recall this great water miracle. Not only do they not remember it, they don’t crave it - God’s provision and blessing. Their craving instead is for something less sustainable and empty - that later in the text becomes their demise.
How often do we forget about our own great water miracles? When the suffering is too great, when we’re holding more than we can bear, when work is overwhelming, and the lines between work and home are blurred, and we’re angry because we’re grieving unfair deaths, and our anxiety and stress levels are through the roof. How is it even possible to remember anything other than the weight of the wilderness or to yearn for the predictable, even if it is torturous? And so we cry out, “God, where are you? DO SOMETHING. I can’t carry this load, at least not by myself.” Or...we’re simply too exhausted to be angry so we weep at our tents. Or we become wrapped up in the predictability of hierarchical structures and binary ideals. And if we check in with our second scene, how is Joshua handling all of this? By realizing for himself if he doesnt at least have an idea of who is allowed to be prophesying and who isn’t that it will all come crashing down on him. As if to say, “Nothing around me makes sense right now, but you know what feels really good in the midst of this suffering and grief? To know that I’m right about something...to know that I’m on the good side of something. To know that these people have authority and these people don’t. Or these people deserve medical care and these people don’t. And sometimes thirsting for reassurance of our goodness and rightness, can spiral into a sense of entitlement, a lack of empathy, a conscious or subconscious bend toward manipulation and gaslighting, disempowerment and abuse - that ultimately becomes our demise.
And yet, God had not abandoned the Israelites. God provided manna for them in the dewy water that grasped onto the land. God showed up and commissioned 72 people in the community to help share the load of Moses. And while baptism isn’t an expressly mentioned ritual in the Hebrew scriptures, the idea of water as an agent of renewal would have been intimately known by the Israelites who practiced mikvah - a purification bathing ritual. I wonder if the Israelites recognized this in the crossing of the Red Sea, or if it wasn’t until they later crossed the River Jordan into the promised land that they felt the significance of the breakthrough, release, and rescue of movement THROUGH the water. The same River Jordan where later the Messiah would come to be baptized.
Crossing through the water is part of the story of our people of faith. Wandering away from the water is part of our nature. Misinterpreting our thirst becomes a coping mechanism for the desert. I find that in driest deserts, I try (and often fail) to be grateful for the oasis of grace, which we see highlighted in baptism - those three Wesleyan types of grace: prevenient - the grace that goes before our understanding or recollection, justifying - the grace that stops us in our tracks, the moment of realization and memory; and sanctifying - the grace that continually pulls us back into community to be encouraged, loved, and fed on our spiritual journey. Our baptisms aren’t just certificates we keep in storage boxes. They’re a tabernacle event, whether we remember it or not, where we become saturated by the Spirit. They are our great water miracles. In a gathering of the community intended to embrace those claimed by God whom we invite into life and love and grace, and eventually vocation through the sacrament of Baptism. It is a passageway from death to life, from darkness to light, from wandering to the promised land, from bondage to liberation. It is THROUGH, through the water we are saved and healed and made whole, imbued with the spirit, consecrated as prophets with something to say about the way of justice and mercy. It is on our baptismal journey that we remember that we are surrounded by more than seventy capable and called people, ready and willing to help carry the load, who share the same vocation of the work of transformation and showing up for and with our siblings as living witnesses that we can be different and still belong together. It is there where we are ushered into unrevised memory of the power of the promise of God’s unfailing presence and love for us and all people, where we feel empowered into leadership and sharing the work of communal life together. And Foundry as we continue turning this corner, I can think of nothing better to remember as we’ve come through the driest of deserts, than our great water miracles. And just like my thirst to get back in the pool, I pray that we thirst for the things that will sustain us and carry us through. Our thirst, may it be for the baptismal waters. Waters that envelop us like a hug with no added pressure. Waters that provide relief, encourage us to both move and rest. The waters that say, “I’ve got you. You’re safe here.” And the waters that grab onto us and beg us not to go.
Let’s Pray. God of the great water miracles, remind us that in our driest deserts, when we hunger and thirst and get caught up in coping strategies that bring harm to ourselves and others that the oasis of grace is not a mirage. Remind us that we are water people, baptized into this storied faith and that we are part of beloved community together. Help us to stand so that we may step up. And continue to rain manna down on us until we no longer insatiably thirst for inadequate substitutes. Drench us in the memory of our baptism that we may intimately know who we are and who we are called to be. For these and all things we pray together in the name of the Triune God. Amen.
May we go from this place remembering our great water miracles, staying in touch with how we cope with our deep human needs, and commit the coordinates of the oasis of grace to our memory. In the name of the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer, go in peace and go in power. Amen.
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“A New Way…”
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, September 19, 2021, the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. “New Day, New Way!” series.
Texts: Psalm 150, James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
The Gaines-Cirelli household continues our long trek through the zombie apocalypse that is The Walking Dead. Now in season 7 of the T.V. show, we’ve come to understand that somewhere along the way, the primary adversaries and threat shifted from being the zombie hordes to other humans. As the crisis drags on and on, food, medicine, and other resources grow thin. Hope in any positive future and trust in any stranger are also in short supply. And people are all trying to survive. “Kill or be killed,” “survival of the fittest,” and “everyone’s out for themselves” are ongoing themes. Increasingly, the narrative is exploring questions about what a person is willing to do to survive, whether simply staying alive is worth losing your sense of “self” or basic humanity.
This came to mind as I pondered our text from James for today: “where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.” James goes on to point out how we pit ourselves against others and how, when we want something and can’t obtain it, we get into disputes and conflicts and are even willing to kill to get our way or what we want.
Perhaps I’m making James’ teaching bigger than what it’s meant to convey. After all, none of us are living in a zombie apocalypse. But we are living in a moment of profound upheaval and suffering. Right now grief is pervasive, trust is small, and fear is big. Violence and vulnerability are ever present. Supply lines are a mess and medicine, well… Everyone is trying to survive. These realities don’t necessarily bring out the best in people. Conflicts and disputes abound.
A couple of days ago, I had an interesting conversation with a couple of folk I know who work at our local pub. They said that behavior in the restaurant has been really challenging as people have “come back.” The manager said she’d been cursed at and called names more in the last two months than she has in the past 5 years. People are upset that some things aren’t available (hello supply line issues!) or that they simply can’t get whatever it is they want. I can’t imagine this is an isolated incident. Our collective patience and emotional resources are worn pretty thin.
And we don’t even need all the extra stuff that is stressing and straining us right now to get caught in what James is talking about. Our whole culture encourages self-help and self-serve and selfies and self-promotion and…self obsession. Of course, there’s a healthy way to practice self care. But the food dished out daily for our consumption is selfishness with a side of envy.
Cultural religion, popular “wisdom” with its materialism, ruthlessness in pursuit of power, and the drive win at all costs is pervasive and we have to be very careful to not worship at its altar. The idols of cultural religion promise happiness and abundance, but in deep ways, rob us of both. We can so easily get turned in on ourselves, on our own needs, on the things others have that we want—whether those things are possessions, relationships, jobs, positions, or whatever. And then if we’re not careful, if we’re not wise, we can make choices, act, and speak in ways that are hurtful both toward others and ourselves.
James contrasts this “earthly, unspiritual, devilish” wisdom with the “wisdom from above” that “is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.” (James 3:17) The community for whom this was written appears to be a congregation of Jesus followers in the first century CE. And the point at its most basic is that selfishness and envy lead to conflict in community while “works done with gentleness born of wisdom” bear good fruits that “make for peace.” James is clear about what Jesus followers should strive for.
In our present moment, it is difficult to live up to the call as followers of Jesus, to consistently act with gentleness born of wisdom. Though, as a collective, we are not only seeing selfishness. There are also extraordinary stories of human selflessness, generosity, and peacemaking in the current context of pandemics. We do have choices.
All of this conjured for me a nature vs. nurture question: do humans come into the world prone to selfishness or does it depend upon our upbringing? I found an interesting short essay responding to this very question. Here’s the set up:
“There has long been a general assumption that human beings are essentially selfish. We’re apparently ruthless, with strong impulses to compete against each other for resources and to accumulate power and possessions. If we are kind to one another, it’s usually because we have ulterior motives. If we are good, it’s only because we have managed to control and transcend our innate selfishness and brutality.
This bleak view of human nature is closely associated with the science writer Richard Dawkins, whose book The Selfish Gene became popular because it fitted so well with (and helped to justify) the competitive and individualistic ethos of late 20th-century societies. Like many others, Dawkins justifies his views with reference to the field of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology theorises that present-day human traits developed in prehistoric times…a period of intense competition, when life was a kind of Roman gladiatorial battle in which only the traits that gave people a survival advantage were selected and all others fell by the wayside. And because people’s survival depended on access to resources – think rivers, forests and animals – there was bound to be competition and conflict between rival groups, which led to the development of traits like racism and warfare.
This seems logical. But in fact the assumption it’s based on — that prehistoric life was a desperate struggle for survival — is false.”
The author, a professor of psychology, goes on to highlight that the relatively small population of humans, the abundance of environmental resources, and hunter/gatherer cultures prevalent in the prehistoric period give no evidence or reason for competition or conflict. Both ancient and modern evidence of hunter/gatherer cultures reveals a tendency toward egalitarianism, cooperation, altruism, and peacefulness. The suggestion is that much of the selfishness we experience today—those cultural religion idols that tend toward unhealthy competition and violence—have grown out of shifts in our “natural habitat” as human beings. And the final assessment of this particular psychologist is that human “goodness” is more deeply rooted than human “evil.”
You can agree or disagree with that. The essay is not an exhaustive study, for sure. But within it is a picture of humankind as created to live in a certain kind of way. That way tends toward mutuality and peace through selflessness, sharing, and working together. And that way of living can be—and has been—disrupted by radical shifts across centuries in how we live together with one another and the planet. The disruptions give rise to suffering, conflict, injustice, greed, and violence. That seems in line with the biblical story of God’s relationship with us and all creation. You know how the story starts: God makes a good creation and there’s a garden that provides for all human needs, for abundance and for peace. There’s but one boundary. One thing that the human creature is denied. And the human creature wants that thing, wants what isn’t theirs, wants more than they need, and chooses to disrupt things to get it. Hiding, shame, and lies follow and then disappointment, betrayal, and disconnection. Not long after, brother kills brother. The rest of the whole book is in one way or another the story of God’s love calling us and waiting for us, like the prodigal child, to come to ourselves and return home.
When I first contemplated the message for today, I thought it would be about how the Jesus way of life together is a “new way.” But what I’d forgotten is that James simply calls us back to the original way—the really old way—that we are all created to be. It’s our original “operating system,” the one made in the image of God and imprinted on every single one of us. We are created to share in God’s way of life together that is marked not by selfishness and envy but by thoughtful self-giving love, compassion, gentleness, and mutual support. That original operating system has gotten all sorts of bugs and hacks and viruses over the years but it is still viable. As we turn this corner, we can choose how to be together. Will selfish concerns and bitter envy get carried into the new season ahead? Why not do a scrub of the system, push the reset button, start fresh? What is one thing you can admit, shift, release, confess, forgive, or take on that will allow you to buck the trend and be patient, kind, and merciful? By God’s grace, we can choose to make the old way new again, and maybe we’ll remember that God created us not just to “survive” at any cost, but to live with and for God and others. Praise and thanks be to God!
https://foundryumc.org/archive/new-day-new-way
“Make Some (Joyful) Noise”
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, September 12, 2021, the sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost. “New Day, New Way!” series.
Texts: Psalm 100, James 3:5b-12
Water is absolutely necessary for life. Up to 60% of the human body is water. The whole creation depends on water in all its forms for life. Water can also be dangerous and destructive—storms, floods, undercurrents, and crashing waves can do so much damage. Anyone who’s been responsible for maintaining any kind of building—home, office, church—has likely learned that water can be one of the most persistent and challenging issues to manage. In both my home and here at Foundry, I’m constantly reminded that water not carefully contained or directed will flow any and everywhere. A water spot in my bedroom ceiling doesn’t necessarily identify where the water is breaching the roof, since water runs along any unbounded channel and finds a low place to seep into things. Over time, water causes rot and mold, rust and erosion.
Words are like that. Today we are given our every three years reminder from the epistle of James that our words can do serious damage. Words and language are, of course, beautiful gifts and provide ways for us to communicate and connect with others, and to describe our deepest thoughts, feelings, and truths. I imagine most of us could tell of a time when someone’s words encouraged, comforted, affirmed, or inspired us. I remember once when I was feeling discouraged about things at a former congregation, a lay leader sent me a message with a list of all the things he saw that I’d helped to accomplish. Words of poetry, prayers, and scripture feed my spirit daily. My father was a man of few words and I have kept every little scrap of paper with any message he ever wrote to me. Words can be profoundly life-giving and sustaining.
But words can also do great damage. Like water, words that flow into places where there aren’t good boundaries will just keep flowing, affecting everything and everyone they touch. And hurtful words do damage. Thoughtless slander or careless conjecture or cruel teasing or hateful speech hurt feelings, wound relationships, and erode a person’s confidence, trust, peace, and joy. I imagine all of us can think of words spoken to us or about us that have left deep scars on our hearts and spirits. The hurtful words are so difficult to shake.
I’ve found over the years that, along with small towns like the one I grew up in, workplaces and churches are super skilled at being “set ablaze by a small fire.” The “small fire” of gossip might be what someone thinks is a benign snippet of hearsay or might be a story shared for the purpose of venting or expressing disdain or judgment. But fire, like water, will spread and flow unless it is properly managed and contained. And a juicy little tidbit is fun to receive and to share and so, often, is not contained. Better to put that tidbit in a sealed doggy bag and let it sit in the fridge until you’ve forgotten it’s there and then, eventually, throw it out because you realize it isn’t something that’s nourishing or necessary. In other words, contain it. Zip it. These days, most of us know something about triangulation—that dynamic where two persons are in conflict and one or both of them try to draw a third person in to try to gain personal validation or support for their cause. That creates fertile ground for talking smack about the “other” person. If you’ve gathered around a fire and choose to chime in or pile on, you are—to work with the metaphor—throwing fuel on the fire and making it bigger and more damaging—not just to the person but to the whole community. Fires destroy things and hurt people. I find that anyone involved in leadership for human community needs skills in this kind of firefighting.
There are appropriate ways and places to share concerns and to work through conflict. In any human community, there will be conflicts and disagreements. We will hurt one another sometimes. It’s not that we are supposed to pretend tensions don’t exist or to ignore hurtful behavior. But where do we take our concern and what kind of words do we use in processing and sharing it? The call and challenge is to be more like Jesus in the midst of conflict. That means at its most base level that you’re not out to get people, that you don’t seek to hurt someone, or to turn people against others, or to trample on the dignity or heart of someone. It means the goal is not to “win” but to seek mending and reconciliation. Sometimes reconciliation is not possible or safe and setting boundaries becomes particularly important. But regardless of the larger context or outcome, we can always choose whether, how, and to whom we speak about it. //
I don’t think the message from James is just about being “nice.” It is about what we create or destroy with our words. Those who study linguistics help us understand that words are both descriptive and formative. In our own scriptures, we have the ancient story of God speaking creation into being. Words created realities. Words create realities. Certain words evoke certain kinds of responses—both of thought and feeling. The sound vibration or energy of words affect things for good or ill. If a child is surrounded by bruising, belittling speech, it’s not just the meaning of the words, but the energy in the words, that will affect the formation of that child’s thinking and language and life. And the opposite is true as well.
James doesn’t mess around in describing how dangerous human speech can be. The human tongue is, “a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God.” (James 3:8-9)
In our society—and in churches that gather on Sunday to bless the Lord!—all sorts of derogatory, dehumanizing words get applied to people—sometimes certain persons, often whole groups. And when it becomes normalized over time to use and allow such language to land upon the bodies and lives of human beings, it becomes much easier to allow injustice or violence to land upon those same bodies. If a person is repeatedly spoken of not as a person but as an enemy, an animal, a criminal, a disease, a sin, eventually, for those who don’t know better, that person becomes what they are called. So why not act toward them with contempt, rejection, or violence?
We bless or curse, we honor or exclude, we build up or tear down, we create or destroy, with the words we speak.
This is why we labor at Foundry to take care with our language. It’s not about being “politically correct” or proving that we’re “woke” or virtue signaling. It’s about trying to be humble before God and loving toward neighbor. We try to use a mix of images and genders for God so as not to put God in a box or presume any one thing can describe the beauty and transcendent being of our Creator. We seek to dismantle certain patriarchal words like “Kingdom” so that the word—“Kin-dom”—might invoke a love-infused, dynamic, communal vision for creation instead of any negative baggage from historical experience of earthly kings and kingdoms. Our staff clearly identify our pronouns as a way both to share ourselves in relationship and to practice radical hospitality by acknowledging and honoring the diversities of gender identities among us. In worship we invite “rising” instead of “standing” and we “receive” instead of “hear” what Spirit is saying—to honor the physical abilities of all persons. There is much I could say about all these pieces, but for today, I simply want to emphasize that we try to use language that blesses, builds up, and honors all the members of the family.
As we seek to practice radical hospitality and create beloved community, our care with language is so important. Our Foundry family is comprised of persons from a beautiful diversity of cultures, ethnicities, races, gender identities, and sexual orientations. This creates opportunities to expand our awareness and understanding of human experience. It also creates opportunities to step in it and do harm. There have been times when I have stumbled over a colleague’s preferred pronouns. There have been times when I have said something and, even as it was coming out of my mouth, I realized how the words literally dripped with race or class privilege in a really unhelpful and uncomfortable way. This stuff happens as we are learning and growing in community.
The point is not that we are expected to understand and master new ways of speaking and engaging immediately or without practice. The point is that we are invited to practice, to be thoughtful, respectful, curious, and humble in the presence of those whose lives reflect back to us new ways of perceiving and experiencing life. You may have thoughts, feelings, and opinions about things. But what if you brought those things into conversations with true, open-hearted curiosity, instead of with pronouncements that—whether you mean to or not—belittle or disrespect a sibling’s lived reality?
Our world is full of harmful words, careless words, bullying words, disrespectful and dehumanizing words—splashed across every kind of media and infiltrating all the places we are. I pray that Foundry will be a community in which we seek a different way—that when we engage in relationship with one another, we will practice with one another a different economy of speech.
What if we intentionally tried to let our words be measured, fair, and shared in appropriate ways and places; to take a breath and take thought before speaking—especially before speaking about someone; what if we intentionally tried to engage in direct conversation with a person with whom we may have an issue, seeing that person as worthy of such respect. What if we listen more and speak less in spaces where others challenge what is familiar or comfortable for us—and enter into the conversation with humility and curiosity? And when we speak words that hurt, as we inevitably will, what if we were willing to ask for forgiveness; and when words have hurt us, to be willing to extend grace?
Today, our Psalm calls us to “make a joyful noise unto the Lord!” And my guess is that it is not just our praise, gratitude, and love for God that is received as a “joyful noise” in the heavenly places. I imagine that God is aware of a whole lot of noise in the world—noise rising out of destruction and denial and the babble of hubris and thoughtlessness. We are invited today to make a noise that gives God joy, perhaps some loving, gracious, thoughtful words…
And knowing that we won’t always get it right, let’s joyfully “give thanks to God and bless God’s name” because we know God’s steadfast love and mercy endure forever!
https://foundryumc.org/archive/new-day-new-way
“Come Home to Love”
A homily preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, September 5, 2021, the fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost. “Homecoming!” series.
Texts: Psalm 126, James 2:8, 14-17
Today is a significant day in the history of Foundry United Methodist Church. It is a day we enter a truly new season of life, joining in-person worship here at the corner of 16th and P Street NW in Washington, DC with a robust online congregation gathered from near and far. Amidst the ongoing pandemics of COVID, systemic racism, environmental degradation, poverty, and violence, we have persevered over 18 months, physically distant, but spiritually connected. Together, we’ve suffered job loss and insecurity, virtual school, family stresses, a steady stream of marches and vigils demanding justice following the murder of George Floyd; we’ve suffered isolation, waves of grief, depression, languishing, an assault on our home, this capitol city, denominational stalemate and churn, and political strife that seeps into everything at every level.
There may have been moments when we doubted this day would ever come, this day when, together, we reconnect to this sacred space and to the sacrament of Holy Communion whether we’re here in person or experiencing the sanctuary and sacrament from a remote location. And, like the Psalmist sings: this restoration is like a “dream.” Our mouths are filled with laughter and our tongues with shouts of joy! God has brought us through so much, has been life-giving water for us along the way, has set us down at this place of turning toward the new stretch of the journey ahead. Today we don’t rejoice because the work is done or because the journey will have no obstacles. We rejoice because we are restored to one another in the flesh and, I pray, restored to our shared task of being and becoming God’s dream for Foundry Church as we continue to lean in to the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century and our third century as a congregation. Today we come home. We come home to love.
The image at the heart of our “Homecoming” theme is from Psalm 126, that of the farmer who goes out, weeping, but with lifegiving seed to sow and then returns home with the harvest—the “sheaves”—of grain. Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the Psalm acknowledges Israel’s joy over God’s restoration in the past and then says:
And now, God, do it again— bring rains to our drought-stricken lives So those who planted their crops in despair will shout “Yes!” at the harvest, So those who went off with heavy hearts will come home laughing, with armloads of blessing.
That last phrase, “come home laughing, with armloads of blessing” struck me. I wonder what blessings we’re coming home with from our time out in the wilderness. Perhaps you learned new things about yourself—your own strength, fears, capacities, or priorities. Perhaps we’ve have gained deeper compassion or awareness of the systemic struggles and injustices in our society. Maybe you’ve met God in new ways or had an experience of God’s mercy that has expanded your capacity for faith, hope, and love. What blessing are you bringing as we “come home?”
One of the things I’ve heard so often these many months is how much persons have yearned to be back in this space, to be re-engaged in the vital ministries we share. I have, over the years since becoming part of the Foundry family, tried to remind us not to take it for granted. Perhaps, we come home with a new appreciation for the power of our spiritual home at Foundry. //
The Psalm is clear that God’s grace is at work in the whole process of restoration and sustenance. But the people “bear the seed for sowing.” We have to do something—as our epistle makes quite clear: “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” God is always active, always providing what we need, but what do we do with what we’re given?
There’s a well-known story about this very thing: A preacher was driving down a country road when he came upon the most beautiful farm he’d ever seen. The house and buildings were well constructed and in perfect repair and paint. A garden around the house was filled with flowers and shrubs. Beautiful trees lined each side of the white gravel drive. The fields were carefully tilled, and a fine herd of fat dairy cattle grazed knee-deep in the pasture. The site was so arresting the preacher stopped to drink it all in.
It was then he noticed the farmer, on a tractor, hard at work, approaching the place where the preacher stood beside his car. When the farmer got closer, the preacher hailed her. The farmer stopped the tractor, idled down the engine, and then shouted a friendly “hello!” The preacher said to her, “Hey there, friend! God has certainly blessed you with a magnificent farm.” And then, there was a pause as the farmer shifted in the tractor seat to take a look at her pride and joy. She then looked at the preacher and said, “Yes, God certainly has, and we’re grateful. But you should have seen this place when God was managing it alone!”
As we begin this new stretch of the journey, what will we—what will YOU—do to create the community and future that is God’s dream for us? Faithfulness, justice, bounty, harvest, health, joy, doesn’t just happen, it’s not guaranteed, it doesn’t appear because we talk about it or say a prayer and then continue scrolling through our phones or T.V. channels. We have to respond to God’s grace and not squander God’s provision. We have to show up however we can, with whatever blessings we’re bringing, and do something. And whatever we do will reap…something. What we reap depends upon what we sow, what kind of seeds we plant. When, as Psalm 126 says, we “sow in tears”—when things in and around our lives are so painful and complicated—it is easy to plant seeds of despair, cynicism, disappointment, anger, impatience, and division. We can (intentionally or not) be like the one in Jesus’ parable Jesus who sows weeds among the wheat. (Mt 13:25).
But we are given grace by God to plant good seeds, even in hard times. Our epistle text reminds us what to plant: “You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And in more recent years, there was a band of prophets called “Tears for Fears” who sang about Sowing the Seeds of Love… “I believe in love power…sowing the seeds of love, an end to need, and the politics of greed…with love.”
Today we come home to once again receive the love of God. But we also come home to share the love of God with others. We come home to love…
What seeds are you planting? Go out even in these continuing times of challenge and change bearing seeds of love and God will bless the harvest and will bring us home again and again, to be restored to one another and to change the world by love’s power, our mouths filled with laughter and our tongues with shouts of joy!
https://foundryumc.org/archive
“Unwashed, Unmasked, Unbothered?”
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, August 29, 2021, the fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
“Is it bad to be really ticked off at people who won’t mask or get vaccinated?” I received this text several weeks ago from a member of the Foundry family. And, since then, I’ve received versions of the same question again and again. Headlines proliferate about the appalling behavior of citizens in school board and city council meetings and clashes between parents, teachers, and governors about the use of masks. And of course there are countless personal stories of church and family strife caused by the divides around vaccination, masking, and other public health protocols related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The accounts I’m reading, and receiving about what some folks are saying and doing really make it seem like we’re experiencing some kind of collective mental break—because either I’m losing my faculties of reason and proportion or a whole bunch of my siblings are.
Other common headlines these days highlight the stories of outspoken anti-vax, anti-mask advocates suffering and dying from the virus. And data points like: “About 99% of deaths today are people who did not get vaccinated. Patients dying in hospitals are telling loved ones they regret not getting the vaccine.”
But of course any of these last points can and have been brushed off as inaccurate or hyperbole. One article I read chronicled the author’s effort to understand the reasoning of her brother who refuses to get vaccinated. What she receives seems reflective of much of what I’ve heard elsewhere. At the heart of it all, is lack of trust. Many people:
- Don’t trust the actual vaccine (side effects and breakthrough cases)
- Don’t trust the messengers (politicized–FDA a government organization could have been pressured to approve)
- Don’t trust the data (unvaccinated passing to children? Children COVID data vs. other risks… the continued mutations…CDC wrong on a lot?)
The lack of trust is understandable since blatant misinformation has been allowed to spread unchecked all over social media from the start. Also, at the beginning of the pandemic, the former president downplayed the severity of the virus, decided to make masks a symbol of “liberal” oppression instead of a time-tested deterrent against dangerous infectious disease, and treated public health scientists who have decades of faithful service under their belt as if they are the enemy. The reaction—perhaps “overreaction”—from the other side of the aisle to shut and keep most everything shut down, whether it was well-intentioned or not, did its own damage to lives and livelihoods. A headline from the Brookings Institution last September summed up a key point, namely that “Politics is wrecking America’s pandemic response.”
Alongside these concerns is the reality that, as one scholar puts it, “If you aren’t white, you know a history that may make you weary about what the medical sector may be telling you to do.” For those who may not know that history, “The medical establishment has a long history of mistreating Black Americans — from gruesome experiments on enslaved people to the forced sterilizations of Black women and the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study that withheld treatment from hundreds of Black men for decades to let doctors track the course of the disease…” More recent “studies have found Black Americans are consistently undertreated for pain relative to white patients; one revealed half of medical students and residents held one or more false beliefs about supposed biological differences between Black and white patients.”
Vaccine hesitancy among people of color is understandable due to these factors, though both Dr. Anthony Fauci and Rev. Jesse Jackson have used their platforms to make sure the public knows a leading researcher and developer for the vaccine at the National Institutes of Health is immunologist and professor, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, an African American woman.
My intention today is not to name all the dynamics of the debacle that is the American public’s response to COVID—as if that would be possible. But I do want to at least acknowledge some of the issues in the mix. And, as is most often the case, there’s much more than one narrative at play.
What does our narrative from the Gospel according to Mark have to add to all this?
These days, when there is an encounter between Jesus and the Pharisees in the text, I often turn to my Rabbi—friend and colleague Steve Weisman of Temple Solel in Bowie, MD—to receive insight. What he confirmed for me is that much of the purity ritual referred to in the Torah has to do with the “order” of things in creation and with boundaries that allow for clarity of identity and relationship. Rabbi Steve says that the purity stuff in the Bible is about “teaching the ability to self-limit, so as not to risk getting ‘out of our lane’ in our relationship to and with God, and respecting the sanctity of Creation and Creator. Your offerings had to be pure, you yourself had to be ritually pure to bring them; in caring for the rest of creation, if we killed something to eat, we had a responsibility not to waste any of it…” This was a good reminder for me. The original idea for washing things was to acknowledge our need to present our best to God and to honor and care for one another and all creation. Embedded in the “law” was a call for self-discipline and reverence. You might even say that purification rituals began as a way to practice loving God and neighbor as ourselves.
In our story today, Jesus is asked by some Pharisees and scribes why some of his disciples were eating without observing the religious tradition of washing their hands. Jesus takes the opportunity to teach, drawing on a common prophetic refrain and specifically using words from Isaiah 29:13—“This people honors me with their lips (“you’re talking the talk”), but their hearts are far from me (but not “walking the walk”).” The NRSV translation of the passage in Isaiah continues, “and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote.” The issue seems to be that a spiritual practice of washing (not a bad thing in itself), a practice meant to draw people closer to God—can easily become a repetitive “going through the motions” that doesn’t touch the heart.
Jesus highlights the way that you can be “clean” on the outside but filled with things in your heart that are “defiling.” Oh, and check this out: the word for “defiling” is κοινόω, koinoó, which literally means “to make common,” and more nuanced, “to treat what is sacred as common or ordinary.” So the “stock list” of “defiling things” in verses 21-22 are simply things that don’t honor the sacred worth of God, self, others, and the creation. What defiles is that which does harm.
So what does any of this have to say to our current moment?
Well, our text speaks to how a good thing can get twisted and used in a harmful way. Just as a spiritual discipline meant to inspire reverence and care can become a tool of judgment and exclusion, so can a cherished civic value like “liberty” become used as cover for the worst kind of exclusion and dishonoring the sacred worth of others. Liberty—or freedom—is a beautiful God-given gift. It’s also a God-given responsibility. We have choices about how we use our freedom. Scripture says “for freedom Christ has set us free.” (Gal 5:1a) But Christ doesn’t set us free to do anything we want. You’re not set free so you can be a jerk. And that goes for whoever you are, whatever your politics, whatever your position on anything.
Of course, right now people are using their freedom to be jerks in all kinds of ways. Jerkiness is equal-opportunity and non-partisan! AND there are those who claim their freedom is being assaulted by things like mask mandates for their children or vaccine requirements at their workplaces or physical distancing in public spaces. And I suppose that, technically, these folks’ freedom to do whatever they want, including putting others in harm’s way, is challenged by such mandates and requirements. These same (mostly white) people want to control all sorts of other things that curtail the freedom of others. So what does that tell us about their intentions?
What is the freedom we are given in Jesus Christ? Freedom from sin—from that which defiles, from that which does harm to others and to creation. We are set free to live fully in God’s grace and to participate in God’s way of love and justice. Notice in verse 8 of our text today, Jesus says, “You abandon the commandment of God…” That’s the danger. We know the great commandment: to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
The freedom we receive in Jesus Christ does not mean that “anything goes.” There are concrete practices that help form us in ways of self-discipline and reverence of God. There are boundaries that help us “stay in our lane” of right relationship with God and others. These are called “Christian ethics”—the way that love gets worked out in community. Love in community looks like justice, it looks like solidarity, it looks like communal support, sacrifice for the common good, compromise, collaboration, compassion, humility, mutuality, care, and personal and communal responsibility.
The late pastor and prophet William Sloane Coffin said, “let others say, ‘Anything goes.’ The Christian asks, ‘What does love require?’ In short, we have come up with love as an answer to legalism on the one hand and lawlessness on the other. Love hallows individuality. Love consecrates and never desecrates personality. Love demands that all our actions reflect a movement toward and not away from nor against each other. And love insists that all people assume their responsibility for all their relations.”
If any would claim to be followers of Jesus, then do what love requires.
Right now there are people dying of treatable ailments because they couldn’t get admitted to the hospitals overrun with mostly unvaccinated COVID patients. Our own Pastor Will’s vaccinated, 84 year old confirmation mentor died recently in Arkansas in just such a scenario. The closest available hospital bed was evidently in Plano, TX.
There are pastors being treated like public enemy #1 and run out of their churches because they have been consistent and insistent about safety protocols. There are increasing numbers of children contracting the virus. There are expired vaccines being thrown out because not enough people are receiving them. There is a threat of continued transmission or mutations of the virus that become increasingly contagious and difficult to treat. And consistently, public health experts affirm that vaccination, masking, distancing, and getting tested at the first sign of any symptoms are the best ways to contain the virus and get the pandemic under control. These practices allow us to be out and about without doing harm.
From the beginning, we at Foundry have said that we will prioritize health and safety, honor the science, and be guided by public health experts. We’ve also consistently stated that wearing masks, distancing, quarantining when necessary, and getting vaccinated as able are all concrete ways that we love our neighbor as ourselves. I understand there are some for whom family dynamics or deep fear continue to present obstacles. Please know that your pastors are here to listen, think things through and pray with you. I’m also aware that there are those whose reactions to our stance will be dismissive at best, violently angry at worst. Which brings to mind the punchline of a favorite story I was told many years ago:
When a “grandmotherly” type pastor was serving a small congregation and a gay couple wanted to join, some longtime members crashed the next Church Council meeting to protest. After the spokesperson had said his piece about blocking the couple from participation, the pastor who looked and acted like she could be everyone’s smart, sassy, not-having-any-of-your-foolishness grandmother simply responded, “Oh Roger, that’s not nice. Sit down and act like a Christian.”
It’s not a line I generally imagine I’ll ever get away with. But it does occur to me from time to time. It occurs to me a lot these days. And today, I’m saying it outloud for whomever may need to hear it: For the love of God, neighbor, self, and all that is holy: wash your hands, get the vaccine (if and when you can), mask up, and—no matter where you find yourself in the mix—act like a Christian.
https://foundryumc.org/archive
Canceled
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, August 22, 2021, the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
Text: John 6:56-69
Our Gospel passage is the conclusion of a story that began with Jesus feeding his congregation of more than 5000 people with one child’s lunch. (Jn 6:1-13) It’s a wonderful, crowd-pleasing story. But the next morning, Jesus preaches a sermon and things take a turn. Today we hear the last of many complaints that follow. The complaint making its way through the grapevine of Jesus’ grumbling congregation is, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” Jesus picks up on the grapevine grumbling and asks quite directly, “Does this offend you?” Evidently, the answer for most of the crowd was a resounding “yes.” Most of those in the crowd decided that they could NOT accept what Jesus was saying, that they could NOT accept what Jesus was offering, that they could NOT accept who Jesus WAS and they “turned back and no longer went about with him.” // Y’all. Jesus got “canceled.”
For some years now, there’s a thing called “cancel culture” that has been prevalent in public dynamics and has been a focus of concern and debate in the public square and in academia. “Cancel culture” at its most basic refers to the act of withdrawing support for someone or something in response to words or actions that are found to be offensive or inappropriate. There are certainly times when boycotting a business or critiquing an influential public figure’s words or actions are important ways to exert pressure for positive social change. And free speech is a critically important part of a democratic society. But the toxic environment of polarized, easily triggered, dehumanized and dehumanizing, either-or thinking and reactivity has been a perfect breeding ground for a version of “cancel culture” that is quite simply an exercise in public shaming and ostracism. It brands people with a proverbial scarlet letter such that they are no longer seen as worthy of any care, respect, or engagement whatsoever. “Cancel culture” is not unique to one “side” or perspective in our society. There are persons across the spectrum of so-called left to right of the political, religious, or academic spheres who “cancel” people due to perceived disloyalty to their brand of dogmatic purity, prejudice, or discomfort.
To be clear, the focus recently has often been on celebrities or powerful public figures who are not going to have their lives or livelihoods radically altered by the social outcry against them. Their egos and sometimes their jobs may get altered, but not their capacity to live or ultimately thrive. It’s important to recognize that there are some for whom getting publicly shamed—whether they did something egregious or not—really does threaten their lives. My point is simply that the public shaming at the heart of today’s “cancel culture” often leads to no good or more just outcome for anyone or for the larger society.
Today we are reminded that “cancel culture” is not really anything new. Most of those in the crowd—the followers or “disciples of Jesus”—“turned back and no longer went about with him.”
What was so offensive that people would leave? What got Jesus “canceled” by so many?
Maybe it was the way Jesus talked or that his words were confusing. What does it mean to “abide in” Jesus? And what’s up with this idea that eating and drinking his flesh and blood has something to do with life “in” God? And is Jesus bread? And is it flesh or words that give life?
And—oh, by the way—gross! Eating human flesh and drinking human blood? Perhaps they couldn’t stomach such talk. It is, by the way, a documented historical fact that there were those who persecuted early Christians due to the accusation that the Lord’s Supper was a cannibalistic rite.
Maybe offense was taken at the fact that Jesus didn’t seem to be trying to “make nice,” but rather used provocative, earthy, unsentimental words to describe what he was talking about. Jesus isn’t talking about eating in polite company. The word he uses (tidily translated “eat” in verse 56) is the Greek word trogo which means “to chew on” or “to gnaw.” Jesus is saying that true life is found by hunkering down and gnawing on his flesh. Not the height of refinement or delicacy.
Confusing words, words that are easily misinterpreted, failing to use the “correct” words, ways of speaking that don’t placate but rather agitate…all of these things could have been what got Jesus canceled. They are certainly things get people canceled today.
Or maybe what got Jesus canceled was his challenge of cherished beliefs. He said that this “bread” they were supposed to chew on was more life-giving and sustaining than that connected with Moses (the manna in the wilderness). Challenging a comfortable, familiar faith and way of thinking? Yep, that’s always fertile ground for cancellation.
Or, perhaps some in the congregation began to perceive what Jesus was saying. Perhaps they understood Jesus as calling them into the messiness of human life and relationship and community: to have REAL flesh and blood encounters with people that might be really painful or challenging and that might require some self-sacrifice. Perhaps they began to realize that Jesus called them to follow in the way of life that Jesus modeled—and they just couldn’t go there because it made them uncomfortable or they didn’t want to be so challenged or bothered. Maybe they left because what Jesus was offering asked too much of them.
Regardless of which offense causes people to turn away from Jesus, the bottom line is that they do. Thousands in the story (then and now) just walk away, unable to perceive, unwilling to receive all that is offered.
There is certainly much to lose if we walk away. But, let’s be honest, let’s not sugarcoat it: there is a lot to lose if we follow Jesus. We have to lose our self-righteousness and self-centeredness. We have to lose our demand for control of everything. We have to lose our polarized, either-or thinking. We have to lose our capitulation to a culture that values bland niceness more than justice, upward mobility more than solidarity, being “right” more than being kind, and money more than mercy. We have to lose our taste for shaming, bullying, or belittling others.
To follow the Holy One of God, Jesus, means giving up “canceling” people. Dr. Cornel West puts it plainly, “Christians don’t believe in cancelling people, everybody can bounce back…everybody has the capacity to be changed and transformed.” That is at the heart of our United Methodist tradition, the belief that people can grow in holiness and love, that we are going on to perfection. And that’s an important piece here. What Jesus models is being present in the flesh and blood messiness of conflict and need and pain with clarity, patience, strength, and love. Jesus most certainly speaks words of critique, but always for the purpose of growth and transformation, not public shame. Not long after the story we heard today in John, a woman allegedly caught in adultery was publicly shamed and made to stand in front of Jesus and all who were gathered in the temple. When Jesus was asked whether he agreed with the law requiring the woman to be stoned, he said, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” When everyone left and the woman was there with Jesus, he did not condemn her but gave her—and her accusers—another chance.
Much of current “cancel culture” offers no second chance, makes no room for grace, for change, for transformation. It ends conversation. It ends relationships. It ends possibilities. It makes a sibling into an object of scorn. And this happens not just on Twitter or Instagram, it happens in our personal lives and relationships at every level. Of course there are times when we need to separate ourselves from a harmful relationship or dynamic. There are times when it is appropriate to clearly denounce the injustice of a person or institution’s actions or policies. But what we’re talking about today are the ways we cut people off in our lives and refuse to engage in a difficult conversation for the sake of reconciliation. What we’re talking about today is how we write people off as nothing more than…whatever the thing might be: a cheat, a liar, a liberal, a Trumper, a coward, a racist, a homophobe… “Nothing more than” is not something Jesus would ever say about anyone. “Nothing more than” erases experience and context and humanity and potential. To follow Jesus we have to lose “nothing more than” and the juicy emotional satisfaction that comes with feeling morally superior or like we know everything about a person or situation (when we likely really don’t). To follow Jesus, there is most certainly a lot we have to lose. Some might find it too difficult a way to go.
But what do we lose if we turn back and no longer go about with Jesus? What do we lose if Jesus gets “canceled?”
Based on the text, the answer is “spirit and life.” If we cancel Jesus, we lose the life we are truly made for, a life enfolded in God’s life, life that is formed by and conformed to God’s wisdom and way of compassion and justice, life that shares in God’s work in the world, life that is filled and fueled by God’s steadfast love. That love is our sustenance, that love is our freedom, that love is shown to us and offered to us in the flesh-and-blood gift of Jesus. Jesus’ “flesh and blood” is, literally, Jesus’ life. The embodied, incarnate Jesus—and all that Jesus said and did—this is what we are invited to feast upon, to receive, to be filled with. The wisdom of God revealed in Jesus. The justice of God revealed in Jesus. The humility and generosity of God revealed in Jesus. The perfect love of God revealed in Jesus.
We are offered chance after chance, grace upon grace, life-giving bread from heaven, and a savior who never cancels us.
So the question is, to whom will YOU go? To a life-diminishing culture or a life-giving Christ? The good news is that you and I get to choose…every minute, every day, graced by a God of second chances. And for that I say thanks be to God.https://foundryumc.org/archive
Wisdom At the Intersection
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli for Foundry UMC August 15, 2021, the twelfth Sunday after Pentecost.
Text: 1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14
The story we read in 1 Kings this morning always conjures for me a Genie in a Bottle: “Ask what I should give you,” God says to Solomon. Sounds pretty awesome…or tempting. We all know stories where the punchline is: “be careful what you wish for.”
If God came to you today with this offer, what would you ask for? No doubt there would be a variety of answers. A quick internet search to see what people would ask of a Genie who offered three wishes turned up everything from curing illnesses, feeding people, the ability to fly(?), well-being of loved ones, and of course riches, material possessions, good looks, and a perfect romance. Even a very cursory search on this topic is pretty fascinating. What would you ask for?
Solomon asks for wisdom. God is pleased with this request. But why? What is wisdom? And why does it matter to God? Should it matter to us?
Let’s begin with what wisdom is NOT.
Wisdom is not piles of facts and data. In this information age, a steady stream of input is bombarding us (and, increasingly that input is peppered with all sorts of made up stuff). Like water from a firehose, information overwhelms us and numbs us. But with all this information at our fingertips are we any wiser? Are we any closer to God or to God’s design or intentions for life? We may understand how things work; we may be able to describe the pieces, the causes and effects of measurable data. But this is not wisdom. My sense is that there are some people in the world who know a lot of things, who are brilliant with observing and manipulating data and ideas, but who do not possess what anyone would call wisdom.
Also, wisdom is NOT something that you just “get” if you live long enough, something we automatically receive while passively meandering along the paths of life. It’s not like a good wine that simply becomes better as it ages. Wisdom must be cultivated—more like the work of the vineyard—in order for it to grow. In other words, wisdom is not guaranteed for adults and it is not beyond the reach of the young. As sister Joan Chittister puts it, “Wisdom is not a passive virtue—wisdom is not just something we soak up if we live long enough not to be able to avoid it. We have to work at getting wisdom or we will live a very shallow life.” Chittister says that wisdom is available for everyone who pays attention to their lives and to God. This paying attention is, it seems, at the heart of how we “work at getting wisdom.” The story is told that soon after the death of the greatest rabbi in the region, a traveler said to one of his disciples, “Your rabbi was renowned for his wisdom. What did he give greatest attention to in life?” The disciple thought a minute and said, “To whatever he happened to be doing at the moment.”
So wisdom is NOT information and data or something we can expect to mature without any effort on our part. But what is it?
The concept of “wisdom” is translated a number of different ways in different versions of the Bible: an understanding mind (NRSV), a discerning mind (CEB), an understanding heart (KJV), a heart with skill to listen (NEB), a hearing heart (ASV), a God-listening heart (MSG). Translators seem to labor to find a way to capture a union of head (mind), heart (soul/spirit/emotion), and will (discerning, understanding, listening, etc.). So at least one aspect of wisdom is being an integrated person (head, heart, and will) who, as a result, can be fully present in each moment. Maybe that is why some children seem so very wise—for they tend to live in the moment, to see and look around at the world with awe and wonder. And many children haven’t been “dis-integrated” yet…
This aspect of wisdom is cultivated through doing our own personal work, it requires doing whatever it takes to know enough about yourself, through loving and careful observation, to be conscious of yourself—to perceive and understand what you are feeling and thinking (and why!)—so that you can observe the present moment with clarity…and then to act or respond based on your observation. This is the wisdom required to not get “triggered” or “hooked” by things that can take you out of your center, out of your mind, out of your heart—things that can carry you off into irrational and reptilian and damaging behaviors or feelings or thoughts.
And, to be frank, this is increasingly difficult and important. We are currently in a crisis of civilization in which every single thing seems more fragile than ever—our planet earth, any semblance of peace, right relationships of care and justice and trust and solidarity—everything is teetering on the edge of or already well down the slippery slope. In the midst of the complicated mess we humans have made through foolishness, shortsightedness, greed, and fear, a mess that has and will continue to have painful consequences for all life, I believe that God is yet at work. All day long. But can we perceive it?
So many of the great spiritual traditions of the world agree that the practice of a healthy self-awareness (not neurotic self-obsession!) and attention to the present moment is at the heart of growing in peace, love, and wisdom. The integrated, conscious person is able to look at self, others, and the world with love and compassion, with patience, with a capacity to perceive God’s presence and power and grace—even in the midst of conflict or danger or discomfort or pain—or the complete mess we’ve made of things. This doesn’t mean that a wise person doesn’t feel fear or pain. It means that the wise person can modulate their response toward self and other that does not add harm.
Sr. Chittister says this: “Wisdom is life peeled and cored, it is attention and consciousness lived to the hilt…Wisdom calls us, the Scripture says, to know ourselves, to squeeze out of every moment of life whatever lesson it holds for us, whatever responses it demands at that time.” This is what we are being asked to do all the time. But in moments of struggle and confusion—like right now—a focus on this kind of consciousness is particularly important in order to keep any kind of solid ground under our feet or to hold on to any semblance of healthy perspective. Wisdom understood as Chittister describes it pulls us out of the shallows and into deeper places where simple categories don’t always work and decisions aren’t necessarily checking this box or that one. Wisdom allows us to perceive the complicated, intricate, confusing, beautiful intersections of the people and world all around us and to learn what they have to teach us.
So to be wise is to be integrated and conscious—of self, others, and what’s happening in the present moment. But there is another piece to wisdom. Discernment and action. The wise person doesn’t simply do no harm, but also seeks to do good. Solomon asked for a shomea lev, an understanding/hearing heart so that he might discern between good and evil and provide wise leadership for the people in his care. And, Lord knows, that is what we need more of at every level right now. A wise leader will be self-aware, digest all the relevant facts and data, will listen to a variety perspectives, will weigh the potential outcomes for the common good, and will make the best decision she can. None of us are inheriting a throne at a young age like Solomon, but every one of us is confronted on a regular basis with tasks, decisions, and responsibilities that will impact others’ lives and our own.
I found it interesting that the Hebrew words for “good” and “evil” are not defined as philosophical concepts but rather point to concrete outcomes of welfare or harm. What is “good” is that which benefits others and “evil” is that which causes injury or calamity. Wisdom is not value neutral. Wisdom—in our spiritual tradition—is ordered to what is good. Wisdom seeks to discern and act with the intention of doing less harm, of serving the common good.
Solomon starts off with a beautiful humility and a beautiful request of God. The way the story is told is that God responds with extraordinary generosity and fringe benefits.
If God came to you today, in the midst of all that you are experiencing in your life and all we are experiencing in the world, and said to you, “Ask what I should give you,” what would you ask for? Perhaps we can all learn from Solomon and ask for wisdom—not because we think we’ll get fringe benefits or because things will immediately get easy, but because wisdom is what we need to know what else we need! Wisdom is what we need to navigate this fraught, roiling, dangerous stretch of history without losing heart, mind, or soul. Wisdom is what we need to stay connected with God. Without true wisdom, our desires can carry us off into all sorts of confusion and worry and heartache. Without wisdom, we will struggle to discern between good and evil or to choose in ways that benefit ourselves, others, or the common good. Without wisdom, we cannot see what is right in front of us, we cannot discern what is most real and true, we do not know ourselves and therefore cannot truly share ourselves with others, and we miss the beauty and wonder of God’s presence and grace that is always dancing in and through the present moment.
Wisdom and the grace to actively cultivate wisdom in our lives—may this be our humble desire. May this be our prayer. For God’s sake and the sake of all that is…
https://foundryumc.org/
To Share In Its Blessings
Stacey Abrams
Aug.08.2021
https://foundryumc.org/archive/living-faith-at-the-intersection
Sermon: Little Voice
Rev. Dr. Lydia E. Muñoz
August 1, 2021
Foundry United Methodist Church, Washington DC
Esther 1: 12
But Queen Vashti refused to come as the king had ordered through the eunuchs.
Proverbs 1: 20 - 22
Wisdom shouts in the street; in the public square she raises her voice. 21 Above the noisy crowd, she calls out. At the entrances of the city gates, she has her say:
You should respond when I correct you. Look, I’ll pour out my spirit on you. I’ll reveal my words to you.
I wanted to be like men wanted me to be:
an attempt at life; a game of hide and seek with my being.
But I was made of nows,
and my feet level on the promissory earth
would not accept walking backwards
and went forward, forward,
mocking the ashes
to reach the kiss of new paths.
These are the words of Julia de Burgos García (February 17, 1914 – July 6, 1953) a Puerto Rican poet and advocate of Puerto Rican independence. She was a civil rights activist for women and Afro-Caribbean. For many of us Puerto Ricans, her poetry is the feeling that runs through our veins.
During a time when women were called to conform to the norms of marriage and child bearing, Julia de Burgos seemed to follow her own heart and inner voice making her own pathways that sometimes led her down some unpopular paths and even some mistakes; 3 of them specifically that ended in divorce-men who could not deal with her independent spirit. But her heart also led her to down a path of creativity born out of a deep desire to see her beloved Island free and her people self-actualized, and she wanted that especially for its poor women.
I think the hardest thing to do in life is to learn to pay attention to when our bodies speak to us. When that thing, that special sense, when the inklings of our heart speak to us. Its hard because so many of us do not trust ourselves, because so many of us do not think we are enough.
Brene Brown says,
“I believe that finding (and speaking with) your authentic voice is essential to being fully alive, connected, and creative. Revealing whom we truly are, what we believe and value, what and whom we love, as well as what keeps us up at night and what gets us up early can be very scary business. Allowing ourselves to be fully seen risks rejection, ridicule, and shame.”
Stepping fully into our voice, therefore, requires complete vulnerability.
I wonder if Vashti knew this?
I wonder if she understood the consequences of following her own inner voice that somehow had enough courage to recognize a bully when she saw one.
Let me tell you about the bully I’m talking about here…
The opening line of the Book of Esther kind of gives us a clue. It tells us that these events took place when Ahasuerus, (an easier pronunciation is his other name Xerxes) who conquest was as vast from India to Cush – 127 provinces in all.
Xerxes was hosting a party to show off all his conquered territories. This is the same king who insisted on conquering Greece – who wanted to complete the work that his father, Darius the Great could never complete and so plunged his entire energy and kingdom into a series of wars and conquests.
War means people are killed
war means that people are taxed,
war means that usually the most disadvantaged have to give up everything to make it happen
– and in the scripture reading there is also a hint of this because this particular party that Xerxes throws is about showing off his riches and beautiful treasurers and how great he was.
This party lasted six months to be exact! Can you imagine? One particular part of the party lasted seven days and was basically a non-stop drinking binge. Xerxes had ordered his servants for everyone to drink as much as they could.
At the same time that this drinking competition was happening, Queen Vashti was holding a feast for the women in the palace. I think there is something between the lines here – maybe Vashti knew what happens when men hungry of war begin to drink like this. Maybe Vashti herself knew who are the true victims of war in the first place.
15 years ago, the United Nations launched a global study on a security council resolution 1325 which recognized the critical importance of women’s participation in peacemaking and peacebuilding. They did this because they recognized the unique impact that conflict, increased militarization and violent extremism has on their communities, their families and most importantly, their own bodies.
This hunger for war coupled with alcohol can be even more devastating. I’m sure even in this moment now that we are together there are siblings among us who have been impacted directly by the effects of alcohol abuse. Was Vashti included in that number? Was she protecting the women in the palace by hosting her own feast?
Well, we don’t have to wait too long for that answer, on the seventh day, when the king was in high spirits or rather when he was thoroughly trashed, he calls for Vashti to come to him in her complete royal attire and crown.
Here it is, here is the moment when we discover who Vashti is listening to. “But Queen Vashti refused to come as the king ordered…” (verse 12)
How did this happen? Where did this courage come from? How did she summon the strength to let the voice inside her be her guide?
Look, I know the rest of the Book of Esther is remarkable. The story of Esther’s own courage and the saving of her people is one that I celebrate with my Jewish siblings come Purim. I mean really, who doesn’t love another day when you get to dress up like a queen, am I right?
But Esther’s courage doesn’t start in chapter 4 of the Book of Esther, it starts right here with the courage of Vashti.
Vashti’s refusal to be treated as an object to be displayed like the spoils of war, given that she might have been Babylonia herself, one of the conquered provinces, might have much to do with her refusal to come to the King when he ordered.
But I think there might be more.
Something for you and I to consider about the role of our inner voice and wisdom. Wisdom that cries out in the streets, Proverbs says. She beckons us to listen intently and to pay attention to the things inside of our bodies that communicate to us in so many ways.
We carry trauma in our bodies.
We carry memories in our bodies.
We carry racism, sexism and oppression in our bodies and maybe you’ve tried to ignore it lately but I guarantee you that this past year of pandemic and social unrest, our bodies have been screaming out to us like wisdom on the street corners.
One of the best things I learned how to do as I entered into ministry was learning how to seek out help and to solicit the services of a good therapist and spiritual director.
I’m not afraid to say that I’ve had many therapists and spiritual directors over the years because friends, that is part of listening to that little voice.
My current therapist is a petite, soft spoken Irish nun who is part of the Franciscan Spirituality Center near Philadelphia. Her accent is delightful, but her intense eyes tell me that she has experienced the world of the living with all its joys and sorrows. Her specialty is focused prayer and meditation. She asks me all the time “Lydia, show me where it hurts”.
The first time I heard her ask me this I wasn’t quite sure what she was talking about. She said to me in her beautiful Irish lilt, “I’m not asking you to tell me what you think is happening, I’m asking you to hear your body tell you where it hurts and let that pain inform you.” A felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one. Eugene Gendlin one of the founders of Focusing as a therapeutic tool. He continues to say, “There is an internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about a given subject at a given time—encompasses it and communicates to you...”
Basically, its that voice, not the negative one that tells you that you are not worthy or that you can’t do this or that. That’s not a voice friends, that’s fear and perfect love cast out all fear.
In the center of that perfect love, what Wesley might have called “the spark of the divine” in that center, that’s where this voice lives. It reminds you that you are worthy of respect, dignity and love. It’s the one that comes out every once in a while, when we let her, to tell us “you deserve more than the way you are being treated” or “you know this is a lie.” We’ve all experienced it, and we all know the consequences of ignoring it.
Vashti doesn’t ignore it – rather she listened to it even at the cost of her own crown, position, safety and even her life. Her choice was so powerful that the king’s men feared how it would impact other women and even their own wives.
What is that little voice saying to you today, friend? What have you been ignoring for a while?
Maybe that little voice is doing everything to grab your attention these days, helping you understand that you can take that first move, or you can do that job, or this relationship is not what you think it is, or the hardest one yet for us to hear that little voice tell us, “You are not being your truest self!”
The good thing is that listening to that little voice inside is a muscle like courage is a muscle that continually needs to be exercised. Wesley called it “moving on to perfection” but that always sound ominous to me.
Rather, I want to encourage you to everyday find a place or a time to check in with your body. To ask yourself the question where does it hurt? And/or to let someone ask you “how is it with your soul?” To let your body show you where that little voice is found and let her come to life and speak. Let her voice wash over your fears and open up the courage to be vulnerable and real.
May Vashti’s choice cast a long shadow over our lives as we consider all our days.
I wanted to be like men wanted me to be:
an attempt at life; a game of hide and seek with my being.
But I was made of nows,
and my feet level on the promissory earth
would not accept walking backwards
and went forward, forward,
mocking the ashes
to reach the kiss of new paths.
Julia de Burgos – Yo Misma Fui Mi Ruta/I Was My Own Path
Thank God for little voices…
Amen.
https://foundryumc.org/
SERMON - “ FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS”
Scripture: Esther 4: 9-17 July 25, 2021
(Celebrating the 65th Anniversary of Full Clergy Rights for UM Clergywomen) Foundry UMC, Washington, DC
There are times when the words in a letter are burned into our memories. Such a letter to me got lost between the move of my first and second pastoral appointments. I had recently been ordained an Elder in Full Connection in the Florida Conference. I suppose I reasoned at the time that it didn’t matter anymore if I kept the letter. But it did matter because I can still quote it today - 47 yrs ago! - from the Chair of the Board of Ordained Ministry in 1974 - “Dear Charlene, You seem to be qualified for ministry, but because you are a woman, there might be issues in the future........ if you think you have a call to ministry, you could try to exercise it in another annual conference.” At the time I received the letter, it still didn’t sink in that I had been turned down royally, and the kind suggestion by the Registrar was to tell me to look elsewhere if I insisted on pursuing my calling. I began to hear all the negative voices in my head. Was I really called? Did I have the capacity to be a pastor? Can I finish seminary? I’m a
failure. The endless loop continued in my head. But more importantly, what was God saying to me? After crying all the way home on my flight from central Fla to the Chicago airport, and then getting to Evanston where I was a student at GETS, I was pretty much paralyzed, and not able to discern God’s voice or presence.
My soul was wounded and my spirit was crushed. But right away, I began to hear other voices speaking to me: from seminary students and faculty, from church friends, from my pastor, from my husband, and especially other women on the path to ordination.
“Don’t give up. Try again even if they said NO to you. Come to my Ann. Conf - we will take you. And most poignant from a professor - don’t let the church rob you of your calling. DON’T LET THE CHURCH ROB YOU OF YOUR CALLING! It’s a long story with several chapters, but suffice it to say that in another year, I applied again to my home conference and was accepted for Deacon’s orders and my first appointment as an Associate pastor. All because a Path was opened up to me by prayer, advocacy, a visit on our seminary campus by a Fla. Leader, a plea from me for another chance, a DS and a Sr. Pastor willing to give me a try and support me, offering me a place to serve. As it turned out, I would be the first female pastor in the Fla. Conference to be appointed to a local church, the first female Elder, the first female DS, and later, much later, the first female bishop in the SEJ.
When a discernment and support team accompanied me for a year as I was being called to the episcopacy, our theme for my candidacy was FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS. The SEJ had yet to elect a female bishop after 4 quadrenniums of effort to elect gifted women candidates. In a book titled “Women Bishops of The United Methodist Church” Bishop Sharon Rader and Professor Margaret Ann Crain interviewed all the living women bishops of our denomination in 2019. In some way or many ways, all the women bishops have carried the unique and heavy burden of being the first woman - to serve in an appointment, to serve on a Cabinet, to birth a baby in an appointment, to lead on a Conference staff, to lead a delegation to Gen. Conference, and to be elected as bishops. Bishop Judy Craig, who is now in the Communion of Saints, said “When our dust is dust, they’ll remember us as those who did the first thing.” Bishop Susan Morrison stated, “To be claimed for a time such as this in the role I was in and the ability to touch lives is unbelievable. I’m awestruck.” Being firsts also meant being under constant scrutiny of what they said, how they looked, how they led, whether they could preach, how they presided and on and on. The reality is we were all under the stress of charting a new course as clergywomen while experiencing the tyranny of an anti-woman mindset and gender bias, ( pg. 174 in “Women Bishops”......) Even today, some women bishops continue to receive threats on their lives, and need to be accompanied by armed security in major public events. Even today
65 years after Clergywomen received full ordination rights, the resistance to women’s leadership in the church continues to take many forms.
Was it any surprise that my discernment team looked to the story of Esther as empowerment for the journey ahead? Something about this book makes us examine ourselves and wonder what God is up to. Something about this book makes us laugh and cry and reach out to God all at the same time. (Interpretation, “Esther”, Carol M. Bechtel, pg. 1) Oh, Esther, how often have we clergywomen recalled your story, and the memory of your being Called by God FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS. We can see God’s hand so clearly at work in your life, your actions, your wisdom, your servant leadership, your desire to bring good to your people.
The Book of Esther is intended to be read in its entirety in the temple or the sanctuary. It is such a powerful unveiling of God’s plans unfolding in the unlikeliest of people and circumstances. It is a drama, a burlesque, a comedy, a short story. It so powerfully captures God’s Power and our roles in God’s plans that each time it is heard it renews the community of faith. Historian Deborah Lipstadt actually won a court victory over a Holocaust denier during her career. Soon after that court verdict, she went to temple and the scroll of Esther was read at her local synagogue’s celebration of Purim. She reports in the Jerusalem Post Magazine in June of 2000, “ I heard that! All of it, and it made me think: Who knows if not for this very
reason I got the education I got, I got the upbringing I got, my job — maybe we’re all meant to do one something really significant. And some of us do it on the public stage, and some do it by helping a child. Nobody knows of it, nobody sees it, but we’re all meant to do something. And maybe this is the something I was meant to do.”
We remember you, Esther. From becoming an orphan with no discernible future, your uncle Mordecai brought you into his family and treated you like his daughter. They were Jewish, descended from the tribe of Benjamin, living in the time of King Ahasueras who ruled from 486 to 465 b.c.e. Mordecai is a respected man, a civil servant in the Royal Court. Because he hears all the gossip from the comings and goings of people making their way to the King’s Court, he knew about a royal party in which the King indulged himself and his subjects in endless drinking and dining and carousing. All to display the King’s massive wealth. When the King calls upon his wife, Vashti, to come and be displayed as a trophy wife to all the guests at the height of the party, she refuses.. He who commanded such great wealth and a vast territory, was not obeyed by his wife. Embarrassed, drunk and raging, he orders the death of Vashti. Then he decreed that all the virgins of his empire were to be brought to the court, become his harem, so that the King can choose one of them as his new Queen. Here enters Esther, a young, beautiful and brilliant young woman, who is carried into court. She, like the other women, were treated like
royalty for a year - with long perfumed baths and soap bubbles, with facials and makeup and massages, with manners and posture training, with fancy meals, with brand new clothes, with skills and duties related to hostessing , and of course to be ready to go into the King’s bedchamber at his beck and call. What does Esther take with her when she is called to the King’s chambers? She always began “ If it please the King...”. She also takes great beauty, knowledge, humility, cleverness and wisdom.She is able to tell the King about an assassination attempt on his life and gives her Uncle credit for how she got the information. She exposes Haman, the arrogant and brutal supervisor over Mordecai at court. Haman has tricked the King into issuing a decree to kill all the Jews, destroy, and annihilate them. Why? All because one Jew, Mordecai, refused to bow down to him when commanded.
Uncle Mordecai had instructed Esther to keep her Jewish identity a secret when she was taken into the court and the harem. Then he coached Esther how to get the Kings’ favor and to have the killing decree removed and a new decree proclaimed. The extraordinary turn of events reveals that Esther is indeed able to save her people. She becomes their Queen and rules with equity , dignity, and compassion. The whole book of Esther is still read at Temple services in the festival of Purim, a celebration where God’s Power of freeing the Jews was made possible through Esther.
I dare to say that every clergywoman has perceived a call like Esther’s - surely not as dramatic, but a clarity that God has called her and equipped her to serve God’s people in the church and in the world. It has only been through hard work and preparation, the mentoring and coaching of others who went before, the discernment of leaders in the church, and the abundant grace of God that each of us has stepped into such a calling, tried it on, and found our own courage and voices along the way. Whether we are representative of the First Wave of Clergywomen, or daughters of clergywomen, representatives of racial ethnic groups, or brought in by long and circuitous routes, we have been emboldened. It is not about us, it is never about us as individuals, or any distinctions or honors that may come to us along the way. It is about how we will live for God and serve others. That will be regardless of who calls us what - in my case, pastorette, priestess, preacherette, lady preacher, or baby bishop.( these are only the names I can say in church).............. or where we are sent to serve, or who rejects us and denies us or threatens us with bodily harm, we are still called by God. And like Esther, we will be given opportunities to lead, to use our power for good, to help save and serve God’s people.
As a retired clergywoman who is still serving as a bishop, I am reminded of the vision and hope of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leader of the Suffrage movement. I still have a vision of God’s Justice and Joy, bringing Heaven to earth. In my small part of God’s healing work, I can say with Elizabeth
that “I never forget that we are sowing winter wheat which the coming spring will see sprout and other hands than ours will reap and enjoy”. Thank you, Esther. Thank you to all clergywomen, those who were “firsts”, those who came before, those who will follow us. “I never forget that we are sowing winter wheat which the coming spring will see sprout and other hands than ours will reap and enjoy.” May it be so. AMEN.
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A Sermon for Foundry United Methodist Church by Rev. Shalom Agtarap
July 18th, 2021
Genesis 21:14
Focus Statement: When systems are not made for us, god gives us blessing, shows us compassion, revives us with life-giving water — to go our own way!
Opening Prayer —
I am the daughter of Filipino immigrants, hard-working, intelligent, spirit-filled people who migrated to California. While I am a cradle United Methodist, my sisters and I were often the only kids of color in a sea of white churches that my father was appointed to. In ministry, I am a brown woman, ordained in an institution that never sought to ordain women, much more Southeast Asian women. And my job is to reflect on scripture compiled without a Hagar in mind. It’s as though I am a plant, whose roots are watered in another garden. They had to be! If I were to be of any help to the Filipino immigrant local church that sent me to seminary, I would have to divest from white ways of knowing, storytelling and preaching. If I were to honor the elders who stuffed $20 bills in my pocket as they pulled me in for a hug, blessing me in prayer and pocket money, I would have to learn to bring the gospel to life in ways that honored indigenous ways of being. The quickest way to dishonor them, would be to hide the parts of myself they knew and loved and celebrated, in the pursuit of bringing the gospel fully alive.
A garden opened up in my time at Wesley Seminary, just up the road from Foundry, I soaked up the water that flowed from womanist, mujerista and other liberation theologies. But I didn’t know how to hold the tension of being a second-gen Filipino woman learning theology in a predominantly black and white context. God-talk facilitated and imagined by people who have lived experience of marginalization and resilience makes all the difference to our collective liberation but I still needed to fill in the gaps. I found myself at crossroads many times. Socialized as an Asian American, I’m taught to not rock the boat and fit in wherever I can. To always excel, but to do so with great humility. What are you? Where are you from? Where are you really from? Are questions I’ve been asked all my life and it has only accelerated since I began serving as a pastor in predominantly white denomination. Instead of seeing my identities as a curse, however, the gifts of womanist theologies remind me I come from a place that I can be curious about. That I come from a people. That I come from a culture. None of these can be erased and all of them are integral to how I experience the world, to how I understand God at work.
Womanist theology, I have learned, is a gift of intersections. And a central character who helps inform this theology is the witness of Hagar in Genesis.
As Delores Williams wrote in Sisters in the Wilderness, a seminal work in womanist theology, “there are striking similarities between Hagar’s story and the story of African American women. Hagar’s heritage was African, from Egypt, scripture says. Hagar was
enslaved. Black American women had emerged from a slaved heritage and still lived in its long shadow. Hagar was brutalized by her slave owner the woman named Sarah. The narratives of enslaved women in the United States and even narratives of modern day workers tell of brutal or cruel treatment from the wives of slave owners and from contemporary white female employers.”1
Hagar continues to speak to us today. Dr. Wil Gafney comments Hagar’s story has a little something for everyone from enslavement on this continent and elsewhere — to all the resistance and revolutionary spirit that has ever risen up against oppressive forces. “Hagar is the mother of Harriet Tubman and the women who freed themselves..I see God’s return of Hagar to her servitude as the tendency of some religious communities to side with the abuser at the expense of abused women and their children. Ultimately Hagar escapes her slaveholders and abusers and receives her inheritance from God, and God fulfills all of God’s promises to her.”
To the white folks at church today, who is Hagar for you? Who is Hagar for me? Though I’ve been invited into Black church communities, though I am deeply accompanied by African American friends, I cannot appropriate these historical and cultural stories as my own. It is my responsibility, and all those who love and celebrate black women, to extend Hagar’s story beyond the black and white paradigm that is so often the framework for race and class in the United States.
For me, to invoke the name of Hagar is to invoke the woman who exists at intersections. And beyond those who identify as women; Hagar to me, is the patron saint of those who dwell in multiple layers of identity. She receives the prayers of those who are enslaved and yet hold great power. People who are frontline workers that in this pandemic have quickly become disposable. Sex workers who are celebrated during Pride events and yet are killed at high rates because of the color of their skin, and for how they break gender norms, all in one body.
What I know, as a clergywoman of color in a mainline denomination is what those who have come before me have long experienced: that we are set within what bell hooks calls interlocking systems of domination: white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. Our church is set within these interlocking systems, our schools, our homes, and even our relationships.
While historical record clearly states the 1956 General Conference voted to grant women full rights just as any pastor in good standing, it was only in the last few years
1 Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, pg 3
we’ve celebrated more black clergywomen’s election as bishops and our first openly queer bishop in the west.
We must read history clearly: that as we celebrated 65 years of full ordination rights to women, that many women — immigrant women, women of color, and transgender women — still lack access to all levels of leadership in our church. Beloveds, we have so much further to go!
Which brings us back to Sister Hagar. She’s got a ways to go before she gets free...she is Othered because of her ethnic background. She is treated like property when Sarah seizes her for her productivity to produce an heir. She is a problem to be solved, not a human being with dignity. Yes, we’re talking about Hagar but can we just talk about Sarah for a minute? She’s got some issues! What prevents a sisterhood from forming, what blocks solidarity from building is that Sarah is consumed by the patriarchy and believes she is entitled to more access and privilege than any other woman in that camp.
The event that ultimately expels Hagar from the community, leaving her and her child vulnerable, is that Sarah heard something. She heard kids at play. In Chapter 21:9 The Common English says she heard laughter.
This woman who holds power, heard joy, mirth, lightheartedness and it triggered in her frustration, resentment, anger.
We need not stretch our imaginations very far to come up with modern day examples of when women in power were threatened by others enjoying life. Whether it’s Amy Cooper calling out a birdwatcher in Central Park, or BBQ Becky at the local picnic or countless white women who called the police on black people over trivial or nonexistent offenses. We have a problem that predates our current struggle with white supremacy— I submit to you that when Sarah heard laughter, she heard life! And the life of Ishmael, was a perceived threat to the life of her son, Isaac — another vestige of patriarchy and who is the rightful heir. Sarah is reminded, with each breath that Ishmael draws, that her own security is at risk and she must protect it at all costs. Why else do so many feel the need to police joy?
To white women, and those who experience the benefits of whiteness, who feel threatened, who feel like their security, or reputation, or way of life is at risk because of the full-throated, belly filling laughter of others — may I offer a word. The God who sees Hagar also sees you. God sees your effort. God sees the ways you’ve been shut down and left behind. God has heard your silent cries. And God will not leave you barren — without joy, without hope.
To beloved ones who exist at intersections, the helpless and harassed who are, in audre Lorde’s words “triple oppression” , the hear the good news: just as Sarah and Abraham were promised provision, so too are Hagar and Ishmael. “Don’t be afraid. God has heard the boy’s cries over there. Get up, pick up the boy, and take him by the hand because I will make of him a great nation.”
Would Hagar have lived in the 20th century, I’m certain she would have picked up some audre lorde.
"A Litany for Survival": audre lorde
when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
or welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid.
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
I invoke the life and witness of audre lorde in sharing her poem, a litany for survival, as we think about the witness of Hagar. Audre lorde was speaking to other black lesbians like herself but the message resonates through the lens of Hagar. There were forces in
life that never meant for Hagar and Ishmael’s survival and yet, Hagar has a relationship with the divine. She is the only one to name God in all of scripture. In Chapter 16, Hagar says to the Holy One “You are El Ro’i, the God who sees.” This relationship allows Hagar to be seen and heard in return. In the midst of exhaustion and desperation, having been kicked out, sent away, expelled, deported, Hagar cries out to God and weeps. The water spent in salty tears returns to sustain her.
After an encounter with the Divine, water is given to Hagar and Ishmael. I do not believe the messenger of God intended for them to build up the energy to make it back to Abraham and Sarah’s camp! Life giving water is given so they continue moving in parched places. There is someone listening today who’s been saved from, given distance, broken out of, walked away from a place where love no longer lives. The best way to honor that gift of water is to not return to the place of death. To break free of the status quo and the ways that white supremacy and capitalism tell us to make do with the scraps we’re given. The good news is that when we follow a different path, away from hierarchies that demean, toward round tables where more varieties of God’s creation can gather — God will go with us and sustain our very breath.
The beauty of reading this story in modern times is that we know the rest of the story! We know God fulfills ALL of God’s promises to Hagar, Ishmael and all of his descendants.
If I may offer a word of encouragement to you today, in the off chance, you are discerning next steps, whether it’s a job, ending a relationship, the grueling task of healing from trauma, or beginning or even harder, continuing the work of anti-racism, — the God who sees, is present to us now in the form of Christ who offers life-sustaining water. And this liberating presence will accompany you in parched places — Christ will not do the work for you, but with the help of the Holy Spirit, will give you compassion and confidence as you make your own way.
Pray: You are the God who sees…
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“The God at the End of .Com”
2nd Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19 — preached at Foundry United Methodist Church July 11th, 2021
I am always amazed at the richness and depth of Scripture. You can return to a passage over and over again and, invariably, each reading raises more questions than it answers. Fresh examination of our most beloved passages brings new insight and deeper dialogue with every encounter.
Contrary to popular belief, Scripture is not a roadmap which always lays out clear boundaries and mile markers for a to-scale spiritual journey. Nor is its prophecy a predictive panacea, or cure, that explains away our uncertainty about the future .
It is rather, I think, a divine invitation. In its words, we meet God at the intersections of our collective past, the present, and the future to receive God’s word for us right now. In it we recognize and remember that God shows up, over and over again at the intersections of our faith and doubt, our hope and fear, our joy and our sorrow. And when we accept the invitation to meet God at those intersections // new joy and abundant life often await us around every corner. As we meet God today where our story intersects with that of David, Michal and the people of Israel, let us pray:
Come Holy Spirit, Living Light of Love, and illuminate our lives anew. Grant us fresh grace, so that as we ponder the possibilities of your leading through THESE words, we might receive and welcome their comfort and challenge. Take the humble offering of this preacher and make of it what it needs to be so that—whether through me or in spite of me—you might be glorified, your people edified, and together we might draw a little closer to Your Kin-dom come. Amen.
It was a new day in Israel! The people were turning the corner of a past rife with internal division, political anarchy, and war with the Philistines. These changes culminated in the return of the Ark of the Covenant—the physical representation of God’s power, presence, and preference for the people of Israel—to the center of their social awareness as it is escorted out of obscurity in backwater Balle- Judah and into their new capital city of Jerusalem.
What unfolds, on the one hand, is prime political theater. David represented a radical change in leadership from his predecessor, King Saul. A popular military hero with a keen sense of how to rule, he threatened familiar institutions and power structures, along with those who benefited from them. By intertwining his kingship with the unifying religious symbol of the Ark, David appeals to the peoples’ religious devotion and offers proof in his procession, into HIS capital city, that his reign and leadership are blessed by God.
But, while there are certainly political motivations for David’s decision, the ark of the covenant is no mere political symbol. Sincere and raucous joy accompany its arrival in the city. The Ark, after all was proof that God was with them even as they turned the corner toward a new way of being Israel together. Proof that God was able to take moments of unprecedented change // and leadership from surprising and unexpected places // and new rituals and ways of gathering together and make of them opportunities for healing, hope, and wholeness.
David is one of the Bible’s more complicated figures. A egomaniac with a seemingly insatiable bloodlust and a penchant for pursuing his own best interests most of the time. But here takes advantage of a strategic opportunity to usher people into the healing presence of God following decades of communal trauma. And his reckless joy, his willingness to literally dance like a fool in front of his people, abandons assumptions about how a king should behave and invites people to consider new ways of recognizing and responding to God’s presence.
Whatever David’s political motivations, the Spirit of God moves in them and maybe in spite of them, creating much needed space for people to remember, recognize, and embrace the hope of God’s abiding presence, the true source of their strength and joy.
In his dancing David becomes, a conduit and conductor of hope, his ecstatic joy an invitation for everyone watching to recognize the presence of God in their midst, and to celebrate, even when it means risking what is familiar and comfortable as we do.
Like so many of you, I’m anxious for the day that this sanctuary again swells with the sounds of “To God be the Glory” and cries of newborns freshly washed in baptismal waters. For chance to be with one another and return to the sacred space we share on the corner of 16th and P. Yet, even as we prepare to re-enter in person worship on Wednesday of this week, my mind can’t help but regularly return to the earliest days of the pandemic.
I remember the fear and anxiety we faced, unsure of how we would remain connected to God and one another, let alone our sanity. Questions and confusion were common; about the science, about our safety. Questions about what online platforms we should use and what happens when they aren’t failproof? We all wondered how, and I’m guessing at multiple points doubted we could, stay socially and spiritually connected using technology designed for workplace? Would our neighbors file a noise complaint by the time we start singing the fifth verse of ‘O For A Thousand Tongues to Sing” at our dining room table. Could we find God in the isolation? Could we find God at the end of .com?
Like the Ark’s arrival on the streets of Jerusalem all those years ago, this season has opened to new paradigms for being the people of God together. We have been led by choir members who recorded audio tracks and then lip synced videos, all while trying to listen to themselves and a recorded piece of music for our virtual choir pieces. We have been encouraged by teachers and preachers and new members who, because of this virtual format, have joined our us in worship and learning from hundreds of miles away.
We were nourished and nurtured by folks like Rosa, who packed communion cups and wafers in Ziploc bags and small group leaders who showed up faithfully, even when they were Zoom-weary, to create space for support and prayer. We were challenged by our Confirmands, who refused to join The United Methodist Church without challenging its complicity in harm and injustice, and comforted by voices who reminded us over and over again that it was ok not to be ok—and then gave us the space for that to be true.
Like David so many of you have stepped into this season and risked being made a fool—as we figured out how to mute ourselves and watched our best laid virtual plans fall apart when our wifi signal just wasn't strong enough.
And somehow, often despite our expectations, we found the presence of God was with us. Not just in our sanctuaries or familiar rhythms and rituals, but with us in the silence and stillness of the stay-at-home orders so many at first feared. In the closets and quiet spaces where we lifted praise and lament and listened for the voice of God. In flowerbeds and lush, loamy vegetable gardens that would never have been tended if we weren’t working from home and bowls of water and boxes of supplies we used to adorn our home altars.
God was on the end of—I’m loathe to admit it—many a group text and long, lingering phone call. God was in the chat rooms where we celebrated sacred moments and grieved what was lost. God was in backyard baptisms and clear plastic baggies that became conduits of God’s living love at communion.
We have witnessed and remembered these last 15 months what is possible when we’re willing to risk doing the unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or unexpected for the sake of opening our hearts and lives to Spirit’s leading. That God’s presence is ever-available and dynamic, moving not only in familiar modalities, but also through new ad unfamiliar technologies and ways of being Church so joy, hope, healing, and—sometimes, maybe most of the time—just plain old survival was possible. We’ve learned, and re-learned, and been reminded that God is with us, always, even at the end of .com. And because of it lives have been changed. Communities have grown. People have fallen headfirst into God’s love. Deepened their capacity to love one another. Even as we’ve done all of this in an unfamiliar, often uncomfortable way, the world has been changed because we accepted the invitation and took the rest.
Sandwiched into this Scripture story of celebration is another story, single line about David's wife Michal. Michal was the daughter of King Saul and betrothed to David when he was first anointed by Samuel. Before he was king, she risked her life to save David’s when he earned the ire of her father, was forcibly married off to someone else to enrage David, and is then ripped from her home following the brutal death of her father and brother to be remarried to the newly anointed King David.
While today's reading only says that she saw David’s dancing and despised him in her heart, a few verses later we encounter a painful exchange between David and Michal about his dancing. She upbraids him for his unbecoming behavior, suggesting that it waas self-serving and un-kinglike. We have to be careful before we assign mal-intent or ill will to Michal’s behavior. Perhaps, after years of being passed between kings and pretenders to the throne, she realized David’s actions were risky and threatened her stability and security. It’s possible she’d simply seen the politics of power corrupt one too many people that she loved and had no more capacity to put up with David’s pomp and circumstance and BS.
The trauma and violence inflicted on her as the daughter of a dead despot and wife of an emerging demagogue was profound. It’s no wonder she wasn’t ready to join the party! She was grieving. She was, I imagine, braced for impact, not ready to embrace joy. David, who a few moments before had created space for people to encounter what God’s presence could do, missed the moment. He dismissed her. Demeaned her arguments. And abandoned her as he danced the merry band around the corner and into what came next. Michal’s place in scripture terminates here, and we’re told she died without children The implication is that she was abandoned by David as he moved into this new season of Israel’s history without her.
I wonder if this brief encounter, informed by but left out of today’s lectionary reading, offers us a cautionary tale of how we turn the corner of this pandemic season. David’s ecstatic dancing reminds us how important it is to seize every opportunity to open space for others to encounter the living, healing presence of God after 15 months of deferred trauma and grief—even when it risks what we’re familiar or comfortable with. Michal’s story asks us to explore our unexpressed grief and trauma and the ways the keep us from recognizing God’s presence in our lives—even in unexpected places and from unexpected sources. She invites to remain open to the possibility of healing and hope it offers, and challenges us to help others do what David did not for her. Together, they remind us that God shows up in both our ecstatic joy and overwhelming sorrow.
And that its easy to leave folks behind if we insist that it’s our way or the highway. In the end, they both seem miss the point and an opportunity for them turn this corner together: that God shows up.
And that’s really the point of this story, isn’t it? God shows up, whether in the Ark of the Covenant or the wild dancing of David or Michal’s profound pain and fear. God shows up in our anticipation and celebration, when we’re ready to move full steam ahead into the possibilities of what comes next and as when we’re mired in profound grief and sorrow . God shows up even as we cling to our pre- conceived notions and assumptions of what is and is not proper, or when our intentions or motives might not be the most pure, when we’re lost in grief and ensnared by fear.
Spirit—as the story of David, Michal, and Ark proves—is always revealing herself in new ways, moving in unexpected places, and opening up fresh opportunities for people to recognize and receive the promise of God’s abiding presence and love. It may not come in behavior we deem becoming or in packages we prefer, but nevertheless the presence of God enters into the midst of our moments and movements, interrupts our expectations, and invites us to be free. All we have to do is answer the invitation.
We are invited together, as Foundry Church, as the body of Christ to be for others conduits and conductors through which they can experience the profound joy and abundant life God desires for all of us. To risk hope and receiving joy even as we feel lost in fear and awash in grief. To be open to peoples pain and fear as we re-enter life together—even when we aren’t— and to remain present as a source of comfort until they’re ready to embrace joy. To challenge our preconceived notions and assumptions about what proper, right or acceptable in such encounters, and to risk being made a fool for the sake of others’ opportunity to know and experience the liberating love of God.
Today’s reading reminds us that we have a profound opportunity as we turn this corner, together, to continue creating space where people can encounter God’s liberating love. Our role isn’t to be gatekeepers carefully deciding and defining for others the “right” way to find that or the appropriate methods by which they will . Nor is it to shame others into joy. Our job is to show up, together, again and again and remain open to how God might meet us when we do—so that no one, as we enter into this new season—gets left as we go.
As we stand at the intersection of where we've been and what comes next we are faced with a crucial question: Will we embrace and celebrate the new ways and means we have known God’s love, grown in faith, healed from old wounds and discovered new dimensions of discipleship? Will we risk discomfort, distaste, and even foolishness for the sake of extending to others the life giving presence of God?
Will we meet one another wherever we are—ready to dance or still braced for impact—and work, and witness, and wait with each other so that together we might be a conductor of joy, a conduit of hope, living love through whose light the whole world is set free.
The choice, my beloved, is ours. Let us choose well. Amen.
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Mark 6: 1-13 July 4, 2021 At the Public Square. Rev. Ben Roberts for Foundry UMC
It could be the type of situation where someone goes home, and they just know you too well to take you seriously. The kind of place where any time you start talking about something serious, someone responds with a story like, “I remember when you were just a little feller running around bonking a giant yellow bowl on your head. You’d just run around saying “bonk, bonk, bonk.” Tapping the bowl on your head like a giant hat.” It can be hard to lead those who know you or know you best.
In Jesus’ case today, the problem was less an issue with lovingly nostalgic family members and more an issue of proper place. Dr. Emerson Powery in his commentary on this week’s text reminds us of the functions of honor and shame in Mark’s society. He Points out that the crowd in this sequence question and point to Jesus’ brothers, sisters, and mother. No mention of a father, which is the clue showing the crowd challenges his authority by shaming him based on his perceived illegitimate conception, affirming his low standing in the community.
This “direct insult” is first and foremost an effort to end the conversation or teachings. Some, or at least enough of the crowd, center their feelings and objections to his teachings and use the insult to scandalize and discredit this otherwise powerful, wise teacher. The community as a function of structured life together has deemed this uncontrollable aspect of Jesus’ identity to be sufficient cause for him to have low standing or no authority.
Overly familiar neighbors or truly scandalous public assertiveness, the point is to stop hearing this prophetic teaching. So often in Mark, it is Jesus’ actions and teachings that are the real offense and scandal for anyone hearing or watching. This is especially true for those holding power and privileged positions of leadership such as the Priests (who twisted systems of purity and debt to their own advantage), Roman colonizers and collaborators (who benefited from the taking of land, labor, and goods, if say tributes/tax weren’t/couldn’t be paid), or even the Zealots (whose efforts were more geared to a militaristic takeover of the system for their own advantage). Jesus seems to have had a very annoying stance of nonalignment with any of those groups and strategies and very often criticized them if not outright undermined them. This is how Jesus brought his faith and message into the intersections of the public square, and I suppose it could have gone better.
Hearing a challenging message this age or any age, does not seem to produce such a different result. A queer voice in the United Methodist Church (if they’re out), a homeless voice for housing (if it means higher taxes), a black voice for police reform (if it’s too loud), latinx voice for citizenship (if they weren’t straight A students), a resident of public housing’s voice (really for anything anywhere), saying anything (if it’s sounds political); while not comprehensive or perfect as a metaphor we still see voices like these muted or not prioritized in the public square. The crowd of the public square is still adept at finding a reason not to act upon or even receive a message from or about the vulnerable, and I am often in the crowd. But the consequences of a lack of openness to prophetic messages for liberation, in any age, remain too deadly to hold our silence or maintain our refusal to receive a word of challenge.
“Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house” (Mk 6: 4).
Again, Powery points out that operating within an honor/shame society, prophets were generally ones who would receive honor, but prophets are usually operating where they are less known. However, for that to be true in someone’s hometown, it likely, and for Jesus in this case, means taking a space or share of honor from someone else and above their appointed or birth share. Or so the norms and perceptions go. It remains that the point here was to keep Jesus’ message from taking root and Jesus himself, and anyone else, from moving up or potentially down the ladder.
I’m struck at the notion of the message and ministry doing better outside one’s hometown. I’m left with the thought how different or perhaps impossible it would have been if James Baldwin wasn’t writing from Paris or how that the “Ripple of Hope” speech Robert Kennedy gave in South Africa wouldn’t have the same reception in South Boston. This was not a right time right place thing in Jesus’ case.
“He could do no deed of power” (Mk 6: 5)
He could do no deed of power, fine, but he was still making his way around and curing sick people it seems despite the crowd’s “unbelief.” These acts of healing are made to sound almost small in our narrative, but I assure they were community shifting in nature.
Last week Pastor Kelly’s sermon included the story of the woman with a 12 year hemorrhage. But for anyone who was ill or unclean they became subject to purity laws and rituals. They were held out of communal participation. And as a matter of becoming hopefully clean again or to attempt to atone for transgressing the purity laws, would have render payment or sacrifice. For the woman with the hemorrhage and for someone like a farm worker coming in contact almost daily with blood or manure, they could be in a repetitious state of uncleanliness and relentlessly subject to requirements of payment and sacrifice or be excluded. I’ll oversimplify here, these medical bills could drive and keep already vulnerable people in a cycle of poverty and further sickness because their work or personhood simply exposed them more often and they couldn’t afford to get out.
There was a system meant to help in a hardship situation; a required debt system where some goods from everyone were put into a centralized place (synagogue/temple) which could be re-distributed to should the need arise. The goods could be sent out in times of famine, war, or community need. However, it was controlled by the same religious leaders as the purity systems, and either from apathy, corruption, or a perverse incentive to maintain their own financial flow; the debt system meant to help started to contribute further to people’s suffering. James Newton Poling in “Render unto God” notes that “Restoring purity was expensive. When Jesus healed such people, he was bypassing the purity system and objecting to the debt system that contributed to the poverty of the poor.” So let’s try this again.
Jesus goes into his home synagogue, a public square for all manner of activity; religious, political, economic. He begins teaching to anyone listening including those in charge. Those whose responsibility it is to see to the wellbeing of the community. Whose responsibility it is to care for the sick per the purity laws. To care for the poor per the law and through the reciprocity and debt systems. Those who often found themselves called upon to maintain order under threat or on behalf of the Romans. And everyone else including some likely harmed directly by the ways those systems had been twisted. He spoke with authority, he taught with wisdom. He talked about systems of oppression. He was insulted, and likely run out.
So he started messing with people’s money, healed a few sick people. He was astounded at their unbelief. But he couldn’t open them up, that’s my phrasing, he could do no deed of power.
Jesus’ faith is rooted in that baseline understanding, love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself. In so doing we ensure that the good creation indeed has enough to meet every economic, physical, or spiritual need anyone might have. Jesus’ faith is one of liberation for those who suffer. That liberation doesn’t come from prayers to the Donkey, or Elephant, or to the bronze eagle of the Roman Empire, but in a powerful and vulnerable act of opening oneself to the possibility of God’s work in the world. Opening to the prophetic messages already and always out there. Opening ourselves up to the possibility that we might be part of the crowd and beneficiaries of twisted systems, recognizing there’s grace even for us. Opening ourselves up to the fact that God calls and can use us, no matter what anyone else may deem insufficient about your personhood or what names they want to call you.
God is interested in the discourses and systems at play at the public square. Jesus’ ministry is at once and always spiritual and political, in that it cares for how we have life and how we have life together. This encounter at the synagogue becomes the play book for the sending out of the disciples.
Hometown ministry or anywhere else, the final verses Jesus instructs the disciples to pare themselves down in dress and resources, “no bag, no money.” Essentially, take no pretense, no high or low expectation, keep yourself open to what you will encounter. Be organized with partners go to places and build relationships. Listen and help name what is broken, what is unjust, and what needs healing…even to the powerful of the public square. And if the crowd refuses to be open, move on; to the next leader, the next house, the next day or opportunity to speak words of life in spaces where they’re desperately needed.
God is interested in the discourses and systems at play at the public square. God asks us to live our faith at this intersection. God knows twisted power’s effect intimately, living and experiencing it through Jesus’ life. God knows intimately how the crowd reacts, rejects, and finds excuses. But none of that can stop God’s power for healing and liberation. Be of good courage, because the God who knows and loves this whole creation, knows, and loves you, and goes ever before you.
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Reversing Otherhood
Text: Mark 5:21
Rev. Kelly Grimes
June 27, 2021
Foundry United Methodist Church, Washington DC
There is a Way
Text: 1 Samuel 17: 32-49
T.C. Morrow
June 20, 2021
Foundry United Methodist Church, Washington DC
We are in the middle of a sermon series on “The Call: Good Trouble.” Last week Pastor Ginger spoke on a passage earlier in the book of 1 Samuel, the identification of David as the one God has picked out to be the king. Picking the eighth and youngest son of a not particularly remarkable family is an unexpected choice. Yet God again and again throughout our scriptures empowers leaders who defy societal expectations for leadership.
The late Representative John Lewis used the phrase “good trouble” to refer to activities for positive social change that push against unjust social norms or laws. With pressure to follow the racist policies of the Jim Crow South, Rep. Lewis remembered his parents saying when he asked about “white only” signs, “That’s the way it is, don’t get in the way, don’t get in trouble.” But inspired by leaders like Dr. King and Rosa Parks, Rep. Lewis says he did get in trouble, in “good trouble.” Today we continue the story of the young David, his community under threat and divine inspiration for David to get involved.
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
“The Lord who saved me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will save me from the hand of this Philistine.”
The audacity to imagine that you can go from tending sheep to besting the biggest, strongest warrior in the Philistine army. It’s improbable, it’s impossible. The young David beating the experienced and physically stronger Goliath? No way.
Yet there is a way. For David there is a way through a leader who finally accepts young David’s offer but then tries to push the leader’s own way for how to proceed, and a way through an opponent who seemingly has every advantage.
For you and for me, there is a way. Whatever the obstacles, there is a way “to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves” as we are called to in our baptismal vows. It may not be in our time, it may not be how we want it, it surely will not be easy. But through the power of the Holy Spirit there is always a way to turn those places where we are outraged over “that’s the way it is” into the next faithful step in being the body of Christ in the world.
In whatever situations where we are called to be about #GoodTrouble, God is with us drawing on our experiences and providing the tools and resources to face our obstacles. As we look at today’s text, you’re welcome to have out your Bible or Bible App to 1 Samuel 17. Let’s see what David encounters and what we might learn for our own journeys.
The stories of David in the books of 1 & 2 Samuel help the Israelites tell the story of their beginnings as a more cohesive entity from multiple tribes. Importantly these books of the Bible show later generations the role of God in the lives of their ancestors, and therefore give hope that God is with them as well. Like the passage last week of Samuel’s anointing of David, this story of David and Goliath shows that Yahweh -- “the Lord” as translated in the New Revised Standard Version -- Yahweh is with the unlikely protagonist David. David has been sent by his father with food for his brothers who are part of Saul’s army facing the Philistines, a main external opponent to the Israelites in the narrative of 1 & 2 Samuel. One of the Philistines, Goliath, has offered to fight a representative of the Israelites. 40 days – or a really long time – go by and no one from amongst the Israelites goes forward. Goliath is described as tall and decked out with heavy armor (he’s gotten called a giant, but the point is that he is a formidable, seasoned warrior).
As we pick up the story in verse 32, young David, fresh from tending the sheep flocks and serving as the food delivery service of the day, offers to be the one to go fight Goliath. The reply is hardly a surprise. The Israelite leader, Saul, dismissively says, “You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are just a boy, and he has been a warrior from his youth.” David is confronted with Saul’s lack of imagination for an outside the box solution even as apparently no one else is equipped to fight Goliath one-on-one.
How many times have we heard: you’re not the right age, you don’t have the right degree, you’re not the right fit.
David might have given in to the dismissal but instead he asserts his credentials and trust in God. In the course of his shepherding duties, he has saved lambs from bears and lions. Fuller examination of the word “saved” here is for another sermon or perhaps your own study this week, but I’ll note that it runs along the lines of delivered from or snatched away from. David is convicted that it is through the power of a saving God that he has been brought through his prior experiences with fearsome foes and likewise God will be with him this time as he faces Goliath.
“The Lord, who saved me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will save me from the hand of this Philistine.”
David assesses the situation and knows he can offer himself. God has equipped him for just such a moment. God empowers us to draw on our own particular strengths and abilities for the sake of Kindom-building. In return, we are called to trust that God will continue to carry us through.
With David’s clear articulation of readiness, Saul finally agrees that David can be the one to go out against Goliath. Saul says, “Go, and may the Lord be with you!” However, even as he seems to understand Yahweh’s presence with David, Saul clings to what he knows and remains blind to the true gift of service that David is offering. As Walter Brueggeman says, “Saul does not understand anything. He has uttered Yahweh’s name. But he wants to outdo Goliath on Goaliath’s terms...”
Saul foolishly tries to make David into the type of warrior that he knows about - fits him up in armor and a helmet and a sword. However, for David, armor and a sword are not the tools he knows; they are not where God has given him strength. David tries to walk around, but unable to do so he casts aside the amor. In this, David reminds us that we need to resist bending to other people’s expectations and norms when they are not what will allow us to best use our God-given talents and passions and convictions. When facing the Goliath’s of our lives, we must remember with confidence that God has been nurturing and shaping us since the day we were born. Let God’s prevenient grace be what is molding you, not the dictates of other’s unholy expectations.
As we look at this passage, I must mention that there will likely be times when we are in Saul’s place. Let Saul’s failure in his hasty attempt to shape David into a warrior serve as a warning. We must avoid trying to mold others into “our image.” Teaching and mentorship are one thing. Demanding that there is only one way to live, insisting there is only one way to fight for justice will lead to failure every time. We need to honor how every human being is made in the image of God. We need to honor how we are called to bring our full beings and God-given gifts to the places where we find ourselves for the sake of the transformation of the world.
David resists Saul’s attempts to control things. David gathers 5 smooth stones and goes to face Goliath with tools that give him an advantage, his sling and his practiced arm. Goliath comes with trash talk, but David responds with the claim that Yahweh has equipped David to meet Goliath and indeed to gain victory. With the skills that he has honed as a shepherd, David does the unthinkable and overcomes Goliath’s greater physical strength.
And so ends 40 days of Goliath coming out every day to challenge the Israelites. A young shepherd comes along, assured that God will be with him just like God has been with him before. God has not only provided the young shepherd with tools and resources to help his community but the discernment to know when they can be put to good use.
This June as we mark Pride month we also celebrate the anniversaries of several landmark Supreme Court decisions impacting LGBTQ people. A year ago the Court held that “an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” One of the cases involved in that decision was that of Aimee Stephens, a trans woman who was fired after she told her employer that she would be transitioning from male to female. Aimee sought to live openly as who she was and continue in her profession, instead she lost her livelihood.
In a January 2020 interview with NBC, when asked about her feelings in advance of a decision, she said, “We’re going to keep fighting regardless of what the decision is.” Aimee was someone willing to get in #GoodTrouble. She was seeking to authentically live her life and ended up becoming an activist, apparently quite accidentally. Instead of taking an offered severance package she contacted the ACLU of Michigan. She knew there was a way to fight the bigotry she faced, but there were true costs as well. As she also noted in that NBC interview, “It is my life, but it’s also a lot of other people’s lives”
Aimee Stephens stepped up when an opportunity that none of us would ask for presented itself. She took the opportunity to fight the injustice of her firing and the effects will be felt in our country for years to come.
When you look around your community, your workplace, your family, the world, where is God calling you? Where is God calling you to get into some #GoodTrouble?
If you are not sure where God is calling you, I encourage you to set apart some time to be in prayer. Set apart some time to reflect on where you see brokenness and are nudged to think, “Hey, I’ve got this, with God I’ve got this!” There will be opportunities when you are paying attention to the world around you and all the ways that God has already provided you with tools and resources. People will try to get you off track, but I encourage you to remain confident in where God has already been with you and where you feel complete trust that God will be with you again. It may seem completely improbable, but you might be the one that brings just that slightly different perspective or experience that can get things moving.
“The Lord who saved me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will save me from the hand of this Philistine.”
The Gospels tell time and again of Jesus breaking the boundaries of “that’s the way it is” thinking. He eats with and talks to and heals people that others deem unclean. Jesus drives out the money changers from the Temple, interrupting a financial system taking advantage of worshippers coming in from out of town.
With all the brokenness and evil of this world, the good news is that we do not have to be stuck. We don’t have to be stuck in our personal lives. We don’t have to be stuck in our collective life. We are called to follow Jesus in bringing fullness of life to all the places that need it, from the front steps of our church, to kitchen tables, to corporate offices, to the Oval Office.
May God continue to shape you and shape me.
May God continue to surprise us with unexpected grace and opportunities.
May God continue to equip leaders with the right skills for the moment to step forward.
With God, there is a way!
Wherever, whenever you find yourself responding to God’s call to #GoodTrouble, as Saul said to David, “Go, and may the Lord be with you!”
Amen.
https://foundryumc.org/
Unexpected Blessings
A meditation shared by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC June 13, 2021, third Sunday after Pentecost, Confirmation Sunday and Pride Sunday. “The Call: Good Trouble” series.
Text: 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13
Jesse didn’t expect the prophet Samuel to come calling. And he certainly wasn’t expecting Samuel to come with a horn of oil to anoint one of his sons as the future king of Israel. Jesse didn’t expect that his youngest son, the one who shepherded the flocks, would be required at the family gathering for the sacrifice since the youngest—and shepherds generally—weren’t included in such things.
But God has a way of challenging our expectations. God sent Samuel and his horn-full of oil to Bethlehem, to the house of Jesse, to anoint NOT the first-born, the one who may have looked tall and kingly, Eliab. Instead God chose the youngest, David the shepherd, who had to be fetched from among the sheep. And, of course, young, handsome David didn’t expect ANY of what happened!
God challenges expectations. And in this story God does that in two very specific ways. First, God breaks the family expectation of giving blessing or honor to the first born son. And second, God breaks the cultural expectation by lifting up a youth—who even though described as handsome—perhaps didn’t have the physical appearance or “stature” that people of the time would consider “kingly.”
God explains these surprising choices by saying to Samuel, “God doesn’t look at things like humans do. Humans see only what is visible to the eyes, but the Lord sees into the heart.” (16:7, CEB)
Samuel, in response, models faithfulness through trusting that God knows what they’re doing, that God perceives things that Samuel cannot, and then through being obedient to the spiritual leading to anoint the least likely future king in Jesse’s family.
On this Sunday when we celebrate both Confirmation and Pride, I give thanks for this story that affirms God’s habit of breaking our human-made, cultural rules in ways that lift up, celebrate, and anoint the gifts of unexpected people.
We know all too well that human rules have demonized and excluded LGBTQ people and that legislated discrimination continues to be supported in many places in both church and state.
Limited human perception has silenced, ignored, or belittled the leadership and insight of children and youth.
Human ways of discerning a person’s worth or leadership capacity, based on “stature” or appearance have meant that countless people have not been allowed to fully share their gifts or contribute as meaningfully as they could.
But God isn’t limited by human ways of perceiving or discerning. Centuries after David was anointed the future king of Israel, on the day of Pentecost, God’s intention was made plain and the prophecies were made manifest: Spirit fell upon ALL FLESH and the human gatekeeping rules and old assumptions and expectations were consumed in the fire of new creation and new community.
And Spirit continues to fall not just upon the “usual suspects” according to human ways of perceiving. Spirit falls on all flesh… and where hearts, hands, and minds are open, She stirs us to get into “good trouble” as we love and serve and are formed by the Way of Jesus Christ in union with the church and in advocacy and service to the world.
We see Spirit’s stirring in the ways that members of Foundry youth group have formed brave space and are building Beloved Community together. Throughout the pandemic, they have met regularly on ZOOM. Recently, the grandparent of a transgender teen found Foundry online and—encouraged by our welcome and message—reached out to see how their grandchild might connect. The youth joined the next ZOOM, at first with their video off. After five minutes, they showed their face. Within 20 minutes, they felt safe enough to share their journey as trans. The youth group surrounded and celebrated their sibling and new friend. Think for just a moment about this. A church youth group…
We see Spirit stirring as, even with the UMC in the unjust tangle we’re in, more and more queer clergy are speaking up and out, and LGBTQ siblings are being affirmed by churches, boards of ordained ministry, and annual conferences, not just locally but in places across the connection. We lament and renounce the continued attacks and cruel rejection of LGBTQ pastors, clergy candidates, and allies here and abroad. But we celebrate the breakthroughs and the blessings we receive through the gifts of our own queer clergy here at Foundry. We celebrate those at turning points in the ordination process. T.C. Morrow will be preaching next week the sermon she will submit to the BWC Board of Ordained Ministry for her final examination toward full membership as an ordained Deacon in the UMC. And Foundry member Chet Jechura, recommended by the BOOM for commissioning as a provisional Elder this year, has received an appointment to serve as pastor of Good Shepherd UMC in Baltimore beginning in July.
We see Spirit stirring in the curiosity of our youth about the work of Foundry’s Board and larger ministry. The Board is actively creating ways for our youth to engage at that level, bringing their ideas, concerns, and leadership to our shared ministry.
And again this year, we see Spirit stirring as our Confirmation class will bring specific additions to their confession of faith and their commitments to God and to the church. And this amazing group of confirmands has requested to continue their study together and Pastor K.C. is working on making that happen.
Thanks be to God that we are given opportunities to continue to witness the ongoing revelation of God’s barrier-breaking revolution of love and grace.
May God give us eyes to perceive, ears to receive, and hearts brave enough to follow the unexpected leadings of Holy Spirit. And may we be open to receive the unexpected blessings of Jesus Christ who is determined to shake us to keep stretching and growing, to stir us to get into good trouble, to love us so much that we might finally be free enough from fear that we can create communities and ultimately a whole world where no one is afraid to show their true face, to tell their story, to offer their gifts. What a wonderful world that will be!
https://foundryumc.org/
Who Is My Family?
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC June 6, 2021, second Sunday after Pentecost. “The Call: Good Trouble” series.
Text: Mark 3:20-35
Jesus was a master at getting into “good trouble.” In Mark’s account the rumblings begin that time four people dug through the roof to lower their friend into Jesus’ healing presence. And Jesus simply does what Jesus does, he releases the friend from paralyzing guilt, with words of forgiveness and affirmation of the man’s agency to rise and be free. (Mk 2:1-12) There were some scribes there that day who were concerned about all this, evidently because it challenged their understanding of God and of what kinds of healing activity humans can do. The case against Jesus continues to build when he is caught eating with sinners and tax collectors—those deemed hostile and unruly in matters of religion and national loyalty. (Mk 2:15-16) The questions and tests keep coming and Jesus is tracked and watched as if he’s a criminal—folks just wait to catch him in a scenario they could use to accuse him. (Mk 3:2)
But Jesus’ words and actions continue to draw crowds—as we hear at the beginning of our text today, so many people to engage there’s no time to eat! //
Jesus was just being himself. Jesus was just doing what he was created and called to do. His identity and his power stirred up controversy and trouble.
And it wasn’t just the religious folk who had concerns. We hear at the beginning that Jesus’ “family” comes to “restrain” Jesus. And a brief textual note here: verse 21 is a very ambiguous phrase in the original Greek. Some translations refer not to “family” but to Jesus’ “friends,” or “kinsmen,” or “his own people”(tribe? region? nation?) At the end of our text (3:31-35), the language is very clear that Jesus’ mother and siblings arrive—his blood family. All this to say, it is not unreasonable to suggest that Jesus was stirring things up in his immediate family, in his broader community of friends and “tribe” AND in the religious community.
And what we see happening in our passage for today is a familiar tactic of response from the human playbook across time when someone is causing good trouble: slander the person and gaslight the people, appealing to their religious and moral scruples, using archetypes that trigger fear. And this is often to distance ourselves from or undermine the acceptance of people we don’t understand, who threaten our sense of what is right, of what’s familiar, or who we fear will take something away from us.
The initial verses of our passage might reflect Jesus’ friends and hometown community being concerned about his well-being in the midst of crowds, taking on so much, thinking he can do something about all that suffering, and being identified as a threat to the powers that be in the process. Or they might have been embarrassed by the chatter about Jesus on whatever functioned as social media at the time. Regardless, the text is clear that whoever these people are, they come to “restrain” Jesus, believing he is “out of his mind.”
The scribes pile on with the claim that Jesus is possessed, that he “has” Beelzebul, is filled with evil, and his actions are driven by the evil one. Jesus is literally “demonized” by those speaking for religion.
Jesus’ response to this is to simply point out the absurdly illogical nature of the scribes’ assertion. Why would Satan destroy Satan? And then we get to three verses that have puzzled people for centuries. What is all this business about blaspheming against the Holy Spirit and eternal sin?
I found it helpful to look at the Greek word translated blasphemy—βλασφημία blasphémia—which means speaking ill of that which is good, failing to acknowledge what is truly good, defaming, reviling, slandering... Another way the word is described is as calling good evil and evil good.
Jesus is clear in verse 28 that people will be forgiven their sin and blasphemies. Then in verse 29 things get confusing. In the Greek, verse 29 does NOT include the word “never” (οὐδέποτε; oudepote). The line says whoever “shall blaspheme”—which might be understood as “when” you blaspheme—there is “not” forgiveness. Jesus isn’t mincing words here, to be sure. But the issue is less about damning people to a state of “eternal sin” and more about calling people to stop doing the thing that will always disconnect us from God and others, namely, to reject, ignore, or deny the good gifts of Holy Spirit at work in others and in the world around us. Stop trying to tell people that something is good when it’s clearly harmful and that something is dangerous when it is clearly life-giving. When and as long as you continue in this behavior, you leave yourself in a state of disconnection, hamartia (ἁμαρτία), you are missing the mark, you are sinning. And this kind of sin has eternal consequences.
Jesus was accused of having “an unclean spirit.” (v. 30) And Jesus simply points out this is not true. Such an accusation is blasphemy, calling evil that which is good. Jesus isn’t filled with an unclean spirit but with Holy Spirit. The acts of compassion, mercy, and healing that are drawing crowds are not fueled by evil intent or devils but by love and justice. Jesus won’t let others define who he is or call evil or unclean what is beautiful and powerful in him.
On this first Sunday of LGBTQ Pride month, this is a beautiful thing to remember. All of us are made in the image of God and Jesus reveals to us what it looks like to bear that image fully in this world. Part of following Jesus is to emulate the one who refused to be defined by others’ attacks and misunderstanding, but rather claimed his identity and his power and offered both to the world in love. Today, again we proclaim without equivocation that LGBTQ people are beautiful and beloved of God—no matter what slanderous, blasphemous things people or church or family members have said. To call a clearly fabulous, loving, powerful, smart, creative, faithful person who happens to be LGBT or Q “evil” is pretty stunning. It is also unnecessary, damaging, and blasphemy. It is calling good, evil. As long as this blasphemy is allowed, as long as it continues, sin is propagated.
For ages, people have used that old playbook though—against all sorts of people. We’ve long been trained to think of some people as “bad,” as outsiders, and as certainly NOT part of the family. Sometimes this is overt training, other times it’s learned through the way society is organized.
Many of you will know that I grew up in very small town Oklahoma. My town, Kiefer, is located 20 miles southwest of Tulsa. I moved back to Tulsa after seminary and served on staff of a UMC for a couple of years before moving to DC in 1998. Over the past weeks, I’ve been newly grieved and angered at my experience of growing up in a place where the worst act of racist violence in our nation’s history occurred and not being taught anything about it. In case you don’t know, last weekend was the 100 year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, when the thriving, affluent African American community in the Greenwood District—also known as “Black Wall Street”—was attacked and looted by a white mob, its citizens assaulted, countless persons killed, and buildings burned to the ground. Lives, livelihoods, and legacies were destroyed in a matter of hours. “In the wake of the violence, 35 city blocks lay in charred ruins, more than 800 people were treated for injuries and contemporary reports of deaths began at 36. Historians now believe as many as 300 people may have died.”
I remember once, as my mother and I were driving along I-44 through the city, she told me that the area adjacent to where we were driving burned down—a whole section of the city. I think she told me that African Americans lived there. But maybe I’ve added that part. To be clear, I don’t blame my mother. I watched the PBS documentary Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten (shout out to Foundry’s own Michel Martin for her narration of the film) and was struck to learn that some Black residents of the area only learned of the atrocity years later when, in 2001, a Oklahoma state commission issued the first, comprehensive official account of what happened.
This is confirmation of the depth and breadth of the intentional cover up, the gaslighting, the erasure from memory of an experience of such magnitude through fear and control and the power of the pen and the pulpit. No one was ever charged with any crime. And, as often happens, it was the residents of Greenwood who were blamed for inciting the “riot.” As the Rev. Floyd Brown, an African American pastor in Oklahoma who himself didn’t learn of the massacre until 20 years ago said, “I think the ingrained despair caused people not really to discuss what took place…and the hurt that they felt in the aftermath.”
This is certainly not the first time I’ve pondered and lamented the radical racial segregation and silence about race in the place in which I was formed and the ways that has affected and infected my perception of reality. Certainly, there are good and beautiful things about my home and upbringing. But I was kept from knowing. Growing up in a culture that pretends something didn’t happen when it did or is silent about violence inflicted or lies about what is real and keeps whole groups of people separated from one another so that some don’t even know the others exist nearby and—like everywhere—allows casual racist references and images and slurs to appear in the regular cadence of sight and sound—all that, along with the racial tensions reverberating through the atmosphere in the Tulsa area, under the surface, like a mass grave…all that has to do something to people. Over 100, 1000, 10,000 years or to eternity, as long as this kind of thing is allowed, as long as it continues, sin is propagated, maybe even something we could call eternal sin…it is soaked up into the minds, hearts, and spirits of unsuspecting people like a virus. And the way is always open for another massacre.
For all of us (and it is all of us in one way or another) who have been taught in various ways, consciously or not, to separate, to slander, to ignore, to deny, or demonize any person or group of people—the good news is that we can wake up and work to live and love differently by the grace and power of Holy Spirit.
In the final frame of our Gospel passage today, Jesus’ mother, brothers, and sisters come calling for him. When he hears they’re present, he doesn’t renounce or rebuke them in any way. Jesus was speaking in parables, teaching, when the fam arrived and, as I read the text, Jesus continues teaching, using the moment as an opportunity to bring his point home. The point is about family—about what connects us, not what divides.
Those who slander Jesus and whisper lies and accusations against him sow division—likely because of religious loyalty and gatekeeping or because of tribal or national loyalty or gatekeeping or because of discomfort, fear, or jealousy. But here’s the thing: Jesus is not out of his mind—he is in God’s mind, has God’s mind, has God in mind. Jesus is not filled with demonic spirits—but with Holy Spirit. And people through the ages may try to undermine Jesus’ mission of saving love, forgiveness of sins, and reconciliation, and liberation, but he’s not having it. Jesus came to dismantle the tribal and religious boundaries that could ever name a beloved child of God as 3/5ths a person or as abomination or as unworthy of God’s love and grace. Jesus came to tear down the walls of division, to break the silence of injustice, and to usher in a whole new creation. Jesus created a new, always open border when he said, “My family is anyone who seeks to live and love in the wisdom and way of God.” (v.35)
By God’s grace, we receive this good news and the call to follow Jesus. If we do, there’s a good chance we will find ourselves in (good) trouble. But that trouble is for a purpose—to live in and work for the freedom of the Kin-dom of God. And when, as a result, people challenge you, “unfriend” you on FaceBook, treat you like you are ridiculous, naïve, uninformed, or downright sinful for where you stand or for who you are, remember that you are in good company. Jesus has been there, done that. And because Jesus has shown us the way, we rejoice in the truth that we are ourselves beloved children of God, siblings in the Beloved Clan, not only given a place at the family table, but honored as participants in the work of widening the circle, in making more and more room eternally, until humankind from every race, gender identity, culture, orientation, ethnicity, ability, and creed can sing and mean it: WE ARE FAMILY!
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Send Me?
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC May 30, 2021, Trinity Sunday. “The Call: Good Trouble” series.
Text: Isaiah 6:1-8
The late U.S. Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis often told the story of asking his parents and other elders about the racist signs he witnessed all around. He said, “They would say, ‘boy, that’s the way it is. Don't get in the way and don’t get in trouble.’ But when I was 15 years old, in 1955, I heard of Rosa Parks. I heard the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the radio. The action of Rosa Parks and the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired me to find a way to get in the way. And I got in the way. And I got in trouble, ‘good trouble.’” He repeated these words often and they have become a kind of call to all people of faith and conscience in America. Again and again he urged, “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” Over the next weeks, we’ll explore scripture with an eye toward God’s call in our lives as individuals and as a congregation—and how we, as followers of Jesus, are called to get in some good trouble in order to love God, love each other, and change the world. I hope you’ll use this time to reflect on what God may be saying to YOU and to listen for particular invitations or challenges each week. We begin today with a message about call in the midst of crisis. //
Let us pray… God of justice and of new life, open our hearts and the ancient text of scripture by the power of Holy Spirit that we might receive what you have for us today. Amen.
I’ve recently started watching the television show “The Walking Dead.” On the surface, it’s a story of a zombie apocalypse. But more than that, so far as I can tell from the 7 episodes I’ve seen so far, it’s a story of human relationship, ethics, and the gifts and challenges of life in community. It’s also an opportunity to explore the different ways people react and respond in the midst of crisis. We, of course, don’t anticipate a zombie apocalypse anytime soon, but I have found that as a person who’s interested in human behavior, community dynamics, and spiritual and personal growth, watching the show has led me the question I often ask when confronted with a challenging human scenario: “What would I be like if that happened to me?
The truth is, we have been in a multi-layered crisis over the past year and a half, a multi-phased crisis, a crisis that’s spun out and highlighted multiple other crises. And some of us are experiencing personal or interpersonal crises of various kinds. What are you like in the midst of crisis? What are we as a congregation like? What do we do? How do you respond?
Theologian and spiritual teacher, Elisabeth Koenig writes, “The anxiety-ridden energy of a crisis contains potential for change. Confronted squarely and reflectively in the presence of God, the energy of crisis can expand our sense of who we are.”
Crisis and the anxiety that rides in on it may not be things we want to welcome into our lives or spend energy on. But there are moments in our lives as persons and communities—like right now—when we cannot avoid crisis, when we can’t pretend that everything’s “fine.” In these moments, the question becomes, who and how will you be in that space?
I imagine I don’t need to outline all the ways that crisis and anxiety can lead to defensiveness, blaming, confusion, reactivity, distorted perception, paranoia, breakdowns in communication and thoughtful engagement with others, and personal panic and inertia. Dissociation from self and disconnection from others often happens. Fight, flight, and freeze are common. All of this can lead to pretty unpleasant things.
Spiritual wisdom from many traditions—and certainly Christian wisdom—encourages us to resist the urge to run away; we’re encouraged to be aware of what’s happening around us and what comes up in us; to observe and to try to name as best we can what’s going on; to breathe, to pray, to bring all of our feelings, reactions, anxiety, fear, anger, questions—into the presence of God and to ask God to help us learn from them. The invitation is to hold the crisis in the larger perspective of the story of God’s liberating love and mending activity in the world, to remember that this moment is not all there is. And to intentionally remain open to what God will reveal to us about ourselves, others, or the realities and world around us. Crisis can be profoundly clarifying.
Isaiah found himself in a crisis moment: King Uzziah has died after reigning for 52 years and, even though during that time the people of Judah rebelled against God (Is 1:2ff) in all the familiar ways—injustice, greed, hypocrisy, lies, arrogance, and power grabs (Is 1, 5)—things had been relatively stable. King Uzziah had managed to hold the nation together.
But now things feel unmoored, uncertain. The injustice that has been allowed to linger and flourish in the nation has left the people and the country vulnerable to all sorts of destruction from within and from without.
And in the year that King Uzziah died—around 738 BCE—in the midst of the national crisis and with anxieties rolling down like an everflowing stream, Isaiah had a vision of God. The hem of the divine garment—just the hem!—filled the entire temple. And seraphs—strange six-winged beings who hid their faces and their feet as they flew—called out to one another proclaiming that the whole earth is filled with God’s glory (no wonder the hem is all that’s visible in the temple!). Things become shaky and filled with smoke.
It’s a beautiful, terrifying divine encounter in the midst of a crisis. And Isaiah could have shut down or allowed fear to send him running. But he stays present. He identifies and names what comes up in him. He feels lost—perhaps uncertain of whether he will survive this moment—for he is aware of both the sin of the nation and his own sin. He acknowledges that God is present in the mix of it all—that he has “seen” God, a thing that has meant death for others in the lore of Jewish religious history. Just then, Isaiah is touched with the purifying fire of God’s mercy. His sin and guilt are “blotted out.” God has not destroyed Isaiah in this moment. God has cleansed him, liberated him.
Hear again the words I shared at the beginning: “The anxiety-ridden energy of a crisis contains potential for change. Confronted squarely and reflectively in the presence of God, the energy of crisis can expand our sense of who we are.”
In this anxiety-ridden moment of crisis in Judah, in the midst of the extraordinary encounter with God, Isaiah discovers that he is strong enough to stay present in the midst of fear, uncertainty, and guilt; he learns that he is forgiven, that he is free, and that he is called. When he overhears God asking the question “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Isaiah says, “Here I am, send me!”
If you read on in chapter 6 of Isaiah, you will see that after Isaiah has volunteered himself, he learns that the work he is called to is impossible. The people, he is told WILL NOT LISTEN TO HIM. It’s a kind of “things will get much worse before they get better” kind of calling. And the getting better part isn’t really assured.
This reality might have led Isaiah to turn tail and run! But he doesn’t. He simply makes himself available and present to God—even as he aware of his vulnerability and sin. And as the scriptures reveal, Isaiah just kept reminding people of God’s love, God’s way of justice, God’s faithfulness, God’s promises, God’s desire for relationship—even when they couldn’t or wouldn’t receive the message or respond.
Not many of us would rush in to volunteer for a job where there’s a high probability that we won’t see the results we desire or when we know that people will likely reject us or our message or whatever it is we’re offering. But, as Rev. Dr. King said, “The time is always right to do what is right.” Which is to say, a divine calling may very well mean doing what is called for in the moment simply because it is right not because it will have immediate positive effects.
John Lewis wrote, “Take a long, hard look down the road you will have to travel once you have made a commitment to work for change. Know that this transformation will not happen right away. Change often takes time. It rarely happens all at once. In the movement, we didn't know how history would play itself out. When we were getting arrested and waiting in jail or standing in unmovable lines on the courthouse steps, we didn’t know what would happen, but we knew it had to happen… We used to say that ours is not the struggle of one day, one week, or one year…Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part.”
The call for some of us may not be to agitate for justice in the public square like King and Lewis but to do what is right in much less visible ways. I just had a conversation with one of my clergy colleagues who shared that the double digit years she’s investing in her congregation are primarily spent in ways that most people will never see or even understand…the deep work that happens under and behind the scenes to bring healing, raise consciousness, and adjust systems into more just and faithful shapes. Deep culture change in community—as well as deep personal change in our lives—is often about the work that happens day in and out that others may know nothing about but that ultimately creates openings for liberation and new life. And often—in community—the new life may emerge once we’re gone and without anyone knowing we played any part in its flourishing.
Whether public and with high visibility or behind the scenes and known only to a few, we may be called to do things that scare us or that we believe are beyond our capacity. We may be asked to step up and move forward in a relationship, a vocation, a ministry, a leadership role, when the way is terrifyingly shaky and unclear—like a shaking structure filled with smoke. In my own life, I have found that what I heard Rev. Dr. Ianther Mills preach at Asbury the Sunday before I started my ministry here at Foundry is true: “What God brings you to, God brings you through.” All our fears and guilt and insecurity and worry about failure are no match for the grace and power of God working in and through us if we are willing, like Isaiah, to stay present and discern what God is revealing in our lives and community.
Crises of any kind will evoke lots of challenging feelings and reactions. Rather than rejecting them, can we confront them “squarely and reflectively in the presence of God” and be willing to discern how God is calling us, revealing to us more of who we are, and beckoning us into deeper faith, hope, and love? Maybe you’ve already heard or are hearing God calling you in the midst of crisis to affect some kind of change in your life or in your work or in your relationship or in the larger society. Will you, like Isaiah, be willing to respond, “Send Me!”?
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SayHisName
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC, May 23, 2021, Pentecost Sunday.
Texts: Acts 2:1-21, John 15:26-27
First there was that time when Spirit moved across the face of the deep at the beginning of all things; Spirit blew as wind, as breath, ruach, and creation came into being.
Then there was the way Spirit rested upon Moses and Joshua giving strength and guidance to lead from slavery to freedom.
Prophets down through the ages were filled with Spirit as they called people back to God’s way of love and justice.
Ezekiel prophesied Spirit breathing new life into dry bones of a broken community. (Ez 37.1-14)
Joel prophesies of a time—after a great suffering, a time of turning, of restoration and new hope—a time when Spirit will be poured out upon all flesh—women and men, young and old, people of every social status and caste. (Joel 2.28-29)
John the Baptizer prophesied that the One who was coming would baptize with Holy Spirit and fire.
Spirit descended like a dove at Jesus’ Baptism and naming as beloved, that moment when Jesus crossed the threshold into a new life of public witness and ministry, filled with Spirit.
And in Jesus’ first recorded sermon, he took up the text from Isaiah that read,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Lk 4:18-19)
Before Jesus died, he told his disciples that “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit…will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you…the Advocate will testify on my behalf. You also are to testify…” (Jn 14:26, 15:26-27) Before Jesus left the earth for the second time (we heard that story last week), he told his followers to stay in Jerusalem and to wait for the promise: baptism with Holy Spirit.
And then the day of Pentecost arrives, a Jewish day of festival celebrating God’s provision in the harvest and on that same day, we are told, the time is full, the heavens can no longer hold the weight of the power that wants to flow forth, and Spirit breaks through like a rushing wind and rain—pouring down upon those who had stayed together, waiting and watching and trusting that the promise would come. And Spirit’s power flowed, filling every single one, including all, excluding none. Spirit power flowed in all the ways She eternally does, inspiring bold leadership and liberation from injustice, fear, and division, giving guidance and prophetic speech to those who feel uncertain and unequipped, filling dry bones with life and recreating the body of broken community. In the wake of this revolution of grace, the people are soaked in a baptism of Belovedness, on fire with the life and love they are given, and newly anointed for ministry as none other than the body of Christ!
This moment is a significant turning point in the story of our God’s activity in the world. Obviously, the day of Pentecost is NOT the entry point for Holy Spirit into the story! But in this moment, God is doing a new thing. Spirit is, once again, inspiring a new creation, what we often call the “birth of the church.”
Recently, I had an email appear in my inbox with the heading, “After 2020 every church is a new church.” And on this Pentecost Sunday, I’m laser focused on what it means for the church not just to celebrate a birthday but to experience a fresh pentecost—to be a new church. Don’t panic! I’m not saying that Foundry won’t be Foundry. After 2020 every church is assessing the shape and mode of congregational life after quarantine. But, beyond and deeper even than that, it is so clear we need renewal—in the United Methodist Church, the Church universal, and in our own congregation. We know there are things to be addressed, injustice and divisions and demonization and encrusted systemic racism, misogyny, homophobia, and every other “ism” that we humans have perfected. And the world is in a crucible moment, a moment of birth pangs. There is a push for newness, for change, for justice, for equity, for peace and friendship and healing and collaboration and common sense—both within and outside the church. And there is pushback and backlash to what is trying to be born. We need Spirit power to give us fresh energy and insight, creative vision, and new courage for such a time as this. As we stand in the midst of the crucible fire and the winds of change, on the brink of re-engaging in both familiar and new ways of gathering as a congregation, what does it mean for us to experience new life as the church?
Over the past years, a common hashtag on social media is #SayHerName or #SayHisName. This is a call to remember and to lift the names of persons who have been killed by acts of racist violence. It is a rallying cry to not let their lives be forgotten or their deaths be in vain. Saying the names of those who’ve been killed is a way to rouse energy and stay clear about the work to be done for justice and creation of beloved community. And as I think about where we are in this moment, I hear myself saying “Say his name!” The name I’m talking about is Jesus.
A couple of years ago, I gave a lecture at Drew Theological School and another presenter was Rev. Dr. Otis Moss, III who brought to my attention the Barna studies which show broad appreciation for Jesus. I was struck by the ways the studies show a majority of people have positive feelings and thoughts about Jesus. Though something I’ve found in many so-called liberal churches is that people don’t want to talk about Jesus—Christ maybe, but not Jesus. For some it’s because they associate the name with forms of church they want nothing to do with. For others, Jesus is too specific; people might feel excluded. I appreciate that these perspectives may come from a lovely sensitivity to friends of other faiths or grow out of centuries of bad Christology. But mercy, we throw Jesus out (the one folks respect and are drawn to) and then wonder why all our brilliant fancy programs and plans and organizational models aren’t bringing growth and transformation. I’m not saying the name is a magic word, but the scandal of particularity that is Jesus, the cross of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, the in-a-real-incarnate-bodiness of Jesus, the love of God embodied in Jesus, the justice of Jesus—that gives us our most practical and concrete example of what our lives and our life together can be when we open ourselves to be Spirit-infused and born anew. The name of Jesus is our rallying cry, the life, teachings, death, and resurrection, are what keep us clear about the work we are called to do and who we are called to be.
We are called and created by the power of Spirit to be the Body of Christ, by the grace of God and in the name and Way of Jesus, to offer a vision for life and life together that sets people free and sets hearts on fire with compassion and courage and a willingness to sacrifice things, face hard truths, and even suffer for the good of another. We are called by the grace of God to break into the chaos of this moment with a grounding word of identity and connection, into the stress and strain and striving with a word and way of peace. We are called to remind people that the worst thing is never the last thing, to stand up to the dehumanizing “isms” in ourselves and others with the truth that will finally set us all free; we are called right into the center of the demonizing fray to proclaim that all human life has dignity and sacred worth because all are children of God.
I’m not suggesting that the church is the only community called to engage in such a way or that the church has all of this sorted. Lord knows we’re so often a part of the problem—agents of empire rather than of Spirit-fueled justice and mending. But we as the church have a particular call and it’s important and it’s needed. I’m suggesting that to be new really means to remember what’s been our call from the beginning, to #SayHisName, to testify to the way of life we are given in and through Jesus by the power of Holy Spirit, to cultivate a community of faith that’s at least trying to be humble and wise and sacrificial and just—a community that creates space for persons to become more human and less reptilian, to become more like Jesus.
My dear colleague Melissa Maher serves a community in Houston, Texas called “Mercy Street.” The community is diverse in many ways including a large population of folks in recovery from addiction. She says, “We call ourselves Hope Dealers. Former dope dealers… now connecting to the Hope Supplier.” Mercy Street’s self-understanding includes things like “we are all works in progress,” “this is a messy community where we will sometimes disappoint one another,” “we don’t run from community, instead we lean-in and trust that giving ourselves towards love in Christ really can make a difference in our lives and our relationships.” I want to be part of a “Hope Dealer” church.
Some folk may never be part of such Christian communions, having their own deep and beautiful spiritual paths and practices or bearing too many scars from experiencing perversions of the Christian story. But even for those who will never actively participate, simply knowing that such communions exist is a powerful witness, a testimony that there is a God in the world who still cares and can accomplish miracles after all. Because as I once heard someone say, a miracle isn’t when God does what we want, but when we do what God wants! So let this day be a fresh Pentecost for us. Let’s claim and gather around the simple gifts of our faith; let’s speak, live, act, give, and pray in the name of Jesus, and by the power of Spirit, experience a miracle. Even new life. May it be so!
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Spirit…Power
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC, May 16, 2021, Ascension Sunday. “Give Me a Word” series.
Text: Acts 1:1-11
It’s a time of transition. Things have been painful—lots of injustice, death, grief, confusion, and fear. And then hope appears—concrete reason for hope appears!
That’s our story! It’s our story right now as we turn the corner from this past 14 months of multiple pandemics and begin to receive information allowing us to begin mobilizing activities that have been off-limits for so long. It’s also the story we receive today in scripture.
The followers of Jesus have been through it! They experienced so many highs and lows on the journey with Jesus. They watched as he was humiliated and killed. They thought he was going to be the one to sit on the throne of David in Jerusalem, to fulfill a promise to restore Israel’s political power—to free the people from colonial, imperial subjugation. And those hopes seemed to die along with Jesus who’d inspired, taught, encouraged, empowered and mobilized a whole movement. But then, hope reappears! Jesus is back, resurrected, and, as it says in Acts 1:3, presents himself alive and speaks about the kindom of God for 40 days.
Notice that even after all this has transpired, the people were still singularly focused on what they’d always been focused on: “Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Another way to say it—are you going to finally give us back what we lost, the old way of being? They were looking back and looking only at their own tribe, their own people. They seem to have missed Jesus’ consistent focus not on the restored kingdom of Israel but rather the vision and practice of the Kindom of God. Jesus doesn’t give them much of an answer to their specific question, but instead gives them this word: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8) Short hand for this: You your call is to be a witness to EVERYBODY, whether or not you like them, trust them, or even know them.
Now, if I’d been in that group, I would have had lots of questions. // And I would have been out of luck. Because just then, a fog, a cloud rolls in (the presence of God often shows up in clouds) and Jesus is lifted out of their sight. He’s gone. Again. And there are no clear answers. Just Jesus’s direction to wait on Holy Spirit. Just wait for the promise: Spirit…power…
The disciples’ hope gets interrupted by the unforeseen complication of Jesus’ leaving and the aggravating reality that things are NOT going be as they were in the past, that the future is yet uncertain, and that they—Jesus’ followers—are gonna have to figure out what to do on the other side of waiting.
No wonder they didn’t know where to focus. No wonder they needed to be reminded by the mystery men in white to come back down to earth. Because all that stuff is difficult to deal with. And, wow, does it feel resonant with where we are as a congregation and people of faith in this moment.
First of all, we’re tired. We’ve been through a lot—some of us more than others, but all of us have been through it. Our emotional, physical, and spiritual reservoirs are low. Patience is likely thin. Many of us are languishing. Some of us are depressed or experiencing high anxiety. Many are grieving losses of family and friends due to COVID or other causes—most of whom we’ve been unable to memorialize and celebrate in traditional ways. We’re faced with a politicized public health crisis that has complicated our ability to trust official communications. And I could go on and on with the varieties of experiences that contribute to the challenging state of our collective mental and emotional health in this present moment.
And now: HOPE! We are hearing that masks can come off if we’re vaccinated and religious communities can gather without restrictions on numbers and on it goes.
It is absolutely understandable that many of us are singularly focused on getting back to church, getting back to the old, familiar ways of gathering, and worshipping. What’s to stop us?
I realized this past week that the shift in message and guidance feels a bit like whiplash—from high alert and multiple safety protocols, to no holds barred. I will admit that, as a leader, it is pretty disorienting. I’ve been trying to stay grounded in the values that have guided us so well through the pandemic—prioritizing health and safety, following the science, and discerning what it means in each phase of the pandemic to love God and neighbor.
To that last point, here are several things for us to keep in mind. We know that there are some who’ve been vaccinated for months while others have yet to be able to get vaccinated. And, as will be true in any human community, there are a variety of levels of risk tolerance or aversion among us. Some folk are finding it very anxiety producing to re-engage after the relative quiet and stillness of the past year, others were ready to fling themselves into the crowded human spaces months ago. All this to say, it’s important to remember that how we are feeling or needing is not necessarily how others are feeling or needing.
Another thing to consider is that some things will be different as we return to in-person worship. And much of what, exactly, will be different is still up in the air because plans are not yet finalized around all the details. Believe it or not, there are so many details to consider, discern, and plan for.
And, since we have valued keeping everyone protected, our staff, committee chairs, outside contractors, and the like have not been in the building except in highly limited ways and only to assure that our beloved spaces were OK over the better part of the year. So at this point, there are some repairs and systems that need care prior to our full return—both for safety and to support a robust hybrid—that is, in-person and digital, Foundry community.
It may be difficult for some of us to imagine—because it’s not readily perceived— just how critically important and significant the call is to set some new priorities that celebrate and connect with our growing digital community whose presence blesses our worship and ministry from places all over the country and world.
Just as with the original disciples in our text, what for some may be a “hope high” gets interrupted by Jesus’ uttering the word, “wait”—and his unwillingness to look back to an old, limited vision but instead saying, “witness” beyond your well-known community. And we, like the first disciples, are confronted with the aggravating reality that things are NOT going be exactly as they were in the past, that the future is yet uncertain, and that, on the other side of waiting, we are gonna have to figure out what to do and how and when to do it.
And all of this from a place of depletion.
Except Jesus is never one to leave us without help. The promise is that Spirit will give us power to do what we are called to do! And this is our WORD for today: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you!”
Spirit will give us power to be patient with one another.
Spirit will give us power to think beyond our own comfort or needs as we try to love our neighbor.
Spirit will give us power to confess and to forgive one another when the stress, exhaustion, and struggle leads us to miss the mark.
Spirit will give us power to be creative and careful and efficient in our re-entry plans.
Spirit will give us power to be open-minded about changes in our shared life that are required for the next season.
Spirit will give us power to pitch in to help with emerging needs as we re-engage in person.
Spirit will give us power to support one another in our various places of pain and struggle.
Spirit will give us power to be gentle with ourselves when we mess up or feel negative or afraid or unmotivated.
Spirit will give us power to witness in old and in new ways to the power of resurrection life, the power of God’s saving, new life-giving love, the power of Jesus’ embrace that draws the circle ever wider.
A wider circle, as we know full well at Foundry, doesn’t mean that we lose our place, it simply means that we get to share life with even more members of the Beloved clan. Spirit gives us power to do that! Thanks be to Jesus for the promise. Thanks be to God for this Foundry community in which—through every change and challenge—we get to do the hard, holy work of loving God, loving each other, and changing the world.
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Friends May 9, 2021 Rev. Dr. Kelly Grimes Associate Pastor and Director of Hospitality and Congregational Care
John 15:9-17 “15:9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.
15:10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.
15:11 I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. 15:12 "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 15:13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. 15:14 You are my friends if you do what I command you.
15:15 I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.
15:16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.
15:17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”
Kelly: GREETINGS FRIENDS!! On this day, I acknowledge the one who I call Mother, Susan Grimes, Daughter of Artie Mae. For those of you who are just tuning in, you’ll find links for fully engaging in our service in our Facebook and YouTube comments or on our website www.foundryumc.org. If you are in need ASL interpretation, we invite you to join us at www.foundryumc.org/asl.
"In every community, there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there is the power to do it. – Marianne Williamson We continue in Jesus’s farewell speech to those whom he loves. Last week we talked about vines and branches connectivity and how the connectivity was god’s plan that we should move into beloved community. Jesus continues this discussion by calling on the listeners to abide and keep. “15:9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.15:10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. 15:11 I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. Abiding is best described as staying in a place Long enough to soak it in. Jesus wants us to do just that in his love. To be covered and surrounded by it that it is our main focus. There’s an iconic picture of Muhammad Ali as he is preparing for his next boxing match. He is submerged in water and he is in a boxer’s stance. He is not fighting the water he is not attempting to tell the water what to do. He is simply abiding in the water. If you can abide in something, it stands to reason that it’s very nature is too big for any of us to control. That’s this love that God offers to us. It can be shared but it cannot be controlled by humanity. And it’s not the warm and fuzzy ideas of love but it is “agape” love. It is God’s love. It’s important that we set the tone for what does love looks like because we can treat it like it’s a vacation - only on special occasions, only at certain times, and only for a certain span of time.
The people of the Christian community near the end of the first century CE that, in addition to growing oppression by the Roman Empire, was experiencing serious conflict with the Jewish synagogue is the context in which this message is given. We cannot separate the context from the message. And so, they are political and community implications for this call to love. Some would say that politics has nothing to do with the message Jesus is offering us today. Let me remind you that the person speaking, namely Jesus, was resurrected from his political assassination based on the attempt to control oppressed people. And so how we care for those who are oppressed in 2021 is directly connected with that. How we vote, what are community state and national budgets pay for, who we exclude from receiving justice, what we teach our children about the institutions in our country and our world. Because as followers of Christ, this was a call to love is the very core of the community. Abiding in the love Jesus offers us is at the core of what will be able to community for us. 1 John 4:16b, 19, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.... We love because he first loved us.” No shade to warm and fuzzy love. Jesus is calling us to go deeper than that.
It’s the love that will make everywhere we look be through the eyes of this love we are surrounded and covered by. It is like your skin on your body – covering everything. It sounds easy doesn’t it? The love that God gives to Jesus, Jesus gives to us. Sounds great wonderful terrific! Will take it! Thanks Jesus! Now here comes the hard part: the command that will cause us to go from just receiving to giving. The command that will cause us to have to think of others and not just ourselves. We have to love one another as Jesus loves us.
15:12 "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 15:13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. 15:14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. Oh good grief Jesus! We were doing great! That’s great agape love that you have received you have shared with us. And now you’re calling us to share that same love with each other? And there are no other parameters for who gets to receive that love? When you say one another, exactly who are we talking about? Now may be easy to respond, “everyone!”. Of course, Jesus means everyone. They are times when it looks easy and sometimes it’s very hard. In the question that I always propose to myself and I propose to you is, “When it’s time to live in the hardest of circumstances are we quick to erase certain people from the list of everyone?”
What, then, does it mean for us today to be Christ’s friends? Bonhoeffer states it this way: “The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us”.
15:15 I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 15:16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 15:17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”
I have a younger brother. His name is Alan. We are nearly 10 months apart. When we were little the night before December 25 we will always charge to go to bed because our chimney would be occupied by someone who would come to do things that would make us happy on December 25. One year I heard one of my parental’s attempting to assemble something on December 24 a peek through the door and realized the true givers of the gifts. My day I was trying to put together my Barbie dream house. Upon this Epiphany, I went right to my brother and shared this new information that I had regarding this season. Some people may say, oh you spoiled it for your brother. I like to look at it as sharing the wealth of information so that we’re all on the same page.
Jesus has shown us who the giver of the gift are. Because he sees us as friends. If we see ourselves Jesus’ servants, we may be attempting to avoid the greater mutuality that Christ seeks with us as his friends. In other words, there may be something in us that says I don’t want to know, I don’t want to see what you see. I want to take the gifts without the responsibility.
And for us living in a culture that celebrates self-autonomy and choice, these words may call us back to an awareness of God’s initiative in seeking us out, gathering us into a community, and sending us into the world. “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” – African Proverb
We’ve got miles to go, friends! Let’s go together. Let us pray... Dear God, Thank you for your love!
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Abide
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC, May 2, 2021, the fifth Sunday of Easter.
Text: John 15:1-8
Her name was Grace. She was one of the first folks I met as I arrived with my friends in the small village in Tamil Nadu, South India. Though I imagine Grace may very well have died long ago, I’ve thought of her often as I take in the horrific headlines and images from the toll COVID is taking in India right now. In the caste system of India, Grace was an “untouchable.” She was poor, her skin a deep ebony, and she was literally “out-caste”—out of the caste system…beneath it. Grace also had the unhappy circumstance of being unmarried; her family had no money for a dowry and, as a result, Grace was destined to be on her own, with little or no support from anyone else. But we learned as we talked with her—in broken English—that she made a way for herself by doing sewing for folks in the village. She shared her home, a ten by ten foot cement dwelling, with six other family members.
In 1994, our Liberation Theology seminar group from Yale Divinity School went to this village to experience an Indian community that was predominantly Christian—a rarity in a country that was at least at that time only 2-3% Christian (and this one was also a community of “untouchables” or “Dalits”). We were planning to stay overnight in the church building that was on the small dirt square of the community. But late in the day, after we had worshiped at an evening Bible Study, Grace approached me with an astonishing offer. This woman who barely had enough to feed and care for herself, invited me into her home. She invited me to stay with her for the night. And so I did. She gave me tea and shared stories of her life. And that night, I slept on the hard dirt floor of that ten by ten room, with 7 other people and a chicken. In the morning, Grace boiled water (a rare and precious commodity!) for me so that I could brush my teeth. I don’t know that I’ve ever received such an invitation before or since or experienced such sacrificial hospitality and care.
Grace invited me into her home, into her life. And as I left, she called me “sister.”
Today, Jesus invites us into his life. Jesus says, “Abide in me.”
We learn today that Jesus is like a vine, green, full of life, reaching down into the depths of the earth and soaring upward toward the light of the sun. Jesus is like a vine and we are like branches of the vine. When connected to that strong, green, vital stem, we flourish and grow. We produce fruit. But we know that the branches only bear fruit because they receive nourishment through the stem, through the vine. If they are cut off from that source of life and strength, they grow dry and lifeless; they die; they produce no fruit. And sometimes, branches need to be pruned—things need to be let go, cleared out, in order for that branch to produce fruit at its full capacity.
This powerful image teaches us about what it means to abide in Jesus Christ. “Abide” is not a word that we hear that often these days. And because of that; some modern translations of scripture choose to use other words instead. But this word “abide” is a great word, a rich word. To “abide” means more than to “be with,” it also means to “stand with,” to be “faithful to,” to “stand firm,” and “never to leave.” And in the image of the vine and the branches, we hear Jesus’ words to us as an invitation. “Abide in me” and receive everything you need for life and for growth and for fruitfulness. Stand with me, be faithful to me, never leave me, because, if you do, you will cut yourself off from the gracious gifts of God that are your source for strength and life. Stay connected to me, trusting my life-giving support and love even in the midst of change, when you need to let things go.
While it is our choice whether to accept this invitation to stay connected and receive grace and life in Christ—we also learn today that Jesus invites us to do what he is already doing for us. Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you.” (“We love because God first loved us.”) Everything we do in relationship with Christ is a response to what Christ has already done or offered to us. Jesus “abides” in you…Jesus stands with you, in solidarity with your every struggle or suffering; Jesus is faithful to you even when you have lost faith in yourself, others, or God; Jesus will never leave you, even when you turn your back. This is the grace of God. It is nothing that we deserve because of who we are or what we have accomplished. It is just given to us free, this love of God. You didn’t make the first move—God did. And God has invited you to share the bounty, the beauty, the fruitfulness of life in Christ. In United Methodist circles, we talk about the grace of God that is present and active in our lives even before we know anything of God as “prevenient grace.” This is the grace of God present and active in our lives before—or even if we never!—“confess that Jesus is the Son of God.” (1 Jn. 4:15) Prevenient grace is Holy Spirit nudging and working in our hearts and minds and relationships to encourage us to receive the invitation to life in Christ and all that flows from that life.
Sometimes, in the course of human life things happen that lead people to disconnect—even to renounce their faith, to renounce God. Jesus doesn’t say such a choice will have no consequence—all our choices have consequences and to deliberately cut ourselves off from the source of life and love will be harmful to us. How could it not be? We can renounce the sacraments, teachings, and relationships of intentional Christian community or just take these things for granted and go through the motions as though they didn’t mean anything. We can choose to do all in our power to ignore or deny God and God’s gifts. But the promise Jesus makes is that grace abides with us no matter what. You may choose not to believe in God, but God believes in you and has chosen to love you. God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it. It won’t change. Ever.
This word comes right on time this week—at least for me. Some of you will have tuned in for this past Wednesday’s FB Live in which I talked about “languishing”—the mental state that hangs out in between flourishing and depression. Languishing is what I have labeled in this season being “COVID fine,” namely doing alright but not really at full capacity. It dulls motivation, disrupts the ability to focus, and increases the odds you’ll not get as much work done without really pushing. I am personally feeling this right now—even as I give thanks that full on depression hasn’t set in, which for me is always a possibility. I know that not all of us have been able to keep depression and anxiety at bay. A reminder for us today as we enter this mental health awareness month: there is help available for you. It is not a moral failure to admit that you need help. We all need help most of the time in one way or another. If you need resources, do not hesitate to reach out to any of your pastors and we will do all we can to help you find the support you need.
While not everyone will be struggling with mental health, I do observe that most people I know both in and out of Foundry are in a pretty volatile place emotionally. The past year with all its pandemics is catching up with all of us in one way or another. And today, we receive this word from Jesus: abide. It is a simple word, an always needed reminder, that the source of our life, flourishing, capacity to bear the fruits of love, compassion, patience, and justice is found in God. Whatever we are feeling, facing, fearing… Christ abides in us, is available right now to give us grace sufficient for every need. All we have to do is stay united with Jesus, in relationship, in solidarity, in faithfulness and love. Abide in Christ as Christ abides in you.
Twenty-seven years ago, as I left that village in South India, I was embraced by Grace. Her love and hospitality and sacrificial giving will forever be for me symbols of the free gifts of God. I didn’t do anything to deserve her attention, her trust, her love, her floorspace. She just offered it all, freely. Grace invited me into her home, into her life. And as I left, she embraced me as family; she called me “sister.” Today, Jesus invites us into his life. Jesus says, “Abide in me.” And we are embraced by grace. And we are called “children of God,” “siblings in the Beloved clan,” those who are sent into the world to embrace other members of God’s family with the amazing grace of Jesus Christ, and—together—to create a human family in which poverty, skin color, tribe, or faith tradition no longer allows a sibling to be out-caste or “untouchable,” a community in which all needs are met and all know themselves to be truly Beloved.
Prayer: Generous God, thank you for your amazing grace given to us in Jesus. Help us remain united with Jesus through every challenge, change, and pruning season; sustain and renew us, that we might produce the fruits of love, justice, compassion, and care that will nourish others and truly serve your beautiful, broken world. Amen.
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Foundry UMC Earth Day 2021
The Reverend Jenny Phillips is Senior Technical Advisor for Environmental Sustainability at Global Ministries in Atlanta, GA. Her work integrates sustainability practices into every aspect of mission. She has a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York and is an ordained elder from the Pacific Northwest Conference of The United Methodist Church.
Sermon Text:
Matthew 25:14-30
Less than Zero
Please pray with me: Creator God, all of creation sings your praise. Open our hearts that we may hear your call to protect all that you have made. Amen.
I’m so very happy to be here with you today. As Ginger shared, I serve at Global Ministries, which is the worldwide mission and development agency of The United Methodist Church. Global Ministries supports more than 200 missionaries, and has personnel, projects and partners in 115 countries. As a part of Global Ministries, the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR), is the global humanitarian aid and development arm of The United Methodist Church.
Much of the work of contemporary mission focuses on addressing problems caused by the broken relationship between God, humans and the earth. We support sustainable agriculture in places that are food insecure and that have histories of conflict and oppression. We provide healthcare in places with deep infrastructure challenges. We provide services for people experiencing forced migration from their homelands. We respond to disaster and support recovery in places hardest hit by weather events exacerbated by climate change. We seek to alleviate suffering.
Our creation story says that human suffering is rooted in the distorted relationship between God, humans and the earth. In Genesis, God offers the first humans food from an abundant garden. God says they can have as much as they could possibly want to eat from the garden of Eden. But God also sets a boundary. God says to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Well, you know what they do. They cross the boundary God sets--a boundary meant to limit their consumption of the earth’s resources. In doing so, they break our relationship with God. Now pay attention here. That first rupture in relationship, that SIN is not just any kind of sin. It is the sin of overconsumption. God tells them to eat their fill and they say great, thanks very much, and now I’ll have what’s over there. They take more than they need. They take more than God wanted them to have.
Then, even as they are cast out from the garden, their children learn that natural resources are a source of power among humans. They raise generations of humans obsessed with controlling food and land and lives, even as the earth cries out when their blood is spilled and their habitats are ransacked. The shards of colonialism and plunder and racism are embedded in the lattice of our spiritual DNA.
Those of us who are white come from people who have leaned way too hard into that aspect of our spiritual histories. We have built our communities and our wealth and even our churches on the backs of Black people, Indigenous people and People of Color. And we have built our communities and our wealth and our churches on the groaning lands and seas of ravaged ecosystems worldwide. Some of us here today benefit from the fruits of that exploitation. And now we are resistant to breaking the cycle, lest it cost us our places in the world as we know it.
But of course, the world as we know it is no Eden. Colonialism left generations of many humans and other creatures poorer, sicker, and weaker. Then exploitation of people and the earth went into hyperdrive with industrialization. And with industrialization came human-induced climate change.
Let me take a detour here to tell you how climate change works. When we look up at the sky, it appears to be a limitless expanse. But between us and outer space is a thin blanket of gasses surrounding the planet. This is called the atmosphere. One of the things that the atmosphere does is stabilize earth’s temperature.
The sun sends energy to the earth in the form of light.
The earth absorbs the energy, but some of that energy is radiated back in the form of heat.
Some of the heat escapes through the atmosphere, but some of it stays in.
As we add more gasses to the atmosphere--we call them greenhouse gasses, more heat gets trapped. The gasses thicken our atmospheric blanket. Just like when you put a thicker blanket on your bed, you get warmer, as we thicken the atmospheric blanket, global temperatures increase. And as temperatures increase, that destabilizes weather systems, leading to the changing weather patterns and extreme weather events we are experiencing more frequently today.
In the DC area, this means hotter summers. Scientists project the number of heat wave days in your area will increase from 10 per year to 60 per year by 2050. Heavy downpours will increase as well, leading to more inland flooding. And on the coast, we expect between 2 and six feet of sea level rise this century.
These changes are creating crises in low-income and high-income communities alike, but like with so many challenges, it is low-income communities and communities of color that suffer the most. This deepens the need for humanitarian intervention. We must ensure that our short-term interventions contribute to long-term environmental health. We have much to do when it comes to addressing the environmental impacts of ministry. We are only just beginning to understand the ways in which we have contributed to the suffering of future generations through practices like building structures without thought to energy efficiency, relying on diesel generators in places with limited energy access, and investing our assets in companies that contribute to the harm. The more we learn, the clearer it is that we must transform the ways we do ministry.
The Global Ministries Theology of Mission says that God’s mission begins with the act of creation and ends with the shared redemption of all creatures and all of creation. This means that Christian mission must begin and end with the mandate to ensure the flourishing of all creation, including both human and nonhuman life. This is why we must address eco-recklessness in our ministries. Eco-recklessness functions in ways that resemble other systems of oppression, maintaining a status quo that privileges certain types of power, behavior, and practices. It pits humans against creation, pretending as though one has no need of the other, or as though it were possible to meet the needs of one without ensuring the health of the other. It affirms the theologically distorted view that God gave humans limitless power to dominate over and consume the resources of the earth at any cost.
While examples of individual eco-heroism and creation-friendly initiatives abound, formal and informal structures of church institutions exhibit eco-recklessness at every level. Not just agencies, but all of us. We need to stop using environmental initiatives as one-off projects to celebrate on Earth Day and start recognizing them as life-saving strategies that are necessary to create a healthy, just world. Given the clear scientific consensus that human activity is the primary driver of climate change (NASA 2020b), it is reckless for churches to dump greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere through their ministries without regard for their impacts.
Now what would Jesus say about all of this? He doesn’t talk about climate change. But he does talk about resources. While Genesis contains the story of our broken relationship with creation, Jesus presents an alternate vision in an unexpected place--a story known to many as the Parable of the Talents. This story, like other parables, is an allegory--a story with a concealed meaning. Many people immediately assume that this parable should be interpreted as a teaching on how to manage financial resources. Indeed, the version of the text we heard from the Inclusive Bible today refers to not talents, but dollars. Others suggest that the talents symbolize our literal talents--in other words, our gifts and our skills that should be used to support God’s realm.
But what if we considered a third possibility: that the talents represent not economic resources, but rather ecological resources that God has placed in our care. Perhaps in this story, the wealthy landowner is God, the owner of all of creation, leaving us each with access to varying levels of resources. God gives us these resources to manage for a while. And if we fail to ensure that they flourish under our care, there will be a lot of suffering.
This perspective is consistent with the passage that follows, the one in which Jesus says that those who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked and care for the sick are the ones who will inherit God’s kingdom. We can only help the most vulnerable among us flourish when all of creation flourishes. We can’t feed the hungry without affordable food. We can’t give drink to the thirsty without clean water. We aren’t going to welcome the stranger if we feel like we have to compete with her over scarce resources. And by the way, Jesus ends that passage with another promise of suffering for those who do not heed. I think that means he’s serious.
Well, I have some good news. Many of us who manage resources on behalf of the United Methodist Church have decided to get serious too. 11 United Methodist agencies, including Global Ministries, announced on Earth Day that we have committed to work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to support a just and equitable transition to renewable energy that builds resilient and flourishing communities. The heart of the commitment is this: We pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 across ministries, facilities, operations and investments and to leverage the gifts of our connection putting equity and justice at the center as we build a net-zero emission economy by 2050.
I really want you to hear this. We’re going to eliminate emissions across ministries, facilities, operations, and investments. And we’re going to do it in a way that ensures equity and justice.
This is a serious commitment to systemic change. The agencies that are making this commitment are involved with stewarding the global physical, financial, social educational, historical and political infrastructure of the UMC. We are making plans to radically transform our stewardship to ensure that we aren’t contributing to suffering around the world in our efforts to alleviate it. We believe the changes we make in the next 10, 20 and 30 years will reverberate throughout the denomination and will impact people and ecosystems globally.
To be clear, we have made this commitment not because we know how to do it, but because we know who we are called to be.
There is no map for this journey. So we’re starting with questions. Some of the questions we’re asking at Global Ministries include: What does this commitment mean all that travel we do when we’re engaged in work around the world? What does it mean for our disaster response work in places where power grids are destroyed and diesel generators are the norm? What does it mean for our health clinics in low-income places around the world that rely on kerosene lamps because they don’t have electricity? What tools, strategies and technologies do we need, and how will we pay for them?
These are questions that we are pretty uncomfortable asking because many of the answers necessarily require significant changes to how we do our work. What we’re saying with our commitment is that it’s time for our agency to face the uncomfortable truths that come with measuring our impact and tolerate the discomfort we feel over the next few decades as we figure out how to ensure our ministries contribute to the flourishing of people and creation in the present and in the future. We have quite a bit of hope this is possible, because we’re working with our partner agencies to leverage each other’s resources and wisdom to support one another. And we are already engaged in pilot projects to help us learn how to do this work better. We’re sending vaccine refrigerators powered by solar panels to health clinics in Liberia and solarizing a hospital in Congo. We’re doing energy studies on health clinics in West Africa. We’re looking at strategies for displacing diesel generators with renewable energy in many contexts where we work. We’re doing the work in our own office as well, with basics like making sure the thermostats are set at the most energy efficient levels possible. And we’re discerning how to measure our current emissions across ministries so we can evaluate our efforts to reduce them.
Scripture suggests that our consumption drives people out of the garden and away from God. Science confirms that it leads to wailing and gnashing of teeth. Ensures hardship through Heat. Drought. Fire. Floods. Super storms. Forced migration. For many vulnerable communities, life as they knew it is already over. If the way we respond to need undermines the flourishing of God’s creation, then we are simply contributing to the suffering we are trying to alleviate. We must do ministry in ways that ensure the impact of the short term good we are doing is actually greater than the footprint we leave behind.
I can’t help but read in the Parable of the Talents that even a commitment to net-zero emissions isn’t enough. It’s simply maintaining the status quo. Jesus would have us ensure that not only do we maintain the resources with which God has entrusted us, but also ensure that they flourish. Not simply stop harming God’s creation, but also start restoring it.
What would it look like for The United Methodist Church to be a leader in the restoration and flourishing of God’s creation? Perhaps our churches would look more like a new building that recently opened at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The Kendeda Building for Innovative and Sustainable Design at Georgia Tech was certified as a Living Building this week. This means that it is a regenerative building. With emissions that are less than zero. It doesn’t just harm the environment, it also contributes to its health. It generates excess energy and drinking water for use on other parts of the campus. It is at least 60% more energy efficient than comparable campus buildings. The project included habitat restoration. The property grows food and native plants and is home to honeybees. Friends, these are strategies we can incorporate into our buildings, our properties, our mission and ministries.
What creation most needs from Christians right now is for us to figure out how to tolerate the horrible discomfort that comes with recognizing our brokenness and the ways it has become institutionalized in systems that fail to account for the costs of waste and pollution and destruction. Because it’s only when we can tolerate looking directly at our hypocrisies and our failings that we can confess, repent and call for the collective social, economic and political change that the world needs in order to move toward sustainability.
The change must be systemic. While examples of individual eco-heroism and creation-friendly initiatives abound, formal and informal structures of the church--even the local church--exhibit eco-recklessness at every level. It is reckless for churches to dump greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere through their facilities and operations and ministries without taking action to sequester or offset those emissions because they exacerbate SO MUCH SUFFERING.
Look. I know we don’t mean to cause harm. And I know that acknowledging the harm is upsetting and overwhelming. But starting to tell the truth about it is actually kind of liberating. And when you start to look at strategies for making your operations and ministries efficient and regenerative, it’s pretty exciting.
The practices that lead to change are going to look different for everyone. You’ve got to look at the ways in which you’re investing your resources--your time, your energy, your money, your wisdom, your spirit--into helping the world flourish. And you’ve got to look at the ways in which your investments are causing grave harm to God’s creation and consider how new ways of doing ministry can contribute to justice for all God’s people and all of God’s creation.
This Earth Day Sunday, I ask you to pray for our agencies and support us as we begin this systemic change. And I ask that you begin to consider ways in which Foundry could do even more than you already do to express your commitment to justice, wholeness and flourishing for all God’s people AND all God’s creation. I’m excited for your kids Earth Day totes and I’m excited for your Going Green program. I also believe that you have it in you to do much more. I believe Foundry can be a church that ensures the flourishing of the resources with which it has been entrusted. Not just mitigating harm but cultivating life. That you can be a church to whom the Great Landowner says, Well Done! You are good and faithful workers! Come and share in my joy.
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Have you anything here to eat?
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, April 18, 2021, Third Sunday of Easter, “Give Me A Word” series.
Text: Luke 24:36a-48
“The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.” This line from Native American poet, Joy Harjo, came to mind as I pondered Jesus’ question in our text today: “Have you anything here to eat?” As a member of my Bible Study said this week, these words are so wonderfully human.
The Jesus we meet today has been through so much—life, friendship, struggle, suffering, death on the cross, time in the tomb, and resurrection. He has walked the seven mile stretch from Jerusalem to Emmaus and shared a meal with some disciples who only recognize him when they’ve all sat down at the table to share a meal.
Jesus promptly disappears from that table—and while off camera—he appears to Simon Peter. (Lk 24:34) And then, in our text today, Jesus shows up among the disciples in Jerusalem who are busy sharing stories of these encounters.
They were literally talking about having seen Jesus alive and yet, in this moment, they still can’t perceive who is with them. There might be any number of reasons for this—things happening too fast, emotional whiplash, being caught by surprise, seeing someone you’re not expecting in a time or place or way that is out of the ordinary… But whatever the case, Jesus makes very clear that he is really there, no mere apparition. He’s there in the flesh. Just as in the story last week from John, Jesus invites them to see and to touch the wounds in his flesh. And, oh, by the way, do y’all have anything around here to eat?
Evidently, ushering in a whole new world makes a person hungry! Or perhaps, in his wisdom, Jesus realizes that, as in Emmaus, the way to open eyes and minds is to share a meal together. Isn’t this also wonderfully human? Not only sharing a meal with others, but talking about food helps us know and understand one another in deep ways. It opens up conversations about culture and values and family rituals. Who has the best BBQ? What is appropriately applied to grits? Where can you find the best tamales or dim sum or bulgogi or fried chicken or jollof rice or palm butter? Is lettuce technically “food?” Food is so elemental and formational in our lives. In so many ways “the world begins at a kitchen table”—or its cultural equivalent. Jesus did, in fact, show up at table after table and showed how to make a feast for thousands out of a bagged lunch. Food is key. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised to hear Jesus ask, “Have you anything here to eat?”
It’s the question that sticks out of the story in a way that I can’t help but believe is intentional. It seems that resurrection life is not only a head trip or a spiritual experience in some disembodied way. It seems that resurrection life is not something that is experienced only in the hereafter when we have shaken off “this mortal coil.” We so often think of resurrection as only about what happens after physical death. And certainly the life with God and loved ones that awaits and the assurance that we need not be afraid of death are beautiful parts of the resurrection promise.
Yet in our story today Jesus reveals that resurrection life is also experienced in this world and is connected to bodies, to the needs of bodies, to the human lives and everyday concerns of bodies. Flesh and bone need care, need food. Consistently, the Jesus revealed in Luke is clear that the hunger and thirst in the world is not for righteousness, sustenance, and peace only in the next life but for those good gifts in this one.
Remember it’s in Luke where we find Jesus’s first recorded sermon. He took as his text the words of Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Lk 4:18-19)
// Please understand, I know Jesus said that thing in the wilderness about how “One does not live by bread alone.” (Lk 4:4) (I often debate Jesus on this point. I’m with Oprah. I love bread.) I am not suggesting that resurrection is only a physical experience. I’m simply amplifying the author of Luke who clearly stresses that God not only has the power to bring new life into this created world and into our own very human lives but is determined to use it.
And this resurrection power—the recreative power of God’s love—is at work in Jesus from the beginning. It’s there in his first sermon proclaiming fulfillment of liberation for the oppressed and restoration of health and economic justice—new life! Resurrection power is at work every time Jesus noticed the ones that others ignored, listened to the ones others shut down, welcomed the ones that others excluded, received the care of the ones others denied, touched the ones others avoided, ate with the ones others called “sinners.” Resurrection power—life-giving power—new creation power—was at work in Jesus’s life on both sides of the grave.
We tend to focus on how what we do in this life will get us our resurrection ticket. Jesus encourages us to focus on how what is freely given in the resurrection affects what we do in this life. Notice that in our text Jesus doesn’t speak to the disciples about their life beyond the created world, but gives direction for their witness in the created world.
Jesus reminds them of what he has said and what they have witnessed:
They were there for the whole story—they experienced Jesus’s love and grace and wisdom and healing power. And they saw Jesus die a martyr’s death, an innocent victim of state violence. They know what happened. Jesus didn’t run. Didn’t get angry. Didn’t resist arrest. He turned toward those who’d decided he was the enemy with open hands and arms outstretched. He had truly done nothing wrong and, in solidarity and in peace he suffered the blows that the poor, oppressed, and victimized have suffered since the beginning.
And now he stands before them again, a hungry, wounded savior asking, “What do you have here that will care for my body?” And in this, Jesus gently guides his disciples, then and now, toward caring for every hungry, wounded, victimized, oppressed body. Let this be your witness. Let this be part of your proclamation of “repentance and forgiveness of sins” (24:47)… Because the world failed Jesus. We didn’t get it right. But God’s unfailing love and the sacred resistance that is God’s refusal to abandon us, God’s stubborn belief in our capacity to change—is what Jesus confirms when he shows up on the far side of the tomb. We’ve been forgiven our failure and are invited to repent—to do it differently now, to change.
Again and again, we are offered this grace, we are freely offered the broken body of Jesus… to perceive, to receive. If we are faithful, we will be witnesses not just to the story of Jesus, but also to the ongoing realities in our world for which we need to repent, the places of struggle, suffering, and pain our living Lord calls us to address with love and courage. In perceiving and receiving the risen, wounded Jesus, allow your hearts to be broken open so that love pours forth in concrete new-life making ways: nourishing food, accessible healthcare, safe working conditions, living wages, restorative justice, and dignity and care for bodies of all kinds. Suffering, hungry, wounded, neglected bodies all around us come asking, “Have you anything here to eat?”
This past week, police killed 20 year old Daunte Wright and 13 year old Adam Toledo while the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer charged with the murder of George Floyd, is underway. I cannot help but perceive Daunte, Adam, George, Breonna, Sandra, Ahmaud, Tamir, and a host of other victims of violences of every kind appearing among the disciples of Jesus and saying, “Look at me. Touch my wounds. Do you have anything here that can care for my body? Do you have anything that can give my body life? Can you do better next time?” The resurrection reveals to us more than a future promise for ourselves, it reveals to us a present call to healing, feeding, and justice.
Today we encounter the risen Jesus who extends to us love and friendship and mercy, who embodies the promise that God’s love is stronger than sin and death and who gives us this word for our contemplation and action: Do you have anything here to eat?
Consider: another chance, new vision, new possibility, new freedom, new hope, a whole new world begins at a table with Jesus. Joy Harjo’s poem is not, as far as I know, meant to describe this particular table. But that’s what I receive when she says:
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
May the world end as we now know it…while we eat together and discover the whole new world God’s always had in store…
https://foundryumc.org/
So That You May Have Life
John 20:19-31
Will Ed Green—Sunday, April 11th, 2021—Foundry United Methodist Church
Good morning, friends. My name is Will Ed Green, and I serve as one of Foundry’s Associate Pastors and our Director of Discipleship. As we move into a time of reflecting on Scripture together we are so glad you’re with us. For those of you who are just tuning in, you’ll find links for fully engaging in our service in our Facebook and YouTube comments or on our website www.foundryumc.org. If you are in need ASL interpretation, we invite you to join us at www.foundryumc.org/asl.
So I want to begin this morning by talking about the “Apophthegmata Patrum,”—no, that wasn’t a sneeze, I said “apophtegmata patrum.” They are the recorded sayings of a group of monks and nuns known as the Desert Mothers and Fathers. They lived in caves, mud huts, and even holes they dug in the ground in the deserts of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine; sometimes in small communities but, more often than not, alone. There, in the desert, with the busyness of life and the clutter of consumption cleared away, they embarked upon a bold endeavor: through prayer and contemplation, to live more humanely, to become—in modeling their life after Jesus—more human, and thus to become truly alive in the love of God.
The “Apophthegmata”are snippets of stories and parables—preserved from the their own self-reflection, or offered to their disciples and visitors, that often begin with the question: “Amma, Abba, give me a word.”
Their responses are not theological treatises or Christian self-help one-liners. They are plain and practical; unconcerned with right belief or theology and focused on matters of the heart. This simple wisdom cleaves performative spirituality and self-righteous theology from the practical matters of daily discipleship. And because of this, they force us to address the ways what we profess is actually transforming our hearts and lives. Something John Wesley might have called “personal holiness” or “sanctification.”
During these Great 50 Days—or the 50 days between Easter and Pentecost—our new sermon series invites us, like the Desert Mothers and Fathers, to focus our attention on the work of being and becoming alive. To receive in the fullness of its power the hope of the resurrection we proclaim. To embody, not just in right belief, but in the daily rhythms of our lives the freedom and abundance of life available when we live as those who believe that Jesus IS risen.
So now, as we turn to the words of the Living Word, Jesus, and ask of them as those who traveled to the desert so long ago: “Give us a word” let us pray:
Order our lives in your Word, O God, that everything we do may bear witness to your resurrection life. Order our words in YOUR word, O God, that everything we say may bring life into a worry-weary world desperately in need of hope. Breathe the anointing of your Holy Spirit upon all those in the sound of my voice, that in this sacred space we now share together we might be transformed by your Living Word, and in that transformation might take our place in kin-dom work to which you’ve called us. And now may the words of this preacher, faulty and fleeting though they may be, fade into the background of the Word which you would have us receive this day. Amen.
I want to begin this morning by acknowledging that is a sermon about Jesus’ body and our bodies and the way they experience and express trauma. There may be moments when previous experiences of your own trauma rise to conscious awareness, so pay attention to your body. If you find yourself feeling anxious step away or pause and take a break, please know that’s ok.
Today’s reading begins with the disciples in the throes of collective trauma. Their doors are barred in fear of what terror may yet occur. Just days before they witnessed their rabbi ruthlessly murdered, were denied by the disappearance of his body the familiar rhythms and rituals of mourning, and are certainly still trying to make sense of his promised resurrection in light of all these things.
Suddenly, a surprisingly fleshy Jesus—given the doors to this kiki are locked tight—appears in the midst of their uncertainty, fear, and doubt. Showing his wounds. Speaking of peace. Breathing upon them. And it’s the revelation of his resurrected and scarred body—the text tells us—through which they see and know him for who he is, finally able to rejoice.
But Thomas isn’t there to see the wounds and recognize the resurrection. And when told of what happened he insists that his belief will come only when he’s able to touch the wounds, feel the scars, and grasp hold of this body which held the trauma they’d all shared.
When Thomas arrives, we’re not told whether or not he actually digs his hand into Jesus’ wounds, but it’s clear he’s given the chance to. And in this moment of direct confrontation with embodied sorrow and suffering—not just Jesus’ own, but that of the community who loved him— Thomas proclaims, “My Lord and My God,” finally able to see through those wounds the full promise of God’s resurrection power.
John’s Gospel is the only one that makes the wounds of the resurrected Jesus central to the story, mixing the past pain and trauma of the crucifixion with the present rejoicing in and hope for resurrection. I find it fascinating that these encounters are precipitated by recognition of Jesus’ wounds. It’s not his miraculous appearance among them, not his face or voice, but his wounds that confirm his identity. John’s Jesus isn’t a face-tuned, blemish-less, social media ready Savior fresh off a few days of rejuvenating rest in the tomb, but one who bears the marks of the cross and yet lives.
Over the centuries we’ve conveniently made this a story about Thomas’s doubt. We love the image of one who must root around in the wounds of Jesus to achieve satisfaction—perhaps because we feel the need to excuse our own doubt or to satisfy ourselves with the thought that at least we’ve got more faith than THAT. But this reading also provides a convenient way to ignore the confronting an uncomfortable truth: resurrection doesn’t guarantee instantaneous healing. When the story is more about Thomas’ spiritual faults than wounds he insists on touching, we get to ignore that that resurrected Jesus still bears the marks of the tomb. The life he offers isn’t one in which our past trauma and sorrow is expunged. Instead, John’s resurrection body forces us to confront how they inform and are part of life. Healing cannot be separated from suffering. Resurrection cannot be separated from death.
Let me pause and be clear here: this is not a sermon about redemptive suffering. As a pastor I wholeheartedly reject the idea that suffering is a somehow necessary part of the way we grow in faith or love of God and one another. This is bad theology—no tea, no shade, Paul…but maybe a little. And it’s the root of so many excuses for the continued mass incarceration, torture, and violence perpetuated against our black and brown siblings, too often one which traps women in cycles of abuse and neglect in the name of “faithfulness,” and is regularly used against my queer siblings as they are subjected to theologies of self-loathing and the horrors of conversion therapy.
But willingness to erase Jesus’ wounds and focus solely on Thomas’s doubt is dangerous. The wounds, and the pain they embody, can’t be overlooked. Far too many people are taught a theology of comparative suffering, where ‘good Christians’ are taught to minimize their suffering—or the suffering of others— because clearly other people have it worse than “you.” We are taught that our doubt, disbelief, heartache and hurt are an expression of faithlessness in God, that these don’t get to exist in tandem with life in a post-Easter world.
Recent developments in psychobiology have given us a deeper understanding of how trauma impacts our brains and bodies. By trauma, I mean any experience which causes acute anxiety, fear, rage, or grief and that activates our desire to “fight or flee”. When this happens, a part of our brain, sometimes called the “lizard brain.” kicks into gear. This ancient, built-in defense mechanism is tied directly our primary life systems, and can activate them before we consciously pick up on a threat. All of us, I’m sure, can remember moments of acute distress when our heart was pounding out of our chest, our breathing shallow, our palms sweaty, or our stomachs churning.
Evolutionarily, these responses are meant to keep us alive until we can escape and process our experience. But what happens, when like the disciples, we encounter grief we can’t process or explain. A tomb left empty, holding more questions than answers. Night after night spent with the door tightly barred with no end to the threat in sight?
Significant or repeated experiences of trauma, as author Bessel van der Kolk writes in “The Body Keeps the Score,” alter our perception of reality. We get stuck in the lizard brains, constantly reacting to something which our conscious brain might otherwise recognize as innocuous or inane. Phrases like “Per my previous email” or “Can we talk?” can send us into fits of rage. News notifications or unexpected phone calls can leave us panicked and breathless.
Left unchecked, these trauma wounds impact nearly every aspect of our lives. We become stuck in cycles of self-sabotage; often in trying to prevent the threat of future trauma, inadvertently causing the very thing we fear. In real moments of panic or danger, we become unable to distinguish those who want to help from those trying to cause harm, leaving us isolated and suspicious.
These repeated trauma reactions build a new kind of knowledge in our bodies, changing the way we exist in and share space with others. Toxic anxiety—or prolonged periods of unabated anxiety—can kill us. Over time, our lizard brain’s over activation of our bodily systems can cause us to gain weight, makes hearts and arteries age abnormally, or our immune systems fail. We brains become so accustomed to our anxiety or the threat of trauma that we unconsciously create a world in which we constantly feel or create it because it’s the only way we know how to live. One study comparing patients with untreated or significant past trauma to those without it, found that the brains of persons with PTSD literally shut down areas which control and help us define our sense of self in proximity to others. In an effort to erase their experience of trauma, our brains adapt, shutting off the parts of our brain that help us know perceive the world around us and know ourselves outside of our anxiety or fear of future pain or grief.
It’s no wonder it took Jesus miraculously appearing in their midst and revealing his wounds, rather than the words of Mary who encountered him just before, to recognize him. And that was just three days later. Thomas spent another week—another week!—living in that terror and fear. Jesus wasn’t the only one wounded in the story. He was just the only one who’s wounds we see.
If you’ve ever read J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, you might remember that goblins are sneaky, burrowing creatures who are terrified of light. Under the cover of darkness however, they leave their caves to wreak havoc and violence on unsuspecting victims, pillaging and plundering everything they can take. I have this image of our unnamed, un-healed trauma operating a little like these goblins. Our trauma goblins burrow just beneath the surface of our conscious awarenness and, hidden by our fear and shame about facing them, co-opt and corrupt our ability to distinguish between despair and hope, life and death, friend and foe. Left unchecked, they impact everyone around us. They change our ability to listen and respond to others. Our capacity to trust and show up authentically, to love and take worthwhile risks. They pillage the wealth of our relationships, our good intentions, and giftedness and in their wake often cause lasting harm to those we love..
But much like Tolkein’s goblins are terrified of light, of being seen, our trauma goblins lose their agency over us when exposed to the light of conscious awareness. Trauma therapists now understand that the long-term trauma can only be dealt with in our bodies. Employing a variety of mind-body techniques like deep breathing, massage, yoga, and meditation allows survivors of long-term trauma and toxic anxiety to begin to understand how their trauma impacts their bodies, and through their bodies to begin learning what it means to regain control of their lives. By addressing the often-unconscious ways our anxiety and trauma is manifested in our bodies, we’re able to break its control over us.
Perhaps this is why it took the wounded AND resurrected body of Christ to break the the coopting cycle of the disciples’ anxiety, fear, and self-doubt. Breathing new life and strength into bodies weary from trauma that never seems to end. Showing the wounds in all their pain and the promise that that there was yet life beyond them. And when that trauma misshaped and Mal-informed Thomas’s perception of himself and others, Jesus extended his hands, wounds and all, without reproach or shame, allowing Thomas to touch the source of his pain so that he might be free to live beyond its control.
In her book Resurrecting Wounds, Shelley Rambo writes:
“The truth of the resurrection conveyed through the symbols of [Jesus’] scars is that these textures (grief and joy, pain and pleasure) will always be present in life, often simultaneously. Interlaced with joy and pain, a life can be marked as holy even in all this ambiguity.”
Jesus shows us how gentle acknowledgment and awareness of our trauma helps us recognize that God is present both in suffering and healing, in doubt and belief; liberating us from the lie that our past trauma and present wounded-ness is all there is to our story. The wounded and resurrected savior bears witness to the real resurrection promise: not that we will always be ok, or skate past suffering in life through slights of hand like comparative suffering, not some glorified, resurrected future free of all our past trauma and grief, but the freedom to see written in our marks our past trauma leaves that while life guarantees suffering and loss, God guarantees life despite of and beyond it.
Social worker and author Resmaa Menakem notes in his book on racial trauma in America “My Grandmother’s Hands” that, “…we tend to think of healing as something binary: either we’re broken or we’re healed from that brokenness…but healing from trauma occurs [over a long time and] on a continuum.” If Thomas teaches us nothing else, he shows us that we do not need to be embarrassed or controlled our past traumas. His reach teaches us how to reject the temptations of comparative suffering, and gives us permission to be okay not being ok. To doubt. To be a hot mess express. His recognition and acclamation of the resurrection shows us that by naming our wounds they lose the power to define our experience of others and the world. In honoring our wounds, in refusing to defer or delay our recognition of trauma, we bring into focus a reality too often denied by binary models of healing: that we can be both hurt and healing, broken and being made whole, in the tomb and yet returning to life.In that way, his demand to confront the wounds, to run his fingers over the still-fresh scars of the cruxifixion isn’t an act of doubt. But an experience of his own resurrection. And while Thomas may, in fact, offer us a lesson on doubt, he’s also showing us what it means, in light of the resurrection, to be and become alive.
On my hands is a roadmap of my past only I can read. Here a deep scar, left when a frantic dash out the door pulled artwork off the wall that bit back. There an almost invisible pockmark from chicken pox long healed. Joints left crooked after broken bones, callouses left from picking up heavy things. They may not be pretty, but all those marks and scars on my hands remind me—in all their beauty and brokenness—despite it all I am still alive.
Pentecost will mark the 19th anniversary of the first time I ever preached and publicly acknowledged my call to ministry. It will also mark the beginning of a profound and painful internal struggle with my God-given identity as a gay man and the ordination process of a church which actively told me that identity was incompatible with Christian teaching. There’ve been plenty of wounds along the way. Having to leave my home and family behind in order to be ordained in the church I felt called to. Living in fear of what would happen if a picture of my partner and I got posted on the wrong account or parishioners encountered me holding hands on a first date. Hiding my identity from my colleagues for fear it might be used against me in a court of…well, church law.
Much like looking at my hands reminds me I'm still alive, every day I choose to name them, acknowledge, touch and know them reminds me that it’s ok that I am healed and still healing. I am broken and almost being made whole. And that I am, in the words of that old Charles Wesley hymn, despite it all, yet alive. The Abbas and Ammas of the desert often remark on the way has a funny way of entering in through the wounds we bear and slowly, imperceptibly, beginning the work of healing. And though I’m not sure I’ll ever stop fighting those old trauma goblins, God’s grace—new each day—gives me fresh hope that they don’t have to define what comes next.
I know I don’t need to enumerate for you all the ways that we are these days, individually and collectively holding and bearing witness to trauma. But I do know that it’s okay to hold doubt in one hand and hope in the other. That in the light of the resurrection your scars and wounds aren’t proof of your failure or lack of capacity or worthlessness. No, they are proof you’re a badass. You can do and survive hard things. You already survived the worst moments of your lives. No one else has ever done that. No one else could.
Best of all, I know that in the midst of all the trauma past, and all the trauma to come, we are accompanied by a Savior who’s love allows us the grace and space to know that—no matter how broken or wounded we may be—we are loved. And meets us in moments when they in all their death-dealing power threaten to overwhelm or overcome us with open arms, proclaiming peace and promising though our scars may remind us of where we’ve been, and what we’ve been through, they may inform but don’t have to dictate what comes next. I think that may be what it means to become in alive in God’s love. And, for now, at least for me, that’s resurrection enough.
https://foundryumc.org/
Sing a New Song
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, April 4, 2021, Easter Sunday, “Learning to Sing the Blues” series.
Text: Mark 16:1-8
Early yesterday morning, as I climbed the stair to my writing chair, the light of a waning moon shining brightly, a single, solitary bird’s voice sang: sing it out, sing it out, sing it out, will you? The melody is familiar, though one I’ve missed. It hibernates, or migrates—I don’t know birdsongs well enough to know which bird was belting out her bright song in the dark—but it appears this time of year, a herald of spring in its fullness, announcing a new moment, a passage from one season to another.
This image reflects my experience through this year of pandemic, singing my song in a defiant, determined commitment to hope in a new moment, new life—all the while, surrounded by the night and shadows, within and without. It may come as a surprise to some, but my cynicism can be as sharp as any. I call my cynicism Shirley (not referencing anyone except the play on words: as in, “surely, you don’t believe that.”) And with each new reflection gone viral on the interwebs early in the pandemic about how we were going to come out of this thing renewed, changed, chastened, wiser and better, I found myself in a near-constant dialogue with Shirley. She really is a broken record of “don’t get your hopes up” ditties. On days when I’m caught between my hope-filled, prophetic self and my Shirley self, I simply flip on autopilot, put up buffers and compartmentalization systems for grief, uncertainty, and trauma, and try to just get through this thing unscathed and doing as little damage as possible.
With each new challenge, each new loss, assault, tragic headline, new number of cases, deaths, shootings, each new instance of injustice over the past year…with each new revelation of how truly broken things are in our lives and relationships and churches and institutions and nations and world, whether I’m in “God’s up to something good,” “we’re doomed,” or “put your head down and get through it” mode I still root about trying to discover what Spirit wants to share. It’s kind of a habit. This past year, a consistent theme is summed up in John Wesley’s last words: “Best of all is, God is with us.”
Some may roll their eyes at so simple a statement, because, after all, what difference does it make for God to be with us when things continue to be so jacked up? Shirley asks that question on the regular, joining the chorus of the Israelites in the desert who complained saying, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” (Numbers 21:5) Shirley sings alto in the chorus of the disciples who woke Jesus from his sleep on the boat in the storm yelling, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mk 4:38) And she would have wondered the same thing as the Marys and Salome that early morning in the cemetery—“Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” (we’re probably on our own!)
Of course, in each of those jacked up moments of wilderness, storm, and the heaviness of death, God was there, leading out of slavery, providing manna and wellspring waters from a rock, soothing the storm with a word, and rolling the stone away so that life might emerge. That’s the story we tell, anyway. Are you buying it?
Casey Gerald, in his beautiful, painful, artful memoir, There Will Be No Miracles Here (a book I read at some unidentifiable moment in the haze of the COVID pandemic) shares this:
It’s hard enough to get used to a crappy life. But once you do, you see that even crap can be cozy and the coziness becomes important to you. And even the slightest change—in the name of progress or healing or uplift—feels like a threat to your existence, so you ignore it as long as you can…The story has to change, you see, and that’s not only a great deal of work to undertake, but also a real risk, as the new story might not be as marvelous as the old sad one. But the greatest risk [is] hope.”
It’s not just whether we will believe the stories of God in scripture, but whether we will believe God is anywhere at all. Gerald confesses that his journey led him not to hopelessness, but to “anti-hope.” He writes:
This anti-hope seems to be in vogue, mind you, especially amongst those who consider themselves too brilliant or too secular to believe in silly things like unicorns and hope and God. They say that anti-hope is the natural order of things, that the most obvious stance for the man and woman of reason is the stance of Cool Customer, leaning against the wall of the world while the moral arc of the universe bends down to crush them, as it must.
In any moment of life, we have choices to make about how we will receive and be in the moment, what we will believe about the moment. The oppressive powers of the world want us to believe that every moment is dog-eat-dog, want us to think that hope is for the weak, that crushing others or being crushed by life is inevitable. That the old story is all there is. That people will never learn and that we ourselves are forever stuck. These are the powers of death and control and fear. Choosing to acquiesce will have predictable consequences.
The alternative is to choose even the tiniest bit of openness to the assertion of “God with us,” openness to Spirit’s movement deep down in all things, through all things, under and within our own skin—even when all things appear despairingly broken.
You may find it ironic that I would focus on “God with us” when, in the Easter story from Mark we received today, Jesus is nowhere to be found. No appearance, no comforting word from the risen Christ. And even the commissioning of the women by the mystery man in white doesn’t lead to the first announcement of Jesus’ resurrection. There is only alarm, terror, amazement, and fear.
Most scholars agree that this is where the original text of Mark ended—fleeing in fear without any assurance that the message given the women was true. And, as much as I love getting to make an Easter quip about women being the first preachers, I also really appreciate this version of the story that leaves all of us standing together at the edge of life and death and new life with nothing but a promise of an unseen Christ beckoning us to follow into uncertainty, daring us to carry on without easy and quick comfort, calling us to grapple with our own fear of something that is truly new and unexpected, encouraging us to come to terms with whether or not we will believe that something so wonderful as resurrection is possible, and whether we will welcome it when it happens.
Casey Gerald tells this story:
[There’s] a village that I heard of not too long ago. The village, somewhere in France, sometime in the seventeenth century, became the site of frequent miracles, according to the peasants there, who were so struck by symptoms of the supernatural that they put down their plows. This, of course, [ticked] off the local officials. They tried to reason with the peasants, to quell the mass hysteria, to no avail. At last, the officials sought an intervention from the highest power in the land, who sent them back with a sign. An actual sign, which was erected in the village square for all to see. It read:
THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE
BY ORDER OF THE KING
Isn’t this the way things go since forever? The proverbial “kings” of the world pass orders and laws, write books and reviews, create budgets, make rulings, and build structures, all the while thinking that they have the power and authority to control the people of God, the movement of God, the freedom of God: “NO MIRACLES HERE!” And, more often than most of us care to admit, they get away with it. Because, after all, human desire, overwhelmingly, is to leave things exactly the way they are.
We can all talk a big game about hope and new life, but as soon as something really new, a bona fide change gets underway, people race out to buy their yard signs in support of the king: “No miracles here!” The body isn’t where it’s supposed to be! Who voted on movement of the body? Who said that the mystery man could be in the empty tomb? Did Jesus sign off on that before he died? Who ordered a resurrection anyway? There’s no protocol for this and we don’t know what to do. This new situation is not the way we do things around here! So let’s bring the dead body back stat and restore things to the way they’re supposed to be.
Oh, it is tempting to want to stay in the old, familiar ways… We love a new thing as long as it has a perceivable, measurable, reasonable explanation and doesn’t make us uncomfortable. We long for a new life as long as no sacrifice is required of us. We advocate for justice as long as it doesn’t mean that we have to foot the bill. Familiar death is so often more preferable to us than disruptive, costly newness.
And yet that’s not all that is within and among us. If it was, Amanda Gorman’s words wouldn’t have emanated from the podium with such soul-stirring electricity:
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true, that even as we grieved, we grew, that even as we hurt, we hoped, that even as we tired, we tried, that we’ll forever be tied together, victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division. Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade. But in all the bridges we’ve made…
In truth, these words are simply a powerful, of-the-now remix of the old vision, the dream of Rev. Dr. King assassinated this day 53 years ago, the dream of Micah and Isaiah, the dream of Mary and her son Jesus, our resurrected Lord.
Will we continue to defer the dream? My inner Shirley is only so sharp and persistent because she’s trying to help me keep from being hurt and disappointed, she knows that some people in the world have no interest in new things, they want to keep the old, broken, hurtful, hateful things—want to keep ALL the fig trees and vines for themselves and pay less than living wages for others to tend them. Shirley also knows the small and wishful thinking that I sometimes try to pass off as faith and hope to myself.
But as much as I may falter and as much as the powers that be may try, no one gets to forbid miracles, no one gets to control new life, no one gets to kill the dream, no one gets to cancel Easter—not with a sign, not with a virus, not with a cynical eye-roll or self-satisfied smirk or fearful, hateful policy or a noose or a gun or a cross. Today we praise God because Jesus has been set free, let loose, is out in the world, risen, shiny, new—bearing the scars and having sung the laments of this life—but alive and with us—all day long and the whole night through. And where Christ is, miracles happen. Anything is possible…We will get through this. Things can be different and better. We can be different and better. The dream doesn’t have to be deferred forever.
And we stand together at the edge of life, death, and new life and have to choose. Gerald says, “I have a radio. It picks up only two stations: Life and Death. I turn the death off, now that I know the sound.”
What station will you play? What song will you sing even when it is still night and difficult to see? Why not sing together the new song already, eternally begun, the dream of poets and prophets from the beginning, recently sung in Amanda’s key?
…our people diverse and beautiful will emerge, battered and beautiful. When day comes we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.
Sing it out, sing it out, sing it out! Will you? Alleluia!
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Lonely Lament
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, March 28, 2021, Palm Sunday, “Learning to Sing the Blues” series.
Text: Mark 11:1-19
Oh, we do love a parade! We do love a rally! And even those who dislike crowds can be stirred to join the throng by the right cause or person as the draw! Give me something to wave, teach me the chant, “hey hey ho ho-sanna!” and let’s march! And when we gather for the annual Palm Sunday parade, we are traditionally given delightful images of children—in various states of confusion, disarray, or glee—being shepherded into sanctuaries with palms; and even in this virtual space, there’s a sense of playfulness and hope and anticipation as Jesus enters Jerusalem, as we ourselves enter Holy Week.
The original parade on this day, best we can tell, is what advocates call a public action. And our story begins by detailing preparation for the event, including securing Jesus’ ride and marking the parade route with cloaks and leafy branches. The chant was taken from an old favorite, the victory song we call Psalm 118: “Hosanna—Save us! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” The parade was carefully planned, the allusions to Zechariah’s prophecy of a new king riding a donkey, humbly bringing peace in a time of war were deliberate and provocative. Its route led to the temple, the power center of Israel’s religious and political life. And all this energy culminates with Jesus entering the temple and then…“when he had looked around at everything” he left. (?? Wah Wah…) And, according to the lectionary, the story for today ends right there.
But the so-called “Triumphal Entry” into Jerusalem wasn’t just that day. The point of the palm Sunday public action wasn’t just to have a parade and “look around” as if on a fact finding mission. Though evidently what Jesus perceived in church policies and behavior, in congress and state legislatures and courts and precincts, triggered a nasty mood. Because on the way back to Jerusalem for day two of the action, Jesus takes out his frustration on an unsuspecting fig tree that had the audacity to not have figs available in the off season. Jesus returns to the temple and this time it’s about more than taking a look.
Jesus comes in hot to disrupt the system, overturn the status quo, dismantle tools of injustice, reveal how things are chatá, Hebrew for missing the mark. Jesus speaks words of scripture, runs people off who aid and abet an unjust system, and flips the money tables—all to challenge and reveal codified systems that benefit the few and marginalize and disenfranchise the many and the most vulnerable. (e.g. Mk 12:38-40) Jesus’ palm Sunday action was not a fact finding mission but a life-saving mission. And its procession route led him to reveal in no uncertain terms how religion was missing the mark, how politics was missing the mark, how economics was missing the mark. Because all of these things were failing to produce the fruits that sustain life for ALL in and out of season. And that is what they are supposed to do. No excuses. //
Our tendency in the American Church is generally to jump from Christmas to New Years Eve to Super Bowl to Palm Sunday to Easter (a few of those are not officially in the liturgical cycle, FYI). We jump from celebration to celebration, big day to big day. And it makes sense, of course. Life is hard—and we all need things to look forward to.
But here’s the thing: the things we look forward to can become nothing more than distractions and props for the status quo if we fail to attend to what happens in-between. For example, if we’re not careful, Christmas can become about how to pile more money on the tables of the rich while making the poor feel guilty that they can’t do more for their children—and this for a story about a child who came into the world to turn those tables (and more!) upside down and to bring relief to the poor. If we take a short cut on the Holy Week parade route we might be lulled into believing that Jesus wants no more than adulation one day and brightly colored hard-boiled eggs and bottomless mimosas the next. That kind of Jesus doesn’t challenge us or anyone. Isn’t that handy?
Our tendency to jump from celebration to celebration misses the lamentation. It glosses over, denies, tries to avoid the suffering. The palm procession didn’t end with adulation. It didn’t end with a triumphant Jesus dismantling injustice with one prophetic sign-act and public witness. If we jump off the route at that point, allowing our palm procession to take a different course, we can move the party to another venue, feeling good about how we showed up to support the big event, but really just leaving Jesus to go it alone.
Of course, Jesus knew that’s what would happen. He knew he was alone—or would be—he knew this even as, early on the parade route, the crowds hailed him as their hope. Jesus alone knew where the palm procession would end, knew what was coming, knew that the path to liberation is not through short cuts or distractions, party favors or pills. Jesus knew as he rode in on his donkey that he would travel the lonely road of prophets before and since—to speak truth for the sake of justice; to put himself in harm’s way to advocate for those denied place or provision in the community; to break unjust human laws in order to reveal the higher law of God’s love and compassion; to unveil the hypocrisy and cruelty of the status quo.
Where does your palm procession take you?
Today Jesus enters the gates of Jerusalem and invites us to follow his lead. Jesus shows us how to step into the pain, to stay on the route that leads to newness. Jesus can show us because Jesus knows what it’s like to feel alone and unseen in a crowd; Jesus knows what it’s like to be targeted and misunderstood; Jesus knows what it’s like to look around at the way things are in the world and feel grief and rage; Jesus knows what it’s like to grieve the death of a loved one; Jesus knows what it’s like to be given an impossible task, the weight of it, crushing; Jesus knows what it’s like to be betrayed and hurt by those closest to him, to be ignored and denied by those who once looked to him for guidance and care. Jesus knows what it’s like to experience physical pain; Jesus knows what it’s like to cry out to God asking for things to be different, railing against feeling abandoned. Jesus knows and so is with you in your lament. You need not be lonely there.
Will you accept Jesus’ invitation to bypass the detours and stay on route with him? Jesus’s Palm Sunday parade doesn’t end with shallow celebration or the emotional satisfaction of one table flipping action. Jesus’ Palm Sunday parade leads through deep, soul and universe-shaking lament. It leads all the way to Calvary. Some things end there at the cross. Life doesn’t. But that’s a story for another day. Promise.https://foundryumc.org/
Lament as Prophecy
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, March 21, 2021, Lent 5, “Learning to Sing the Blues” series.
Text: Psalm 10
Why, O Lord, do you stand far off, allowing the proliferation of hate, hate speech, hate crimes, champions of hate spouting hate and violence, spewing bigotry and hatred through airwaves that flow into living rooms, limousines and dive bars, the hateful rhetoric seeping into minds that move bodies to do more violence?
Why, O Lord, do you stand far off, allowing the proliferation of legislation and legislators that do harm, that redline and manipulate, that pander to profit margins and power brokers, that ignore what makes for peace and instead rally around the worship of weapons, that make it possible to buy a gun and use it for murder that same day, but impossible to register and vote on the same day?
Why, O Lord, do you stand far off, allowing your beloved, vulnerable children to be objectified, terrorized, marginalized, demonized, stalked, targeted, assaulted, and killed?
Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?
In arrogance the wicked persecute the poor—…
Their mouths are filled with cursing and deceit and oppression; under their tongues are mischief and iniquity. They sit in ambush in the villages; in hiding places they murder the innocent.
Their eyes stealthily watch for the helpless; they lurk in secret like a lion in its covert; they lurk that they may seize the poor; they seize the poor and drag them off in their net. (Ps 10: 1-2a, 7-9)
Our human capacity for oppression and violence knows no boundaries; it exists in multiple forms and falls upon persons of every kind and color. Each country, culture, or community will have its own flavor or nuance of oppression based on all sorts of factors—from Myanmar to Israel to Zimbabwe to the U.S.—from kitchen table to board room table. But some common threads, clearly identified in our scriptures, appear wherever humans are found: those upon whom violence falls are consistently the vulnerable, those on the margins of mainstream, white-bread, fit-in-a-box society, the poor, the outsider, the person who looks, sounds, or acts outside of any culturally, socially constructed “norm.” Oh—and also women and children. Basic rule of thumb for oppression: if the person can be used, abused, or taken advantage of, they’re fair game.
Our own country and culture continues to be exposed for the tapestry of human cruelty, neglect, and injustice that mark both our history and our present moment. This past week we’ve been reminded, through deadly attack, of the anti-Asian bigotry that is part of that tapestry. The ongoing push in so many states across the country for legislation that suppresses voter access is part of that tapestry. The litany of strands that make up the blanket of injustices covering our land could stretch from the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans, white with foam.
Injustice is not all of who we are, but it is part of who we are. Denial of this doesn’t make anything better. It makes things worse. And so prophets through the ages cry out in lament, naming the pain and injustice in their context in order to wake people up. And we need prophets because from age to age those crying out from the margins or gasping for breath under the boot of the oppressor are ignored, devalued, or dismissed as the noises of ingrates, traitors, whiners, weaklings, slackers, or criminals.
We know how easy it is to ignore or make up excuses to dismiss injustice when we’re not directly taking the blows. And the whole system in which we live is designed to help us do just that. Walter Brueggemann’s scripture-based definition of empire describes our context in the U.S.: “rule by a few, economic exploitation, and religious legitimation.” This reality leads to a “numbed consciousness of denial.” Even if we don’t mean to, everything around us trains us to ignore the cries of the oppressed and focus only on our own, daily rounds. Brueggemann says, “Imperial economics is designed to keep people satiated so that they do not notice. Its politics is intended to block out the cries of the denied ones. Its religion is to be an opiate so that no one discerns misery alive in the heart of God.” In other words, the imperial reality distracts, rationalizes, and drugs the populace so that the awareness of suffering and human pain won’t get in the way of business as usual and a healthy bottom line for those in the top 1%. //
We have explored lament as naming our own pain, suffering, and guilt. Today, Psalm 10 provides an example of a lament that names the pain of injustice against the poor and vulnerable. The complaint and charge is hurled against God, “Why do you stand far off when wickedness, deceit, oppression, and iniquity run roughshod over your children?” In verse 11, the Psalmist says of the wicked, “They think in their heart, “God has forgotten, / he has hidden his face, he will never see it.” Then, as in other lament prayers, there is a turn. In verse 14 we hear:
But you do see! Indeed you note trouble and grief, that you may take it into your hands; the helpless commit themselves to you; you have been the helper of the orphan.
The prophetic voice cries out in lament not only to name the pain and wake people up, but also to shake loose memory of God’s liberating, new-life giving presence and power. Again, Brueggemann writes, “Newness comes precisely from expressed pain. Suffering made audible and visible produces hope, articulated grief is the gate of newness, and the history of Jesus is the history of entering into the pain and giving it voice.”
Prophet Howard Thurman calls out the perversion of Christianity by the powerful and dominant who make it an “instrument of oppression.” Thurman clarifies “that Christianity as it was born in the mind of the Jewish teacher and thinker [Jesus] appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed…Wherever [Jesus’] spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.”
Prophetic lament is a way people of faith follow Jesus, enter into pain, and cry out against the injustice in our lives, communities, church, nation, and world. We lament not because we are seeking attention, or because we enjoy complaining, or because we seek anyone’s destruction—but rather because members of our human family are hurting and, instead of allowing ourselves and others to remain in a “numbed consciousness of denial,” we are determined to wake up and do something about it. Perhaps in our lament we’ll begin to hear God asking us, “Why do you stand so far off?”
We lament not to stay in sorrow or bitterness, but to claim the good news of Jesus, to hold fast to hope, to remember the liberating power of God’s steadfast love, to participate in the new thing that God is always doing, to live our lives committed to a future where no more backs are against the wall.
Let us pray:
Merciful God, we confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart. We have failed to be an obedient church. We have not done your will, we have broken your law, we have rebelled against your love, we have not loved our neighbors, and we have not heard the cry of the needy. Forgive us, we pray. Free us for joyful obedience, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
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Lament as Release
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, March 14, 2021, Lent 4, “Learning to Sing the Blues” series.
Text: Psalm 22
Many things look different today than they did this time last year. One of those things is our basement. In the midst of a major overhaul and repurposing of the space, I’ve learned more about BTUs and the need for outside air than I ever cared to know. Evidently, for someone to safely sleep down there, we need to install an air vent valve. If this isn’t cared for, toxic fumes can build up and do damage to human bodies!
This came to mind as I thought about the spiritual practice of lament as “release.” It’s common these days to hear someone say, “I just need to vent!” There are times when we need to get energy or feelings or frustrations out so they don’t do damage to our bodies and spirits! A good “vent” session is appropriately shared with someone trustworthy who understands you need to get something out of your system. And venting is not an edited essay, but rather flows unfiltered right from the place of pain.
Psalm 22 and all Psalms of lament are like that; sharing with God what we need to get out of our system—when something is not right, when there is pain, grief, injustice, fear, persecution. And, as we’ve been learning, the practice of lament invites us to speak freely to God, literally to liberate ourselves from any pretending.
When we speak freely with God, not controlling everything in an attempt to feel, sound, or appear “together,” then our words are no longer held hostage and can begin to name things that shift our trajectory. Perhaps you have experienced something like this; when you let go of your politeness with God and allow your words to flow unhindered, sometimes new insight or forgotten wisdom emerges and you catch at least a glimpse of hope or new life.
Some of you may remember a couple of weeks ago when we discovered in Jeremiah 20 one verse of “praise chorus” (verse 13) sandwiched between two absolutely brutal laments of complaint. I suggested that in giving voice to our pain without trying to clean it up, our speech might turn from complaint to praise. And biblical scholars say this is not at all unusual. The lament prayers in scripture consistently make such a turn. Most Psalms of lament include not only complaint and pleas for help but also words of trust and praise.
Psalm 22 may be one of the best-known Psalms of lament, because it’s quoted by Jesus from the cross (Mt 27:46, Mk 15:34): “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The opening complaint in the Psalm is followed in verses 3-5 with words of trust. This pattern of complaint then trust repeats in verses 6-10. In verse 11 we receive a petition for help: “Do not be far from me.” Then back into complaint (verses 12-18) followed by another petition “But you, O Lord, do not be far away!...Deliver my soul…my life…Save me!” (19-21a)
Then there is a final turn in the prayer. Beginning in verse 21b, the psalmist breaks into a song of praise that carries the prayer to its ending. Notice that the praise is not because all things have been made well. Most of the language is future oriented—things that “will” happen. And a key word is “remember.” People will remember God’s mighty acts of salvation and “future generations will be told about the Lord, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it.” (Ps 22:30b-31)
Memory and hope are intertwined here. Some of you have heard me say before, “in the present we can hope for the future because we know what God has done in the past.” This memory of God’s activity liberates us in the present moment. It keeps us from being bound by despair, from becoming stuck in pain and resentment.
But sometimes we may need to rattle our cage in order to shake loose memory that’s been crusted over with pain, humiliation, or rage. The Psalms of lament show us how. They illustrate that to get free requires the release of what we think we have to keep bottled up. Hiding or holding on to our pain can lead to deep resentment and bitterness in our hearts and spirits. And resentment and bitterness are poison for relationships, for joy, for any hope of newness. There are two options: some kind of release that is intentional and healthy or a blow-up that causes lasting damage.
A couple of weeks ago, I was sharing with my friend Randy some of the grief I’ve been feeling—the stacked-up griefs of the past number of years, this last year of pandemics, and the most recent grief over the death of my friend and colleague, Junius. Randy shared with me the story of a woman he came to know when she was his child’s pre-K Montessori teacher. As with most practitioners of the Montessori approach, she is a peaceful presence, careful with her words, patient, and beloved by the little ones she teaches.
One day Randy went to visit her at her home. She was going through a painful divorce and was caring for her two children. At one point he went into the backyard and saw a large stack of assorted, brightly colored plates. When he asked one of the kids about them, he was told, “Oh, those are my mom’s plates.” “What are they for?” “Look…” And there, where the fence formed the corner of the back yard, was a pile of shattered shards of brightly colored plates. Randy asked his friend later, “What’s up with the plates?” She said, “Whenever I need to let something go, I come out here, close the door, and throw plates.” She then demonstrated; she really hurled them…really let it rip. Randy said her countenance changed, the act allowed her to access her fire, her pain, her anger and to release it. When he probed further, he learned that she had learned to do this from her mother back in Puerto Rico where she had been raised.
What beauty and power there is in this practice. This woman knows how to identify when her energy is getting toxic and needs some outside air, how to direct and release her difficult and painful emotions in a visceral way that isn’t aimed at others. “Sometimes,” Randy told me, “she will gather shards from the pile and create mosaic art for her yard, making something beautiful from the broken pieces.”
For most of my life I struggled with the thought of Jesus being “forsaken” on the cross. In the moment he cried out, quoting Psalm 22, he was indeed experiencing the fullness of human suffering—physical, relational, vocational; he gave voice to that deep pain through lament. But some years ago, I remembered that Jesus knew all the words to the Psalms…he knew that verse 1 isn’t the whole prayer. He knew the movement from despair to hope in Psalm 22. Jesus models for us the importance of crying out to God in our suffering, of naming what is real without trying to pretend the wounds of pain and injustice haven’t landed on our bodies and in our spirits. Jesus, on the brink of death, hurls his voice against the heavens like brightly colored plates hurled against a fence, releasing his words even as he releases his spirit, all the while clinging to the promise that God will yet make of his broken body something beautiful and new.
This is the promise from God for all our brokenness and pain. Lament is one way to shake loose that promise in our memory. And so we are invited to pray with Jesus:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.
Yet you are holy, …In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them. To you they cried, and were saved…
All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord;…
…and I shall live for him.
(Ps 22:1-5, 29)
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Lament as Confession
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, March 7, 2021, Lent 3, “Learning to Sing the Blues” series.
Text: Psalm 51:1-17
Lament is what we do when bad things happen to us or those we love. We’ve been focused on that kind of lament the past couple of weeks. But what about when we do bad things to ourselves or to others? This also inspires lament, when guilt at the damage we’ve done causes us to experience anguish, that terrible weight of realization that you can’t undo the thing, that it’s just out there in the world. It might be public. It might be just between you and the person you’ve hurt. It might be secret. But in any case, it’s happened and it’s in you. What will you do with it? As with any suffering, difficult emotions, or reality, we are invited to bring it to God in prayer.
The so-called “penitential psalms” of lament are models. Today we received Psalm 51, the Psalm traditionally included in the Ash Wednesday liturgy. Every year these lines land in my being with a thud:
…I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment. Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me. (Ps 51:3-5)
Another, perhaps less familiar prayer, Psalm 38, includes these lines: For my iniquities have gone over my head; they weigh like a burden too heavy for me.
My wounds grow foul and fester because of my foolishness; I am utterly bowed down and prostrate; all day long I go around mourning. I am utterly spent and crushed; I groan because of the tumult of my heart. (Ps 38:4-5,8)
These lament prayers in scripture give us words that viscerally describe the experience of suffering both the guilt and consequences of our own iniquity, sin, and “foolishness.” In that often railed against verse, Psalm 51:5—the verse that makes it sound like babies are horrible sinners—what we receive are words of pain and grief at the unavoidable participation in sin even from our earliest moments of life; because none of us, even as children, are free from the capacity for self-centeredness and ignorance and doing harm.
There is a difference between such awareness of human sin, true remorse, and confession and words spoken or actions taken in an attempt to evade responsibility or do damage control. For some, what really makes them upset is not that they’ve hurt someone, but getting caught in their wrongdoing. They may do a press conference or release to issue a public apology to try to cover their backsides. But at the end of Psalm 51 it says:
For you (God) have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. (51:16-17)
Going public with your transgression will be deeply painful, but notice here that the public act of making a sacrifice is nothing more than hypocrisy unless that public act is attended by a true acknowledgement of the harm done and a heart broken by the pain of it.
At this point, some of you may be tempted to check out of this conversation, turned off by all this sin and guilt stuff. So let me acknowledge that, for ages, there has been an unhealthy and unbalanced emphasis on sin and judgment in Christian preaching and teaching. Whether intended or not, the message received by thousands upon thousands of the faithful is that we are born bad and that God is mostly interested in judging us, giving us grades based on performance, and deciding who’s “in” and who’s “out” of heaven. As a result of this long imbalance, lament as confession will likely feel much more familiar and “traditional” than the rage and searing accusations against God we’ve encountered from Jeremiah the past couple of weeks.
Wanting to balance “original sin” with “original goodness” (Gen. 1:31) and out of an impulse to bring healing to battered spirits schooled in fire and brimstone theology, many protestant churches stopped praying prayers of confession in public worship and stopped emphasizing human sin in preaching. As with most pendulum swings, there is danger of throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. For grace to mean anything, we have to acknowledge why it matters. In short, it matters because, as the apostle Paul says clearly, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) We do things that are destructive and harmful to others, to the planet, to ourselves. We do these things personally and systemically, by choice and by being part of a culture infused with sinful systems. Sin is what separates us from God and from others. It takes the form of all kinds of actions that cause broken places, fractures, distance, disintegration, separation. Sin is a real thing. And, if we have caring hearts (as I believe the vast majority of people do), it feels awful to know we’ve done harm.
The purpose of penitential prayers of lament is not to cause suffering or to rub in that we are separated from God or to draw us into a place of self-loathing. Rather, the confessional laments give us space to be with God in the suffering we feel because of our sin, to acknowledge how our actions have created separation, and to be honest about the ways we beat ourselves up for our transgression. In other words, as with all lament, we are encouraged to turn toward God and to be honest. Psalm 51:6 says, “You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.” As anyone in recovery will tell you, the first step is admitting there is a problem—to yourself and to your God. The first step is to stop trying to keep secrets from God, to tell the truth; to name the harm you’ve done, name the pain you’re feeling, know you can’t undo it, and acknowledge you need help.
In Psalm 32 we receive the invitation clearly:
Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the guilt of my sin.
Therefore let all who are faithful offer prayer to you;
And in our Psalm today, Psalm 51, the whole prayer pleads with God for mercy and forgiveness, for cleansing, restoration, and deliverance.
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. (51:1-2,10)
Lament as confession invites us to trust that God loves us even when we have messed up and done harm. That doesn’t mean God will magically remove consequences of our actions or that we will magically be relieved of responsibility or pain. But it does mean that our failure and foolishness and cruel mistakes are not the full measure of who we are. It does mean that we are assured of meaningful life, new life, a fresh start as a beloved child of God. No matter what. God doesn’t cancel us. God will walk with you through humiliation, retaliation, loss, illness, and any other consequence of your sinful action. And God will give you freedom and power to do better in the future.
Once you experience the way God is present to you and remains with you in the destruction and disorientation wrought by your sin, things like steadfast love, grace, and mercy are no longer just pleasant words. Those gifts from God are finally understood as the only firm foundation to stand on, they are liberation from despair and fear, they are hope and life.
Brilliant lawyer, author of Just Mercy, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson, says this: “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
Hear that: You are more than the worst thing you’ve ever done.
In my heart I know it’s true. But, wow, it’s hard to really believe.
Life with my dog Harvey teaches me. Harvey is an 80 pound Clumber Spaniel. He is hilarious, adorable, and our angel. There was a time, however, when Harvey became obsessed with the cat’s food and would go to any length to get the cat’s dish once he realized he could reach it. He could get very mean about the cat food. It came to pass that, before I’d discovered a solution to the cat bowl access problem, Anthony and I took a trip and had a sitter stay with Harvey, Daisy, and AnnieRose. While we were gone, the sitter startled Harvey when he had gotten ahold of a cat food dish and he reacted from his primal protective-of-food space and bit her hand, causing real damage—like needed surgery damage. It has only ever happened that one time in all his 10 years, but my angel of a dog did real violence to one reaching out in care.
That moment was awful and did real damage, lasting damage. That is part of what’s in Harvey, part of Harvey’s capacity in certain scenarios. But that is far from all of Harvey’s being. He is more than this worst thing he has done.
I can see that in him. Our spiritual practice of lament as confession is a way to try to see that in ourselves.
The wonder of this practice is that you will be humbled, but not in a way that makes you feel like less, but in a way that reminds you just how much you matter, just how much you are loved, just how much God believes in your capacity for goodness. Lament as confession doesn’t leave you in sackcloth and ashes, it frees you to rise from the ashes with a clean heart and a new and right spirit, ready to try again in the power of God’s grace.
Silent Prayer of Confession…
Jesus, Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world. Have mercy on us.
Jesus, Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world. Have mercy on us.
Jesus, Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world. Grant us peace.
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Lament as Trust
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, February 28, 2021, Lent 2, “Learning to Sing the Blues” series.
Text: Jeremiah 20:7-18
If you were to flip through the pages of the Bible I was given by my church in the 3rd grade, you’d see that I spent some time as a child, marking passages I thought were especially important. Some I remember in particular are from Proverbs, and the topic is anger and how important it is to speak “pleasant words” if you speak at all. For example, Proverbs 29:11 says, “A fool gives full vent to anger, but the wise quietly holds it back.”
I was determined to try to be patient and wise and to speak pleasant words, kind words, gentle words. I was what? 8 or 9 or 10 years old? Since those early days of my life with God, I’ve come to understand that holding back quietly isn’t always the way of wisdom. There “is a time to keep silence and a time to speak,” (Ecclesiastes 3:7) a time for anger and for peace. Last week, we began to explore the spiritual practice of lament and were reminded that we are not limited to only “pleasant words” when we speak to God. We are free and, in fact, encouraged to bring it all—and that includes our most raw expressions of pain, rage, and grief. The encouragement is simply to be honest. Though it isn’t always simple or easy to do that.
Just this past week, I spent time with a beloved friend who is experiencing a time of deep suffering. Significant losses and challenges in his life have left him feeling alone and deeply depressed. Through his tears, he talked about how he wears masks every day, never letting others see what he’s feeling. He has always been the one to take care of things, to manage the details of life for himself and his loved ones, to be strong and confident. He feels like a failure right now. This is an all-too-common experience for men in particular, though of course “fake it ‘til you make it” is a sometimes dangerous strategy employed by persons of any gender identity. Thank God, my friend found it within himself to trust me enough to reach out and say he needed a hand. But here’s the thing: if no one teaches you or gives you resources to ask for help—or to tell you it is allowed!—then tragedies of all kinds can and do occur. Many people literally do not have the language to give voice to their pain or know how to ask for help.
This is one reason it is such a gift that the prayer and practice of lament is part of our faith tradition. When our congregations utilize the language of lament in prayers, sing words of lament in Spirituals and other sacred music like we’re receiving today in worship, and create the kinds of brave spaces in which people feel free to be honest, we collectively learn the language of pain and can practice naming the pain and suffering in our lives and the pain we observe in the world around us. And we also learn that it is OK to bring it all to God.
Last week and today we have received words of lament from the prophet Jeremiah. In chapter 1 of the book, we are told that Jeremiah’s calling as a prophet was upon him “in the womb.” When Jeremiah becomes aware of this call, he protests that he’s too young for the task. And, in response, God promises to be with him, tells him not to be afraid, puts God’s words in Jeremiah’s mouth, and appoints him “over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow…” (Jer 1:10) Yeah, that always goes well… There’s a reason for the saying “don’t shoot the messenger…” Jeremiah sets about speaking truth to power and calling the people out for their idolatry and breach of covenant with God. Persecution ensues.
One example is found just prior to our scripture passage for today where we are told that Pashhur, a priest in charge of the temple police whose job it was to keep order in the sacred space, had arrested Jeremiah, beaten him, and put him put him on display in stocks. (Jer 20:1-2) // Jeremiah has some feelings and some choice words for God.
In fact, the laments of Jeremiah include some of the most brutal charges against God in the entire Bible. The first of the two laments Shelley read for us, verses 7-12, the lament we heard echoed in the presentation from the Heritage Signature Chorale, accuses God using the metaphor of seduction or enticement and sexual violence—overpowering. When Jeremiah cries out about the “violence and destruction” done to him by God there is no one to hear or to help. Jeremiah’s “close friends” are characterized as plotting the same kind of violence against him that God has committed.
The second lament, found in verses 14-18 hearkens back to the words Jeremiah received at his calling. He curses his own existence, wishes he had never drawn breath, wishes both he and his calling had died in the womb.
Keep in mind that Jeremiah is not here spewing hate speech against a stranger, making these claims against a known enemy or a foreign threat. This isn’t Jeremiah namelessly, facelessly bullying someone through social media. This is Jeremiah crying out to the God who was with him in the womb, the God who’s been with Jeremiah all along, the God with whom he has a close, intimate relationship. And as much as some may have the impulse to remind Jeremiah of this, to try to talk him off the proverbial ledge, it is important to just let Jeremiah have these feelings, to let him use all his words in his moment of deepest anguish and to turn the sharp, biting power of prophetic speech back upon the God who had given him that power. We don’t need to protect God or God’s feelings. God can take care of herself.
I am reminded of what a colleague said to me once after he witnessed a particularly anxiety-ridden and brutal event in which I had taken some direct hits in a very public way. He said, “Sometimes when my children say cruel things to me, I have to remember that they feel safe enough with me to process their feelings that way, trusting my love enough to hang in there with them.” It might have been one of the kindest things a colleague has ever said to me. It certainly came right when I needed it. And I think of God like the parent who takes so much and understands why the complaints and charges and laments are coming. God knows what a mess we’ve made of so many things in the world. God knows the injustice and suffering within the human family. God knows why we cry out. And God’s love is steadfast no matter what.
Even Jeremiah, in the midst of his most scathing diatribe against God, signals something that contradicts his attack. Did you notice how, like an unexpected green shoot appearing in the slightest crack in hard and cold pavement, a little praise chorus emerges between the laments? “Sing to the Lord; praise the Lord! For God has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers.” (20:13) Even in the midst of the deepest suffering and lament, after accusing God of the worst kind of abuse, Jeremiah praises God as deliverer. Here all that is managed is that one little verse, verse 13, that smallest thread connecting Jeremiah to something beyond the pain, to someone beyond the suffering. It is a sign that Jeremiah hasn’t been completely swallowed up by the abyss.
Sometimes we may think that lament is an inherent rejection of God or reveals lack of faith or trust in God’s goodness, mercy, justice, and love. But, consider: if with God we are willing to take off all our masks, to stop faking being “fine”…if we stop going it alone, cleaning ourselves up, and using only pleasant speech, and instead just open up and vent everything we are feeling, right, wrong, or completely over-the-top, that might just be a sign of the deepest faith and trust. And it may be that in giving voice to your pain, your own “verse 13” may emerge.
But, even so, in the moment—and perhaps for many moments to follow—there is disruption in relationship with God. “The prayer of lament is the language of the painful incongruity between lived experience and the promises of God.” As one author writes, “The lament prayer is…full of tension and paradox. On the one hand, it signals the breakdown of previous ideas about God that have foundered on the harsh facts of experience, with the result that God seems utterly hidden and frightening. On the other hand, it expresses a trust in the goodness of God so profound that is continues to cry out for God in the agony of God’s apparent absence and silence and looks for redemption in the midst of God’s terrible hiddenness. Paul Ricoeur rightly speaks of ‘the enigma of a lament that remains…caught up with an invocation.’”
Sometimes one verse of invocation is all we can manage in the flow of curses and complaints to God. Today the invitation is to trust that whatever you can manage is enough. God knows. God understands. God can take it. Try to trust that, whether you can speak or feel it, there is a “verse 13” truth, a lifeline, a love, that will never, ever let you go, there is a God who will deliver and bring you through.
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What Time is it?
A mediation by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, February 17, 2021, Lent 1, “Learning to Sing the Blues” series.
Text: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21 / Reading by Josiane Blackman
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Lament as Agency
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, February 21, 2021, Lent 1, “Learning to Sing the Blues” series.
Text: Jeremiah 12:1-4
For some cultures, lament is simply part of life. This shows up sometimes in the personal and communal rituals of people’s faith traditions. Sometimes, lament emerges as music rising from a people’s soul, art formed from the lived reality of their lives. The Black Spirituals that many of us know well in the church and their cousin, the blues, are examples of this. The late, venerable Black Liberation Theologian James Cone says plainly, “I am the blues and my life is a spiritual. Without them, I cannot be.”
However, for many people, there is a natural aversion to the idea of lament. This arises from a variety of influences, religious and cultural.
In many churches, it is communicated mostly through un-written rules that tension, anger, and really any emotion identified as “negative” are not appropriate or welcome. I’ve heard often over the years that someone stayed away from church when they were suffering—because they might cry or because they felt they couldn’t be the way they thought they needed to be in church. And in an effort to
balance what was (and still is in some places) an overwhelming focus in the church on sin and guilt, the tendency is to avoid the “downer” topics of failure and fear or the practice of confession. Stadiums and sanctuaries fill up where the “power of positive thinking theology” and “happy, clappy” worship downplays, denies, or distracts from the deep pain, loss, struggle, injustice, and feelings of confusion and powerlessness that many experience every day.
One author writes, “It seems safe to say that within American culture there are deeply conflicting attitudes toward expressions of grief, rage, and other negative emotions. On the one hand, there is the oft-noted tendency in our culture to cover up experiences of loss and failure in both personal and public life and to uphold what has been called official American optimism. On the other hand, there is a strong counterpressure in therapeutic American society, often encouraged by the mass media, to ‘let it all hang out,’ to demand that all emotions be immediately and publicly vented.”
The “let it all hang out” impulse, without any safe or guided channel, simply spews painful emotions in every direction in ways that don’t lead to healing, but rather do more damage. This is not what the spiritual practice of Judeo-Christian lament is. I was tempted to pre-empt a variety of concerns by sharing a whole list of things lament is not. However, I have chosen to simply say that over the course of this Lenten season, we will explore some of what the spiritual practice of Christian lament is. As I said this past week in our Ash Wednesday service, if ever a time called for lament, this is it. //
Over the years in pastoral conversations, I have discovered that often, the key question, the question that loosens knots of confusion and stuckness is this: Who is God to you? How do you think about God? What is God like in your experience?
The answer affects how we feel and act in relationship with God. If we think of God as remote and “hands-off”—a benevolent but uninvolved creator, that will affect our engagement. If God is understood as controlling all things in a micro-managing kind of way, that will evoke a different kind of relationship. If our conception is that God fixates on our mistakes or is mostly about punishment, well, you can imagine that makes a difference in how we feel about God and about ourselves.
In these common ways of thinking about God we are left in a pretty crummy place. We are on our own and left to our own devices, powerless and manipulated on the gameboard of “God’s plan,” or fearful, never feeling we measure up, and weighed down with guilt. And these feelings may hit closer to home than we care to admit. None are appealing or helpful, especially when we are faced with suffering, persecution, anxiety, injustice, and death.
Thankfully, we are not left with only these conceptions of God. As feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson highlights, the tendency has been to think about the God-human relationship in a “power-over” or “powerlessness” paradigm. She invites a shift to a “power with” image. This invokes a different kind of relationship altogether.
I remember years ago, a member of my then congregation noted that she felt really solid about the words I say at the beginning of worship every Sunday except for when I get to God “knows you by name, loves you, and wants to have an ever-closer relationship with you.” She said, “The relationship part is where I need work.” This is where I want to ground our understanding of lament—in all the various ways we will explore it through this Lenten season.
God doesn’t just want to be around you or to observe you or to be a vague “energy” in your life. God wants to have an ever-closer relationship with you. A relationship. As Jewish theologian Martin Buber described it, God wants to be in an “I-Thou” relationship, subject to subject, free agent to free agent. This is understood as a relationship that is mutual, that is respectful of the others’ freedom, that honors the uniqueness and dignity of the other. It is a sharing of two selves, a “power with” kind of meeting.
Perhaps this sounds obvious or simple. But do keep in mind that scripture and particular images of God have been used to justify subjugation of women, people of color, and minoritized groups—to make us feel that we don’t have agency or voice of power. Some of you will have watched the PBS series The Black Church this past week and been reminded how slave masters feared enslaved persons learning to read because once they could read the Bible for themselves, they would understand even more clearly both who God is—a God of justice and liberation—and who they are to God—beloved children of dignity and worth. The Spirituals were, according to Howard Thurman, “an expression of the slaves’ determination to be in a society that seeks to destroy their personhood. It is an affirmation of the dignity of the black slaves, the essential humanity of their spirits.”
Likewise, feminist and womanist theologians highlight the ways that biblical prayers of lament provide a model for women’s resistance to domination and abuse. “Women who have been taught (like children) to be ‘seen and not heard’ in relation to faith and religion should notice that the very act of putting anger, impatience, and frustration into words often enables the speakers in the Psalms to come to a renewed sense of assurance in God’s continuing care.”
My friend and teacher, the Rev. Jesse Jackson gave voice to all of this with his famous call and response lament and affirmation… “I may be poor, but I am somebody! I may be on welfare, I may be uneducated, but I am somebody! I may have made mistakes, but I am somebody! I must be, I’m God’s child.”
The core affirmation is that you are a person. You are somebody. You have agency. Your voice, your experience, your perspective matters—and not only if or when you are successful in the world’s eyes, but also when you’ve hit rock bottom. You can cry out from that place and be met there by a God who knows you by name, loves you, and wants to have an ever-closer relationship with you.
And in that relationship, you don’t have to clean it all up or have “the right answer.” I’ve observed over the years, particularly when teaching about prayer, that there is a strong tendency to feel that being angry at God, talking back to God, or accusing God is off-limits—that it’s wrong or breaks the “good, faithful Christian” rules. Our scriptures contradict this over and again, as persons reveal faith in God’s steadfast presence precisely through their anger at God, their arguing with God, their accusations against God. This, you see, is a sign that they know themselves to be in the kind of relationship with God that allows them to be somebody with God, to be free to speak, to act, to feel.
Our text from Jeremiah is a good example. In this lament, the prophet brings formal charges against God saying, “let me put my case to you. Why does the way of the guilty prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive?” (v.1) Jeremiah implies that the wicked continue in their destructive ways because God “is blind” to their ways. (v. 4) Jeremiah speaks of how the treacherous have God in their mouths but not their hearts. And then he cries out, “my heart is with You and look at what I’m going through! This is unfair! Give the guilty their due, God!” // Our focus today is not to try to answer Jeremiah’s perennially valid question of why so often the guilty not only get away with their crimes, but prosper. Our focus is on the fact that Jeremiah lifts his voice with this complaint and request to God. Notice that Jeremiah didn’t just spew his anger and complaint all over society. He brought it to God in relationship. This is what we are talking about when we speak of Judeo-Christian lament.
I can already hear some sweet Church People responding to Jeremiah. Can you imagine what some would say in the presence of Jeremiah’s outcry? “Now, now. I know it’s hard. It’s not fair. But God has a plan. God is in control.” And I then imagine Jeremiah firing back: “If God is in control, then I don’t want anything to do with that God or to be anywhere near that God because none of this is OK…”
One teacher writes, “A lament is a passionate expression of distress. To lament is to wail and to complain and to ‘sing the blues’—of loneliness, hopelessness, helplessness, grief, exhaustion and absence of meaning. It is the voice…of a person in turmoil. Finding this voice for ourselves and learning a vocabulary with which we can honestly engage…in a way that does not deny or dishonour…very real anguish, is vital…Availing ourselves of the language of lament is the alternative to disengagement.”
If we aren’t given permission to lift our own voice, to name what is real for us in our lives, to lament, then we may very well disengage—from other people, from the church, from life, from God. I distinctly remember a woman in one of my prayer courses explaining how she felt that God had abandoned her in her time of greatest need, the suffering and death of her loved one. As we engaged in some conversation, it became clear that she had never felt she could name how angry she was at God for all that had happened. She realized that she didn’t believe she had permission to bring that anger directly to God. She lost her voice…she denied her true feelings and experience…and, as a result, put distance between herself and God. She said, “I wandered away. Maybe God has been waiting for me all along…”
You have permission to lament. You have permission to bring your charges against God. You have permission to come into God’s presence as the somebody you are. God is there. Waiting.
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Creative Extremists
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, February 14, 2021, Transfiguration Sunday. “Tired Feet, Rested Souls” series.
Text: Mark 9:2-9
Months ago, in a conversation among the staff team related to our Journey to Racial Justice initiative, an African American staff member asked, “Is the goal for us to simply become a nicer, kinder, more well-informed version of white supremacy? Or are we trying to really change things?” This, for me, is an important set of clarifying questions as we move more deeply into this pivotal year as a congregation, denomination, and nation. And the questions may find some response on this Transfiguration Sunday.
Six days prior to the extraordinary events we read about today in our Gospel, Jesus told his disciples what was going to happen to him—that he would suffer, be rejected, killed, and then after three days rise again. Peter didn’t want to hear it. And Jesus’ response was, “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (Mk. 8:31ff.) Jesus goes on to speak to the disciples and the larger crowds about what a “divine thing” looks like: deny self, take up your cross, lose your life for Christ’s sake and for the sake of the gospel, because that is the only way to truly have or save or keep your life. And six days after Jesus shares these words, he takes Peter, James, and John up a mountain to pray. And then things got weird and wondrous and scary. Moses the lawgiver and Elijah the prophet show up and talk with Jesus who is, himself, a fulfillment of both law and prophecy. Jesus’ appearance changes in a “dazzling” display, and not, by the way in a way that makes his brown eyes blue, but in a way as amazing as if I could keep using environmentally friendly detergent and get my whites to come out of the laundry like new-fallen snow (that would be a miracle for sure!). Peter, unable to simply receive what was happening, offers a suggestion for what they should do. And just then, out of the foggy cloud, there comes one very clear message of exactly what they should do: “This is my Beloved child. LISTEN to him.” Listen.
One would think that such an amazing experience coupled with this clear message would have an impact on those present. But it seems that listening was just as hard for the first disciples as it is for us. Because Jesus has to keep repeating himself. The text records that Jesus speaks of his suffering, death, and resurrection two more times (9:31, 10:34). The disciples must not have been listening in their active listening workshop because they completely miss the point. The first time, they respond by playing that best-selling game “Who’s The Greatest?” And the next time James and John—who witnessed the vision on the mountain and heard the voice from the cloud—ask for plum positions in Jesus’ Cabinet after he wins the election. Both times, Jesus responds with the same message: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” (Mk. 9:35, 10:44) Die to self so that you can rise to a new life in God’s love, a life that manifests in self-giving service to others. Three times this pattern plays out; three times Jesus speaks of dying and rising. Why was it so hard for the first disciples to listen and to truly comprehend this? Why is it so difficult for us?
First of all, it’s often difficult to get ourselves out of the way so that God can get through to us, so that we can truly receive a voice that is not just the echo of our own voice. And then, if we are able to grow quiet or still enough to receive what God is saying, the message—especially this core message!—presents its own challenge. Because who really wants to hear about losing yourself, being humbled, giving something up? Jesus’ teaching about dying to self and rising to a new life of loving service threatens the status quo of our lives—it requires change. Jesus’ words about denying the self is in direct opposition to the world that tells us to invest in self-help, self-defense, and self-promotion. Jesus calls us to follow him, to lose the false self and claim our true humanity, and that challenges any notion of ourselves as either too important or too insignificant to serve others. Jesus’ call to serve others is not a cozy, comfortable idea that we can accomplish by simply “liking” certain posts on FaceBook or reTweeting the pithy ideas of other people (though in my experience even doing that can put us in an uncomfortable position with friends and family).
To really listen to Jesus is to hear ourselves being called out of complacency, to hear ourselves being given work to do, to acknowledge the prejudices, bigotry, and defensiveness that get in the way of our solidarity with others, our responsibility to not just look out for #1 but to look out for the well-being of others and to sacrifice things if needed for their sake. It is to hear a call to true solidarity with suffering, to sit with it in ourselves and with others and to allow brokenness to lead you where it will. Jesus knew where it was leading him. // And it was only after he was led there, all the way to the cross and beyond, that those first disciples really got the message. Their lives were changed forever.
If we really take in the message of Jesus, the proclamation of the Kin-dom, the good news that is Gospel, we will see there is no half-way, there is no lukewarm, there is no kinda-sorta in the call. It may not happen all at once—we in the Wesleyan spiritual tradition do talk about “growth in holiness” and “going on to perfection/perfect love” after all. But my point is that you either commit to follow the Jesus revealed in the Bible or not. And Jesus was not half-hearted, but was an “extremist.” Not the kind we may immediately associate with that word—persons whose focus is exclusive and violent. Jesus was an “extremist for love, truth and goodness.”
On this Transfiguration Sunday, as we conclude our series infused with the teachings of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from his Letter from the Birmingham City Jail, I am struck by Dr. King’s reflections on extremism. King was responding to the “white moderates” about whom he lamented, “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” The “lukewarm” position of the “white moderates” led them to call the non-violent direct actions being done in Birmingham “extreme.” At first, King was “disappointed” about this but, upon reflection, decided he could wear that label with pride. He wrote:
Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . .” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime—the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
I believe that the nation and world remain in dire need of creative extremists.
The story we receive from the Gospel today reveals that the fulfillment of the law and the prophets in Jesus results in a transformation, a transfiguration, a metamorphoó (μεταμορφόω). This is not a glimmer of a change, it’s a terrifying, wonder-full-on revelation of a human life completely One with God and lit from within with all the gifts and power of Spirit. It is an extreme moment whose message is clear: “This is my Beloved child. LISTEN to him.” And not “in one ear and out the other” listening. And not listening in a way that leaves you cozy in the status quo of “my way and right away” and doing only what “works for me.” Rather, listen and truly receive, take in the message and vision of life infused with self-giving love, justice, humility, compassion, and courage—because that is what the world needs, it’s what our shredded relationships and Republic need, it’s what we ourselves need. Spiritual writer, Frederick Buechner says, “To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world’s sake—even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death—that little by little we start to come alive.”
That is what we are all asked to do today: listen to the One who reveals to us how to participate in the work of new creation and to live. God’s law reveals how to live together in peace with justice so that all receive the dignity and provision of life in God’s Kin-dom. God’s prophets reveal a vision toward which we are always working and warn of the obstacles in getting there. The call to practice the law and align with the prophetic vision in our lives and communities requires real transformation. “Is the goal for us to simply become a nicer, kinder, more well-informed version of white supremacy?” That would be like a people who take the powerful, prophetic words of Martin Luther King, Jr. and put them on refrigerator magnets or t-shirts but don’t write the words on their hearts. That would be a lukewarm reception of what Spirit is saying that allows for gaslighting, denial, and rationalizations. The goal is not to be more well-informed, the goal is transfiguration, creative extremism. The goal is to be extremists for love, extremists for the extension of justice. The goal is a more truly human world, scrubbed of the stains of white supremacy, economic injustice, environmental destruction, and every form of prejudice and tribal violence. Are you willing to go up the proverbial mountain with Jesus, pray for the grace to truly receive the voice of Christ—in the words of scripture, in the witness of the saints past and present, in the voices of those around us who may be saying things hard to hear—and to be open to the particular ways that God is speaking, calling, acting in your life today, ways that will really change you? If so, listen with a humble heart, a quiet mind, an open door. And be ready to step back onto the journey from the place of revelation and transfiguration to wherever the path—and God’s love—leads. It won’t be simple or easy—that is certain. But what is even more certain still is that beloved community and life, deep and true, awaits.
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How Will We Be Known?
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, February 7, 2020, fifth Sunday after the Epiphany. “Tired Feet, Rested Souls” series.
Texts: Isaiah 40:27-31, Mark 1:32-39
Let’s talk about demons. What comes up in you when you hear the word? Perhaps it’s an image from a story or movie. Perhaps it’s a feeling of fear or anxiety. Maybe it’s a particular person or group. Perhaps the word “demon” raises curiosity or maybe a description or explanation of what a demon is from previous study. I imagine that many will understand that things we now explain through medical science may very well have been called the work of demons in the 1st century.
In verse 32 of our Gospel text, people bring to Jesus “those possessed with demons.” To be possessed is to be influenced or controlled by something. Demons—or fallen angels—are generally understood as spiritual beings who are against God, literally “anti-Christ.” The Greek word in verse 32 is daimonizomenous, meaning to fall under the power of a demon. So one way to think of demon possession is a person who willingly or unwillingly has a malevolent spirit in their lives in a way that controls or influences them. As a result, these persons do harm to themselves and others. I wonder what comes to mind as potential current examples or experiences of this…
The same word daimonizomenous, can be translated “demonized.” Consider: to “fall under the power of a demon or fallen angel” may also be understood as a life owned, curtailed, damaged by anti-God beings outside the self (beings acting upon you, not within you). Hear the story with this way of translating the word: “That evening, at sundown, they brought to Jesus all who were sick or demonized…” Those who are “demonized” may have been named as evil, or worthy of contempt or blame. Why? Well, why are people demonized today? Because of who they are, what they look like, what they have, what they’ve done, what they’ve said. Scapegoating, blaming, tribal hatreds, prejudice, all of this is both ancient and ever new. Right now there’s a lot of demonization going on. I wager many if not most of us will have a person we could slap the word “demon” on right now.
In any and all the ways we think about demon possession, make no mistake that it affects the whole of a person’s life. In the culture of Jesus’ time, both illness and daimonizomenous meant separation from community, exclusion, isolation, and often harsh treatment.
For those who find the whole idea of “demons” hocus-pocusy or simply distasteful, let me suggest that you don’t have to buy in to the notion that there are angelic beings who serve Sauron or Voldemort or Satan in order to acknowledge that evil is real and a powerful force that affects human lives and relationships. Wherever it comes from, there are powers that take hold of humans and lead us to do terrible things. This is not to say that we have no culpability for the harms we commit—in “a devil made me do it,” get-out-of-jail-free-card kind of way. But it is to simply be honest about the forces that tempt us and that bind us.
Here’s a personal example. Over the years, I have grown increasingly aware of and angry about the way that as a white person I’ve been soaked in ways of perceiving, thinking, assuming, acting from the moment I was born—ways informed by white supremacy.
And let’s pause a minute for some definition of what I’m talking about when I speak of “white supremacy.” (with thanks to Dr. Izetta Mobley for sharing her expertise and resources) “While most people associate white supremacy with extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis, white supremacy is ever-present in our institutional and cultural assumptions that assign value, morality, goodness, and humanity to the white group while casting people and communities of color as worthless, immoral, bad, inhuman and ‘undeserving.’” Legendary scholar Barbara Smith writes, “Toxic as such beliefs are, white supremacy is not merely the individual delusion of being superior to Black people. Institutionalized white supremacy does not need individual bigotry in order to function, because it is a universal operating system that relies on entrenched patterns and practices to consistently disadvantage people of color and privilege whites.” White supremacy is “baked in” to our political, economic, and cultural systems and fuels widespread ideas of white superiority and entitlement—both consciously or unconsciously.
Being completely unaware or intentionally denying this state of things leaves a person like me like a bull in a china shop, bound to break and destroy and do harm. But here’s the thing: awareness of the reality and power of white supremacy doesn’t mean that I automatically can stop the behaviors or the assumptions or micro- or macro-aggressions against my siblings of color, no matter how much I desire to. The last thing I want to do is harm. And even when I’m trying to be a good ally, I hurt people I love, honor, and admire. And it makes me angry that I didn’t get any choice about being formed in a white supremacist culture, it is simply the water in which we all swim. I am bound by it, scarred, and stained by it. It is a power that is not of God, that is directly opposed to the love of God and of neighbor, that is directly in conflict with the Kin-dom of God that is the heart of Jesus’ proclamation.
You see I am at some level possessed by—under the influence of—the demon of white supremacy. Unchecked, this leads to daimonizomenous, demonizing, blaming, belittling, silencing, excluding people of color. It can also, frankly, lead me to demonize those I blame for fueling and continuing to sustain the white supremacy I was born in to. It makes me sad and angry that there’s so much daimonic power at work in and around me! //
Thanks be to God that Jesus is more powerful than the demons and that Jesus loves me and loves you. Thanks be to God that Jesus shuts down the demonic voices. Thanks be to God that Jesus proclaims in word and deed the good news of the Kin-dom—setting captives free, removing blinders that keep us from perceiving, and giving us freedom and power to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in any form they present themselves.
You see, we do have free will. You can choose, I can choose, whose influence and control we will surrender to. If we choose Jesus, our priorities will begin to reflect the love, compassion, and justice of God. And when we inevitably fall or push someone else down, Jesus will be there to forgive and help us all get back up and stay on the journey. Under the influence of Jesus, you will find yourselves being honest about the state of your own life and willing to call out that which is doing harm in yourself and the harm being done to siblings’ bodies and spirits. When we are possessed by the love of God through Jesus, we will be willing to risk much in our resistance of evil in the world. We will be willing to try and to keep trying.
I’m painfully aware that truly moving toward both awareness of white supremacy and the concrete changes such awareness inspires may be easier for individuals than groups. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his Letter from the Birmingham City Jail, “Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.” He asks, “Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world?” That remains a very “live” question. From where I sit, King’s assessment of the American church has shifted little. He wrote, “So here we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a taillight behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice.” He goes on, “So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent—and often even vocal—sanction of things as they are.”
Foundry has been known over the years to at least try to be headlights that lead to “higher levels of justice.” We take pride in this piece of our identity and call. We take every piece of our call to love God, love each other, and change the world seriously and seek to put it into action concretely. We do speak up and speak out. We do show up and stand in solidarity. We try and keep trying.
And at the same time, we (as a whole) are possessed by—under the influence of—the white supremacy daimonion that took up residence in the body of our nation from the beginning, the demon that afflicts the United Methodist Church and every faith community. As a group, our comfort, privilege, loyalties, and familiar ways of being create their own obstacles to really breaking from the status quo. And we are not immune from the temptation to demonize those we believe are doing harm. “Wokeness” doesn’t get rid of white supremacy. Sometimes it even creates a playground for new little demons to gather.
So what do we do? Dr. King writes, “I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.” In other words, in our desire to create change, to bring justice, to clearly name and rebuke the powers of racism and white supremacy, we must not allow ourselves to be possessed by hatred or violence. Our “means” must be aligned with the way of Jesus, a way that is always the way of love and compassion. AND we must also be acutely aware of how easy it is to fall back on rationalizations, existing (immoral) laws, loopholes, and perceived obstacles that keep us bound in the white supremacy-soaked status quo that fails to do justice. In short, we are called to try to do what’s right for the right reasons in the right way. I honestly believe that’s what most folks are yearning for—not a community that’s perfect, but one that is honest and trying in every way to have integrity as followers of Jesus.
And, make no mistake, this is exhausting. It takes a lot of energy, resources, and time. Dr. King lifts up inspiring examples of those who were, as he called them, “the real heroes” in the South, those who faced “jeering and hostile mobs…with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer”; the “old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, [Mother Pollard] who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: ‘My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.’… the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake.” These heroes are remembered because they did what they could, they acted with integrity, they faced the daimonion of white supremacy without returning hate for hate, blow for blow, and they kept going…
How will we be known? How will we be remembered, as individuals and as a congregation? Will we go down in history as a people who did all in our power to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to lovingly, peacefully, and courageously resist and dismantle the powers of white supremacy in our lives and congregation and nation? I pray we won’t let the privilege of wealth or whiteness lull us to sleep or convince us this has nothing to do with our lives. I pray that all of us in the Foundry family will remember that we, like Jesus, can wait on the Lord in prayer and let God renew our strength, so that even when our proverbial feet grow tired from the long journey, our souls will be rested in the knowledge that we are marching upward to Zion, to the Kin-dom, to the beautiful city of beloved community that is promised by the God whose power is second to none.
https://foundryumc.org/
It’s Time
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, January 31, 2020, fourth Sunday after the Epiphany. “Tired Feet, Rested Souls” series.
Text: Mark 1:14-28
Next month will mark 9 years since 18 year-old Trayvon Martin was murdered. July of this year will mark 8 years since the acquittal of the man who shot Trayvon and the outcry that spurred the Black Lives Matter movement that continues to mobilize the fight to end State-sanctioned violence, liberate Black people, and end white supremacy. July will also mark 7 years since I began my ministry at Foundry. My appointment began in July of 2014, the month that Eric Garner was strangled to death by police in New York City. A month after my arrival, 18 year-old Michael Brown was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. In those first months as the Senior Pastor of Foundry, I was reading as much commentary on these events as I could get my hands on, was praying a lot, and was in conversation with the Foundry clergy team—then consisting of Pastors Dawn, Theresa, Al, and Ben—about how to faithfully respond and position Foundry in the struggle. There was so much I didn’t know—I knew enough to know that!
In November of 2014, 12 year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by police in Cleveland. A couple of weeks later, the second week of Advent, 2014, I preached a sermon in which I proclaimed “black lives matter” aloud for the first time in worship. I confessed my own failures as an ally in the struggle. And I encouraged our mostly white congregation to not use our privilege to “opt out” but to engage, to recommit to the concrete work of what we now call anti-racism.
Over the next year, a new Racial Justice Ministry Team offered regular studies and opportunities to engage in learning and advocacy. In 2016, our first Scholar in Residence was the Rev. Dr. Alton B. Pollard, III, then Dean of Howard Divinity School who challenged and taught us through a series of book studies, films, and facilitated conversations. I mention some of this history in my book, Sacred Resistance, particularly referencing the debate about whether and why to hang a banner outside Foundry—a debate that began in the summer of 2014. As I wrote in the book:
Some in the congregation wanted to immediately hang a large banner emblazoned with #BlackLivesMatter outside the church building. In an intense moment during a workshop with the Rev. Dr. Alton Pollard, Dean of Howard Divinity School, African American members expressed concern about hanging a banner without the engagement and commitment of the whole congregation. To publicly communicate a commitment to the Black Lives Matter movement without knowing the form our solidarity would take—actions, relationships, money, tangible support—smacked for many of an attempt to “check the box” and say we’d done our work on white supremacy without having to engage the same kind of deep work that had taken place around marriage equality. Dr. Pollard also made it quite clear that if the congregation chose to step out with such clear advocacy for racial equity and justice, there would be negative consequences. “Just get ready,” he said. Stories abound not only of the defacement of signs and banners proclaiming Black Lives Matter, but also the ongoing violence against black and brown bodies and those who stand with them. Foundry’s intentional work of engagement and advocacy continues unabated. But at the time of this writing, there is no banner.
The book was published in 2018. Last summer, we hung a banner proclaiming Black Lives Matter and littered our lawn with signs saying so as well. It was time. It was time because we had both committed to the Journey to Racial Justice and were well underway in the work when the blood of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd cried out from the ground for justice. Today, we have a 21 foot banner across our lawn with the words proclaiming our commitment. We are actively engaged with sibling congregations Asbury UMC and John Wesley AMEZ, and the JRJ is crafting a strategy for meaningful change. I am grateful for the ongoing, unfolding work. And now I’m going to press pause on the Foundry story to shift over to our Gospel story for today.
What we receive in our text is the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry. Right at the beginning of Jesus’s appointment his cousin and partner in ministry—the prophet John, known as the Baptizer—is arrested for calling out Herod to his face for marrying his brother’s wife—a flagrant disregard for the law. We are told later in the story that, while in custody, John is murdered in a brutal way. (Mk 6.17-29)
And also, right off the bat, Jesus encounters a “man with an unclean (akatharto) spirit.” You may hear in the Greek “akatharto” the same root that gives us the English “catharsis.” A catharsis is a purgation, a purification. Akatharto literally means not purged, not clean. There are many ways we might think about this, but at the most basic level, akatharto refers to something that separates from God or is against God or God’s will. Akatharto spirits or energies need to be purged so that a person can freely experience life in God’s love, mercy, and justice.
The story reveals that Jesus has that “thing” (exousia)—that extraordinary power, influence, and moral authority—that moves people, that changes lives. And when the man with the akatharto spirit encounters Jesus, he knows he is exposed, he knows that Jesus knows—and that Jesus, through that knowing, has the power to literally call out that in him which is not of God. What happens next is that the unclean spirits do not leave quietly or peacefully. They scream and do bodily harm to the one who’d been giving them harbor.
So, to recap: the framing issues of Jesus’ ministry are prophets being arrested by the state, silenced, and killed and akatharto spirits doing damage to God’s children, spirits who, when identified and rebuked, do not leave quietly but act in violent ways, seemingly bent on destruction.
Does this sound at all familiar to anything in our own lives and context? I hope it is not necessary for me to detail the ways that events over the past weeks and months find their resonance in the Gospel narrative—those crying out for justice being manhandled and jailed and those whose hatred, bigotry, and violence is called out reacting with even more vitriol and violence.
Resonance is also found with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in solitary confinement in the Birmingham jail in 1963 when he wrote the letter that inspires this series. And it was only a matter of time before he, like John, was murdered. King knew firsthand what happens when akatharto spirits within the human family are publicly named and consistently called out: there is an ugly outcry and bodily harm done to innocent victims. And yet, Dr. King was resolute and clear. Jesus had called him and he followed. He knew that the time was ripe. His naysayers said the actions were “untimely,” that he should “give the new city administration time to act.” King’s response:
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation…“Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
There may be some members of Foundry who grow weary of this continued conversation. Some likely know it’s important but just want a break from it at church. Some may be wondering why we keep talking about it, or why we are investing so much energy and resources in the work of anti-racism right now. Some may think we’re already good to go on the topic, some may believe there are other, more important things we should focus on, and still others may feel uncomfortable and judged in the conversation. Some of our members of color might be concerned that we’re doing this work right now simply because it is the issue du jour, just another passing “church program” that won’t have any lasting impact or make real change.
But I return to where I began, reminding us that the journey to racial justice at Foundry is not a knee-jerk reaction in this present moment, but has been inching and lurching along since before my arrival and certainly over the past six and a half years. The truth is that we have deep work to do in order to accomplish the catharsis, the purgation, of internal, interpersonal, institutional, and structural racism in our shared life. Wanting to “take a break” from the conversation is understandable for people of color who may be exhausted with grief and exposure, tired of all talk and no change. And we white people struggle with grief, discomfort, feelings of guilt, tension, and confusion… but let me say, as gently as I can, to my white family members: our siblings of color don’t get to “opt out” or “take a break” from any of this. Can we not, as a sign of solidarity and personal and institutional accountability, stay open and connected both to the conversation and the emerging work even and especially when it is painful and difficult? Can we not bear even that for the sake of justice? For the sake of our beloved siblings?
In 2014 I said, “Racial bias is real and infects our culture like a cancer. It is not a ‘black problem.’ It is a human problem. Racial justice is not a ‘leftist’ or ‘progressive issue.’ It is a Christian issue and an issue of conscience for all people of good will. Racism’s insidious power affects us all.”
And such entrenched, insidious, deadly power and ways of thinking, assuming, and acting will not be vanquished quietly or easily. Clearly. Again… inching… lurching… and yet so far to go… Purging systemic racism is not a matter that will simply magically work itself out over time without any tension or forcing of the issue. In response to one who urged waiting because “the teachings of Christ take time to come to earth,” King wrote:
Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
Rev. Dr. King said this 58 years ago. 58 years. It was the time then. We had the chance then and look at where we are today. This, itself, is a testament to the power of the akatharto spirits of racial prejudice and just how determined they are to steal from us and the whole human family the life together that is possible.
Years of study and conversation and consciousness-raising have brought us to this moment as a congregation. There have been moments all along the way when we might have done and said more, when we could have stepped into the work of racial justice and equity in a more sustained and impactful way. But the good news is that Jesus is calling us today to follow. We can choose this very day to receive the power and freedom Jesus gives us to share in the work of catharsis, of purgation, to cast out the soul-staining, body-breaking powers of white supremacy from our lives, our church, our denomination, our nation. We are called to do the work of sustained, tension-bearing public engagement and personal soul-searching. Now is the time to do something; the year 2021 is the time to do something definitive for our congregation for racial justice and equity—as definitive and concrete as the summer of great discernment around marriage equality. Now is our time and we are called to use the time creatively, to be moved by the power of Jesus at work in and through us to move our lives and institutions “from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.” We may be 400 years past time. But the time is always ripe to do right. It’s time.
https://foundryumc.org/
Don’t Run Away From Tension
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, January 24, 2020, third Sunday after the Epiphany. “Tired Feet, Rested Souls” series.
Text: Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Considering how much people love a good fish story, it is curious that in the whole of the three-year lectionary cycle, the book of Jonah is included on only two Sundays—and neither of those selections include the fish! Today’s passage is certainly a key moment in the story. But the short book—totaling just four chapters—is such a rich wisdom parable, layered with symbol, satire, and surprises it merits not only a full read, but also repeated, probing reflection. Likely written in the sixth or fifth century B.C.E., Jonah, like any good satire, is both entertaining and sharp in its critique. The Jewish people in this period—either toward the end of the Babylonian exile or newly returned—were struggling to navigate how best to relate as a minority population among the nations of the surrounding lands. There were tensions and concerns about assimilation and about losing their cultural and religious identity. These religious, tribal, national tensions are certainly part of the backdrop for the story of Jonah. And the primary characters—the reluctant Hebrew prophet Jonah, the city of Nineveh, and God—all play their parts brilliantly. The tension is palpable from the beginning.
God calls Jonah to cry out against the wickedness of Nineveh. Jonah’s response was to flee in the opposite direction. Historical side note: Jonah is mentioned in one other place in scripture (2 Kings 14:23-27) as a prophet who supported the Northern Kingdom (Israel) in the 8th century B.C.E. Nineveh is a large city in Assyria, the nation that brutally conquered the Northern Kingdom during that same period. The last place Jonah wanted to go was into the belly of the beast, Assyria.
But in trying to get away, Jonah lands in the belly of another beast, the great fish provided by God who provides a strange, comic shelter for him within the waters of chaos and danger. In that place, Jonah cries out to God. And after three days and nights, Jonah is returned to dry land, changed. He is now not only a prophet, but fish vomit.
This is where our text picks up. God calls Jonah again and this time, Jonah doesn’t run away. He walks about a third of the way into Nineveh and delivers his prophecy, the shortest sermon on record, just 5 words in Hebrew: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And immediately, in a magical realism kind of way, the people “believed God,” their fasting and putting on sackcloth were signs of their repentance. The king of Nineveh ups the ante, proclaiming that all people and animals will fast and be covered with sackcloth and turn from their evil ways and violence.
And looking upon this rather absurd scene of people and their cows and sheep covered in sackcloth and ashes, God’s mind changed and the calamity Jonah had announced did not happen.
One might think that Jonah would be pleased that his 5 word sermon had such a transformative effect on the people. What we didn’t hear today, however, is that Jonah’s reaction is rage and despair. He goes so far as to say he’d rather die than live with this outcome. Why might Jonah be displeased at God’s mercy upon the Assyrians? We know one reason—Jonah hates them. Jonah wants God to be gracious, merciful, slow to anger, steadfastly loving and ready to relent from punishment with him but not with them. (4:2) Jonah wanted to end the story with his message of judgment being the last word. Instead, the story ends with Jonah outside the city, pouting under a tree withered by a worm (the kind of image that lends itself to a Bernie Sanders meme).
We don’t know if the people of Nineveh’s repentance was sincere. We don’t know if Jonah withers up like the tree or has a change of mind or heart. A good story doesn’t necessarily tie up all the loose ends. It leaves us in the tension of the questions and, ultimately, of our own choices, our own reality. It holds the mirror up in such a way that we are confronted with our own stuff, the ways our image does not yet reflect the image of God.
In this moment we, like the first hearers of Jonah, are in a moment of religious, tribal, and national tension. This story is a prism that shines light in multiple ways upon our lives. I will highlight two.
First, like Jonah, we may struggle to go where God calls us. There will be many reasons for this, but a pretty consistent reason that folk run away is that God’s call requires discomfort, requires us to enter into or even to create tension. And I’m talking about God’s call on all of us through our Baptism. To participate in God’s mighty acts of salvation, to use our God-given freedom and power to resist evil, injustice, and oppression, will mean that we’ll be led into situations that are deeply uncomfortable, emotionally fraught, and dangerous because that is what real love requires.
I am in regular conversation with a close colleague, a white man serving in East Texas in a town historically scarred with racist violence. He explains how folks in his area have figured out what it takes to “get along” and so they do what it takes not to rock the boat. My friend has been increasingly speaking out on issues of racial justice. One result of this is loss, not only of church members and money, but friends. As he prepared for one very public act of solidarity in town, he sent his family to grandma’s house out of fear of violence against them. His experience is just one of so many examples of why people—perhaps especially white people—might sympathize with the eight white pastors and religious leaders to whom Martin Luther King, Jr. responded in his “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail.”
These eight white men were upset by the “boat rocking” of the direct actions in Birmingham. They suggested that the peaceful protests—protests akin to a prophet who walks into the city and proclaims God’s judgment against evil and violence (like Jonah or Jesus)—incited “hatred and violence.” They asked, “Why not negotiate instead?” To this MLK responded:
“You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’ I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”
Too many persons who claim to follow Jesus are afraid of the word “tension,” unwilling to acknowledge tension as a divine change agent. People of any race, ethnicity, or culture can fall into this trap in various contexts—most folks recoil at the very thought of conflict and tension. But part of the lesson of our scripture with its backdrop of historical brutality against persons of other tribes and ethnicities; part of the call of God in our time as we grapple with the ongoing scourge of systemic racism in our country, is to recognize the ways that white churches, white leaders, white pastors have been and continue to be unwilling to speak and act as allies in the struggle for racial justice and equity for fear of tension and conflict. We have been perfectly willing to let hatred, violence, and tension affect the lives of our siblings of color. But when even a sniff of tension gets close to us, the pattern has been defensiveness and blame directed everywhere but where it truly belongs. Those white religious leaders in 1963 never once acknowledged that the “hatred and violence” they claimed as the outgrowth of peaceful protest were why the protests were necessary in the first place.
As King famously wrote (and I quote directly, using the common parlance of the day), “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
It is here that many receiving these words may be mentally scurrying about to locate themselves as far away from any of those people—the Klan or the “white moderate”—as possible. After all, everyone knows that we are bold and willing to take a stand for the sake of justice! I give thanks to God that the huge Black Lives Matter sign on Foundry’s lawn, and the signs in my yard, my preaching and advocacy for racial justice and equity, my choice to march or publicly stand in solidarity, Foundry’s investment in the Journey to Racial Justice, don’t cause me to lose half my congregation or threaten the financial sustainability of the church or put my family in physical danger of violence. But let’s not pretend that systemic racism doesn’t exist within our congregation or that there is not a word for us in King’s letter. Together, we continue to try (thanks be to God). We continue to directly address issues and create spaces where tension and conflict are bound to emerge among us. This will likely increase over the coming months as we begin to discern concrete tactics to implement change. My prayer is that we will not run away from the tension, but receive it as a sign that we’re really doing something, that we might just be moving toward a “positive peace” with justice.
I also want to say a brief word about “unity.” Unity is a good word and a lofty goal. I hope anyone who truly knows me would say that I deeply desire unity among the human family. But like the “negative peace” of which King wrote, there can be a “negative unity.” Unity without justice, without change, without any accountability is just a word. Wishing for it or trying to manufacture a “kum ba yah” moment will not cut it, no matter how deeply we long to just get to unity already. In our rush to regain some sense of normalcy, a reprieve from daily chaos and intentionally divisive rhetoric, I pray we with the privilege of choice to retreat or to stay engaged, will not be silent when there is a move to release the tension before the work for “positive unity” is done. I pray we will remember that blaming others for sowing division while not taking concrete responsibility for our own role in sustaining injustice and disunity is hypocrisy.
And this leads to the other thing I want to briefly highlight. The story of Jonah challenges us to confront our own hatred and our own tribal, political, ideological, religious, racial, regional prejudices. This is a tension as difficult as any to bear. Jonah didn’t want his enemies to receive the mercy that God extended to him time and again. Perhaps he wanted God all to himself or for only his people, his nation. Perhaps he thought God was only on his side. Can we—you and I—be honest enough to admit our own hatred and prejudice?
This tension is indeed difficult and painful; because it reveals just how far we are from fulfilling God’s call of radical love and mercy. That is the call upon every one of us, friend and foe alike. It is God’s radical love and mercy that has brought each of us through until this day—whether we perceive it or not. It’s the goal of our living, really, if we seek to be truly human. To love as God loves. To be merciful as God is merciful. This doesn’t mean we have to like everyone. It doesn’t mean we have to all agree on things. It absolutely doesn’t mean “anything goes.” But it will require us to honor one another enough as children of God to not kill each other, to pray for one another, to bear and even create tension in order to move toward the goal of positive peace and unity, and as King wrote, to “rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”
God’s not going to let us go, no matter how much we try to run away… a storm, a fish, a call, a joke, a shade shrub, a protest, God will keep showing up, will keep working through the tensions so that we might finally… change. We can throw a tantrum about that. Or we can choose to say, “Thanks be to God.”
https://foundryumc.org/
You don’t have to be an AutoParent to be a good one. Join Family Pastor and mom of 2, Rev. K.C. Van Atta-Casebier as she openly shares her own hilarious parenting fails, secret cringe-worthy confessions, and some heartwarming parenting wins. If you need some solidarity and hope on this parenting journey, then this is your podcast! Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @autoparent!
Guest Preacher, the honorable Cory Booker. Introduction my Senior Pastor Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli.
Human Relations Sunday January 17th, 2021. Tired Feet, Rested Souls Sermon Series
https://foundryumc.org/archive/tired-feet-rested-souls
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC, January 10, 2020, Baptism of the Lord. “Tired Feet, Rested Souls” series.
Texts: Acts 19:1-7, Mark 1:4-11
Today, we begin a new sermon series, “Tired Feet, Rested Souls” inspired by MLK’s “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail.” Over the next six weeks, I will bring themes from the letter into conversation with the weekly scripture. There is much to explore and to learn together. It feels like a movement of Spirit that this series should begin on this Sunday following the events of this past week. It is to Spirit I turn now as we pray together…
“In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, ‘Those are social issues which the gospel has nothing to do with,’ and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between bodies and souls, the sacred and the secular.”
These words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were written in his “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail,” an open letter in response to eight white religious leaders who publicly critiqued the peaceful protests against racial segregation and violence in Birmingham in 1963.
It is a common thing in the churches I’ve served—even in Foundry, believe it or not—to hear people say they don’t want politics in church—let’s not grapple with “social issues which the gospel has nothing to do with.” My question is simply, what social issue does the gospel have nothing to do with? As Dr. King notes, it is “strange” for Christians to make a “distinction between bodies and souls, the sacred and the secular.” It’s strange because the God of the Bible doesn’t make these distinctions and most certainly cares about social issues. God cares about “politics,” that is, about the way we live in community, seek to order our common life, and care for the common good. Moses was political. Esther was political. Isaiah and every prophet was political. Jesus was political. All of these engaged and challenged the rulers and powers of the day for the sake of justice and righteousness and care for the suffering and oppressed and ultimately for the good of everyone. I have spent significant time in my life articulating a biblical, theological, and practical vision for the inherent connection between our Christian faith and politics. Sacred Resistance is one evidence of that.
Today, I will simply point out that what we have seen on display this week in our city is not an expression of healthy tension between political points of view. It is not an outcry against systemic violence and oppression for the sake of any justice or righteousness defensible in holy writ. It is a deep perversion of the connection between Christian faith and politics.
The insurrection we witnessed is fueled by a white, Christian nationalism not only willing but happy to have “Jesus Saves” signs and crosses paraded alongside the Confederate flag. Before and during the protest, violence was signaled in all the old, familiar, racist ways. In case anyone missed the more subtle signals, a noose was erected near the Capitol. “Religious liberty” another perversion of an otherwise lofty term and ideal is used in this context to defend selfishness, exclusion, inequity, injustice, and outright bigotry. As writer and researcher Robert P. Jones wrote, “This seditious mob was motivated not just by loyalty to Trump, but by an unholy amalgamation of white supremacy and Christianity that has plagued our nation since its inception and is still with us today.” As Jones indicates, this week’s events have been centuries in the making. In recent years, prominent white pastors in our country have spoken of our soon-to-be-former president as a savior, an idol in the old Roman Imperial mold—a sent-from-God ruler who would shut down the liberal aggressors who have the audacity to insist that Black lives matter and that naming and seeking to eradicate injustice and inequity is not a failure of American patriotism but its true call. //
On this day when we tell the story of Jesus’ Baptism, we’re reminded that Jesus is the one sent from God. Jesus is God’s child, the Beloved. Jesus models for us how to use our freedom. He clearly had power, charisma, wisdom and chose not to throw his weight around and lord over others, but rather to humble himself, to enter into the same waters of Baptism that we share, to face the wilderness and its many temptations, to journey in community and solidarity with all in need, to welcome and raise to leadership those whom others rejected or ignored, to insist upon both personal spiritual devotion and social justice, to care for both souls and bodies, and to persevere even unto death for the sake of love. Jesus reveals for us the perfected image of God in human form. Remember that in the beginning we are told that all humans are created in God’s image—all of us!—in all our various gender identities, skin colors, nationalities, religions, and abilities.
Jesus shows us what we’re capable of. In our Baptism we are incorporated into God’s mighty acts of salvation, given the freedom and power to resist evil, injustice, and oppression, and called to serve Jesus Christ and the Way of the Kin-dom which is love made manifest through justice, equity, mercy, compassion, and generosity.
One word from our Baptism liturgy I don’t want us to miss today: power. We are given freedom and power by God. To do what? To abuse our privilege? To hoard our resources? To put others at risk for our comfort? To bully and belittle people? To become champions at resentment and cynicism? To be cruel and inhuman? To hide behind wealth or whiteness? Some people use their freedom and power in that way. But God gives us freedom and power to follow Jesus and to emerge from the waters of God’s mercy and love ready to do what it takes to participate in God’s liberating and saving work of Kin-dom building.
Rev. Dr. King wrote, “There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period that the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that transformed the mores of society.”
King wrote these words as he sat in jail in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, a city he described as being completely “engulfed” in racial injustice, “thoroughly segregated,” and with a widely known “record of brutality.”
He’d gone to Birmingham to participate in the campaign “organized (locally) by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth… to attack the city’s segregation system by putting pressure on Birmingham’s merchants during the Easter season, the second biggest shopping season of the year…On April 3, 1963, it was launched with mass meetings, lunch counter sit-ins, a march on city hall, and a boycott of downtown merchants. … the campaign’s actions expanded to kneel-ins at churches, sit-ins at the library, and a march on the county courthouse to register voters.
On April 10, the city government obtained a state court injunction against the protests. Two days later, on Good Friday, King was arrested for violating the anti-protest injunction and was placed in solitary confinement. From there he wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and was released on bail on April 20.
On May 2, 1963, more than one thousand African American students attempted to march into downtown Birmingham where hundreds were arrested. The following day, Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor directed local police and fire departments to use force to halt the demonstrations. The next few days’ images of children being blasted by high-pressure fire hoses, clubbed by police officers, and attacked by dogs appeared on television and in newspapers, sparking international outrage.
After mediated negotiation between the business leaders and leaders of the campaign, on May 10th, King and Rev Fred Shuttlesworth announced an agreement with the city of Birmingham to desegregate lunch counters, restrooms, drinking fountains, and department store fitting rooms within ninety days, to hire blacks in stores as salesmen and clerks, and to release hundreds of jail protesters on bond.
Their victory, however, was met by a string of violence, culminating four months later on September 15, when Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members bombed Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church which had been the staging center for many of the spring demonstrations. Four young black girls—Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair—were killed. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the eulogy at their funeral on September 18, 1963. Nonetheless, Birmingham was considered one of the most successful campaigns of the civil rights era.”
I tell this story today in some detail because we all need to know it, we need to remember that concern for businesses over concern for Black lives is not a new one, we need to see that the issues currently being lifted by our Black, Indigenous, and siblings of color—and the same kind of attacks against them—are reflected in the events of 1963. I also tell this story because it shows a community, grounded in their faith and trained in the ways of nonviolent protest and resistance, who does what it takes—willingly going to jail, suffering blows, organizing for power, persevering even amidst tragedy after tragedy—to make real change. This is a community who uses their God-given freedom and power for the sake of justice and righteousness. They did not just take the temperature, they changed the thermostat.
This is not work that is separate from our life of faith, it is sacred resistance, it is part of our call.
Foundry, we’ve taken the temperature, right? We know that there are cold hearts that leave others’ bodies out in the cold as a result. We know that the heat of rage and resentment and hatred is at a boiling point, doing damage in untold ways. We know things are changing for better or for worse. We are called to change the world for the better. As those created in the image of God, given freedom and power through Spirit, we are called to not just take the temperature but to change the thermostat, to bring warmth where it’s needed and coolness where there is none, to do what it takes to make real change.
So here’s what you can do:
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do your own work; stay grounded in prayer and study
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explore the ways that you are already supporting economic and racial justice through our Social Justice ministries (perhaps some of you can share in the comments!)
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engage with the Journey to Racial Justice initiative at Foundry
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connect with the BWC We Rise United campaign
You are made in the image of God and are a member of the Family Beloved. You are given freedom and power! How will you use it to change the thermostat?
https://foundryumc.org/
Looking Ahead
Rev. Dr. Kelly L. Grimes - Associate Pastor, Director of Hospitality and Congregational Care
A sermon prepared for Foundry UMC for January 3rd, 2021
https://foundryumc.org/
Singing By Heart
A reflection shared by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, December 27, 2020, the first Sunday after Christmas.
Text: Luke 2:22-40
Most people who share Christian faith will say they have a favorite Christmas carol, song, or album—or maybe several! I am on the “several” team…
Music, for many of us is at the heart of our spiritual lives.
Songs are experienced and shared in many ways, they come in different styles and with different vibes.
And songs are part of our faith tradition from the ancient of days. Miriam and brother Moses sang a song of victory and joy at God’s liberating power to bring Israel out of slavery. There are the whole books of Lamentations—five dirges mourning the fall of Jerusalem and the Song of Songs—the love song to rule all others! And of course the Psalms are songs—“the hymnbook of the Bible.” There is the so-called “Christ hymn” found in Philippians 2. And in the Gospels we have Mary’s Magnificat and Zechariah’s song (Blessed be the God of Israel who comes to set us free… UMH 209). In both Matthew and Mark we are told that Jesus and the disciples sang hymns (Mt 26:30, Mk 14:26). And today we get yet another song. The song of prophet Simeon—“Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.” The prophet Anna likely also had her own song of praise and proclamation, though that one isn’t included in the text.
The song (or canticle) of Simeon is found in our UM Hymnal (#225) though I doubt that many of us know it. For many in other parts of the Christians family, it is known well because it’s part of the liturgy of the hours, a closing song for night prayer or compline. For those who pray using the hours, Simeon’s song is as familiar as your favorite carol. It’s a song many know by heart.
Think about that phrase “to know something by heart…” What a line! Something that you know without having to “think” about it, to know something from a “heart place,” a part of yourself that is deeper and perhaps more integrated into your being… That’s the way much of our music is—and certainly for most of us, the music of this season.
As I read this story we’ve received from Luke today, I also found myself resonating with the image of Mary and Joseph bringing Jesus to the temple for the religious rites. Lord, once we get out of this pandemic situation, I imagine there’s gonna be a run on folk bringing their little ones for the rites!! I always love this reminder that Jesus was raised up in the community of God’s people. Jesus was presented and circumcised as an infant—the Jewish rite of initiation into the covenant, made the annual religious pilgrimage with his family to Jerusalem for Passover (Luke 2:41ff.), and made a habit of going to synagogue on the sabbath day (Lk 4:16). No wonder he knew the scriptures and the songs of his faith. Anyone who knows a thing about child development is that what is learned and experienced in our earliest years are things that shape and form us and remain with us! And folk who know about human development generally know that things that are habitually repeated—words, actions, songs—become embedded in our DNA (I think of this as a unity, physical/spiritual/emotional).
People have joked with me over the years about how it seems I know all the words to the songs in the hymnal. The truth is that I was raised singing these songs and have sung them pretty consistently all of my life. And in this Christmas season, there are certain songs—some in the hymnal and others not—that I began hearing as an infant. The words and melodies reside deep in my being. Over the years, I have come to understand just now foundational the songs I was taught as a child and youth are to my understanding of God. I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart! If the devil doesn’t like it he can sit on a tack! (Sacred Resistance!)... I am a promise, I am a possibility, I am a promise, with a capital “P” I am a great big bundle of potentiality! And I am learning to hear God’s voice and I am trying to make the right choices. I’m a promise to be anything God wants me to be… O God of the stars, the sun, and the moon, O God of the wind and the sea, though you’re everywhere, how amazing it is that you can be here with me… As a youth, the music of Jim and Jean Strathdee was central to my experience. And little did I know that one of our favorite songs to sing at camp—“I am the Light of the World”—was teaching me a version of Howard Thurman’s reflection often called “the work of Christmas.” The lyrics I sang at Camp Egan near Tahlequah, Oklahoma included, “When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, with the kings and the shepherds have found their way home, the work of Christmas is begun… to find the lost and lonely one, to heal the broken soul with love, to feed the hungry children with warmth and good food, to feel the earth below the sky above!... to free the prisoner from all chains, to make the powerful care, to rebuild the nations with strength of good will, to see God’s children everywhere…. to bring hope to every task you do, to dance at a baby’s new birth, to make music in an old person’s heart and sing to the colours of the earth!... I am the light of the world! You people come and follow me. If you follow and love you’ll learn the mystery of what you were meant to do and be.”
These words, together with the words of Charles Wesley, Fanny Crosby, Charles Tindley, and so many more are the ground from which all my understandings of God, other people, and my place in the world have grown. Singing seems to set the words in our spirits and to help them take root—Music helps us to “learn things by heart…”
It was a joy to receive again our children singing on Christmas eve—that piece from the 2018 pageant was wonderful! And it makes me newly give thanks for the ways that we continue to create space for people of all ages to sing—as our ancestors have done through the ages—to sing praise and glory to God for all of God’s tender mercies and beautiful gifts. I give thanks for the ways that we continue to value singing and music—not as entertainment, but as worship, as prayer, as praise, as a proclamation, as a way for Spirit to teach us the faith, to help it lodge more deeply in our being.
Thanks be to God for the best gift of all, Jesus, in whom all God’s promises are fulfilled, the one who teaches us not only to learn things by heart, to sing things by heart, but who takes residence in our heart and helps us have the courage to be truly led by heart…to free the prisoner from all chains, to make the powerful care, to rebuild the nations with strength of good will, to see God’s children everywhere…
https://foundryumc.org/
The Fullness of Time
A homily preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, December 24, 2020, Christmas Eve.
Text: Luke 2:1-20
I’ve become increasingly tempted to purchase clever, comfy t-shirts. You know the ones I mean? The ones with quips like “Next week has been exhausting” or “Cupcakes are muffins that believed in miracles.” An early fave is: “Underestimate me. That’ll be fun.” This past week, I saw a new one, a simple line drawing of a glass filled about halfway. To the side there were two brackets measuring “1/2 water” and “1/2 air.” And the caption: “Technically, the glass is always full.”
2020 has been a year in which it may be difficult to perceive the glass as even half-full. Many have experienced loss—of jobs, loved ones, relationships, health. It is a year in which we as a nation have been reminded of vast, empty spaces in our country where compassion and grace for others belong. It’s a year that has revealed the ongoing deficit of equity and justice for our black, brown, indigenous, and impoverished siblings. 2020 has been a year of lack and emptiness in many ways. We’ve spoken about it throughout these months as a time of wilderness wandering—a place of uncertainty, danger, vulnerability, and unknowing.
In the Middle Eastern wilderness of old, there are no street lamps, no flashlights, no GPS gadgets, or cell phones; and if clouds cover the moon and stars, the terrain becomes not only dangerous, but impassable. If you get lost or separated from your people, well…it’s rough out there.
But… That’s the first word of scripture we heard tonight: “But there will be no gloom for those who were in anguish.” Another translation of Isaiah 9:1 is “Nevertheless, that time of darkness and despair shall not go on forever.” But…nevertheless…[the text continues] those who walked in darkness have seen a great light, upon them light has shined. (Is 9:2)
The shepherds were skillful at navigating the wilderness with their flocks, but when the beautiful dark sky becomes filled with God’s glory in an unfamiliar way they were terrified. “But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.” (Lk 2:10)
And here’s some of that good news: When your cup seems empty of what’s needed most, when things are uncertain and unfamiliar making you fearful and anxious, when all you perceive is pain, grief, anger, loss, loneliness, or lack, when others look at you or a situation and say there is no hope, the Christmas story interrupts—not ignoring the realities of our lives and world—but saying: “Nevertheless this suffering will not last forever. For a child is born for us who is a light for our path, a guide for the Way, a Prince of Peace, one who comes to save us!”
And so we sing “Joy to the world! The Lord has come! Joy to the world! The Savior reigns with truth and grace, with righteousness and all the wonders of love!”
And we sing this song even as sirens of ambulance and firetruck speed by, even as those on earthly “thrones” of power and wealth withhold what’s needed for the survival of siblings who find themselves out in the cold, with insufficient or no shelter, hospitality, welcome, food, or experiencing other harsh conditions of this current wilderness. We sing our song even as injustice and bigotry are championed by the powers that be in ways that continue to make the world unsafe for impoverished infants like Jesus, refugee children like Jesus, little brown boys like Jesus.
We sing our songs nevertheless not because we are ignoring or accepting those realities but because we have received the great gift of Jesus in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,” (Col 1:19) the one who has come into the world in flesh and blood just like ours and touched through personal experience all the vulnerable, broken places in our lives and our world and infused them with divine presence, the one who showed us how to sing songs of love and joy even in the midst of struggle and pain.
“The fullness of time” generally refers to a time when things are ready or ripe, the “right time” for something to occur. My journey through the 2020 Advent season has led me to a new understanding of what the “fullness of time” can mean: in every moment of life, there is always present or possible both sorrow and joy, acts of hatred and acts of sacrificial love, doors closing and others opening. Some among us have experienced amazing joys in 2020—births, new opportunities, insight, marriage or new relationships, liberation of various kinds AND this while also experiencing the pain and fear and rage and loss of the pandemics marking this time. Others have struggled mightily through deaths and job loss and illness and other painful realities of life this year AND have found moments of extraordinary beauty and joy even still.
It struck me yesterday as I sat in the Foundry sanctuary, newly grappling with the reality that the livestream for tonight couldn’t happen there due to connectivity issues...and the Foundry bells were ringing their noonday reminder of God’s presence when, all of a sudden the fire alarm started going off, complete with loud, honking chirps and flashing lights. And I thought, “This is the way it is: our time is always full of both danger and vulnerability and the beauty and power of God’s love and mercy.” The disappointment for me of not being in our sanctuary tonight, simply highlights what a gift our experiences in community truly are and offers an opportunity for gratitude and joy…and not taking such good gifts for granted.
God really is Emmanuel. God is with us, perceived or not. When the glass seems half empty, God’s presence not only fills the other half, but bubbles up like a wellspring and our cup overflows. The wellspring begins in God’s own heart, a heart so full of love and mercy that it spills over into Jesus of Nazareth whose love and mercy spills over into all creation. We’re told in scripture that happened “in the fullness of time.” (Gal 4:4) Jesus lived all his life as a witness to the power of love, grace, justice, and compassion. Jesus lived all his life with open arms and heart extending to each and to all the wonders of God’s love.
And as we gather as Foundry and as a human family tonight, spread out across the city, region, nation, and world, we sing again our songs of joy. Because the hopes and fears of all the years are met in Jesus tonight, the dear Christ enters into every beautiful, broken heart and, by God’s tender grace, teaches each one how to be open and then… filled to overflowing.
https://foundryumc.org/
Now…Nothing Will Be Impossible
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, December 20, 2020, “The Fullness of Time” series.
Text: Luke 1:26-38, 46b-55
“Mary…you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus…And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren.”
And NOW…what has seemed impossible will be revealed as… possible? But, seriously, should we be surprised that old Zechariah had some questions when God’s messenger, Gabriel, announced that Elizabeth would conceive a son after all indicators pointed to “past it?” Should we be surprised that it took Mary a minute to catch up with what was happening, that she was “perplexed” at the arrival and greeting of Gabriel? After all, she was a 14 year old girl without flashy pedigree, husband, or cultural agency—she did not live in a time and place where young women were given voice or choice. Pregnancy out of wedlock was a crime and would threaten both hers and the child’s life and her betrothed, well, that was probably over. And yet she is singled out by God with he assurance that the child will not only survive but thrive. She is singled out by God as worthy of being mother of a king. This simply isn’t how things are done. This isn’t how the world works. This isn’t possible. And notice that Gabriel doesn’t just deliver this proclamation and depart, but evidently waits around to see if Mary is in, a signal that Mary was given at least some measure of agency. “Here am I…Let it be with me according to your word.” Gabriel then departs with the good news: “She said yes!”
The angel communicates to Mary that some things “will” take place. “You will conceive”… “He will be great”… “of his kingdom there will be no end”… “The power of the Most High will overshadow you”… “the child to be born will be holy…the Son of God.” It’s all just words at that point…Gabe pulling up saying, “Hey Mary, these impossible things will be…trust me.” And in the bit of the narrative not received aloud today, after her encounter with Gabriel, Mary travels to her six-months-pregnant cousin, Elizabeth, who says of Mary, “blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” (Lk 1:45)
It’s among the first of the Christmas wonders, this belief. So much in our world—then and now—might suggest that we choose otherwise. Why did Mary believe when everything about the situation was impossible? Evidently, she knew the stories of her Jewish faith, like the story of Hannah who sang at her long-awaited child Samuel’s birth. Mary’s song echoes her ancestor Hannah and is traditionally called the “Magnificat.” It paints a portrait of a certain kind of God who is merciful, strong, impatient with destructive pride, disruptive of the status quo, a God who overturns the “way things work” so that the hungry and lowly ones receive the good things usually reserved for the rich and powerful.
This is the God Mary knows—and these things are not, in her song, things that “will be,” but are proclaimed as things that are, things that have already taken place. This is the way our God acts, she sings. This is what our God does from generation to generation, she proclaims. And in the song, Mary recognizes that she has been added to God’s mighty acts, that she is now part of God’s revolutionary love story: “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me.”
Throughout this Advent season, our reflections have pulled words from the Gospel texts that highlight the dynamic time-infused nature of the story we tell and point to God’s engagement with the human family throughout time. “After that suffering”… “The beginning of the good news”… “The One who is coming after”… “Now…nothing will be impossible.” Advent is supposed to be a season of waiting and anticipation, a season of trusting the promise that the birth of Jesus, the birth of perfect love, justice, wisdom, compassion, and mercy will be born again in our time. And yet when it comes right down to it—maybe it’s just me—I am weary of waiting…and so wander back into where we began: “How long, O Lord?” If all that justice and stuff are what you do from generation to generation, why not get from “will be” to “now?”
How long, O Lord? How long until the “Proud Boys” are scattered in the racist imaginations of their hearts? How long until those in the halls of government at every level who abuse their power are truly dethroned and their sway dismantled? How long until privilege is not reserved for those with the least melanin in their skin? How long until those brought low by the pandemics of white supremacy and COVID receive good things like debt, rent, and student loan forgiveness, gap pay, reparations, equity in healthcare, and living wages instead of empty promises and crumbs? How long until it would be unthinkable that as one scholar has suggested “America’s billionaires could give everybody in the country a $3000 stimulus check and still be richer than they were before the pandemic?”
We may be tempted to get twisted up in disappointment and cynicism, we may settle for egg nog or cookies or sparkly things as the only sources of joy, giving up the energy it takes to keep hoping the story we receive at Christmas is believable in any way. And I’m not even talking about believing any particular assertion of angelic beings or “a virgin birth,” I’m talking about the belief in a God who actually does act with a mighty arm on behalf of the impoverished and oppressed, the unexpected and simple ones. We can lose our faith in God. That’s an option. Or we might pause and remember that, throughout all of time, God doesn’t lose faith in us even with our miserable track record as a human family.
The story we tell today is a shining example of some humans who were worthy of God’s faith. They recognized that, in order for the things God says will be to occur sooner, they had to do their part now. Mary and Elizabeth respond in their time, their “now,” and bear new life into their generation, new life that flows into every generation to come. Without Elizabeth, there’s no John the Baptizer, no preparer of the Way. Without Mary and her “yes,” there is no Jesus and all the life and hope and saving grace he brings. In short, what Elizabeth and Mary did in their “now” made possible the promised “will be.” We exist now as this faith community because Mary not only believed that God was able to fulfill the promise of new life, but also said, “Here am I…”
From generation to generation, God gives us what we need to do what is right, to bring healing, to live justly, to share life together such that all have what they need, to let go the need to steal or to overpower or harm others. God helps us recognize that what we already have is enough to do some good in the world with and for others. God has given us everything, promised everything, hung in there with us when we turn up our noses, when we receive a divine message and respond with some version of “That’s asking too much. That’s too expensive. I don’t have time. Someone else will take care of it. I am not equipped. Thanks anyway.” If we all did our part, focusing our energy and resources on responding with a “Here I am!” to God’s call, the moral arc might get bent more quickly. The “How long?” question is partly ours to answer! And this is our now.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke of “the fierce urgency of now.” In his brave and deeply controversial speech at Riverside Church, challenging the U.S. war in Vietnam he said, “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there ‘is’ such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.” We as Foundry Church have focused a great deal over these past months on our call for “such a time as this.” I have pressed again and again the point that this is our stretch of a long journey toward God’s vision of a truly just and gentle world. Our time is now. In the midst of the pandemics of systemic racism and COVID, deepening political and relational divides, and crises of health, education, employment, environment, and more, there is no time for apathy or complacency or pushing off responsibility onto God as though we couldn’t get something done if we each did our part. What are you doing now for justice, for peace, for love? If Josie Wright Martin at age 11 can raise and contribute over $6000 to Foundry’s work, well…? Pray, befriend, serve, lead, teach, give…
At the end of this challenging year, we look ahead not only to things that will be but to what God is doing right now. We as Foundry are called to participate, to play a role in the mending work of God, to engage and do and dream and share things in the months ahead that will be life-changing, life-giving, that will change the world. Some may worry whether we’ll have enough money, commitment, creativity, perseverance to discern, much less do, all we’re given to do and to be and to become. But I believe that everything we need is already present among us, that we are worthy of God’s faith in us, and that, as we respond to God’s call and each do what we can do now, the will be will… BE. For nothing will be impossible with God!
https://foundryumc.org/
The One Who Is Coming
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, December 13, 2020, “The Fullness of Time” series.
Text: John 1:6-8, 19-28
November 4th, 2020 was a Wednesday. It was the day after the election. And, since it was Wednesday, it was a day I set up my stack of boxes on top of an ottoman in the purple parlor of my home, ran an ethernet cable from the second floor interwebs box down the stairs to plug into my laptop perched on the boxes, rigged the stationary sheer curtain on the picture window behind me with a random curtain rod to provide protection from glare, and then sat in on the sofa for a while in the swirl of emotion and thoughts stirred by that particular, historical moment. I was preparing, of course, for my weekly FaceBook Live “ponderings,” my unscripted, mid-week message that has become part of my—and Foundry’s—weekly rhythm through the pandemics of 2020.
What I shared that day was a reminder that our work in the world is the same regardless of who is president—because our God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. But what caught me off-guard as I began to speak was the joy I felt and proclaimed in that moment of deep uncertainty. I was surprised to hear myself proclaim “this is the day the Lord has made, let’s rejoice.” Because in addition to uncertainty, I was among those feeling deep disappointment (and maybe some despair) that so many in our nation maintained or added their support for a person whose racism, bullying, narcissism, and ineptitude around not only COVID but other issues and crises continue to cause damage and are well documented—regardless of how vociferously some claim otherwise. I share this not as a jab at those who disagree with me politically, but simply as an example of the way that joy can surprise us sometimes. And, regardless of where you find yourself politically, there has been pretty widespread distress over the chasm that so starkly divides the people of this nation and the ongoing vitriol and violence being perpetrated as a result. I felt strange and perhaps guilty that day proclaiming any message of rejoicing. And yet, in my unscripted sermon, it was joy that emerged.
Today is the third Sunday of Advent—or Gaudete/Rejoice (Latin) Sunday. The traditional focus is on “joy.” The pink color of the candle we light on this Sunday is a symbol of the joy that emerges as we draw closer to the birth of Christ. And it seems that every year as this Sunday rolls around the tension between the painful realities in the world and the invitation to joy is so taut that it could snap at any moment… If that has been true in past years, Lord knows it is true in 2020. COVID cases and deaths are surging just as was predicted by scientists; awareness of the U.S.-sanctioned executions of imprisoned siblings is once again making headlines—as if the atrocity of the death penalty is a new thing in our land; the energies of white supremacy continue to roil all around and within us doing ongoing damage to black and brown siblings in every possible way; more than 10 million persons are unemployed in this nation even as the gap between rich and poor continues to grow; a “tsunami” of evictions looms; we see no end in sight for the dog-whistling and mobilization of hate groups to “stand by”; therapists and pastors and social workers are overrun with folk needing their care; so many hearts are lonely and bodies hungry… In the midst of all this and so much more, we are invited to contemplate joy. Joy.
Notice I did not say to feel joy as if we could manufacture it. As with that moment during my livestream, joy appears when it will. And it doesn’t equate to being “happy.” It is something else altogether.
The late Orthodox Christian Priest Alexander Schmemann once wrote, “The knowledge of the fallen world does not kill joy, which emanates in this world, always, constantly, as a bright sorrow.”
I have been captivated by the phrase “a bright sorrow” all the years since first encountering these words. It captures the tension that seems inherent in any honest experience of joy. Describing joy as an emanation of “a bright sorrow” is enigmatic but seems, somehow, true. Within the context of our spiritual tradition, the pain and injustice of this broken world may kill many things, but cannot kill joy.
As I pondered all this I wondered why those who organized the Revised Common Lectionary selected this encore story of John right after last week’s story of John—really just two different gospel accounts of the same story. And why would they select this gospel story for “Rejoice Sunday?”
Certainly the emphasis is different between the two accounts of John. But do we really need both of these texts so close to each other? Maybe someone remembered how quickly we move on, how easy and typical it is for us to ignore the prophets.
After all, prophets often rub us the wrong way. They repeat themselves. They won’t let things go. They won’t let us off the hook. They have seen into the depth of pain and suffering around us such that they will not rest until freedom comes. Spirit has touched them so that they care less about their own daily rounds and more about the propagation of food for the hungry, shelter for the unhoused, sustenance for those who are impoverished, friendship with the outcast and the lonely, dignity and equity for the oppressed, and renewal for societies breaking under the weight of shiny, fast things like words and bullets and needles and machines and the siren call of excess. Prophets could give a flip about our respectability politics and are impatient with things that don’t matter to the nourishment of human bodies and spirits and are fearless in advocacy against all that does harm. Prophets are always trying to get up in our business!
Maybe the setup of the lectionary is a way to mimic the actual activity of wilderness criers across the ages, the way they show up again and again and again crying out in hope that someone will finally get the message. This prophet, John, baptizes with water and points to the one who is coming after…the one more powerful, the one who baptizes with Holy Spirit, the one who is the light of the world. Are we paying attention? Are we willing to stay in the flow of the river of grace and mercy long enough to step into a truly new way of being in the world? Are we receiving what John is saying?
The one who is coming with Holy Spirit power and as light seen by people who walk in darkness is prophesied in the book of Isaiah. And both these prophecies were received in times of temptation to idolatry, times of upheaval and danger for the nation of Israel. Just as we experience today, fear, anxiety, distraction, violence, vulnerability, and discouragement were all part of the picture. So much of the wilderness criers’ message is a warning and a call to repentance…but here and there and now and again, all of a sudden, the prophetic texts are punctuated with lines like these—like joy that bubbles up out of nowhere:
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness— on them light has shined. 3 You have multiplied the nation, you have increased its joy;… 4 For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken…
6 For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
7 His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace…
He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness... (Isaiah 9:2-7, selected)
And these…
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; … to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; 2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,… to comfort all who mourn;… 4 They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.
For I the Lord love justice... (Isaiah 61:1-4, 8, selected)
These ancient words give content to our Advent hope and undergird the prophecy of John centuries later. Notice that the promise is liberation, peace, righteousness, justice. Notice that the anointed one comes to set people free so that they might participate in building up, raising up, repairing what has been devastated over many generations. // And perhaps this is the heart of the matter.
John was raised up—like the prophet Isaiah—as a witness to God and reminds us again and again, Advent after Advent, year after year, (and this year) week after week, that God is at work, that One more powerful is coming to meet us in the wildernesses and tensions and broken places of our lives, and that, with God’s help, we ourselves have a part to play in what God is doing in the world.
You and I will be baptized with Holy Spirit! You and I will be given light when the night is long so that we might journey through until the storm passes over and the morning comes. And this, so that you and I will be set free and given power to participate with God in God’s mighty acts of salvation, love, justice, and reparation of the devastation of generations… We can be part of God’s work in the world! Our time is connected to God’s time, our history is part of God’s salvation history, our lives—even yours and mine—are called to participate in the prophetic work of God’s mending and movement toward the divine vision of creation restored in all wholeness.
I once wrote, “Prophetic witness will always cry out in grief over the suffering of innocents, the callous inhumanity of so many in power, the greedy destruction of what is good and true and beautiful. Because a prophet looks upon the world and sees beauty and goodness, love and harmony, sees both what is and what can be.” To perceive even in or through the pain of the present moment “what can be” might be described as an emanation of “a bright sorrow”…a longing for that which is possible. To look deeply into the now and yet perceive One who is coming into the world to enfold and energize us with purposeful lives and with a love that, in the final analysis, will always win…that might inspire at least an inkling…of joy.
https://foundryumc.org/
The Beginning of the Good News
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, October December 6, 2020, “The Fullness of Time” series.
Text: Mark 1:1-8
“Once upon a time...” “In the beginning was...” That’s the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives’ tale blues riff begins with “Woke up this mornin’...” Rock legend Steven Tyler is the source of this little truth nugget. Stories have a beginning. And in the span of human time, every beginning means that something is ending or, at least, changing. If a new story is told, the existing story is amended or released.
“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
The beginning of the gospel according to Mark begins with a fragment, a sentence with no ending. I guess I’d always known that, but it struck me in a peculiar way this year. I found myself puzzling over it—probably more than it warrants. Steven Tyler came to the rescue, reminding me that maybe this sentence fragment is simply the way stories begin, a signal of a new chapter in the human story.
And what a gift to receive a new chapter that begins with the promise of good news! // When bad news has been our daily bread, when we’ve had to labor to hold on to hope, when we’ve been bombarded with confusion and gaslighting and reports of violence and abuses of every kind, our bodies and spirits long for a good word, some good news. Bring on the εὐαγγελίου (euangeliou), the “gospel,” of Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, the anointed one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell!
Lest we get ahead of ourselves, notice that the most ancient account of the good news of Jesus begins in the wilderness. It doesn’t begin in the party hall or throne room. It doesn’t begin in a time of peace and plenty. It doesn’t even begin in a bucolic and potentially sappified setting with a manger and glowing light. No. In Mark’s version the beginning is in the wilderness. The wilderness is where Israel rebelled against God—not once, not twice, but again and again. The wilderness is also where God continued to show up with mercy, sustenance, and guidance bringing water from a rock, manna from heaven, and elemental signs to lead the people forward.
And the Jordan river where John does his baptizing runs through the wilderness and is a symbolic place of crossing over from one life to the next. Having visited that place for the first time in January of this year, I can tell you the Jordan is not a clear, sparkling river. Anthony accidentally drank some of the water I’d set aside to bring home and was afraid he was a goner. Just sayin. That place now as then is a place surrounded by violence and struggle and deep-seated enmity among people and nations.
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ starts with a fragment, echoes of prophecy cried out by John, reverberating across the stark wilderness landscape of an occupied land filled with ancient enmities and alighting on the waters of a murky river. The good news begins right where it is needed—in places of struggle and uncertainty.
And then, as now, good news was a draw. We are told that “all the people of Jerusalem were going out” to receive John’s “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” Would that be received by us as “good news” today? The words—“repentance”…“sins”—have become heavy with the baggage laid upon them, so heavy that they might sink to the bottom of the river once we have thrown them away. But I hope we won’t throw out the gospel truth with the bath water. And there is gospel—good news—to be found here.
To repent is to acknowledge something is wrong and turn away from it. It is being honest about our sin, about the things that we have done and left undone that separate us from God and other people, things that have done harm. Just imagine if you had to eternally drag around all that baggage…imagine if there was no facility available for clearing our conscience, writing a new chapter, making new choices and commitments about how to live?
A baptism with water, even iffy, murky water as found in today’s Jordan River, is a washing, a cleansing. And that is a good feeling! Think about any time in your life when you’ve not been able to have a bath or shower for a time. Perhaps it was during a hospitalization or on a mission trip or work assignment without the kinds of facilities available to most of us; or perhaps for some of us, it was during a time lived on the street or in our car. Those moments help us understand what a privilege it is to get to take a shower! After many days or weeks, you emerge from the water, feeling like a new person!
And water baptism is, at its most elemental level, a washing facility. The water baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins is an opportunity to remove at least a layer of the gunk that clogs the arteries of our hearts so that love can’t flow freely, the grime of resentment and regret that has built up on our being over the years making us—if we’re being honest—small-minded and ashamed, the prejudicial gack that has been smeared over our proverbial eyes that keeps us from perceiving what is real, from perceiving every human as our family. A water baptism is very good news! Because it means that, should we so choose, we can present ourselves acknowledging we are in need of a scrub… and emerge from the waters lighter, free, and shining…maybe like a new person!
This baptism is not only found at the beginning of the good news but is, itself, the beginning of the good news. It is the necessary preparation for what comes next.
Repentance and forgiveness of our sins, removes all that gunk that gets in the way and takes up space better filled with what Jesus comes to offer. John proclaims that Jesus comes to baptize us with Holy Spirit, the very breath of life and conscience and creativity and prophetic power. Prepare the way of the Lord! Take a bath! A repentance bath…forgiveness and mercy are in the water. And those beautiful, humbling gifts liberate us, open us, to receive and share the life that God promises in and through the one who is coming, Jesus.
What comes next in Jesus is more powerful than our most stubborn excuses and rationalizations, more powerful than empire and all its agents and effects, more powerful than bullies, more powerful than our neuroses and our addictions, more power than the voices in our head trying to convince us we can’t be forgiven, more powerful than prejudices and bigotry encrusted in our psyches through centuries, more powerful than water, that elemental symbol of chaos and destruction, water that Jesus calms with a word, so that it drapes in gentle folds about his feet. //
Writer Kathleen Norris tells of how, in her work as an artist-in-residence at parochial schools, she uses the Psalms as examples of poetry. The children, she says, are often surprised about the Psalms—the way the poetic prayers of the Bible don’t mince words or leave out painful things in human life. And Norris says the children’s writing captures much of that emotional directness and honesty. She goes on to share this:
“Once a little boy wrote a poem called ‘The Monster Who Was Sorry.’ He began by admitting that he hates it when his father yells at him; his response in the poem is to throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town. The poem concludes: ‘Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.’” ‘My messy house’ says it all: with more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?”
And there it is. The beginning of the good news is a clean up job, it is a preparation of our “house” to receive Christ who fills us with new life in the power of Spirit. It doesn’t just magically happen. We’ve got to show up and do our work. We’ve got to get into the water with John. Honesty and vulnerability are required of us. Fessing up and Self-love and open hearts are required of us. But even in the wilderness, even in these days of pandemic, even in the swirl and churn of these difficult days in our nation and world, we can do something. We can do those things—honesty, vulnerability, fessing up, self-love, open heartedness—right? We are not powerless.
We can wake up each morning with our minds stayed on Jesus, proclaiming that new every morning is God’s love and mercy, new every morning is a new beginning…We can look around at the mess made after we’ve made it again and say “I shouldn’t have done all that.” And then get busy cleaning it up. And, by doing so…once again, in the wilderness, in the mess, the good news is proclaimed, a new chapter begins…and we prepare the way for Christ to be born again.
https://foundryumc.org/
After That Suffering
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, October November 29, 2020, “In the Fullness of Time” series.
Text: Mark 13:24-37
Time is a tricky thing. Theoretical physics gives us concepts like absolute or Newtonian time, relativity and the space-time continuum, and loop quantum gravity theory—all different perspectives trying to understand what seems to be the fairly agreed upon belief that time is one of the most difficult things to understand. Yet here we are. And it is whatever time it is. And humans have forever been anxious to try to predict the times, to predict when things will happen—and are, mostly, tragically or hilariously wrong. We join our ancestors in moments of suffering who for centuries cry out “How long, O Lord?” Or with Whitney Houston, “How will I know?” Or with every child anywhere on a family trip, “Are we there yet?” We talk about time as a commodity and often get caught in a scarcity model—as if we don’t have enough. Or we think of time as an empty space that is our duty to fill with activity. When will there come a time that there’s more time? Is that even possible? Is time really a measurable thing? And what about eternity? Does time have a “start time?” And we’re back to physics and question after question.
Time is always a tricky thing. And in this year of disruption and disaster and disease, time—at least my experience of it—has just been plain weird. Sometimes a week feels like a day and a month like a week. The familiar rhythms and markers of our existence have been so thrown off that it feels like we’re floating in some shadowy wrinkle in time. And we don’t know how long all this is going to last and we can’t plan our lives in the little boxes and fields of our calendars that normally give us some sense of control because predictions of vaccines and protocols and tests and all the other stuff surrounding COVID-19 are shrouded in uncertainty wrapped in contingencies.
It’s true that—because human life has often been disrupted with disease and violence—one of the most common refrains of our spiritual tradition is “How long, O Lord??” But in the midst of that outcry, if we’re paying attention, our faith tradition helps us manage and mark time. The seasons of the church year, the liturgical seasons with their assigned symbolic colors and images, are one of the ways that our religious practice orders time. And today we begin a new year with this first Sunday of Advent. Advent is all about waiting, about anticipation, about looking ahead to fulfillment of a promise. But one difference between human experience of time generally and our religious observance is that in church time we’ve got an end date—we know, for example, that we will light a candle on our wreath for four Sundays and then, on December 25th, baby Jesus arrives! It’s like clockwork, like Newtonian time, steady and forward moving and certain. Jesus is gonna get born no matter what items on our holiday to-do list have been completed or left undone, no matter whether we’ve gathered in person with family or in worship on Christmas Eve or not.
But there’s this whole other kind of time at work underneath our observance of Advent…or maybe above or around… It is the bigger, broader space of time that begins perhaps at creation and certainly by the birth of Jesus and stretches into this present moment and beyond. This time is not predictable or controlled. It is the time between the Alpha and Omega…the beginning and the end. It is the time between when God got this party started and when all reaches its divinely imagined goal. As one scholar describes it, “Jesus’ followers are summoned to faithful vigilance during an arduous, ambiguous time between the inauguration and consummation of the [kin-dom] of God.” The Gospel according to Mark is particularly focused on this “arduous, ambiguous time” and the text we heard today may reflect the particular upheavals happening in the lives and time of Mark’s readers.
If you read the whole of Mark chapter 13, you will read of a variety of dangers and sufferings: false prophets, wars, famines, persecution, family dissension, and exile. Our passage follows these with, “But in those days, after that suffering…” And it sounds like Jesus is going to tell us when to expect the suffering to end (“after that suffering”). And it sounds like Mark wrote the words of our text as if the end of the story—the “consummation of the kin-dom”—was expected within the times that he was living. I mean it says “when you see these things taking place, you know…” and “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” But then we get that bit that says, “about that day or hour no one knows.” Tricky.
What we receive next is the teaching about staying awake. We’re supposed to stay awake so as not to miss when the big event happens. Now I have become very good at being awake—often in the middle of the night when I really don’t want to be awake. Staying awake for a long period of time can make you exhausted and cranky. And, well, the time between the inauguration and consummation of the kin-dom of God is not over. The suffering is not ended. Perhaps the specific sufferings of Mark’s day are over—that is, the abuse of power by Roman emperor Nero, whose reign was marked with tyranny, extravagance, and debauchery which inspired the Jewish revolt against imperial Rome. At least we don’t have any of that these days, you know, people abusing power for personal gain for themselves and their cronies, not acting with integrity, making decisions that do harm, acting with prejudice and without any sense of cooperation—all within an inherently broken and oppressive imperial system… At least we don’t have any uprising from those who have been marginalized, disenfranchised, oppressed, and overlooked… Oh…wait… This long time of waiting for tyrants be unseated, empires to fall, and peace and justice to take over is exhausting. How long are we expected to stay awake? A human body and spirit can only take so much after all…
“But in those days, after that suffering…” What if this phrase is not meant to mean after a particular suffering in one, specific time? What if the “day or hour” of a divine arrival is not referring to a one-time event? I grant to all of you biblical scholars and theologians out there that Mark is almost certainly reflecting an ancient Jewish hope (found in Daniel and elsewhere) in a “Son of Man” return at the end times to sort everything out the way God wants it. But I beg that you will grant me some interpretive license, some listening underneath the plain meaning or intention of the author in order to receive what Spirit may also want to say.
In this long waiting time, this long suffering time, this long time of wondering how long the cycles of injustice and cruelty and war and destruction will continue—in this, our time, what if the message in the text, the message of signs and of words that don’t pass away, the message of remaining alert—what if this is a perennial message, a daily message, a message for us after “that suffering” we experienced yesterday or an hour ago or after the suffering we are experiencing right now is passed…What if the message is that after every suffering, large and small, today and every day, we are assured that an inbreaking of God’s love and mercy will surely come. It may come in ways you might miss if you’re not expecting it. That is, most of us will not see a vision of Jesus surfing back to earth on the waves of cloud or anything else so clear and dramatic. The never-passing-away reality of God’s mending, tender love may come to us through the most everyday kinds of moments. As one poet described it:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent
Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then—
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent
By bestowing largesse, honor,
One might say love.
Any teaching about staying awake is not, of course, a literal call to sleep deprivation or insomnia (thank God). It is an invitation to remain awake and alert to the present moment, to what is really happening, to each present moment’s beauty and its pain and everything in between. It is an invitation to be always looking for an inbreaking of grace, of divine presence, of visitation.
There have been moments when the way the breeze caressed my face was, for me, a clear sign of God’s embrace. When a random message from a rarely heard-from person came to me as a clarion call to purpose. When a new relationship was revealed as part of God’s liberating work in my life. And in this long year challenging in so many new ways, Jesus has shown up again and again. It would be easy to miss these things—and God knows I’ve missed so much in my distraction and my collusion with our culture’s cult of filling time and calendars with what we think are controllable expectations. We can’t know exactly how or when Jesus will show up except on Christmas and Easter! But the promise is that Jesus will draw near after the suffering, in the suffering, in this present suffering, with love and grace just for you. So make that your expectation. Stay alert to that possibility.
This holy season into which we enter today is a particularly focused practice ground for living this way. It gives us a way to mark the time with intention, to wait on the Lord not in idleness, but in focused activity. And as we move through these days in the earth’s cycle where on this part of the planet, daylight grows short and night stretches on, and in this year when isolation and illness and injustice cast long shadows, we are reminded that we can shine, we can illumine a way for others who are trying to find footing, we can nurture the lives of others through love and care, we can share what we have, we can pray with and for one another, we can do what we can do. And for all that we cannot control, we wait on the Lord, we look for Spirit, we rely on the visitation of the Christ, trusting that the long night will end, that morning is coming. And our waiting will never be in vain, for in each and every day God is Emmanuel, God with us. And in the fullness of time our long-expected Jesus will come into the world to usher in that perfect peace, that divine justice, that ancient hope for the consummation of God’s creation that is the desire of every nation, the joy of every longing heart.
https://foundryumc.org/
The Least of These - Matthew 25:31-46
Rev. Ben Roberts
A Sermon for Foundry UMC
11-22-20
Today is celebrated in our liturgical calendar as Reign of Christ or Christ the King Sunday. And today marks the end of our liturgical year, so that’s nice, 2020 is sort of, over today. Christ the King, enthroned in glory, gives us an assurance of who has final authority and to whom we’re accountable for the power we hold in this life.
“Just as you did it to one of the least of these” and “just as you did not do it to one of the least of these” is either a reassuring balance that even the smallest acts of mercy we take are received as acts of righteousness in the face of need and injustice. Or It may feel like a maddening judgmental score card where our every action is weighed as good or bad and the side with the highest total determines our fate. That’s a pretty natural place for our minds to go considering that in a contest, other than golf, the side with the highest point total is declared the winner. The judgmental score card is too often accompanied by a paralyzing feeling of “what’s the use in trying” in a complex world of big and small systemic injustice. One thing is very clear…Prince, R.E.M. and Jimmy Buffet all lied to us, this end of the world scene does not sound much like a party at all.
Matthew’s Gospel ends Jesus’ ministry with this series of three teachings. All of them include forms of judgement, only one of them is any sort of party, in the first part of chapter 25 describing being ready for the end with images of entering a wedding banquet. From our story today, we have an image of judgment comparing this end process to sorting out of sheep and goats. From here the Gospel moves on into the passion narrative and the plots to betray and crucify Jesus.
All this feels heavy to me in these waning days of global pandemic Fall with Winter coming. Be reminded, fear not, an inbreaking of hope, peace, love, and joy is, and always is, coming. Tempting as it is, let us not skip this drama in Matthew. It certainly serves a purpose for the author in their communication with their community. Ever the convincer, Matthew dials up the end of time imagery in a continued effort to ground Jesus in the same line with all the other Jewish hero’s and in this case the promised one with authority of Judgement, seemingly a reference to apocalyptic narratives in Daniel, chapter 7:13. The long and short of the message being; this is the one, listen to him.
Here, in our story, Jesus describes not only what a process of judgment might look like (there are multiple), the Son of Man’s role in it as king, but also the default mode of life of the righteous sheep-le (meet the needs as you encounter them), and the goat-y behavior of the unrighteous (qualifying or being asleep to the needs all around).
It could easily be my own agenda here, but I took note as an Ordained Deacon the UMC, that the “accursed” in the story, question Jesus by asking, when did we see you and not diēkonēsamen (minister to, or take care of) you. Admittedly, I read into this Jesus’ underlying conflict with religious leaders who, rather than extend mercy, enforced extra financial burden upon the sick and prevented them from participating in religious and social life until they paid up to become ritually clean. No mercy, until you pay. Maybe they were not religious leaders at all and thought those acts of mercy were reserved only for official roles. The result is the same either way, official role, or none, when they failed to extend mercy to the lest of these, especially those who could not pay, so also, they did not extend it to the king.
For me today, the biggest temptation of this text might be to just start naming all the goats. Especially right now when it’s so obvious. Like, extremely obvious. Just look at what they are wearing it might as well say “goat.” Look at who they talk to, look at who they do not talk to. Look at the legislation they’re passing, and the legislation they fail to pass. Look at who they voted for. Look at the wild departures from agreed upon norms. Look at their high property values and their low taxes. Look at the conditions of their schools and their neighborhoods. Look how they treat their neighborhood. Look how judge-y they are. They didn’t even post about that thing on social media, but they posted about that other thing without hesitation. Look at what they’re watching and reading, they think that’s news, it’s 100% goat-y. And they’re so mean if you even get one word wrong. They act so entitled. There’s no way this is not clear to everyone, even them, they aren’t even aware.
And of course, in a narrative story, where there are sheep and goats and it’s so incredibly obvious that they are the goats then of course that means… I mean you know, just look at who we voted for. Look at how we do church. Look how caring we are. Look how we support the established agreed up normative system. Look at our school and how smart our kids are. I tip big when I have some faceless person risk their life to bring me food in the pandemic. Look how good I am at naming how goat-y they are. It’s so painfully obvious that they are the goats and that means I…am…the……………….king.
Right, well…yes, so…..hold on, that actually doesn’t sound right at all, that sounds a little goat-y.
I met my now spouse, Cortney, 11 years ago when we were living in Burkina Faso. She was there through Peace Corps and lived in a town called Bogande. I was there with a non-profit living in the capital, Ouagadougou. In a straight line, were about 100 miles away, which of course is an 8 hour bus ride. If you’ve never lived on the edge of the Sahara Dessert, you should know it’s hot. Also, there’s not a whole lot to do out in smaller towns, so you need to think of your own entertainment like books or a game called “goat or kid (human child).” It’s played by listening to random sounds on the other side of your wall that could be either a goat or a kid, then guess which one it was. You may then get up and go look to see which one it was, or, again it’s a very hot place, wait to see if the goat or kid passes within your view so you don’t have to stand. That’s the whole game, plenty of kids, plenty of goats and they make similar sounds when they’re little.
There were also plenty of sheep. Funny thing though, dessert sheep in Burkina don’t look like the sheep we’ve been conditioned to think of here in the west, big wool fluffy coat. Many of the sheep that I encountered had little coat at all. Well, at a distance when they’re all mixed together, and especially since I didn’t know what I was looking for it’s hard to tell which is a sheep and which is a goat. For instance, this photo, which is one of my personal favorites, I took in a place called Bani. I posted this picture to my Facebook page and captioned it “A man with his goat.” And it should be no surprise to you at this point, that that is not a goat. That is a man with his sheep.
Matthew’s point was never to send us in a spiral trying to figure out who’s a sheep and who’s a goat. I don’t even think Matthew’s point was to make those receiving the message spiral on judging ourselves as sheep or goat. Chapter 7 verse 1 and 2, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.” No, this story is once again driving home Chapter 3 verse 17, “this is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” It is also, driving home the point of what the righteous do, like all of the sermon on the mount in chapter 5. Merciful, peacemakers, salt, and light.
Matthew shows us in this story the operating mode of the righteous. It doesn’t come from striving in the sense that their work was somehow forced. They ask the question same as the unrighteous, “when was it that we saw you in need?” Their actions just seem to be the outgrowth of their understanding of the law and their practice of faith. As they encountered those in need, they seem to have met the need through whatever means available. Their whole disposition seemingly oriented to perceive and to respond, however large, however small. Likewise, the so called “accursed” having been similarly instructed and encountering those same needs chose not to respond. Or, and potentially more dramatically, they substituted their own understanding of what a need was by qualifying it on some scale other than God’s justice.
The disposition of the righteous in this story remind me of a sense of encounter with God’s grace as we describe it in the Wesleyan tradition. God’s grace and God’s Spirit continually working in this world. Waking us up to the need, brokenness, and the beauty present in our world and in ourselves. Inviting us to receive and live into a life of relationship with God and one another through the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ. Then dwelling and walking so closely with us that works of mercy and justice become a reflex and not a 9-5 occupation or a task list.
My time in Burkina showed me that I lack the skills, knowledge, and love to truly know the difference between a sheep and a goat. I should refrain from inserting myself as King in this story. We aren’t called to render judgment anyway. But we are called to identify and respond to the needs being expressed by our neighbors. Pray that it would be so.
Pray we will respond to the need expressed when black trans women are 7 times more likely be killed than the rest of the population. The need expressed when the prisons are private and exist to turn a profit. The need expressed when an election year means record-high gun sales and this time 40% of those sales are to first-time buyers. The need expressed when a city in a tight budget year can “find” 80 million dollars in relief for businesses, hotels and entertainment but no additional funds to end chronic homelessness and ensure people don’t die on the street. The need expressed when a quarter of a million people have died from a virus in barely 10 months, yet there is still no coherent national leadership for a coordinated response.
The need expressed when 17% of The District’s population is at risk of eviction proceedings unless protections are extended. The need expressed when 80% of those at risk of eviction are households of color. The need expressed when nationwide the estimates of the number of people at risk of eviction by year’s end stands at 30 million people, translating to 12-13 million rental households and meaning most of the individuals are children. The need expressed when it consistently takes nearly a decade to replace homes resulting in the displacement of public housing residents. The need expressed when Breonna Taylor’s killers are still on the loose.
The need expressed when we can’t even do, the least we can do to help each other in this moment and put on a blessed mask.
The need expressed, when the needs expressed feel too large and too long standing for us to do anything about it. Respond.
Some days the response will be giving water to one who is thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner. Some days it will be trying to tear a whole prison down. Some days it will be standing in the street saying look over here these lives matter and they are at risk. Many days it will be ensuring we’ve not substituted our own understanding of what a need is by qualifying it on some scale other than God’s justice.
The needs expressed, need forgiveness, grace, and accountability. And so do you and I.
Doesn’t feel like much of a party, but we pray for the end all the same. Yes, of this sermon. But also, the end of this pandemic. The end of uncertain days or at least these next 60 days. The end to our many emergencies. The end to loneliness, destruction, anger, and violence. God can do it. We can do it. Fix your eyes on an enthroned Christ and remember his teach; we can do it. May our response today be letting God work to make us a people of reflexive mercy and justice to serve even the least of these. When that happens, then we can watch the inbreaking of joy, of peace, of hope, of love that comes next.
https://foundryumc.org/
Awakening – 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Rev. K.C. Van Atta-Casebier
A Sermon for Foundry UMC
11.15.20
Good morning and welcome to those just joining us, you’ll find links for fully engaging in our service in our Facebook and YouTube comments or on our website foundryumc.org. If you are in need of ASL interpretation, you’ll find that info on foundryumc.org/asl.
Let’s Pray. God, for Your wisdom and revelation and hope, we pray now. Amen.
She stumbled her way through the unenchanted forest, with just a map and a fanciful dream. She didn’t at all find herself enchanted by the reverberating tree chorus or the soft, babbling stream. She kept her head up and, on a swivel, on guard. As her armor clanked, she was reminded of the uncivil. It was hardest to forget, that part. She looked down to see that the trodden path was close to being swallowed by the brush. Just a little bit further to go, a turn here, a twist there, and no need to rush. Only it felt like a race...antagonized by looming darkness, to arrive at peace…. salvation for her life, at too fast a pace. She wrestled with the pain that was much too embedded in every cell to release.
Her head turned up again, just before a tree collision. She kicked it in anger and consternation. It was so unapologetically big that it blocked her vision. Who does this tree think it is, taking up so much space? She wondered what it must have felt like...you know...to be so firmly rooted in place. Take a break, she heard the forest floor whisper, something to consider on account of the indefatigable mind sparring and her heel was beginning to blister. No, push through, she thought. Don’t quit. The kingdom called peace is at the end of this map that I brought. This is not it. She kept her eyes on the prize so to speak. There was a course laid out before her. She continued to strive and vehemently refused to appear weak. Only she realized...that she hadn’t moved, still face to face with the tree. Who was she kidding? What was she trying to prove? That she was somehow free? She plopped down at its base, took off her armor, pulled her knees to her chest, and with her hands, she buried her face. The forest hummed and rocked and lulled. As she felt herself begin to drift, an inevitable jolt. “This isn’t going to work,” she groaned. She lifted her head once more. Put on her armor and journeyed back out in the dark, ignoring the whispers from the forest floor. She felt lost, certainly not found...as she gazed into the never-ending scape, and with each nightingale tweet, her heart began to pound - a reminder to fear her escape. Shake it off. Going back was not an option. In her rear view, a kingdom standing PROUD, all drunk from the same toxin. Stabbings in the street, a mobbing and delusional crowd. Egomania, narcissism, and gasoline – a potent concoction.
Security was a funny name for a kingdom of oppression and violence, with a dialect of fear. She traversed through the night with caution, and eventually the forest began to clear.
The new light of day started to spread out. She gasped. Dejected, her eyes landed on a familiar sight. Had she somehow gotten turned around? Maybe she could tell if it wasn’t so bright. “No, it must be, I followed the map exactly right.”
…..
Resigned, she traced it with her wet eyes and made mental notes, built of the same stone, same gargantuan size, perhaps a less ostentatious throne, but strikingly similar, this was supposed to be the prize? “This can’t be the kingdom of peace. I didn’t come all this way to be starved at the same feast.” She fell down to her knees. A revelation of a futile attempt to escape this formidable beast. She shook her fists at the sky. “You promised this was it. You gave me this map, why? You told me I would be safe here, and I’m not one bit.” She crumbled into a cascading cry.
…..
Then she heard a faint whisper “...up here.” She lifted her head. “Unh Unh,” said the voice. “This time I’m gonna need your heart instead.” Inhale. Exhale. Deep breath. She loosened her shoulders and opened her chest...felt zap after zap...the painful etching of a new map. When the light released her, she turned back toward the forest, this time noticing how very enchanted it was, the trees breathing as they swayed, she must have missed that part. And she ran, with reckless abandon toward something new, her arms spread apart. Once embraced by the strength of the rooted trunks and the magic of life echoing all around her, she felt safe to meander about in her salvation. That sweet Cyprus fragrance and the water rapping against the stones invited her into the intoxicating dance of faith. Her heart and the whimsical, messy, melody settled into the same tone. Ah, yes. Her divinely entangled fate. Soon, the darkness began to creep in, and she decided to look directly into it, a gaping invitation to the unknown.
“Where is my heart taking me,” she wondered? It was dark and scary, and she started to falter. “A place called awakening,” the forest thundered. “A place where the rocks of the river form an altar.” Deeper into the unknown she went. Until she couldn’t go anymore. Too tired to figure out what this all meant. “Take a break,” whispered the forest floor. Illusory peace and security nowhere to be seen. She sat down to rest, up against a tree. Audaciously big, she thought. She pulled her knees to her chest, buried her face in her hands and wondered what it must feel like to be that free.
And then she spotted it. A small, almost unsuitable starry gleam. It became so bright that she awoke from her long and arduous dream. She yawned and stretched. She loosened her shoulders and opened her chest. “Ow.” Her heart ached. How could that be? If she wasn’t yet awake. Unless…
…..
She brushed herself off. Parched, she headed to the river for a quaff. The star gave light to the dark path. As she approached, she noticed a pile of stones inviting her into the bath. For awhile she played in the water like she did as a girl. Then she surrendered and let the water toss her about in its whirl. As she melted away, she heard a voice whisper, “remember, you’re a person of the water. And here in the altar bath, you’re not just anyone, you’re my beloved daughter.” The water healed the heart scars. And the sun was starting to scare away the glistening stars.
In the light of the new day, she danced about in the peace and security of being known. Of being held. Of belonging. Of the love she had been shown. Of the freedom she felt. Her heart still throbbing…. here in the in-between. “Perhaps this is a kingdom without a king,” she mused. “Perhaps it's just a kingdom without a g. Yes, a Kin-dom is on the loose.” And now she doesn’t have to wonder how it feels to be that free.
“An enchanted escape doesn’t have to be my final destiny. But I can never now unsee awakening. It’s a reacquainting place for when the empire starts to get the best of me. An invitation to grow up and grow down, to hold steady in the blustery imperial winds, to remain grounded in the earth matter, to give boundless hope much to our chagrin, to silence the hollow, dusty chatter. To remember that we are water people. That salvation is something for us to meander about in. That empires are not innately peaceful. But we are. Awakening is the place of incarnation and the resurrection and everything unseen
It holds more questions than answers, and gives space to the unknown
And guttural shouts of, “what could this possibly mean?”
If only we can remember what we’ve been shown. We can help others be more free. Our destinations aren’t mirages of peace and security promised by new regimes. In fact, it’s not the destination at all. It’s all in the dream.”
Awakening.
Now I see.
“You and I aren’t meant to be in separate kingdoms. We’re not meant to be ripped apart.”
And so she ran with reckless abandon, following the map to awakening that had been painfully etched on her heart.
Let’s Pray.
God for assurance of peace and security in the belovedness of our baptismal identity, we pray. Awaken us to ourselves….and to faith, hope, and plentiful love. Remind us that we’ve been given armor and not a weapon. Help us to heed the tiny whispers of Spirit that invite us into rest and open our hearts that we may know more intimately how to be human together in this cosmic accident. Remind us that we are water people, baptized in the sacred river. And that we’ve been splashing around in salvation from the beginning. Remind us that it's in the unknown that we become known. Help us recommit to the vocation of peace-building rather than recruitment. And hold us, call us beloved, dance with us, waft sweet smells under our noses, and mop up the spillage of our hearts. Every day when we wake up, give us a fresh start. In the name of life abundant we pray together, Amen.
Benediction:
Foundry, may the love of God, the hope of Jesus, and the communion of the Spirit be with us now as we embark anew on our journey to awakening. Amen.
https://foundryumc.org/
What’s It Gonna Be?
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, October November 8, 2020, “Choose This Day” series.
Texts: Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
The people of Israel have finally arrived in the land that was promised. Joshua, Moses’ successor, is the son of Joseph, the one sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, the one who rose to great power as an aide to an Egyptian Pharoah. Joseph’s presence and leadership during a famine was a catalyst for the Israelites landing in Egypt in the first place—where they grew too numerous in a way that threatened the new Pharoah who proceeded to enslave them. We know the story from there…Moses… Passover…Exodus…Wilderness…Conflict and Conquest… and now Joshua gathers the tribes for a covenant-making ritual in the Promised Land.
This moment is a significant point of transition for the nation, a decision point about what kind of nation Israel will be and how they will live together in a new context. They bring into that context a reality in which God and militarism and tribalism and religious commandments are all mixed up in a complicated soup. And the historical players, those whose names are etched into the narrative as on stone monuments—from Abraham to Joseph to Moses to Joshua—carry with them plenty of complicated baggage themselves.
This is a moment when Israel is ostensibly trying to create a community that is grounded in the high ideals of the Mosaic law with love of God and neighbor at the center. But they seek to build that community on conquered land as a people who bear the scars of a history of slavery. Israel has gotten where they are now through violent, military conflict and plunder. And within their own nation there are rifts and rivalries between tribes.
Just so we’re tracking, how does this story resonate with our own in this moment in the United States of America?
High ideals and lofty vision, check.
Been through some stuff, check.
Conquered land, check.
Scars of slavery, check.
Imperfect historical leaders who’ve been both brave and good and selfish and terrible, check.
Fueled and formed by instruments of war, check.
Rifts and rivalries between tribes…well? Check.
God’s name and character stirred—perhaps dubiously—into the mix, check.
A central, grounding narrative of our faith is the story of the exodus from Egypt, the liberation of Israel from slavery and their long journey in the wilderness, trusting in the promise of a land flowing with milk and honey. The wilderness narrative is my go-to in seasons like the year 2020—or really any time of intense struggle, lack, or uncertainty. The promise that God receives the cries of the unlikely ones, the powerless and oppressed, acts as an advocate and guide to liberate them and to upend the unjust systems in ways that bring greater equity and lead to a promised land of new life and new community. I love this. It gives me a frame and a hope. And I believe that is appropriate—there’s truth in it.
But I will say that I don’t like thinking about the part of the wilderness wandering that includes the more complicated, unsavory baggage. I don’t like thinking about how, in the scriptural record, God gets saddled with responsibility for the violence done as our ancestors marched toward what they believed was their entitled due. I don’t like thinking about how the high ideals for the new kind of community in the new land were compromised by the way the new land was acquired through conquest and displacement. I don’t like thinking about how there was conflict and power posturing among the people at every turn along the way. I don’t like thinking about how easy it is—even for an oft-conquered people—to tell this story from the perspective of the conqueror without even acknowledging the voices of the conquered.
Sometimes we need to tell the hard, complicated truth of our history to be able to truly step into God’s new thing. To tell the hard truth doesn’t mean that we erase anything. It doesn’t mean that we don’t acknowledge the beautiful and brave and honorable parts. Rather it simply asks that we are willing to look at the fullest picture and to name what we’ve ignored or gotten wrong, where harm has been done, the things and people we need to care for if we truly want to live the ideals, values, and faith we profess.
We are in a moment in which our nation’s history is catching up with us. I’m not learned enough in the various dynamics nor do I have time today to try to sum it all up in any comprehensive way. But I dare say choices that have been made from the very founding our nation—choices made by public officials and by private citizens and residents—have had consequences. And we are currently in a moment of reckoning with all those consequences—the good, bad, and ugly. The struggle to create community aligned with our highest ideals is at a point of boiling over.
We know that poverty and systemic racism leave thousands upon thousands of our siblings vulnerable to indignities and violence of various kinds every day. That reality has only gotten worse in recent years. We know that the impoverished and people of color have been most cruelly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic that has, to date, killed more than 237,000 of our siblings in this country. If we’re honest about recent history, we know that lies and mismanagement allowed the pandemic to get so out of hand. And what we’re also experiencing right now, as one journalist has written, is the way that events of the past four years have “divided seemingly like-minded people of goodwill: friends, relatives, neighbors, professional colleagues — people of similar backgrounds and who theoretically should align politically, but don’t. And who have a hard time feeling anything but contempt for the other.”
We are in a place where we cannot imagine how others can actually support who or what they support—and vice versa. We cannot even agree on what the issues are, much less have a meaningful conversation about them that might leverage our different approaches to possible solutions. And today we know that a large number of our siblings in this nation are feeling grief, fear, confusion, and rage. And a large percentage of us are feeling relief, hope, and utter joy even as we know that there is so much work ahead of us. And there are many who will be having a challenging mix of emotions and thoughts as we try to process the most extreme, hateful reactivity in these days. Some among us will want revenge for damage done. Some will not trust anything that is being said by anyone.
Today we find ourselves in a moment in which we, like the tribes of Israel, have some choices to make. Those choices have at their core the central question: What God will we serve? Because the kind of God we serve makes a difference for better or for worse. Our faith—the God whom we serve—forms our sense of purpose, our priorities, our values, our understanding of what it means to be human and how to be in community. The God whom we serve will help us know how to respond in the days and months ahead of us as citizens of the Kin-dom of God who are part of this nation.
And the God whom we are called to serve is radically free, unbound to any human political system, party, or politician, yet always working deep among us for the sake of what is right. The God whom we serve is the God who gives us freedom and power to resist evil and injustice in any form they present themselves. To stand against anything that does harm to our neighbors, that denies dignity, that steals children and separates families, that harms the planet, that intentionally stirs the reptilian energies of our nature instead of the better angels. Our God is the God who helps us have the courage to be honest about our history, to be peacemakers, to love and listen when it would be easier to hate and dismiss. Our God sends Spirit to encourage and inspire people to tirelessly work over years, in ways most people will never know, to do the things that move the needle, that bend the moral arc toward justice, that further the cause of the Kin-dom. Our God doesn’t abandon us in our stubbornness and foolishness but instead continues to draw near to try to help us perceive how to get to the Promised Land without destroying everything and everyone in our path.
Regardless of the election outcome, our choice today would have been the same. Will we seek to serve a God who calls us to sacred resistance which is—from start to finish— “about love, love that looks upon each person with a desire for their wellbeing, love that looks upon human community with a desire for healing and peace with justice, love that looks into all creation with a desire for mending and reverence, love that is compassionate and merciful, love that is stubborn and sacrificial.” Patient and kind…not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Not insisting on its own way…not irritable or resentful…not rejoicing in wrongdoing, but rejoicing in the truth. This is how God loves the world. This is how God loves you. This is the love God created us to choose and to live.
I’ve heard it said recently that a focus on love is weak, is for wimps, you know, that whole tough guy thing. I’ll just quote the Bible, love is stronger than death. Hate is easy. Love is the challenge.
At a certain point, like the Israelites of old, we simply have to make a decision about whether we’re serious about loving God and loving neighbor, whether we’re serious about living the promise or just want to keep talking about it.
So what’s it gonna be?
I pray that we will continue to be and become a community of sacred resistance, a community willing to be bold and humble, to risk getting things wrong as we try to get it right for the sake of love and justice, to be a people who can honestly say, trusting in God’s help, “as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
https://foundryumc.org/
Blessed Choices
A homily preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, October November 1, 2020, All Saints Sunday, “Choose This Day” series.
Texts: Revelation 7:9-17, Matthew 5:1-12
“Choose this day whom you will serve…” These words were spoken by Joshua to the Israelites at a key moment in their history. What God will you serve? The question is always before us and our answer has implications for every aspect of our lives. This choice affects all our other choices. And every moment of life, from the most significant to the mundane, involves choices at some level.
As a nation, we are on the brink of a big choice. Like every choice, the outcome will have consequences. Each one of us is responsible for our own discernment and action. After the election, we will still have choices. Every single day. Regardless of the outcome, there will be important work to do, decisions to make, priorities to discern.
And as followers of Jesus we’re not left without guidance. In the wilderness place, Jesus was tempted to serve a god who twisted scripture to try to draw him away from a life of self-giving service, away from the God of love, peace, humility, vulnerability, and justice. Jesus made a choice—and, in case you don’t know the story, Jesus didn’t choose to only feed his own belly, to take the money and power, or show off to get praise and fame. (Mt. 4)
And today we receive the opening lines to Jesus’s most famous sermon, the “sermon on the mount.” Honestly, every time I am given this text to preach I feel compelled to counter the ways I’ve heard it interpreted as the “BE attitudes,” that mourning or being denied righteousness (justice) are our ticket to getting blessed. That feels like a ridiculously slippery slope.
It helps me to remember that both Jesus and the writer of Matthew were speaking to particular communities, both of whom were vulnerable and suffering persecution, exclusion, and subjugation. Again and again, they were faced with choices about how they would respond and where they would put their loyalty and trust. What God would they serve? In the midst, these communities followed Jesus—or at least tried to. And they, like us, are drawn to Jesus and look to the wisdom and way revealed through him for guidance and encouragement.
What if the opening words of Jesus’s sermon are an acknowledgement of the realities and varieties of human feelings and experiences in the crowd? Imagine Jesus simply offering a blessing, a promise of God’s grace and presence in whatever circumstance folk are experiencing—a promise that things won’t always be this way.
Are you humbled or feel like the wind has gotten knocked out of you? Blessing upon you. Are you swallowed up in grief? Blessing upon you. Do you feel powerless or taken advantage of because of your gentleness, kindness, and mercy? Blessing upon you. Are you starved for a crumb of justice in your life? Blessing upon you. Are you seeking to act with purity of heart, with good intentions, seeking righteousness and peace even when it is difficult to stay the course? Blessing upon you. Are you pouring yourself out for the sake of others, for the sake of justice and, as a result, being slandered and persecuted? Blessing be upon you.
The God revealed in Jesus blesses us in our humanity, in our struggle and pain, and in our trying to live aligned with God’s wisdom and way.
That way has at the center loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves. And as we reflected upon last week, it’s not always clear exactly what that will look like. This means we have to discern and then choose…
The famous prayer of Thomas Merton comes to mind:
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
I love this prayer for so many reasons. But perhaps chief among them is that Merton names our situation as those who choose to try to love God and neighbor. We desire to do God’s will but cannot always know if we’re getting it quite right. Even still, we try and trust that God knows we are trying.
On this All Saints Sunday, we celebrate the Saints of our tradition and culture—known and honored by many—and the saints of our own lives who may have been known only in their small circle. But we give thanks for each one of them and for the ways that they tried. No human is without fault and yet there is a beauty and power in trying to love God and love neighbor as ourselves, to trust God’s love and mercy as we deal with the consequences of failure, and to keep on going regardless of the circumstances with as much grace and strength as possible.
Today, I hear Jesus blessing us in all the circumstances of our lives right this moment—blessing us not with a promise of a winning lottery ticket, our desired outcome in the election, or quick resolution to the overwhelming challenges of our time, but with the promise of God’s love and presence and an inheritance that far outlasts this moment and our time in this world. I hear Jesus blessing the saints who have crossed over into the next life—“a great multitude…from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages…they who have come out of the great ordeal.” (Rev.7:9, 14)
And I give thanks for the vision in Revelation that points toward a place and time beyond our confusion and our struggle to choose rightly, a place and a time in which the barriers between us have been broken down and God’s beloved children across the earth will no longer hunger for food or thirst for justice, where all will be willing to honor our common humanity, our shared life, where all will be nourished by love that bubbles up like a spring, and will humbly allow God, like a mother, to wipe every tear from our eyes. (Rev. 7:16-17)
Why not choose to try and live that vision now?…For it may be that in trying and trusting…we are blessed…
http://foundryumc.org/
The Urgent Demands of Love
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, October 25, 2020, “Fearless Generosity: For Such A Time As This” series.
Text: Matthew 22:34-46
“Enough of this tip-toeing around the fire.” This word I received in prayer a couple of months back has been a struggle to understand. What is the fire? And why am I tip-toeing around it? Upon reflection, I’m pretty sure these words are Christ calling me out for my reluctance to step more fully into the fire of God’s all-consuming love that asks me to trust God more and stop wasting energy on pointless striving. After 50 years of living and trying so hard to love God and neighbor, it’s a bit of a drag to get tagged by Spirit as a tip-toer. But there it is. Love demands much and always more of us. Not more production or perfection, but more of our true, honest, vulnerable selves, more of our willingness to surrender to God’s passionate and tender love for us. God seeks to draw us into the divine fire, not for our own sakes alone—though certainly that’s part of it—but because as we live more fully in the love of God we live more intentionally and generously with and for others.
Some words of G.K. Chesterton come to mind as I name this—“Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.”
There may be those who would push back on this statement. After all, the heart of Christianity is love. How is that so hard? Just love.
Right… OK… Just love… Easy…Because love is always straightforward, the loving thing to do is always clear. Because loving ourselves in a healthy way comes so naturally we shouldn’t have any problem loving our neighbors that way… And our love never gets tangled up with old baggage or confused with illusions... And of course loving God in the moment of tragedy or abandonment is a breeze… and the whole loving our enemies thing? a snap.
A moment’s reflection reminds us that love is many things—power, passion, energy, the very source of life and meaning—it may even be simple! But easy it is not. The love we’re about in the context of our faith is not found in empty words or good intentions or paper hearts. Our aim is the kind of love embodied, enacted, lived by Jesus, it is an all-in kind of love: heart, soul, mind, and strength.
But so often in church circles love gets watered down into such thin soup that the hungry remain hungry. I keep going back to some lines from Austin Channing Brown’s memoir I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness in which she names the ways that love as it is practiced in Christian circles is so often “inconsequential.” Particularly speaking of her experience as a Black woman in a culture that assumes “white is right,” Brown names how easy it is to make love dissolve “into a demand for grace, for niceness, for endless patience—to keep everyone feeling comfortable while hearts are being changed. In this way, so-called love dodges any responsibility for action and waits for the great catalytic moment that finally spurs accountability.” She writes, “I am not interested in love that is aloof. In a love that refuses hard work, instead demanding a bite-size education that doesn’t transform anything. In a love that qualifies the statement ‘Black lives matter,’ because it is unconvinced this is true. I am not interested in a love that refuses to see systems and structures of injustice, preferring to ask itself only about personal intentions. This aloof kind of love is useless to me.”
If our understanding of love is mostly about “keeping a peace” that has nothing to do with justice, or a love driven by nostalgia or tribal, national, or bloodline loyalties…or if our understanding is that love gets parceled out in little bits or is so careful that it makes no impact or gives up when things get difficult we’re missing the mark.
In the greatest commandment God doesn’t say love me when you feel like it. God doesn’t say, love me with your mind alone, thinking Goddish thoughts and debating the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. God doesn’t say only love me with your praisy warm feelings surrounded by nothing and no one that challenges you to stretch yourself. The commandment isn’t to love God by checking boxes and doing tasks that satisfy our own sense of accomplishment and self-righteousness—the call is to love with soul, with our deepest wholeness and essence and humanity, that which connects with every other soul…that which connects us to our neighbor.
And we’re not called to love only the neighbors with whom we share common history, language, or culture. The commandment doesn’t say love your neighbor when it’s convenient or when there is no risk involved to you or when it doesn’t ask anything of you. The love at the heart of our faith, the love that God IS and Jesus embodied, is a love that gives and gives, that risks and becomes as vulnerable as we are—that pursues us (sometimes quietly and other times, less so) until we fall into that divine, all-embracing, all-consuming love and so finally yearn and then learn to not be so self-centered and afraid.
The love we’re called to is consequential, it’s a love that changes the world because it counters the thin, quid pro quo, transactional ways of love so prevalent all around us. Jesus’ love was not aloof. It was incarnate, passionate, sacrificial, generous, intimate, patient, and gracious. Jesus’ love crossed boundaries and tore down walls—really tore them down, didn’t just rebrand or post a sign—as he created a new kind of human community where persons are invited to let their humanity touch others’ humanity. Jesus shows us the all-in love God lavishes upon us and beckons us to enter ever more fully into that divine fire and into the life and community that emerges.
Beloved, as Foundry we’re just trying to learn how to love God and love each other like that.
Right now, we are experiencing social, economic, cultural, political, environmental, spiritual, and relational upheaval the likes of which haven’t been seen in ages—and certainly not in our time. In this time of volatility and possibility, Foundry is being driven by the urgent demands of love. We will not withdraw from the difficult conversations and decisions around racial equity or back down from our commitment to building a fully inclusive church and society that honors the gifts of all including LGBTQ siblings. We continue to serve struggling neighbors in our community in both direct ways and through mission partnerships to provide IDs, food, safety, and shelter. We are going deeper in Bible study, not skimming the surface. We are building larger networks of relationship, not retreating into isolation and closed groups. We are reaching out to connect with our folx who struggle to connect in this current digital environment. We are using any and all resources available to proclaim a Gospel vision of hope and liberating love in ways that reach our local community and stretch into the far corners of the world through technology. We may take it for granted, but the truth is that there are so many people who do not know that “Beloved” is their true, family name! So many don’t know that their lives are precious and powerful and meaningful and cherished. So many are lost in lies, bound by perversions of what it means to love, swallowed up in a culture that tells them they are nothing unless they have money or a gun or a fancy title or car or home, are unlovable unless they fit into the so-called “norms” of society.
My dearest hope and vison is that, together, we might create community that is always becoming more like the truly human community Jesus would be proud of, a community where tenderness and beauty are cultivated, a community where we are willing to be honest about our lives, our struggles, our hopes, our ideas, our feelings—where we receive one another as people, not roles or job titles or those who are supposed to have it all together, but where we practice being human with other humans, all on a journey and trying to find our way and always seeking how we can love our neighbors in consequential ways. In this crucible moment, we have an opportunity to let go of things that get in the way such a vision and to take up new things that will feed it.
And there is no map for this moment. There is little precedent and a lot of uncertainty.
All this may seem ridiculously overwhelming. We’re already exhausted at every level. I feel that. And when I was feeling it most deeply, the word came, “No more tip-toeing around the fire…”
And in our collective weariness and anxiety, a word has come with extraordinary clarity: “Foundry, you are called for such a time as this.” No more tip-toeing around the fire… Love demands much and always more of us. Because, as Martin Luther King, Jr. preached, it is through the redemptive power of love that “we will be able to make of this old world a new world.” By God’s amazing grace and perfect love, may we be set on fire with the kind of love that makes things truly new.
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Love demands that even when things are most difficult, we keep trying, that we do what we can and give what we can. On this consecration Sunday, I am inspired by the commitment and generosity of so many. And I know that the ONLY way we will meet our goal and continue to meet the urgent demands of love is if every person and household gives with fearless generosity. This is not a time to think that someone else is going to make it happen. I always want you to know that I do not ask you to do anything that I am not willing to do. I give more than 10% of my take home pay to Foundry with my goal being to get to 10% of my gross salary. This is a core spiritual discipline for me and is a way I make my love consequential. The late pastor and prophet, William Sloane Coffin once said, “What we need to realize is that to love effectively we must act collectively.” We love most effectively when we share the work.
Over these last weeks you’ve been invited to Fearless Generosity, estimating your regular giving to Foundry in 2021 for such a time as this. Those gifts are vital for Foundry’s continuing ability to show up and provide a faithful, loving, and justice-seeking witness in the world. 2020 has brought challenges beyond our wildest dreams as the pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism have broken not just human bodies but the body politic. Illness and injustice continue to take a devastating toll. Through it all, Foundry continues as an anchor, a lifeline, and a beacon in the storm. We have provided concrete support for vulnerable neighbors in DC and seamlessly pivoted our worship, music, discipleship, family, and care ministries to online experiences. Foundry’s impact has not lessened but grown in these months of quarantine. Our witness in the wake of the murder of George Floyd touched hearts and minds not only of our immediate neighbors, but people of faith and conscience across the country.
By estimating your giving, you give us the tools we need to budget faithfully for the work that lays ahead. We want to say thank you to those of you who’ve already made your estimates.
I want to share with you now a graphic that shows where we are as of right now: We’ve received a total of $23,384,838,338.21. If you’ve not yet had a chance to make an estimate, there’s still time! Please remember that even if you are set up for a recurring gift, we still need you to submit an estimate for 2021 in order for your generosity to be added to our number. Every single gift is so important.
As you receive the gifts of Foundry’s virtual choir and see images of the way your gifts have been and are at work in our community, I invite your prayerful discernment about what you will contribute to help Foundry meet our goal for such a time as this. And then please visit our website and submit your estimate of giving there or you can use the link we’re going to drop into the comments section now.
To love effectively, we act collectively. Let’s do it. 😊
https://foundryumc.org/
Glory at God’s Back
A reflection offered by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, October 18, 2020, “Fearless Generosity: For Such A Time As This” series.
Text: Exodus 33:12-23
I like to think of myself as a person who is able to take life as it comes, a “go with the flow” kinda human. And, to a large extent, I think that is true. But, truth be told, when it comes to some things, I’m as much a control freak as anyone—mostly when it comes to things that I believe will affect the life and health of my family, my congregation, or the larger community. And, while I labor to pay attention to the more subtle and unspoken shifts and movements of things, my default is to take things and people at “face value”—to desire and to trust a direct word. With people and with God. Please don’t make me have to guess what’s going on. Just tell me! Show me!
Moses seems to be saying something like that in our story today: “Come on, God…lay your cards on the table. Show me what you’ve got for us. Show me your face. And no poker face, please. Otherwise, how will we know what to do? How will we perceive what it takes to be loving and just, to resist things that do harm? If you don’t tell us what you’re up to, if you’re not willing to show us, how will we know how to be your people?”
And here is what I hear God saying in response: “I tell you what I’ll do—I’ll set you up in a safe place and will pass by. Not gonna show you my face—because it is impossible for you to comprehend the full picture of what I’m up to in any given moment. And even if you could take it in, I wouldn’t show you. Because you have such a tendency to make idols of revelation—to make a static, dead thing—like an old photograph, a moment snapped in time that becomes what you believe life is or, in this case, who I am.
If I showed you my face in any given moment, you might freeze-frame that moment, rather than remain open to the dynamic, always new thing that I’m doing. I am that I am…I will be what I will be…and while you may not understand it, my hiddenness is part of my mercy and grace. If I show you who I am today, you will think you’ve got me figured out, that you can control me or put me in a box or contain me in a book. If I am up front with you today then you may think that the current vision is set in stone and cannot be shifted based on changes in the world. And that would lead to stagnation, exclusion, alienation. If life isn’t changing, that means it is dead. If things aren’t changing, aren’t open to receive and to give life-giving love anew each moment, then death is assured. So I’m just going to pass on by—so near that you can feel my breath flowing through you, but you will only see my back. You will perceive the after-effects of my movement in your presence. You may then perceive the direction I am moving and can choose whether to follow…
Oof… how easy it is to make idols of revelation, to put God in a box. And the whole idea of God’s hiddenness as a grace that keeps us open and alert? …Spirit hit me between the eyes with this new word for me from this old story.
We at Foundry came into this year with momentum, with years of work and investment in ministry bearing fruit. It seemed we had glimpsed God’s direction for us that was leading to new life and vitality. 2020 was sure to be challenging, but we were as engaged as ever in the work toward full inclusion in the UMC and ready to be full participants in General Conference and the process of discerning and creating what comes next for our denomination. Years of study, prayer and preparation were finally taking concrete shape in what we now know as the Journey to Racial Justice. 5 years of investment in program ministries that strengthen connection with God and one another and help us study and serve together more regularly were bearing fruit—attracting new people, growing disciples, inspiring calls to ministry, and expanding our reach for service and justice. Investments in human resources and staff development were also paying off in ways that supported the vision and mission and that made for a healthy work environment for the team. The Board was moving into an even more intentional mode of visioning and strategic thinking. And all of this contributed to an overwhelmingly successful financial stewardship campaign in which we exceeded our goal for the 2020 budget. We. Were. On. A. Roll.
And then… COVID… and then… George Floyd…
So over these past months I have been praying that God would set me—and us—on solid rock, in a safe place and would draw near enough that we might feel the breath, the wind, the Spirit of God in real ways, in ways that might give us a sign or some direction for what to do next. I’ve been ruminating over these months on how God is at work deep within our lives and world, moving even when we can’t perceive it. Yet it took days of contemplation on our text today to begin to get shaken out of the give me more information and some semblance of certainty stupor.
At the beginning of the year when we were seeing the sprouting and growth of so many seeds planted over the years, it seems God may have decided we needed to add another row to hoe…or to engage what we’re up to a bit more slowly…or to perceive things that we’d been missing. And that feels frustrating (we were on a roll!), but it means the potential for more life, more nourishment, more growth, more health, more opportunities to cultivate and be good stewards of the vineyard we considered a couple of weeks back. It is so easy to make our plan or our vision into an idol—even if it is a Spirit-inspired plan! But in the midst of the painful pandemics of this year, the assurance is that God passes by in a way that can unveil our idolatries and lead us where we need to go.
I often get hung up on the word “glory”—which from the original Hebrew can mean abundance, honor, or glory. Moses asks God to reveal God’s “glory.” St. Irenaeus in the second century CE said that the glory of God is the human person fully alive. And, if that’s the case (as I’m persuaded it may be), then I am with Moses—“God, show us ourselves fully alive, show us communities, cities, nations, in which humans are truly human, fully alive in love and compassion and justice… Show us what that looks like and show us how to get there. God, hide yourself to keep us open and receptive and curious if that’s what it takes. Put us in the cleft of a rock alone for a while to ponder and discern what you have for us if that’s what it takes. Challenge us to expand our vision and our sense of call even when it means sacrifice if that’s what it takes.” //
If we think we’ve seen it all, then we are no longer open to the new life that will surely come. If we are holding on to an old picture of ourselves, of our congregation, or of any human reality—as if that were the whole picture, then we’re prone to lose vitality, aliveness. You and I are always called by God to grow in holiness and in love, to become more fully human, more fully alive!
And Foundry is called right now to expand our vision not only of what we do, but of who we are and how we do what we do. It’s time for us to release the fear that we will lose something if we embrace some new technology. It’s time for us to be open to the notion that we are more diverse than we might imagine and that full inclusion means grappling with messy intersections. It’s time for us to consider how God is asking us to risk discomfort for the sake of justice. It’s time for us to ponder making visual and structural and policy changes to more concretely reflect our commitments. And I’m only giving voice to a few things that have seemed to bubble up in my own prayer and discernment…it is not the whole picture and is always unfolding.
God is always out ahead of us—leading us into a future that we cannot fully perceive, but that is full of possibility and promise and freedom. God is always ahead of us, but not so far ahead that we are alone or lost. We perceive God’s “back”—or what trails behind in the wake of God’s activity and presence. And because God’s love is new every morning and because God works all day long for good, what trails behind in the wake of God is glory. It’s difficult to perceive God every day—especially when things are difficult. But every week, when our staff meets together, we begin by naming where we see God showing up. And there is always a robust list where we are seeing the activity of Spirit moving for good—showing us new things, giving inspiration, and leading us into the future.
Maya Angelou once wrote, “I believe that each of us comes from the creator trailing wisps of glory.” Imagine that… our lives—yours and mine—born and renewed in the wake of God’s passing by… And imagine the new life for Foundry—sparkling and alive through God’s unresting, unhasting, always loving presence. Imagine it… and then be surprised when it is different and better…beyond your wildest dreams.
https://foundryumc.org/
The Person for the Job
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, October 11, 2020, “Fearless Generosity: For Such A Time As This” series.
Text: Exodus 32:1-14
Ever experienced a moment when it felt like no one was at the wheel? Like you’re either stuck in neutral or careening toward a cliff with no one who seems to be there to do anything about it? Well, the Israelites are there. God is up the mountain and Moses went up there, too. And there’s not been a peep from them for forty days and forty nights. The Israelites’ response to this reflects a common human tendency when feeling powerless and miserable and faced with waiting and uncertainty and silence: they get impatient and fickle and make some seriously questionable decisions.
The Israelites—aided and abetted by Moses’s brother Aaron—decide they’ve had enough of not having things in their own hands, of not controlling the timeline and the journey’s itinerary. And so, driven by some perverse nostalgia and an even more irrational trust in the values represented by a golden bull—an image made of riches gleaned from the Egyptian empire—the people throw God over for a sacred cow.
Now just to be clear, the people have already received the 10 commandments (Ex 20); they have also pledged, on multiple occasions, with great gusto, that they will live according to the words God has given Moses. And, OK, it’s been a while they’ve been waiting—but likely not seven months of COVID isolation!—(I digress) Anyway, here they are in some ancient version of “burning man” out in the desert… perhaps thinking that their own wealth and creativity and ideas and the god they make for themselves will lead them into a future that is better than what that other God had promised. I can imagine this kind of conversation at the foot of the mountain: “That God is hard to understand. And this Moses—he seems to have done all he’s capable of. Whatever. And why did we think that God was so great again? Where is that God right now? And what has that God done for us lately? We’re the ones who’ve been doing all the heavy lifting. So our strength and vision and experience are enough. The gods made from our stuff, the gods that are familiar, the gods that can be held with a leash of our own imagination, are so much more predictable and manageable than the God who is free. Let’s make some golden gods and party!”
None of this is really that shocking. In fact, it’s all rather painfully familiar. How many of us have been tempted to worship at the altar of sacred cows—the old, familiar ways? How many of us get impatient with God and are tempted to throw God over? How many of us catch ourselves paying homage to the bull market and worshiping at the altar of the almighty dollar? How many of us or those around us pine with nostalgia for some illusory past in which we try to convince ourselves that things were better and easier? This is all very human and familiar—whether it’s the 13th century BCE or this seemingly God-forsaken 2020. No surprises here.
What does seem shocking in the story we receive today is that God is so ready to do the people in. But if anyone’s paying attention, this God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God whose name is I am that I am and I will be who I will be, the God who chose to be in a love relationship with a people who were from the other side of the tracks—this God is passionate and perfectly free to feel all the feels… and often does! God’s first reaction is to disown his people (v. 7) and then proceeds to propose raining fire on the people, their party, and their gold statue and to be done with it. This God gets hurt and angry and disappointed and all the rest.
Good thing Moses was there. And Moses was there with God because, evidently, God knew who was needed as a partner in the relationship and in the work with this people. Way back at Horeb when God first spoke to Moses from the bush that burned but not consumed, God was clear that Moses was the person for the job. Perhaps it was because Moses proved he could hang in there with a God who hot as a firecracker, who had the capacity to consume things with fire, but refrained from doing so… Who knows?
That’s certainly what he does in this instance. In the face of God’s burning hurt and rage, Moses acts as the people’s advocate and as God’s advisor. On the surface, Moses appeals to God’s political reputation: “Do you really want the Egyptians to think you were just kidding about your love and compassion for the people Israel? Do you want the Egyptians to think you are a hypocrite, that you are evil?” But Moses is connecting to something much deeper. Moses says, “remember.” Remember those you have loved through the ages, those to whom you promised your presence, your providence, your love. Remember. Remember who you are.
A few weeks ago, I received my first ever topic request for a FaceBook Live “Ponderings from the Purple Parlor.” The question I was asked to address is basically “Why doesn’t God punish people who do harm?” or, as I boiled it down, “Why do good things happen to ‘bad’ people?” As I reflected on these questions, I was clear that it really comes down to what kind of God we have. What kind of God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Miriam, Esther, Ruth, and Jesus? As I’ve already shared, this God is passionate, sometimes burning with love and other times with wrath. And yet, the story we tell is that even when our God has been forgotten, ignored, betrayed, and defied, even when our God has to watch beloved ones do silly, selfish, cruel, destructive things, even in all that, our God doesn’t abandon or destroy us. And God doesn’t coerce or manipulate us. But really wants to be in a relationship—and for that to work, everyone has to be free to choose, free to give and to receive love and care. The God of our spiritual tradition may have moments of rage and disappointment and grief, but is—at the end of the day—compassionate and merciful, abounding in steadfast love.
And that is lovely when it means that we receive compassion and mercy. It is not at all emotionally satisfying when we look around at those who are happily worshiping their golden bulls and making themselves gods and living the high life, all the while defrauding the poor and demonizing the marginalized and using people as commodities and poisoning the earth.
And here is where I’m kinda stunned at Moses. Because notice that in the midst of the divine fit God says to Moses, “and of you I will make a great nation.” How tempting is that? After all, the people dancing around the bull in the valley have been blaming Moses for every little thing since they crossed over on dry land. And being the Patriarch of a great nation would mean enjoying the good things of life—privilege, wealth, and more. It could have been very emotionally satisfying at a certain level for Moses to see the people get punished by God for their lack of gratitude, for the ways they hurt him, for taking him for granted, for their fickleness and sin, for being so quick to forget.
But Moses doesn’t forget who God is. Moses doesn’t forget that God spared his life on more than one occasion, that God called him—a stutterer—to speak in the halls of power, that God knew he was a murderer and still honored him with a mighty task to participate in the liberation of those in bondage, and with an intimacy with God that gave him strength. Moses doesn’t forget who God is—a God who receives the cries of the suffering, who is gracious and merciful, who provides manna in the desert and water from a rock, who refuses to stand by while beloved ones are oppressed, who lifts up the lowly, and makes a way when there seems to be no way.
So instead of egging God on and cashing in on God’s pain-inspired offer to make Moses king of the castle, Moses—in a stunning act of humility and faithfulness—says to God, “Remember.” Remember who you are.
God must have known that Moses—even with all his imperfections—was the one God needed on that stretch of the journey for such a time as that time on Mt. Sinai. In verse 14 we are told that after listening to Moses, God “changed God’s mind.” The word here, vai·yin·na·chem, has echoes of repentance, of feeling sorry for something. God remembers what is true, remembers God’s own heart of love and compassion and how much the people have already been through.
In such a time as this, a moment of crisis on so many levels in our land and in our world, it is important to remember what is real and what matters most of all. Remember what kind of God we serve. For it is the image of that God imprinted upon all flesh. And it is the love, justice, and compassion of that God we are made to enact in the world. Remember. Remember that the awful headlines do not represent the whole of the human family. Remember. Remember how God has been gracious and merciful to you when you didn’t deserve it. Remember. Remember when God has brought you through and helped you cross over. Remember. Remember when somehow you had enough to get by when you couldn’t believe it was possible. Remember. Remember that God has called you and empowered you to be yourself in the world, to offer your strength and vision and humor and talent and brilliance and creativity and kindness to the great work of mending and making a more gentle world. Remember.
Remember that you are a part of God’s family and your family name is Beloved. Remember. Remember that you are the person God needs right now to step up, to serve, to give, to pray, to love, to advocate, for such a time as this. Remember. Remember that even when it seems that things are stuck or careening toward a cliff or mired in greed and conflict and violence and fear, God has promised to see us through to a place of new life and restored community. Remember. And then go ahead and throw a party, giving thanks for that God of ours who will never let us go.
https://foundryumc.org/
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC, October 4, 2020, “Fearless Generosity: For Such A Time As This” series.
Text: Matthew 21:33-46
Things are messy and confusing and disappointing and sad and violent and don’t seem to make much sense… That goes for the current state of our nation as well as for the parable in today’s Gospel. I won’t elaborate on the increasingly weird, horrifying, and unsettling moment we’re living right now. But let me give some context for our scripture passage.
Jesus has taken his donkey ride into Jerusalem with palms and shouts, has made a scene in the temple over an unjust economic system infecting the holy places, has brought healing to those who came to him in need and, as he settles in to teach in the temple, is challenged by some of the power brokers of the day—in particular the temple leadership—who are charged to care for the community. Jesus’s response to their challenge was pretty pointed as recorded through the lens of the author of Matthew, inviting centuries of interpretation that’s missed the deeper wisdom in the text and made Jews the villains. I’ll pause just long enough to remind us all that Jesus was a brown-skinned middle eastern Jew himself. So let’s just be clear that the critique is not directed toward a particular group, religion, race, or culture.
Jesus’s critique in this allegorical parable is directed at those who are given stewardship of what God has created and have failed. Instead of being faithful and generous stewards, they have instead taken what is not theirs, done violence to God’s servants and prophets, and sought to rob God’s child (or children) not only of their inheritance but of their lives.
Whether we imagine that the “vineyard” is the world, a nation, or a particular community, what God has created is meant to produce good fruit—the fruit of the Kin-dom. Things like love, peace, patience, joy, kindness, goodness, gentleness, generosity, self-control (Gal 5:22-23)…justice, hospitality, kinship. The vision for Israel and later for the followers of the Way of Jesus is a vision of communion with God and one another that produces these things, a way of life that can be practiced, modeled, and shared as a witness for others for how life can be. It is a way of life that doesn’t hoard the good gifts of creation or of Spirit, but rather labors to assure that all have what they need, that doesn’t do harm or kill one another, but rather receives each person as a unique, beloved child of God of inherent dignity and worth, that strives for peace with justice in society and intentional communities of love, friendship, and service.
In many ways, we are all given stewardship of God’s vision. What kind of stewardship is it when hatred and violence is done in the name of Jesus? What kind of stewardship of God’s vision of communion is it when whole communities in a society are disenfranchised, ignored, suppressed, and counted as expendable? When beloved children of God are unwelcome in churches because of whom they love or how they dress or what they have or how they act? What kind of stewardship of God’s vision is it when people who call themselves followers of God or of Jesus are unwilling to name racism as sin, or to experience even an ounce of inconvenience—like wearing a mask—when others’ lives are at risk? What about If we say we are people of faith, or followers of Jesus, then our words and actions, priorities and stances make a difference.
All of us, individually and as a community, need to receive the teaching from our text today with both humility and hope. With humility because we know how easy it is to always see ourselves as the “good character” in the parable. But, Lord have mercy, if we’re honest we know that we both have and will again miss the mark on everything but hypocrisy. We can receive the teaching with hope because at the heart of it all is Jesus who—even when his closest followers messed up—was gracious and merciful, extending the chance to try again. I urge you to notice that it is not Jesus who suggests “putting those wretches to a miserable death” but rather those to whom Jesus was speaking. In a time when it may seem that those bent on propping up white supremacy, cultivating greed, and sowing division are winning the day—take heart that the creator of all things chooses the stone rejected by the status quo as the cornerstone for a new world unfolding. Jesus is our cornerstone, the Way of Jesus our foundation, our plumbline, our leveler. At least that is what we are striving for.
And as we consider the larger world and the ways that leaders abuse their position as stewards and caretakers of community, we have hope that God will continue to raise up new generations of stewards to do the work of Kin-dom cultivation when we or others fail. Our text today—messy and confusing as it is—has something to say to all of us.
As we kick off this new series and step into our Fearless Generosity: For Such a Time As This campaign, the message clearly resonates: Foundry, we are called to be good stewards of God’s Kin-dom vision in a time of mess, injustice, violence, and confusion—in our denomination, nation, and world. We are called to receive and heed the words of the servants and prophets of God—in scripture and in science and in synagogue and sanctuary and scholarship and the voices of those crying out for help and for justice and in all the places that God’s wisdom and way are revealed to us. We are called to be humble enough to recognize the extraordinary privilege and gift it is to be part of this congregation and to continue to be a prophetic witness, to practice sacred resistance, to welcome all people in the beauty and wholeness of who they are, and to do the hard work of putting our words and faith into concrete action for racial equity and justice, and for a vision for DC that provides support for all its residents.
Over the past seven months, it has been clear as ever how important our presence, mission, and witness are—for people both near and far. As you saw in the video we shared earlier, Foundry has been a beacon of hope, a source of spiritual strength and moral guidance, an anchor providing stability, and a conduit for concrete action to support vulnerable and hurting neighbors. There was a moment a couple of months ago when it became very clear to me and to Foundry’s leadership that this is not a moment when Foundry needs to retreat, hunker down, shrink our vision or our work. In this moment when there is so much uncertainty and so much injustice and suffering, God needs us to “Foundry” more than ever—to be more of who we are called to be, not less, to do more of what we do, not less, to reach more people with the radical hospitality and saving love of God, not fewer, and to put more on the line for the sake of justice and peace, not less. Look at where we are as a people. In this crucible moment there is at least a sliver of a possibility that there could be a shift in our land that might bring some of God’s Kin-dom vision to fruition on earth as in heaven. If this is not the time for us to be bold and courageous and sacrificial, then…when?
It will be a new kind of faith community we eventually move into next year—both an in-person community and a robust digital experience and community, a more concretely anti-racist community, with deepened understanding and practice of full inclusion, and new and creative ways to manage the burgeoning hunger for small group connection, rigorous study, meaningful connection with our sister congregations, and so much more. And all of that will prepare and strengthen us to march into whatever comes next. When the world is on a razor’s edge of destructive chaos or new creation—that is the time to rise up, come together as a people, and participate in the new thing, the Kin-dom thing, that is possible. If not now…when? Foundry, we are called for such a time as this.
https://foundryumc.org/
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli for Foundry UMC September 27, 2020, "Come Thou Fount Series"
A mediation by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli for Foundry UMC September 20, 2020 Reconciling Sunday.
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli for Foundry UMC September 13, 2020, “Come thou Fount” series.
A sermon preached by Rev. Kelly L. Grimes for Foundry UMC September 6th, 2020. “Come thou Fount” series.
Not Today, Satan - Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 16:21-28
Current Series: Close Encounters With The Living God
Rev. William E. Green
A Sermon for Foundry UMC
8.30.20
The Divine Shelf - Matthew 16:13-20
Rev. K.C. Van Atta-Casebier
A Sermon for Foundry UMC
8.23.20
Let’s Pray. God, for Your wisdom and revelation and hope, we pray now. Amen.
In our text for this morning and the surrounding texts, there is this symphonic interplay of Christ’s divinity and humanity that prepares us for this critical question...Who do you say that I am? And honestly to us it could seem like an invitation to pick one. Is what we’ve heard about you true? Are you the child of God? Or are you the human that was birthed and given life by Mary, a perpetual-includer, a hope-giver, a challenger (I’ll admit a little angry for my taste sometimes), a guide for the way of peace and liberation? Divinity or humanity: how should we identify you here, Jesus? And in the text as an answer to this question Who do you say that I am?, Peter responds YOU ARE THE MESSIAH, perhaps unaware that he is unlocking a significant piece of the gospel story. And Jesus’ response is YES, I am that. And oh by the way also, I want you, Peter, to be the foundation for the space the Messiah inhabits in the world. Someone will need the keys to open the doors to my people at all hours of the night, to fire up the ovens in the kitchen for bread-baking, to collect alms and distribute them. Be careful with these keys, though Peter, because they also lock doors and can bar them shut and can be used for defensive posturing at best and ethnic cleansing at worst. These keys also lock chains, Peter, and whatever is bound on earth, will be bound in Heaven. This word for bound is used in every other place by the author of Matthew as a synonym for what happens just before death. Bind it and then we will burn it. Bind him, and throw him into the darkness. Bind him and deliver him to Pilate. And in many ways it's worse than the death it foreshadows. It’s an agent of humiliation, a tool of torture, a sure-fire way to exclude (or at the very least place out of sight) people from the family. It’s a big job, Peter. Just as we don’t get Jesus’ divinity without Jesus’ humanity, we also don’t get to claim a divine promise of Messianic fruition and salvation as ours without being handed the keys to the whole dang thing. Peter’s ability to move forward in this calling as the rock and foundation for the ekklesia (the church) is shaped by his understanding of who Jesus is. A gift, the author says, given to Peter from Heaven.
This question for the disciples is one we should be reckoning with every day. Who will we say Jesus is? The struggle of recognizing who Jesus is in the world is an ongoing, ever-present, deeply theological question which considers the collision of Jesus’ divinity and humanity, and it directly affects our relationship to the ekklesia, to divine work, and to the Kindom origin of the Messiah.
I have this theory that claiming Jesus’ divinity and salvific power without accountability to the work of figuring out what that actually means is the equivalent of holding up a divine shelf to ensure that the Kindom doesn’t crash down and leak all over the systems and institutions that we’ve crafted around our apologetics and often poorly examined portraits of Jesus…and what we’re supposed to do (or perhaps, more prevalently, not do) about it. Institutions and systems that are built with gatekeepers (and their protection at all costs) in mind. But the incarnation cuts out the middle person…on…purpose. If it was up to Peter to conjure the Messianic idea or have it told to him through someone else, this text might have gone in a different direction. But because of impediment-free revelation, it’s an opportunity to lean into what is to come and from that moment, the author says, Jesus began to tell the disciples about the great suffering that lay ahead. Which may not feel like good news. The leak from Heaven, though, is a consequential next step in the harrowing journey to the Golgotha and the life that lies beyond it.
And I want to challenge us to not continue to put all of our effort into holding up the divine shelf. Especially if it is just for the sake of continuing a fruitless dichotomy, to appeal to our binary mindsets or our separatist ideals. If we’re just doing it because we need here and there, we need us and them, we need now and later…we might be calling the Messiah by the wrong name or giving the Messiah the wrong title.
Here’s what I want us to hear, it is an enterprise to keep the Kindom of heaven where it is, to prevent a more close encounter...to keep Jesus’ Messianic revelation up on the divine shelf as a separate characteristic and to claim it without accountability to it, to use it as proof rhetoric for our own Christological convictions that tell us we’re home team, and that we are fine to keep on pretending that somehow not interacting with the world is what will save us and that there will be hell to pay for the ones who dare to try. People make millions of dollars and “save millions of souls” by holding up the divine shelf and keeping it as a distant ideal. It can be sold, because it promises that full investments in capitalist theocracies are rewarded with impunity. And it is controlled by those in power, who sit on thrones of supremacy and bathe under faucets of privilege, who collect rugs to sweep things under and co-sign unwritten rules, and who benefit most from its right-side up, uninterrogated narrative that holiness or salvation was bought by the shedding blood of a brown-skinned immigrant in chains with no realization that the whip is an extension of their very own hand. … Keep it out, keep Jesus’ melanin Messiahship and our role as “bringers-about” of an upside-down Kindom out. Hold up that shelf, hire people to help us if we have to. Repackage it. Commodify it. Keep ourselves clean and white and unaccountable. Let the Messiah sort it out. We’ll wait.
But the divine shelf must fall.
It has to clang in its reentry and crash our parties of complacency. Those words, “You are the Messiah,” need to make an absolute mess of this place. Because divine work doesn’t solely exist in ethereality, divine work happens when the disciples are invited into the sea of doubt and offered a courageous, faithful, and yes, even faltering witness, when Jesus feels compelled to change his mind, to shift away from stereotypes and insults hurled at a woman desperately trying to save her child, and to expand his definition of community, of who is welcome at the table. It happens when we are given permission for imperfection, when our impossible standards for ourselves and others bear no fruit and are yanked out of the ground like the weeds they are. It happens when we find a sacred, stolen moment or breathing space to connect cosmically to the fuel station of the universe. When “this is what it feels like to do the thing” becomes an empowering mantra rather than a crippling cry. Its in whispers, in shouts of protest, in the wails of grief, in the songs of hope and of HOSANNA. AND it happens when we invest in the streets and work for racial and economic justice and access to affordable housing and healthcare. It echoes in the halls of lawmakers as we organize against the crafting of evil and unjust policies. It reverberates in prisons as we visit AND as we work to dismantle the system that unjustly locks folx away in the first place. Jesus is the Messiah, the anointed one, the bringer of divine promise and liberation and resurrection. The personification of the Kindom. And also, the Messiahship is incomplete without the audacity of the flesh. Every instrument in the symphony must be played. We need to float through all of the movements –proclamation and the pain, the rising and the reconciliation.
May we get the music stuck in our head, commit its chords to our heart. And even when we feel out of touch or like its meaning is muddied more than ever before or when something is attempting to shout or tweet louder, may we find ourselves humming the melody of the Messiah, reminding ourselves that what we know about the Messiah is true - that the Messiah is BOTH - the circle-expander, the un-binder, the challenger, Mary’s child, AND the long-awaited fulfillment of a divine promise of liberation, that we are also accountable to see carried out in the world.
The Messiah isn’t a reinforcer of separation, or roll calling on an ‘us and them’ roster. ‘You are the Messiah’ is an indicator that the way we live and go about divine work matters, that the Kindom is leaking, and it’s our job to let it (as painful as it might be for our privilege or assuredness)…so that we might continue the work of living in a community of open doors that breaks bread, collects and distributes alms, AND is mindful of the intersections of oppression and the way that the (Big C) church has co-opted those stories. A community that acknowledges its pools of power and does the work to bring more folx to the table, a home for every person to feel safe to show up and not be loved ‘in spite of who they are,’ but in the FULLNESS of who they are. It’s a big job, and it takes waiting and working and suffering and resting…questioning, regrouping, refueling and carrying on in the long-term work. Because the Messiah is not a trend, it’s a revolution.
And the beauty is that we can’t keep the Kindom out even if we try. We can’t hold up the divine shelf or plug the Messianic leak. No matter how many gatekeepers we hire. No matter how much we insist on investing in our comfort, predictability, and stiltedness. No matter our paralysis in visceral pain, grief, or illness. No matter our perceived failure or hesitation at the starting line. Our shoulders will begin to recognize the weight that we bear. And the divine shelf will fall mightily.
This quote from Meister Eckhart demonstrates why:
Earth cannot escape heaven, flee it by going up, or flee it by going down.
Heaven still invades the earth, energizes it, makes it sacred…
God is at home (here). It is we who have gone out for a walk.
Let’s Pray.
God whatever we’ve unfaithfully bound, may you come and help us loosen it. May we be emboldened to sing loudly the symphony of who you are in the world and know that with each note, we have a responsibility to be agents for your liberation - for others and for ourselves. Give us the strength we need for this thing and the next. Gather us up in community as witnesses and reminders of your holy work in us and in the world. Whisper to us each morning that you have not abandoned us. Breathe life and hope into the ekklesia, Lord. We’ll continue to unlock it. In the name of the Trinitarian God we pray together, Amen.
Benediction:
Who is it that you say that I am? I am the Messiah?
Then Foundry it’s time for the divine shelf to fall
To remember who we are
To invite perfection into a nasty fall from grace
To unfold every corner
To relocate our humanity in the divine work
And to take these keys and go on a spree of unbinding.
Go now and may grace and peace abound with us on the journey, Amen.
https://foundryumc.org/
A sermon preached by Rev. Ben Roberts for Foundry UMC August 16th, 2020. “Close Encounters with the Living God” series.
Grappling with God
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli for Foundry UMC August 9, 2020, tenth Sunday after Pentecost. “Close Encounters with the Living God” series.
Text: Genesis 32:22-31
It’s a scene tailor-made for a movie script or a budding psychoanalyst’s dissertation. The archetypes are stacked one upon another—estranged twin brothers who have different ways of being in the world; a shadowy antagonist; a struggle alongside a river crossing with foreboding heavy on both sides; the thin place that exists in the hours just as day is breaking.
Jacob is at the center of this scene. Over the centuries, he’s become a kind of stock character, a trickster, a hustler—his name is translated “he supplants” or “heel”—for he was born holding the heel of his twin brother Esau. From the beginning of his life he’s engaged in one kind of struggle after another, working angles, trying to get ahead. And he always seems to come out smelling like a rose, always one step ahead of danger. But on this night, Jacob knows that his life may have finally caught up in a way that could be the death of him.
You see, at God’s leading (Gen 31:3), after around 20 years away, Jacob is heading back home after some trouble with his father in law. His brother Esau, still living in their hometown, vowed to kill Jacob back in the day for taking his birthright and his blessing. Jacob sends word to his brother that he’s coming, that he’s done alright for himself, and hopes that they can, you know, make up (Gen 32:3-5). The response is swift: Esau is on the march to meet Jacob with four hundred men. Cue the ominous orchestral theme… Jacob does several things at this point. He prays to God, humbly but directly—“I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown” (32:10)—“I am afraid of him…” (and then, in case God forgot) “Yet you have said ‘I will surely do you good…’” (32:11-12) He sends gifts ahead to try to appease his brother. And he sends his wives and children ahead of him as well, never knowing if he’ll see any of them again.
Jacob has done everything he can, worked the only angles he’s got, he’s prayed, he’s planned, he’s gifted. And now he is alone.
Imagine Jacob, afraid and knowing he may die, reflecting upon his life… The way he came into the world holding on to his brother. The way that relationship got twisted—in part through the actions of their parents. How Jacob developed his own strengths of quick wit and cleverness, so different from his brother’s strength in the hunt and the fields. How he had gone through an elaborate ruse to try to be like his brother so that he might receive blessing from his father. How, in the process, he hurt his brother and humiliated his father and was forced to leave home and his mother’s fierce love and protection. I imagine Jacob remembering all the highs and lows of love and marriage, the complications with Leah and Rachel, and with his father in law, Laban. He might also have played back the dreams and visions he’d been given, images of his children’s faces, the beauty and bounty he’d experienced…as well as all he’d said and done that was unkind, unjust, deceitful and hurtful. I imagine Jacob looking back over his life with gratitude and regret and guilt and fear and hope all tumbling over his mind like a creek flowing over rocks.
And when night fell the wrestling began…
Can you relate? Ever found yourself awake in the wee hours of night in a kind of wrestling match in your mind and heart? Your story won’t include the details of Jacob’s life. But who among us doesn’t grapple with fear? Who among us doesn’t carry things from childhood forward that we are bound to run into on our life’s journey? Who among us is without the marks of our parental or sibling relationships on our psyches? We have all made decisions that led us down one path or another, sometimes into danger and regret and other times into freedom and joy. There are different energies within us, like twins who have different gifts and strengths, all deserving nurture and love—but often it’s difficult to honor it all and hold these energies together with any sense of wholeness. What have you done in order to try to get love? What have you sacrificed in order to try to earn the blessing you crave? Who have you been willing to hurt in order to gain wealth or comfort or pleasure? What losses have you suffered that are yet uncared for, what wounds are untended? What are you proud of in your life and what would you give anything to do over?...
When we are alone, when it is clear we are vulnerable, that things are going to be different one way or another, that we must confront the reality of our life—all our history, our personality, our gifts, our mistakes, our strengths, our woundedness, all our complications—in those moments, there is struggle. There is wrestling.
That’s what happened with Jacob. Is he fighting with himself (like Luke Skywalker in the cave)? Is it a demon? An angel? Is it God? The struggle is intense and it leaves Jacob limping. But he holds on. He holds on even when the man tells him to let go. He holds on even when he doesn’t have a clue who he’s wrestling. He holds on when it seems it would have been a big relief to let the mystery assailant go on his merry way. But Jacob would not let go. And it is here that the story turns.
You can characterize Jacob in all sorts of ways. But the thing that seems consistent throughout his story is that he is determined to fight for the life he longs for. And he’s not afraid to ask for the blessing that he needs. “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” The response to Jacob is simple: “What is your name?”
All Jacob has is the name he was given, “Jacob”—the supplanter, the usurper, the “heel.” In speaking his name, Jacob makes a kind of confession, an admission of the mix and mess and striving of his life. Here I am, alone—no “Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham.” Just Jacob. And this one with whom Jacob has been wrestling has something to say to that. “That name, that narrative, is not all of who you are. All the striving of your life—the struggle with humans, with yourself, and with me has led you to this moment. And when you cross the river, when you pass into this new day dawning, when you leave this place walking differently as a result of your hip, I will call you Israel.” Jacob asks the man’s name. And the implication is beginning to get clear—this is God! And God asks, “Do you really need to ask my name?” There God blessed Jacob/Israel. I wonder whether the whole encounter was the blessing, this close encounter with the living God…
What does Jacob’s grappling with self, others, and God teach us about our own?
If Jacob’s story is any indication, we learn that the whole of our lives is held in God—the painful bits and the joyful surprises and the tensions and the triumphs. God is always at work for good—not just in the world around us, but in our world. Paul writes, “all things work together for good for those who love God who are called according to God’s purpose.” (Romans 8:28) Lately, this verse has made more and more sense to me. It isn’t that God causes everything that happens to you, but that God is with you in all of it and desires nothing more than to help you come through, to survive, stronger, wiser, with more compassion and love.
Jacob’s story reminds us that God knows all of you, so you might as well be honest. God knows you better than you know yourself—knows not only what you’ve done, but why. God knows everything you’ve experienced, suffered, offered, achieved, everything you’ve sacrificed, everything you’ve dreamed, how hard you try and how much you’re carrying. God knows what you’ve done that was harmful or hurtful. God knows it all.
If you read the whole of Jacob’s story, you’ll see how God just keeps showing up even when we might think Jacob doesn’t deserve it. Morning by morning, new mercies are received…over and over.
I am increasingly convinced that the most difficult thing for many of us to grapple with is God’s mercy. To acknowledge who you are—all of it—and then to receive God’s mercy is a deeply humbling, awe-full experience because you know you didn’t earn it, but that somehow God believes you’re worthy. Receiving God’s mercy is a blessing that, if fully received, changes us because we begin to recognize the depth of God’s love and the stubbornness of God who is determined to get it through our thick heads that we’re more than the worst thing we’ve done, that we’re more than the self-limiting names that we or others assign to us. We struggle to believe that God cares so much, that God loves us and wants to bless us. Jacob is a champion of demanding the blessing which God always wants to give.
Many among us are metaphorically at the ford of the Jabbok river right now.
Some are facing difficult decisions, perhaps feeling stranded and afraid, uncertain about the future or how to proceed, having worked every angle and done everything you know how to do. Many among us are weary and worn down with grief and rage and loneliness and stress. Some among us are paralyzed with guilt and regret, a sense of unworthiness or emptiness. Others are trying to discern how to step into life as it continues to shift and change all around us, how to adapt and find ways to thrive and to serve and to grow.
As a nation we are standing at the river being asked who we are, being asked to tell the truth about our whitewashed history, being asked if we’re willing to hold on even though it’s painful to acknowledge our nation’s sins, being asked whether we’re willing to meet as siblings and write a new narrative of true liberty and justice for all, whether we’re willing to be substantively changed so that we move together in a new way.
And when we find ourselves at this point, when things get really difficult, when we feel most vulnerable, weary, guilty, wounded, uncertain, angry, and afraid, knowing that things in our lives need to change, the temptation is to just give in—to shut down or let go of our faith, our hope, our love. At this point God always shows up and takes hold of us—sometimes as a parent tenderly holds a child and sometimes like a mysterious wrestling partner. In any case, like Jacob, our part is to hold on, to persevere, to not let go before we step into the new day dawning.
As we hold on to God, trusting God to hold on to us as we step up to face what is before us, we eventually learn to let go of our idols of self-sufficiency, control and comfort, to let go of the names and narratives that hold us back from life God knows is ours to live, to let go of our deepest fears and self-loathing.
As we hold on to God, Jacob teaches us not only to expect but to ask for God’s blessing. That blessing may not be what you imagine, but it will be life for you. Because it will always be some form of God’s tender mercy and liberating love. And that’s something you won’t want to let go—even if you could.
https://foundryumc.org/
Stepping Out of the Boat
A sermon preached by Rev. Kelly L. Grimes for Foundry UMC August 2nd, 2020.. “Close Encounters with the Living God” series.
Text: Matthew 14:22-33
Live Life as if...
Nothing Can Separate You From the Love of God
Foundry UMC DC July 26, 2020
I am so thankful to be with you today. What a privilege! I have been looking forward to being with you in person but well you know what they say about the best laid plans....
We are all getting used to this virtual platform and while it is likely to be with us for a while, I miss being in community, singing hymns – we are built to be in community.
I give thanks every day for this less than perfect option of connecting with people.
I have worshiped in more churches than ever before, attended more meetings and even have enjoyed a meal with family and joined with friends each week for a virtual Happy Hour.
So, here we are together in this unique and what now seems normal way.
Like many of you, I keep looking for something normal, something familiar. One way I have done that is to return to familiar scripture. Scripture that has spoken to me in the past. Scripture like Isaiah 43 – Don’t fear for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name – you are mine.
Or Psalm 139.... you are marvelously and wonderfully made – I actually like this better in Spanish – the passion in some words just doesn’t translate – maravillosas son tus obras – I love the word maravillosa!
So, can you imagine my surprise when I realized that today’s lectionary text was Romans 8:26-39?
The Spirit comes to help our weakness.
When we don’t know what to pray, the Spirit intercedes for us.
We know that God works all things together
for good
If God is for us who could possibly be against us?
Who will separate us from Christ’s love? Hardship? NO
Distress? NO
Persecution? NO
Famine? NO
Nakedness, peril, sword? NO
Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth no anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Friends, NOTHING. NOT A THING can separate us from the love of Christ. No pandemic, no injustice, no economic uncertainty, no church separation.
NOTHING can separate us from Christ’s love.
Now this doesn’t mean you live a haphazard life – it does mean that you live in the confidence of God’s unfailing, unfaltering, never changing love.
I call that grace!
There is the assurance, the freedom in living as if nothing can separate you from God’s love.
If you follow me long enough you will quickly learn that it is not a Cynthia Harvey sermon without at least one reference to Frederick Buechner.
Here what he says...
We are above all things loved – that is the good news of the gospel – and loved not just the way we turn up on Sundays in our best clothes and on our best behavior and with our best feet forward, but loved as we alone know ourselves to be, the weakest and shabbiest of what we are along with the strongest and gladdest.
To come together as people who believe that just maybe this gospel is actually true // should we come together like people who have just won the Irish Sweepstakes.
It should have us throwing our arms around each other like people who have just discovered that every single man and woman in those pews is not just another familiar or unfamiliar face but is our long-lost brother and our long-lost sister because despite the fact that we have all walked in different gardens and knelt at different graves, we have all, humanly speaking, come from the same place and heading out into the same blessed mystery that awaits us all.
This is the joy that is so apt to be missing, and missing not just from church but from our own lives – the joy of not just managing to believe at least part of the time that it is true that life is holy, but of actually running into holiness head-on.
Ya’ll this captures in my mind the joy that comes from loving and being loved. We run into holiness head-on!
The world is turned upside down and those of you who live in the DC area feel that fragile state perhaps even more.
Hardly anything in our every day life seems familiar. There is the health pandemic, racial pandemic, economic pandemic, political pandemic – things most of us have never seen, heard or experienced.
In the midst of the upsidedowness, it is comforting to imagine the holiness of love – God’s love - in the midst of chaos.
Holiness and love in the midst of injustice. Holiness and love in the midst of uncertainty.
Joe is a wonderful man in our Conference. He is passionate and very active in United Methodist Men. You will not get past him ever – whether he knows you or not – without him asking you perhaps the most important question of the day, “ has anybody told you they love you today?” Then he gives you a giant smile and hug and says, “I love you, God loves you.”
There are days at Annual Conference that I look for Joe because I need to hear those words. Sometimes we need people like Joe to remind us that God loves us.
What if someone stumbled into this livestream.
What would they hear, what would they experience? I know it is a little harder these days but could they experience the love of God?
Would they get a sense that this is a place where they can experience bumping into and falling into holiness? Would they know this is a place where they can be loved no matter what because nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
Loving might be next to breathing -- both being most natural and also most difficult both a requirement to be truly alive.
Did the Beatles have it right...All You Need Is Love?
The lyrics for this commissioned piece were intended to be simple since it had to be understood by everyone around the world.
There was actually criticism that the lyrics and the general sentiment were naïve.
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game.
All you need is love....love is all you need.
They really wanted to give the world a message that could not be misinterpreted. It is a clear message saying that love is everything.
We know this to be true. The scriptures are filled with references to love. Not romantic love but the love of God.
The Gospels are chocked full with messages of love that say to people like you and me that love is everything. To love and be loved by another and most importantly by God is everything.
The great commandment, “you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being and with all your mind. You must love your neighbor as you love yourself.” No other commandment is greater than these Jesus said.
Really? No other commandment!
The Beatles and others might claim that love is easy – we know it is not.
Yet there is no other commandment that is greater than to love as God loves. Love no matter what. Love as if there is nothing can get in the way of it!
Our call is to personify love, to be love to a world that might not know love.
Love is a gift. Love is a verb. It is something that you do - something that you give. Love that is inseparable.
When we love as God loves us we move into a thin place – a threshold place, an entrance, a place filled with possibility, a messy yet fulfilling kind of place, a place where we bump up against the holy.
We have all had those experiences when we find ourselves in those places where we are overtaken by an extraordinary sense of love – running into holiness head on.
The birth of a baby.
The death of a loved one.
A wedding,
Graduation,
Ordination.
You are a gift to the church. At a time when our world and our church is in turmoil, you are here! You keep turning up week after week because somewhere, somehow you know that nothing can separate you from God’s love. You are running into the holiness we call love head-on. There is a whole world out there that needs to know this kind of love.
As the church we love faces possible schism, splintering, and brokenness over LGBTQ matters - you continue to show up and say not on my watch! I love too much. I love like God loves.
You know that everyone deserves to love and be loved. You know that to God there is no distinction – slave or free, greek or jew, male or female – there are no distinctions for we are all made in the image of God.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you ever again that you are incompatible with Christian teaching. How can that even be? If you are a child of God, made in the image of God HOW IN THE WORLD CAN ANYONE SAY THAT ANYONE IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH CHRISTIAN TEACHING???? That would be like saying that you are incompatible with God.
That very statement is antithetical to the gospel. Nothing separates us from the love of God.
But here we are in this unprecedented place. The world, our communities and the United Methodist Church has not ever seen anything like this.
Who knows what will happen?
Yet you are here!
The world has shifted,
the church has shifted!
Yet you are here!
God is still calling people!
God is calling you!
You know that fear and love cannot go together! You know that love casts out all fear.
You have been called by love – God’s love for you and your call to love neighbor.
For our founder, John Wesley all that God is and God does is motivated by love.
Author Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, a Nazarene and holiness scholar said in “A Theology of Love” that to be Wesleyan is to be committed to a theology of love.
Love was probably no easier for Wesley than it is for some of us.
He was not easy to love and I am guessing it wasn’t easy for him TO love.
He was a quite a rebel. He fought the establishment and challenged the status quo.
John Wesley was denied the opportunity to preach in his home church.
So, Wesley went to the only plot of ground that actually belonged to him – his father’s grave and it was from there that he preached - just outside the church.
I would guess that Wesley was not loved by the establishment. He was criticized for his unorthodox ways. He preached outside the church walls which was considered evil to the Anglicans.
As Methodists we are part of a legacy of reluctance and resistance.
Strangely comforting isn’t it?
Remember your baptismal covenant to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.
Resistance is baked into each of us!
Our Wesleyan legacy is one of love and an assurance that in all things, God is with us – nothing separates us from the love of God.
There is someone out there waiting for someone just like you to share the unmatchable, unfathomable love of God that can overcome COVID, racial injustice, human sexuality. They are waiting for you!
Right, left, Republican, Democrat, traditionalist, progressive, gay, straight and everything in between – they are waiting for you to show them what living life as if nothing can separate you from the love of God looks like.
They are waiting for you to love them, to help them order their life by love. If you show them love – they will love you. You will teach them and they you that, nothing can separate us from the love of God.
Because to disciple is to love and to love is to disciple.
Love is the bedrock of the Gospel. It is the bedrock of who we are and who we are called to be. We are made in the image of God to carry out a life of love.
A love that punches holes in the darkness.
A love that sees the hunger for acceptance in a person’s life.
A love that speaks truth into the world.
This is courageous love.
WE need to be that person to those who are living on life’s ragged edge and yes, even those who seem to have it all together but don’t.
We all need to know that we are not only loved but BE-LOVED. That we are a child of God - chosen by God!
We are God’s beloved sons and daughters - chosen to help mend broken people, broken communities, broken homes. We are God’s beloved chosen to love as God loves.
Our call to love can change the trajectory of the world. Our call to love can change people, situations, and circumstances.
Our call to love can change this church. It can change the United Methodist Church.
Our call to love can change YOU!
Does It Have to Be This Way?
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli for Foundry UMC July 19, 2020, seventh Sunday after Pentecost. “Living As If…” series.
Text: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Invasives. They threaten to devour my yard. They are what my landscape architect friend informs me is destroying so many of our habitats. They may look pretty at first but then proceed to cover over and strangle everything else. Invasives seem to have an uncanny ability to multiply at an alarming rate, to flourish in places they don’t belong.
The Kin-dom, Jesus says in our parable today, is like a cultivated field that has been invaded and planted with seeds that don’t belong. And when this becomes apparent as the plants grow, the farmer counsels letting everything grow together—out of care and concern for the survival of the intended crop—with a sorting out of everything at the appropriate time.
This is a risky proposition, this “growing together,” because invasives are so aggressive, and can do so much damage. But evidently, the planter has confidence that the wheat will be strong enough to thrive and produce its life-giving food even in the midst of struggle and assault.
This metaphor would have made sense to the original audience of Matthew’s Gospel, a community of Jewish Christians who not only had the usual conflicts of religious community within its own ranks, but were also actively engaged in conflict with leaders of the Pharisee-led Judaism that predominated in 80-90 CE. Trying to grow in healthy ways in the midst of attack and surrounded by philosophies, theologies, and practices that don’t fit into the vision of the Kin-dom Jesus taught was difficult. This parable offers a rich image through which to consider how to respond to this reality.
And, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that the writer of Matthew took this rich parable and sucked every drop of nuance right out of it in the allegorical “explanation” that follows. When we are in conflict—polarized, defensive, and fearful—it seems common to want to categorize things, to lump people together, to assign absolute values—“good” or “bad”—and to take comfort in our self-appointed “goodness” and the promise that the “bad” people will get what’s coming to them. There is something very emotionally satisfying about imagining our enemies weeping and gnashing their teeth.
But does it have to be this way?
My first reaction when I started praying with our text for today was to notice that in the parable, the enemy appears and plants troubling seeds “while everybody was asleep.” I thought, “If people stayed awake this wouldn’t happen!” See? It doesn’t have to be this way! Perhaps this is true to some degree—constant vigilance could protect the field from destructive invasives. But then I realized that can’t be the core message. Because the truth is we are all planted in a field, born into a world, that has “pre-existing conditions.” No amount of vigilance can undo what’s been already done. Ways of thinking and reacting and treating others are all around. Like seeds of invasive plants that get eaten by birds and then migrate with them, being excreted in all the places they alight, concepts, ideas, philosophies, prejudices, are consumed and carried and shared. For example, Ibram X. Kendi’s book Stamped From the Beginning illustrates the way the idea of racism moves and morphs and takes root over centuries.
Whether we like it or not, this is the way it is. We are in a proverbial field in which things are all mixed up. There are planted seeds of love and life and there are seeds of harm and death. And seeds want to grow. And they do grow together. In a world of pre-existing conditions we are surrounded not only by creative, gentle, playful, inspiring, soul enhancing energies, but also by aggression, malicious intent, pain, greed, and other potentially soul-damaging stuff. We’re not only surrounded by these things—as though we can remain separate or distant from them—but we soak up and ingest them to varying degrees. Our make-up is affected by the field in which we’re planted—like a wine that tastes a certain way because of where the grapes were cultivated or milk that tastes a certain way because of what the cows ate or the flavor of honey tinged with the flower the bees loved most that season. Within each one of us are the capacities for care and for harm, for love and for hate, for violence and for peace.
With the way things are, we have to choose what way we will respond. How do we navigate this complicated world, this human life, so beautiful and broken? One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is just how tempting it is to do the thing we hear in the allegory today—to assign everyone a label and to tidy things up with hard and fast absolutes. You go into the “children of the kin-dom” camp and you go to the “children of the evil one” camp. The impulse will always be to rip out or cut off or otherwise lay hands on whomever we deem “the evil ones.”
Now some will argue that the text is clear that it’s not up to us to make these assignments or to try to get rid of the “children of the evil one.” But let’s be honest, that’s what people do. And texts like this one have provided handy religious legitimation for doing it. And let’s be honest about how it’s not just those other people who do this, but we do it too. Let’s be honest about how easy it is to fall into this way of thinking even when we try not to (“I hate people who hate people!”). And perhaps we can also be honest about how some of us turn this thinking on ourselves and believe that we are “bad seeds,” deserving of punishment, undeserving of care or love. What we imbibe from the soil in which we grow can be deeply internalized such that it is difficult to extract ourselves or others from these labels.
Lumping people together based on anything—race, accent, education, appearance, political affiliation, orientation, personal style, identity, vocation, whatever!—erases a person’s humanity and identity. You put a person in a category or under a label and all of a sudden they are no longer a person with a story and a family and a body and dreams. They become a thing. They might be a thing you consider good—“wheat”—or a thing you consider bad—“weed”—but they become an object, not a subject. The wheat isn’t expected to have weediness in it and the weed isn’t expected to have any wheatness in it. They can no longer be truly human.
A recent example that is resonant with our current challenge and work: writer Michael Harriot, whose work I’ve come to know on Twitter through The Root wrote, “That ‘anti-white’ sentiment people keep talking about is just the erosion of what I call the ‘privilege of individuality.’ White people aren’t accustomed to being lumped together and being defined by the actions of others. Welcome to the club.” Being lumped together under any label is literally dehumanizing. And it is what our labels, stereotypes, racism and all the isms do. When we have successfully dehumanized people, it is much easier to blame, use, abuse, and kill them.
My guess is that there will be some listening to my words and thinking something like, “But some people are awful! Are we not supposed to get in the way of injustice? Are we not supposed to call out those who harm the vulnerable? Are we not called to get into ‘good trouble’ for the sake of the Kin-dom?” The answer to all of those questions is simply “yes.” That is absolutely part of our work as we engage sacred resistance. I don’t think our parable today is asking us to do nothing or to ignore evil, injustice, and oppression.
I do think it is about being honest about the reality in our world and in our own lives, a reality that is much more complex than the easy dualisms and absolutes so prevalent in our current context. Remember, Jesus calls Peter “Satan” in a moment of hyperbole and then entrusts him with the keys to the Kin-dom; he sees through the small life of despised “tax collector” Zacchaeus to perceive the big things he will do with his generosity; Jesus loves Mary Magdalene and draws her into the inner circle when others exclude her due to her “demons.” In Matthew 5:43-44 Jesus teaches us to love our enemies and in 18:14 says that it’s God’s will that none will be lost. Our parable today uses scary images to highlight that there are consequences for our choices—it is damaging and painful to body and soul to be hateful, cruel, and selfish. But the whole of the Gospel affirms that God’s way of dealing with a broken world and with broken lives is not to abandon or destroy, but to draw ever nearer in love, mercy, and grace—even stepping directly into the mess of the world with us. Jesus shows us what it looks like to be truly human, perfectly reflecting the image of God’s love. Jesus never dehumanizes or allows a label or a mistake or a flaw to define a person.
And thanks be to God for that. Right? We are all human. Not one of us is “weed-free.” We are all trying to find our way. None of us are perfected in love, we all do harm, we all experience pain, we all have tangled up roots from all sorts of seeds, taken on the “flavor” of the soil in which we’ve been planted, we are all complex, unique creations and children of God. As followers of Jesus, our call is to be human with other humans, to be “humanizers” in a world where the seeds of inhumanity and dehumanization want to grow. We are called to be planters and cultivators of love, mercy, and grace and to let those Kin-dom values fuel our resistance, to let those divine gifts live and grow in us and make us and the world more truly human.
It’s never easy to be human. The world, our lives, are beautiful and broken. And God knows, right now everything is hard.
Perhaps it didn’t have to be this way, but this is the way it is right now. What are you going to do about it? How are you going to be in it?
What might happen were we to live as if God’s amazing grace is at work in every single moment, in every single tangle, in every struggle, on every bridge, in every triumph, on every street, in front of every courthouse, along every line, in every weakness and strength, in every mistake, in every life, including our own—determined to strengthen, to mend, to liberate, to save? What if we were to live as if all we are made—planted—cultivated—to do is love?
https://foundryumc.org/
There is a Reason to Hope
Foundry United Methodist Church's Summer Guest Series continues with a sermon from the Reverend Junius Dotson. July 12th, 2020
Lamentations 2:11; 3:46-50 These are trying days. For the past several months we have been dealing with a pandemic called COVID-19, trying to navigate the Coronavirus in which we seem to have no control of. * We experienced 70K new cases just yesterday and we mourn the deaths of 137, 000 Americans and over ½ million people around the globe who have died from this virus.
And to make matters worse we are also navigating the virus of 1619 and it appears to be making a full-hearted comeback. Police brutality, White Supremacy, Health disparities and economic inequality have all converged in recent weeks to create the perfect storm.
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Our spirit grieves the modern-day lynching of Arhmaud Arbery, as well as the killing of Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Rayshard Brooks and the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police, handcuffed, lying face down with a knee in this neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.
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Even as we have tried to shelter-in-place Black lives are still at risk of being infected by the virus of racism.
In the words of that great theologian Marvin Gaye, “what’s Going On?” That’s the question he asked when he peened these words: Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today – Ya
Oh, what's going on
What's going on
Ya, what's going on
Ah, what's going on
In the midst of pain and suffering, we too are often left wondering what’s Going On? Why God would you allow such things to happen? * We are also left wondering where is God during the trials and tribulations of life? * Where is God when life hurts? * God has promised to never leave us or forsake us, but yet sometimes God seems so far away when things are going bad in our lives. * Here’s the question that I’ve wrestled with this week: how do I hold on to belief in the God of salvation and liberation, in the face of the problems and the contradictions that the world produces for my faith? * We are confronted with the painful reality, that when we finally emerge out this quarantine, we will confront a world, that is not as we want it to be. * Can I tell you friends that when tragedy is big enough, deep enough, close enough and real enough, there can no longer be business as usual?
What are we supposed to do in the face of this reality we now confront as a nation?
- I like the way the psalmist posed the question, Psalm 11:3 “When the foundations are being destroyed what can the righteous do?”
- When the foundations are being destroyed, when everything is up in the air,
- When the deaths of 100’s of thousands of people grows increasingly acceptable because of political and economic expediency.
- when we worry about whether it’s safe to allow our children to participate in a peaceful protest,
- when we worry about whether our child will survive a simple traffic stop,
- when we are bombarded by words and images, and political rhetoric, that dehumanize and degrade the very existence of some of God’s children,
- when it’s all in crisis and chaos,
- What can the righteous do?
- I SPEAK NOT SIMPLY as a pastor, nor as the General Secretary for Discipleship Ministries, but as a concerned father. A father of a 24 year old son. A son who has already outgrown me in physical height. He’s 6’3. His name is Wesley. Wesley recently graduated from KU and has already had two (almost life threatening) encounters with the police. I pray that every time he leaves the house that he will return home safely.
- What can the righteous do? In the chaos…in the confusion, when we feel crushed, when we feel out of control.
- How do you keep your eyes on Jesus…when they’re full of tears?
- How do you find hope in the face of tragedy?
Jeremiah helps us along this morning. He asked that question many years ago.
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- Jeremiah went through one of the most horrendous periods in the history of Israel, when an enemy nation came in and ravaged his entire land.
- During Jeremiah’s lifetime he watched enormous atrocities – inhumanities done to his people, to his family, to those that he loved.
- Jeremiah wrote what he lived and he lived what he wrote.
- When the brokenness of humanity is on full display, lament is an appropriate response.
- In the middle of a national tragedy where he had just lost many of his fellow citizens he penned these words in the book of Lamentations 2:11.
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He said, “I have cried until the tears no longer come. My heart is broken, my spirit poured out as I see what has happened to my people.”
- Then he says, 3:47-48: “We have suffered terror and pitfalls, ruin and destruction. Streams of tears flow from my eyes because of the destruction of my people.”
Lamentations deepens our understanding of where to find hope in hardship.
There is a reason for hope, but 1st,
WE MUST HEAR THE CRY FOR JUSTICE
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Lamentations invites us to hear the voice of sorrow as we live between the effects of our sin and God’s future restoration.
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The times in which we live are not only trying times, but they are also crying times.
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As believers in the body of Christ, we cannot be unmoved by the chorus of cries that reverberate through the streets of cities across our nation.
- We all understand that when basic human needs go unmet, cries will be heard.
- Some today are crying for food in the midst of a pandemic that has left many hungry.
- Others are crying for community, camaraderie, and companionship; because although we live in an age that connects us by technology in ways like never before, this quarantine has many feeling more isolated than ever.
- We are haunted by the echoes of myriad cries for employment, health care and end to the senseless violence on our streets.
- And yet undergirding all of these cries is the cry for racial justice.
- The killings in Minnesota, Atlanta, Denver follow a long string of deaths of black people at the hands of the police — in Staten Island; Cleveland; Baltimore; Ferguson, Mo.; and North Charleston, S.C., among others — that have stoked outrage around the country.
- And so, then the cry for justice will be pertinent as ever.
Isn’t that what most people want? Justice.
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- An even playing field? - A fair chance? - An equal opportunity?
- An opportunity to be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character?
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We must hear the cry for justice because as John Wesley said, “What one generation tolerates, the next generation will embrace.”
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- The lack of introspection on the part of many white Americans about racism.
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The denial and dumbfoundedness or astonishment of a nation, being overcome by “fear of the other” and the obsession with naming the other as evil, does not see that it incubates and unleashes terror and Evil from within.
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Every normal, healthy-minded human with a strong sense of right and wrong will be outraged when justice is denied to any of God’s children.
- But there is Good News, that even as this cry grows louder, I am convinced that in the midst of the problems we face as nation, we still have the power of God’s promises. There is a reason to hope.
- I’m so glad that in the midst of his tears, God reminds Jeremiah of a promise.
- Lam 5:17&19 “We are sick at our very hearts and we can hardly see through our tears but You, O Lord, are King forever. And You will rule to the end of time.”
- God is in control.
- God is still on the throne.
- In spite of the tragedies.
- So, I remember no matter what happens God is in control.
- There is a reason to hope: for Is 40:4 declares, “every hill and mountain will be made low, every valley will be exalted, the crooked will be made straight and the rough places made smooth, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”
- As the people of God, we have to hear the cry for justice.
WE MUST RECLAIM OUR PROPHETIC WITNESS
In the third chapter, v22 we read that “the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end” (Lam. 3:22). Jeremiah proclaims the never-ending, morning-ready mercies of the Lord over a destroyed city. Jerusalem looked like a wasteland and a war-zone. But, while those questions lingered and the suffering continued, Jeremiah pronounces what he knows to be true about God despite what he sees. We too are called to rehearse the truth of God and to usher in a resurgence of hope.
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I’ve come this morning Foundry, to issue a prophetic challenge to the people called Methodists.
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- I humbly submit to you that though we have a host of new struggles and fights for freedom in our midst, and the struggle for liberation IS NOT over, but there is a reason for hope.
- Our mission field is not merely across the sea, its across the street – in D.C., Minnesota, Baltimore, Dallas, Denver, in Atlanta, in Little Rock, in Lincoln, in Baton Rouge, in Kansas City, in Houston, and in your community.
- I believe the capacity to address America’s issues relating to racial justice lies within the church, particularly the United Methodist Church.
- IF YOU WANT A BAG OF CEMENT to become concrete, you have to mix it with water. Likewise, you have to mix God’s Word with faith in order for it to become a concrete experience in your life. Faith Without Works Is Dead!
- Faith demands an action, not just a feeling.
- I have been particularly encouraged looking at how diverse the crowds of protesters have been – young and white and suburban and black and urban – and thinking that we have a unique opportunity as the church to not only support these efforts but to also begin authentic relationships with young people.
- Discipleship begins with relationship. You cannot disciple people that you are not in a relationship with.
- This is a moment to intentionally engage millennials in meaningful conversation.
- They want to be in strategic conversation with the church.
- We were once a church that inspired social movements, headquartered and planned them, but now watch from irrelevance as others now carry the banner.
- We CAN DO SOMETHING!
- We can intercede in prayer daily,
- we can invite young people into conversation,
- we can listen and learn how to address issues of race with our neighbors in open, honest and authentic dialogue,
- we can advocate for uniformed police standards and trainings for non-biased policing.
- We CAN DO SOMETHING!
- I believe there are millions of young people who are waiting to see if the church will dare to be a relevant and prophetic voice for such a time as this.
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Waiting to see if we will fully embrace the personal mission statement of Jesus, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
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- Are we not hearers of the same spirit?
- I believe our communities need churches like you Foundry, for such a time as this.
- I believe as we hear the cry for racial justice and respond with a prophetic witness we will begin to reach a new generation of believers.
- This is our moment. There is a reason to hope.
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That’s why I echo the words of John Wesley who said, “Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing!”
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There is a reason to hope. For God declares: [If] My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).
- When we seek God's will with humility, prayer, and obedience revival can come and revival will come for the people called Methodists.
There is a reason to hope. Even when my heart is breaking because of the circumstances of life, it does not change the truth about God.
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- Romans 8:38-39 “I am convinced that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God. Not life, not death, not angels, not demons, not our fears for today or our worries about tomorrow. Not even the powers of hell can separate us from the love of God.”
https://foundryumc.org/archive/living-as-if
A Good Fit
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli for Foundry UMC July 5, 2020, fifth Sunday after Pentecost. “Living As If…” series.
Text: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
It has become very clear over the past couple of weeks that many of us are feeling a deep weight and weariness in the wake of all that has happened and is happening in our world. And today we hear Jesus say, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” I want to swim into this invitation like cool water on a hot summer day. But notice: as soon as Jesus says, “Let me help you lighten your load,” he invites us to pick up something else: “Take my yoke upon you…” What’s up with that?
Well, let’s get clear about what a “yoke” is. A yoke is a wooden crosspiece that is fastened over the necks of two animals and attached to the plow or cart that they are to pull. Yokes were carved carefully to fit the animal who would be using the device; a carefully made yoke would rest well on the shoulders and wouldn’t bind or blister. The Greek word for “easy” (chréstos) can also mean “well-fitting.” The well-fitting yoke was used to make carrying a burden or pulling a load easier. And the yoke allowed two animals to share a load, thus lightening the load for both. The Judeo-Christian tradition uses the metaphor of the yoke to describe the way of God revealed through the law and the prophets. It is also a word used to describe the teachings and way of life of Jewish Rabbis—that is, the way a rabbi interpreted and practiced Torah, the law, was that rabbi’s “yoke.” A disciple of a given Rabbi would take on the “yoke” of that teacher.
In both the literal and figurative sense, a “yoke” is something you put on, that you wear. And think for a moment about things you wear that don’t fit well…they’re unflattering at best and really uncomfortable at worst. Ill-fitting or inappropriate shoes can cause blisters and over time can affect your whole body alignment causing strain and pain. In the same way, ill-formed, ill-fitting yokes do damage. If I put on a yoke that was made for a body with much broader shoulders than mine, think about what that will do to my body. If I take on an interpretation of biblical law that is ill-formed—say lacking careful study or grace—just think about how that will affect the shape and health of my whole life. If I am yoked with someone who is pulling in an opposite direction from me or if I’m unwilling to move when the person with whom I’m yoked is trying to move, we’re both going to get hurt. If the yoke is well fitted for me but ill fitted for the person with whom I’m yoked, even if we’re traveling the same path, my way will be easier than that of my partner on the journey, though we will both struggle more than is necessary. The bottom line is that yokes—both literal and the law—can either do damage to those who “wear” them or can provide help and freedom from carrying burdens too hard to bear alone.
Jesus invites us to put on his “yoke,” the way of life he taught and embodied, a way of life guided from start to finish by the great commandment to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as ourself. This, Jesus says, is the yoke that’s “easy,” that’s a good fit for our most human shape. Jesus’ embodiment of love that preaches good news to the poor, healing for the wounded ones, freedom for the captives, mercy, compassion, and peace for a bruised world, gentleness, humility, and justice in our relationships with one another, is the yoke we are all made to put on. I have heard folk describe the yoke Jesus offers as an exclusively “me and Jesus” or “God and me” situation—that is, the yoke is about Christ helping us carry our load. I don’t disagree that’s part of the promise. But here’s the thing: Jesus’ yoke—Jesus’ way of life—binds us to one another, commits us to one another, connects us, yokes us. It’s never going to just be “me and Jesus” because whenever we invite Jesus into our life, he brings all his friends with him.
I have been ruminating on the juxtaposition of Jesus’ invitation to take on his yoke and this weekend when our country observes Independence Day. On the one hand, you could say that Jesus’ way of life, his yoke, is about liberation, about freedom so it’s a happy coincidence to get this text in the lectionary on this day—plus the bonus of Jesus giving us permission to rest, to chill. But a couple of things give me pause. The story we have traditionally told is that Independence Day is a celebration of our freedom from tyranny, our commitment to “liberty and justice for all.” And the words penned at our founding are beautiful and the goal lofty. They would seem to align with the vision of care and right relationship that Jesus taught. But the truth is that the liberty, the freedom, the justice, was for some, not for all. The yoke of Christ was severed from the beginning.
Over the years I have come to more deeply perceive the irony of a national celebration of “freedom” first celebrated in 1777 when one in five people in the colonies were African human beings who were enslaved by white people. Frederick Douglass in 1852—well before passage of the 13th Amendment that ended slavery—brilliantly denounced the national celebration of July 4th saying:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
Then a hundred years later Langston Hughes wrote a poem with the refrain “America never was America to me.” He wrote:
O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Hughes, of course, was African American and in this poem he speaks not only for his community, but also for poor whites, indigenous people, immigrants, and all who hope in the dream of America yet find “only the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.” And fifty years since Langston Hughes passed into the next life, we find ourselves in this moment. Some would argue there is much to honor from our past and also much that’s changed for the better. Both are true. But our present moment has blown the lid off the injustice, suffering, and rage so many of our neighbors continue to experience in their lives. Poverty, systemic racism, homophobia and transphobia are still rampant in our country, placing crushing burdens upon beloved children of God. Pernicious interpretations of religious texts, twisted applications of biblical law, and greedy, unjust civic laws and policies create a reality in which some are free, expecting and enjoying every opportunity life affords, and others can’t drink the water from their tap, can’t go for a run, can’t answer their front door without fearing for their lives. Some in our land suck up all the air leaving others with no air to breathe.
Our Gospel for today begins by Jesus highlighting the fact that some people are determined to judge and reject anything that might challenge them to perceive something new or to change. Both John the Baptist and Jesus were called names and rejected, even though their practices and message were very different. Different approaches didn’t reach those who were challenged by the message of the Gospel. If people don’t want to hear it, they won’t. And we sadly see this right now in many ways related to safety protocols for COVID-19, systemic racism, skewed narratives of American history and more. To be asked to acknowledge the suffering of the most vulnerable and oppressed, sacrifice some comfort to protect others, accept that part of our past and present as a nation is marred by racist violence and greed, is perceived by many as impinging upon their freedom. No matter how lovingly or authentically it is shared—whether in protest, movie, data and studies—if folk don’t want to hear it, they won’t.
But, Jesus says, “wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” And wisdom made her home in Jesus and guided Jesus’ teaching and actions. And Jesus offers his “yoke”—an offer that is heartily received in Jesus’ time and in our own by those weighed down with the burdens of injustice and systemic violence. Jesus comes alongside the downtrodden, the sick, the disinherited, the oppressed and says, “You matter. Let me share the load, carry your burden, journey with you. You are not alone.”
And the offer of a well-fitting yoke is extended to everyone. Jesus wants all of us to put on a way of life that does no harm, a yoke that doesn’t do damage to others or to ourselves. That is our work—each and all of us in our own way. We are called to set down hurtful things that have creeped up around our shoulders and into our thoughts and hearts. That stuff is ill-fitting, heavy, and shreds our soul. We are invited instead to pick up and put on the yoke of Jesus who says, “Learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”
Be gentle and humble with others in this time when there is so little grace margin in the world. Be gentle and humble with yourself. And trust that Christ will help you do the hard work needed for the living of these days. And it is hard work. The “yoke” Jesus offers is not an “easy” life without any burdens or challenges. Rather it is a yoke that is well-fitting, that doesn’t do harm when we put it on, that binds us to Christ AND to one another, so that the burdens we bear become lighter because they are shared.
I believe the heart of the teaching today is that true freedom in human life is not found in independence but rather in interdependence. We are created for interdependence and the yoke Jesus offers is fitted with that in mind. It connects us to God and each other in love, in compassion, in mercy, in grace and helps us pull together toward the Kin-dom vision that’s our goal. And that means that your suffering is yoked to me and my suffering is yoked to you. As Paul taught, if one member of the body suffers all suffer together with it (1 Cor 12:26). God gives us grace to help one another carry the burden, to ease the weight, to lighten the load one for another. Your life is bound up with my life and my freedom is bound up with your freedom, your safety is bound up with my safety and my good is bound up with your good. No one is free until all are free.
Many of us are weary today. Many are carrying heavy burdens. And the pain of the world can seem too much to bear. But the good news is we are yoked to one another and to Christ. And together we press on to freedom. Thanks be to God.
https://foundryumc.org/
You, Me, Us
Foundry United Methodist Church's Summer Guest Series continues with a sermon from the Reverend Dr. Kevin Smalls. June 28th, 2020
https://foundryumc.org/archive/living-as-if
What Peace? What Love?
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli for Foundry UMC June 21, 2020, third Sunday after Pentecost. “Living As If…” series.
Text: Matthew 10:24-39
Last week Foundry received a powerful call from Rev. Kimberly Scott to live as if our loved ones are at risk, to recognize that God has placed us where we are today to be part of building up a new world. When Rev. Scott repeated the call to live as if our loved ones are at risk, I found myself thinking our loved ones ARE at risk. The question is: Who do we count as our loved ones? Who is our neighbor? Only our blood kin? Only those we know well? Only those with whom we agree?
Today, the lectionary gives us what folks in my Thursday night Bible Study widely agree is a not-so-favorite passage of scripture. And, I get it. It’s full of all sorts of confusing and triggery words and phrases. “Fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” “Whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.” “Do not think I have come to bring peace, but a sword.” “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” And what’s all that business about finding and losing life? It’s a lot! But, honestly, the more I’ve read and prayed with our text this past week, the more I realize that these lines of scripture are the sermon Jesus might give if he were to show up at the podium at St. John’s Episcopal Church on Black Lives Matter Plaza today.
Matthew chapter 10 begins with Jesus calling together his disciples to give them authority over unclean spirits and power to cure disease (Mt 10:1) and to proclaim the good news of the Kin-dom (10:7). Jesus then sends them into the world and communicates clearly that some folks will not receive them, will not acknowledge their authority, will not welcome their message (10:14). And worse, they’ll likely get beaten up by those in power and “dragged before governors and kings” (10:17-18). We hear in verse 25 “If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household!” In other words, the disciples who do what Jesus does in the world, aren’t going to get better treatment than Jesus himself. And, remember, Jesus wasn’t out of the manger before the agents of empire were trying to kill him. He hadn’t started to walk, much less talk, before his parents were forced to seek asylum to save his life (Mt 2:13 ff.). And we know that trend continued throughout his life. Even still, Jesus didn’t back down or pipe down but simply continued doing what he had been sent to do. And he was firmly in the prophetic flow of his ancestors like Auntie Esther whose story we heard last week.
Following Jesus, being called to do and to speak and to love as he does, is risky. It is costly. If your Christian faith isn’t making you shift in your seat, re-examine your priorities regularly, sacrifice some time, energy, or money, try something that feels uncomfortable, make space literally or figuratively for people who make you twitchy, and risk losing something for the greater good, then, well, something is missing.
Let me interject here—as I know we are all weary and in various stages of grief for so many reasons right now—our faith—of course!—is a source of comfort and encouragement. God’s grace and peace is always available for us.
But any kind of “peace” that is pretending there is nothing wrong is not peace. “Peace” achieved by proffering a bland niceness wrapped around simmering resentment, aggravation, dismissiveness, and hatred is not peace. Any “peace” that avoids difficult conversations or avoids naming or changing things so as not to make people angry or uncomfortable is not peace. These and other things are not peace, they are denial, avoidance, and lies. Jesus taught in the beatitudes that peacemakers are blessed. I don’t think he was talking about denial, avoidance, and lies. It’s a different kind of peace that Jesus reveals to us. The next beatitude is instructive: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Mt. 5:10) You see without righteousness, right relationship—justice—there is no peace. No justice. No peace. “Peace” without justice isn’t peace, it’s pretending. // And understand: the point is not to seek persecution or to stir the pot just to stir the pot.
Jesus wasn’t persecuted because he disturbed the peace in an already peaceful world; Jesus was persecuted because he disturbed the injustice of an unjust world. And he did that in order to make real peace. Jesus comes to disturb anything in the world that keeps people from knowing the fullness of their dignity, value, power, and belovedness. This means—for just one example—that sometimes a gay child will have to challenge the teaching and beliefs of his father and mother in order to live in freedom and in love. Jesus comes to disturb any system or mindset or attitude or practice that would systematically deny anyone their freedom, safety, and daily bread. Sadly, I’ll bet you can come up with myriad examples of that in our world.
All of this leads me to imagine Jesus marching down 16th Street, NW in Washington, DC, stepping up to the podium—after spending some time with the folk who are sleeping on the steps of St. John’s Church—and then stepping into a certain kind of prophetic speech, a cadence meant to unsettle and to make a point. Strong language, hyperbolic utterance, hard words tumble forth such that we are left with little doubt that they’ve landed and done their disturbing work. What is getting shaken loose in these words? What is Jesus trying to get through to us?
That there are more important things in life than our own comfort or ease. That we are made for more than looking out for #1. That going along to get along may have its place in small matters, but doing so when some lives are treated as they don’t matter may cost you your soul.
The Greek word translated “soul” in verse 28, psuché, is the same word translated “life” in verse 39: “Those who find their life (psuché) will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Psuché can also be translated as “breath.” Our soul, our life, is breathed into us by God. And Jesus teaches our life is precious, valued—every hair of every head is counted!—and meant and sent to do healing and life-giving things. We were made to love—to love God and to love neighbor. That is the life purpose breathed into everyone. But, this life can be diminished, denied, even lost.
Think of how much true life is lost by those who think they’ve “got the life” and have it all figured out: those who focus only on their own advancement and comfort and are willing to do anything to get it, those whose “smarts” fuel a cynicism that blocks any vision of a new world, much less motivation to work for it, those unwilling to take attention away from managing their own stuff long enough to realize the folks they’re saying should pull themselves up by their bootstraps don’t have boots, folk who don’t bat an eye at the thought of thousands of lives lost to COVID-19 if it means boosting an economy that already benefits those who can comfortably avoid infection as they enjoy the pool at their second or third home.
God breathes life into us and sets us in creation and in community to live with and for one another. We have been given a Kin-dom vision for life together that breaks down walls of hatred, tribalism, prejudice, selfishness, and greed. We are given authority and power and grace from Jesus the Christ to live and to share that vision and that life with love, with boldness, with compassion, with courage. Jesus isn’t preaching that we shouldn’t love our parents or that if we mess up we get a star taken off our “worthy” chart. One of the ten commandments is to honor father and mother—and there are plenty of ready examples of God’s unfailing compassion and mercy and love in scripture as well. What Jesus is preaching is that the love and the way of life to which we are called requires something of us that may lead to conflict even within the communities that have raised and formed us: our families, our church, our circle of friends, our nation.
Jesus is preaching that we can live a thin peace that doesn’t “rock the boat” and in the process lose the life we were created to live, the life that is willing to sacrifice something in order to participate in the work of love, compassion, and justice. Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor who initially supported, then opposed the Nazi regime in Germany was imprisoned for 7 years in concentration camps. He wrote the following—with some additions to fit our moment: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.” [Then they came for the immigrants, and I did not speak out—because I was not an immigrant. Then they came for the unhoused, and I did not speak out—because I was not unhoused. Then they came for LGBTQ people, and I did not speak out—because I was not LGBT or Q. Then they came for black people, indigenous people, and people of color, and I did not speak out because I was not a person of color.] Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. Beloved, our loved ones ARE at risk and we are receiving message after message to do something about it.
We are being called to rise up in this moment of Spirit-breathed, Spirit-ignited revolution in our city and our nation and in our world—the Pentecost revolution that ignites God’s dream. Today we are given authority and power by the grace of Christ to let go of our fear and find ourselves as agents in the revolutionary dream of God’s all-embracing love unleashed in the world. That will take many forms and each of us will need to discern our particular role.
What are you willing to risk for the sake of the dream? What kind of peace will you pursue? What love will you share and with whom? What are you willing to risk for the sake of others? What are you willing to lose in order to live the life you’re made for? Are you willing to live as if more than your life is at stake?
https://foundryumc.org/
Foundry's Summer Guest Series starts with a guest sermon from Reverend Kimberly Scott
For Such A Time As This- I. It is indeed and privilege and honour that I stand before you today…For Such a time as time…A few months ago, I could imagined I’d preaching for you today Foundry…The Day following my Ordination as an Elder in Full Connection of the Desert Southwest Conference….Had some one told 10 years ago that would be standing in a virtual pulpit/ anyone virtual pulpit today I wouldn’t have believed… Preaching, teaching and being a leader CHURCH in the was never on my bucket list church….But God, has been up to something for such a time as this…. A time in which so much of our lives have been put on hold due to COVID 19 PANDEMIC ….A time in which LGBTQIA folks in the UMC are faced with the reality that their promise land has seemingly disappeared over the horizon, and in now out of site… AT a time such as this that our history, our past has seeming become our new or a renewed reality……. I know this your PRIDE SUNDAY, but it would be socially irresponsible to NOT You see I understand that there are some of you, who you assumed you’d lived through worst season of racial tension, discrimination, injustice and inequality in this country… I recognize that some of lived through the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights, Woman’s Lib and Gay and Lesbian Right Movement… AND there is at least one, generation of persons gathered here today who truly grew up believing they lived in a color blind society… Some of us thought systemic racism and homophobia was dead in this country with the election of Barack Obama, AND then there’s unfortunate reality that some gathered here today have seen the CHURCH at war with itself all your life due issues of colonialism, racism, sexism and homophobia…. In other words, some of us have been waiting for TRANSFORMATION to come in in our streets, in the church and our world for way too long… We are sick and tired of being sick of creating new hash tags… So what is our call as faithful followers of a Jesus Christ who died so that all might be set FREE? What is our call as those who claim to serve a Jesus who died to set the oppressed free and so that through his Body humanity might live into the reality of the REALIZED Kin-dom of God?.... I don’t have all of the answers but today text situates us in life of Esther to aid us finding our way forward…For Such A Time as this II. The text: For Such a time as this Although most of us have heard or are familiar with the famous quote for such a time as this, from the book of Esther.. Due to the fact that Esther rarely makes the lectionary many don’t know the full or context that makes that statement so profound. So let us start with who Esther is… She is a young Jewish woman, orphaned due the death of her parents. Fortunately, she is adopted by her cousin Mordecai. Mordecai serves as a courier within the Kings royal court… At this time in Bible History the Jews, God’s chosen people, are in exile. Jerusalem was conquered, its people taken in chains into Babylonian captivity. So the Jews of the diaspora have, settled and made their homes in Susa, and they are living as a recognized religious minority in the heart of the powerful Persian empire….Thus living on the margins… Thus, as an orphan and a Jewish female, Esther is a nobody among nobodies in this minority community. With her true identity kept secret, Esther first appears in the story as one of the young virgins brought into the king's harem, by her cousin Mordecai to be a possible replacements for Vashti, the banished wife of the Persian King. After a year living in the harem being trained, Esther pleases the king and is eventually crowned queen. Remember All this takes place while Esther keeps her Jewish identity thus her relation to Mordecia secret (Esth 2:10, 20). Meanwhile Mordecai he has won favor by serving the king faithfully and even preventing an assassination attempt.
Somehow Mordecai’s Jewish heritage becomes known to an enemy by the of Haman. Haman is also a favored member of the King’s royal court. Yet, he is jealous of Mordecai and his standing with the king.
Mordecai get into a power struggle with a Haman Mordecai refuses to bow before Haman, and this so infuriates Haman.
Haman decides not only to put Mordecai to death, but also to slaughter his entire people. And he secures the king's permission to do this.
Our text today in Esther 4 picks up right after Mordecai has learned of Haman's plot and he is distraught.
In this distraught state, weeping, and dressed in sackcloth and ashes he shows up at the palace gate wanting to inform Esther of what’s taken place.
After going back and forth with a messenger, Eventually Mordecai reveals Haman’s plot to exterminate all the, Jews… And pleads for Esther to beg for the Kings mercy to spare her people’s lives
As was read in our text…When Esther first learns of Haman's plot and the threat to her people, her reaction is one of reluctance, helplessness and hopelessness.
She tells Mordecai she could not approach the king without being summoned, and she could possibly face death,
and besides the king has not summoned for me in thirty days, implying that she has fallen out of favor.
Yet, Mordecai's is persistent and send on one last plea: “Esther, ‘Do not imagine that you in the king’s palace can escape any more than all the Jews. For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place and you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this?’” Esther 4:13-14 (NASB)
III. What is this story about… Well right away we learn that the leaders of the Persian empire/ Haman, had an agenda… A racist agenda to exterminate all the Jews.
We might now a little bit in this country about racist agenda to exterminate a group of people…
We know a little bit AS Methodist about homophobic agenda to exterminate queer people from the church….
So we should be able to place ourselves inside this story…
FOUNDRY….I need you to place yourself inside this story…. FOUNDRY….I need you to place yourself inside this story….
Foundry…ESTHER… Esther you are facing the genocide of yourself your people…You are being given a difficult task…..
- To choose action or to choose to be SILENT when your people needed her the most. 2.Esther you’ve got to choose rather to confront your husband/spouse, the King, the power be, risking death simply by entering a room without being asked or to do nothing and continue to live a plus life as the Queen Esther.
- Esther you can choose to plead with your husband/spouse the king, to stop this ethnic cleansing or to do nothing.
- Esther you can save yourself and your people or you can do nothing. So secondly this is narrative about choice and free will? God always give use Choices right……Since the beginning….
Now..When we reflect on Esther’s life, who she was, where she had come from and then read 13-15 it can easily come across as Mordecai scolded her focus self-preservation In others words we might take it as MORDECAI calling her out for being selfish..… But listen….Let’s read the text again… Do not think that because you are in the King’s house you alone of all the Jews will escape. 14 For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish.
More than any other thing the word that sticks out to me…Is the phrase…For if you remain SILENT time this….For if you remain silent this time
HERE Mordecai catches ESTHER’s attention by clueing her in to the bigger picture…the broader context of who she is.. He essentially say her, although it feels LIKE you have arrived- You have not made it to your promise land because your in the King’s palace living a lavish life DON”T forget …You are still a JEW..…. Mordecia is saying…Esther your LIFE is not simply about YOU…But about us…… You did not make it to this PALACE: for yourself or by yourself or because of yourself.. So, don’t to comfortable yet…WE-a collective WE are not arrived at your promise land.. If you remain silent at this time and focus on yourself…Eventually relief will come to our people by you and your family will die….
In speaking these words to Esther…Mordecai draws her away from the needs of self and self-preservation to a sense of connectivism and into to the UNBUTU spirit.. I am BECAUSE you are… You are BECAUSE I am
He reminds her she had been CHOSEN for this TIME to set ASIDE her own interests, goals and desire to let go of her own ambitions, and face their common foe full-on. And how does Esther reply… him.
With that message Esther is inspired….No she is compelled to take control…To act quickly in this crisis to save her people in the midst of the threat of death…
She is obediently, faithful.. she is a team player….Eshter goes on to be the savior of her people….She was indeed call for Such a time as this….
She was called to risk her life and her legacy with no guarantees of a positive outcome. Just on faith and Goodwill… That’s the “for such a time as this” Mordecai challenged Esther to accept. And that’s the “for such a time as this” God also sets before you and me… So what do we learn from Esther? So what is Esther teaching here? First, this is call to not be SILENT when a CRISIS arise amongst our people..When we see harm being done..When injustice in present…In our world…In our churches… Over the last week, we’ve all heard the stories about people all over the world reacting with protest, riots and marches due to the George Floyd case…. AND to BE quite I honest I really wrestled with my own response the first few days because quite frankly I was scared… I was scared about being hurt, arrested, being in the wrong place at the wrong time…. Pause… And then across the screen flashed on a protestors sign…. Silence = Violence…. Silence = Compliance… …Riots are the voice of the unheard….. And then the kicker…In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of FRIEND… I instantly felt convicted like I should be doing something…I took it as my call to stop sitting on the sidelines and to become a part of the solution…. So wrapped up in Esther’s is a call, is Esther teaching us to use our voice to …To give encourage us …To give us courage AND The power to speak FREEDOM for the captive…For the oppressed… -Freedom is the call to a protect LIFE of via the ACT of love,
TO SPEAK words of FREEDOM is to BRING ALL TO A PLACE OF wholeness and abundance…
---The call to speak of freedom and speak freedom into EXISTENCE for others ,
challenges evil, destructiveness, oppression, violence, decay, and defeats death…..
AND this INDEED Good news!
So -How do we speak of freedom in a world suffering? - We must be A voices for the voiceless…To speak NEW truth to power..
Because next in our text, There ESTHER’s story models for us how to live OUT OUR CALL AND to put the community and God’s Kin-Dom building work ahead of our self-seeking ambition..Imagine that… God has given each of us a job/careers, resources, education and influence…. God has opened doors and given each of us opportunities for God’s Kin-Dom purposes. God didn’t create us to just sit back and live a lavish life not focused on the world around us. The more resources and privilege we have the more WE have that belongS to God… As Luke 12:48 teaches to whom much is given much is required… BECAUSE God placed us where we ARE today to literally be apart of building UP a NEW WORLD… PAUSE I had the privilege of attending the Iliff School of Theology at time when the late Dr. Vincent Harding was there…Dr. Harding assisted in the writing of many of Martin Luther King Jr. speeches…. IN his experience walking beside and working with KING he was inspired to write a song sung to the tune of we are climbing Jacobs ladder, titled…We Are Building Up A New World….That is the song I lead in with today before the prayer… VINCENT HARDING charged us at Iliff to take seriously our responsibility at Building Up A New World…To take seriously our Kind-Dom building responsibility… THUS…Today we are in the midst of KinDom battle…The enemy would love to have it’s way by distracting us and having us be continue to be inwardly focused on the all things that matter to us…But God didn’t build us that way… GOD BUILT us to BE IN COMMUNITY…. Esther could have easily continued to live the lavish LIFE in the King’s palace and let whatever happen to her people just happen… But she would have most certainly have missed her Kin-Dom Calling and an entire nation would have been lost… Instead an entire nation was grateful for how Esther responded to Mordecai’s REQUEST. Their lives were spared. How many lives matter to you? Who’s lives truly manner to you… How have you shown it…. I answered my call to ministry at a time I was mad at God the church for all the harm I had a experienced and openly queer lay person who faithfully served the church…. But God said kin stop whining and crying about how horrible the church has been to you and God and be a part of changes the church, because are not the only one who has been harmed or being harmed by the church…. .And that’s how convinced me of my first for such a time as this moment…. To leave behind, my church, my family and my career… You see as school counselor for 10 in las Vegas, NV I had witness LGBTQIA youth being harmed by due to the LDS, BAPTIST, CHURCH OF GOD upbringing to name a few. I saw countless numbers of students in and out of treatment center, some end up runaways and others victims of suicide…. I know It is no mistake that the first Sermon God laid on my heart, An Untimely Commissioning to Speak, Just Might Save the Life of Nation or A People…With that sermon based on Moses calls story ..God was calling me new life of work….To save I believe a generation of LGBTQIA young people of Faith……. FOUNDRY it’s not just by chance that less than a year AGO today I met your PASTOR and we would do some really HARD, UGLY, GRIMEY work together in our fight LGBTIA liberation in the UMC….. It is not just by chance that the day after my ordination God has placed me an An openly QUEER/MARRIED, African American in before and placed it in my spirit to preach to proclaim For Such A Time as this because to the TIME IS Now….The time is NOW…My life, my ministry has been filled with taking risk… Foundry you are being called to LIVE as IF your loved ones lives are AT RISK.. You are being CALLED to live as if you loved lives are at risk… As if those nearest and dearest to you are the ones facing extermination …Extermination from the church because they are LGBTQIA…. As if those who are nearest and dearest to you are the one being fed the crumbs from the table of a crumbling church… You are being CALLED to live as if you loved lives are at risk… As if those nearest and dearest to you are facing or EXECUTION in the street because of the color of their skin.. So many black and brown lives could spared in the world today if today if we’d ALL choose to step up to service, to speak out against racism and police brutality And to fight for legislative and policy changes even if it involves sacrifice, of our money time, gift and talents… So many QUEER and TRANSPERSONS lives and MINISTRY could be speared more of us would choose to step up the mic and SPEAK out, Us their resources and political influence to find a way FORWARD to CREATE the church that JESUS died to build… Finally…. Esther is teaching us here that our call to act is on God’s watch…God’s time not ours… Esther got the call for Mordecai and responded urgently.. Was the call timely? NO…In fact, it didn’t make human sense to Esther I’m sure. She was sure she had finally arrived.. She was sure she had finally become SOMEBODY..Of high stature esteem and respect……… Yet Esther was obedient to the call… She used her privilege ..She sacrifice herself for the sake of others…For the sake of her people… How many times have received a call to be apart of something that would have caused you to make a sacrifice and you said… Oh no, not this at moment, this is terrible timing? ….Or perhaps this is not my time… OR I’ve done all that I can do…I’ll leave it to the next generation to figure out… …We are just prolonging our collective suffering….We are prolonging the the Kin-Dom reality the God so desperately wants us to experience… We are prolonging bringing an end to SUFFERING, INJUSTICE and OPPRESSION..…
We have been called to be the ones to free the oppressed recover sight to the blind..…
AND to bring about love, peace, and justice today for the transformation of the WORLD today in the hear now… Who are WE waiting ON to do our work for us?
Let us not delay the Kingdom building any longer….
We have been called….For such a time as this. Because the time is now……
Let us pray….
….We stand in awe of your timing, yet we have gathered together today embracing it…
Because as the song goes, all we have is now; To be faithful, To be holy And to shine lighting up the darkness.. For Such a time as this we were placed upon the earth to hear the voice of God And do God will will…
For such a time as this we stand in awe Oh God for how you’ve readied us for your service , for how you commission us for your service at your pace.
… Oh God although the mystery of your timing seems to evade us, God in your timeliness and in your way you brought us here together from places near and fear, through many dangers seen and unseen, from many different life experiences, paths, cultures and social location and united as the Body.
Yet, we must also confess oh God we have left much undone…We have not adequality to proclaimed good news to the poor.
We have not adequately proclaimed liberty to the captives and allowed the blind to see,
We have not adequality free oppressed,
Continue to equip us in YOUR of work of Kin-DOM building…
Help us oh God continue to build your kingdom of justice, peace fueled the passionate love of you oh God, self and neighbor.
Empower us to see through your eye the inequalities of the world and in holy frustration be the change we want to see in our world.
Let us no longer allow for injustices and evils that that rob so many of their future.
Eternal God And above all, fill us with your Spirit and your Holy boldness…. That we might look to hours, days, and years ahead with hope, determination for such a time as this, because the TIME is NOW!
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From Beginning to End
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli for Foundry UMC June 7, 2020, Trinity Sunday. “Living As If…” series.
Text: Genesis 1:1-2, Matthew 28:16-20
In the beginning…to the end of the age. These are the first and last phrases in our two assigned texts for this day. And as we come together on this Sunday following the events of this past week I want to highlight what these words hold. They hold the promise of God’s presence in this world, God’s abiding presence with the whole of creation, God’s steadfast, tender presence with you and with me in the depths of our suffering and the soaring heights of our triumphs—from beginning to end, God is with us. God’s creating and re-creating love was and is and is to come. In the beginning, God created and Spirit blew across the waters, bringing life and flourishing out of formless void and chaos. And at the end, Jesus says, “I will be with you.” Between the beginning and the end, we are commissioned by Jesus to do the work that he himself does—to proclaim the good news of God’s reign, to heal, liberate, and usher in new life (Mt 10:7-8), to baptize, to teach others “to obey everything he commanded,” and to do it all “in the name” of the God whom Jesus reveals most fully. Just as Jesus was the presence of God in flesh, so now we are given power to be Christ’s presence in the world.
The so-called “Treat Commission” we heard today may hang some of us up on certain words that drag around a lot of baggage, words like “authority” or “obey” or “commandment” or even the phrase “make disciples.” These things can conjure images of exclusion, authoritarianism, cultural theft, colonialism, forced “conversion,” and intellectual and physical violence done for the sake of making people conform to “our way.” And all this is due to the fact that the language and teachings of the Bible have been twisted and used to do violence in myriad ways over the centuries.
But I refuse to let the language and life-giving promise of our book be held hostage forever by such abuses. These verses from Matthew provide guidance for the living of these days. So let’s be clear right up front that in this text, the one with authority didn’t take authority away from anyone but has been given that authority from God, our Mother/Father who released him into the world and through the power of Holy Spirit who anoints and fills him. Jesus never used divine authority to manipulate or do violence. To “make disciples” is not to frighten or bludgeon people into some thin profession, but to help people know of God’s liberating love and how to practice the way of life Jesus taught. What we’re asked to teach others to obey are the commandments of Jesus, including the powerful and challenging teachings in the sermon on the mount, like the beatitudes, loving your enemies, and praying for those who persecute you. The parables and teachings of Jesus require careful, prayerful thinking and interpretation—not mindless box-checking. And the greatest commandment in the law according to Jesus is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind and your neighbor as yourself. (Mt 22) That, he said, is the heart of it all, the central teaching of our faith. All the law and prophets only make sense when interpreted through the law of love.
This is the “one beautiful law”—this and none other—that governs the lives of those who seek to share in God’s life. The law of love is upheld not primarily through warm feelings. It is not upheld through good intentions. It is not enacted through violence, control, manipulation, or showing off. The law of love is upheld through doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. (Micah 6:8)
From beginning to end God has been with us, is with us, will be with us to help us to live and to serve, to pray and work for the Kin-dom to be ever more manifest on earth as it is in heaven with the law of love at the center.
See how God has shown up in the past: God was with the prophet Miriam as she sang and danced her people’s march from slavery to freedom (Ex 20:20ff). God was with the people as they received the challenge from Moses and then Joshua to choose either life or death (Deut 30:15) and whether to serve the God of liberation or the idols of empire (Josh 24:15). God was with Esther as she defied the law of the land and challenged the king to advocate for the lives of her people (Esther 4:14-16). God was with David as he faced Goliath, with young prophet Jeremiah, with pitiful, tantrum-throwing Jonah, with Ruth and Naomi who had to get creative just to survive, with the women of Bethlehem wailing for their children slain by Herod (Mt 2:16-18). God was with the people who lined the streets as Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem, hailing him as the one who comes in the name of the Lord. God was with those who have organized workers to advocate for equity and safety, with those who have fought in the courts for true justice for their neighbors, with the ones who’ve met in church basements and congregation halls for decades, training, praying, and mobilizing to care for the creation, the impoverished, the disenfranchised, and oppressed, with those who have preached and marched and sat in or sat down, who walked out or broke through for the sake of justice. God has been with brilliant scholars who provide critique and vision and with young leaders in the Black Lives Matter and other movements for change across our country, those whose blood, sweat, and tears have helped bring us to the moment we are witnessing now. Jesus was present with every victim of a lynching or murderous hate crime, knowing full well what it feels like to be so abused. See…….God has been with us from the beginning.
And God is with us as we march, as we choose, as we struggle, as we try to release our idols and resist empire. God is with us as we advocate for change that will protect the lives of black and brown people, as we stand up to aggressors and oppressors. God is with us as we cry out in lament and solidarity with all those victimized by racial violence and by injustice in our land. God is with us as we line our streets and kneel for 8 minutes and 46 seconds to honor the life of George Floyd and to honor all lives lost and to proclaim our commitment to create a world that values human lives more than property, economic gain, or growth in the markets.
God is with us in our bold acts of courage and sacrifice, and in every little act of love, tenderness, mutuality, or care. God is with us in the places where we get hung up, afraid, defensive, angry, or anxious. God is with us in the beautiful, complicated mix of human experience where—did you know?—we can hold many different realities, concerns, and ideas together at the same time! Human life doesn’t exist in either/or categories for is always both/and/and/and… For just one example, you can love and support friends and family who are in the military or police force AND advocate for change—even full-blown overhaul—in those institutions. God is with us in this beautiful mix where today, at one and the same time, we can be proudly celebrating our graduates AND deeply grieving or raging at the systemic racism that plagues our land AND being distracted or distressed by personal issues AND feeling hopeful and inspired by the ways that people in our city and across the nation and world are rising up to say that racist violence must end. God is with us.
And God will be with us in whatever happens next. God will be with us as we not only show up to share in public protest, but show up at the ballot box, respond to calls to organize and build public power for change, and participate in public actions that advocate for new priorities and policies that serve our most vulnerable neighbors and the common good. God will be with us as we pray with and for one another, deepen our awareness of the things that sustain white supremacy in our lives and organizations, (complete our Journey to Racial Justice survey), address the brokenness in our personal lives and relationships, do our part to dismantle unjust systems and to build a society truly founded upon the law of love.
God will be with us when we hurt each other in the process of building a better world. God will be with us as we make mistakes. God will be with us as we struggle to know what to do. God will be with us as we keep trying.
In God’s ongoing re-creation of the world, all the gifts of the people of God are needed: good thinking, deep praying, generous giving, wise visioning, strong leadership, loving agitation, thoughtful parenting, careful administration, strategic organization, inspired artistic expression, smart lawyering, spiritual and physical healing, patient teaching, loyal friendship, and every other gift we have to offer. God will be with us.
I want to say to beloved black and brown members of our family, I see you and have been praying for you and for wisdom to serve and to lead in ways that encourage, strengthen, and honor you as we continue to build beloved community in Foundry and beyond. Now is the time for me and others to not only imagine or dream or pray for a world where you are truly safe, free, celebrated, and honored but to ask for forgiveness for the ways I/we have failed, to listen deeply, humbly do our own work to become anti-racist, discern where we can make the most difference in the cause, and then get busy making it happen. This is my commitment and one I invite other white members of Foundry to affirm. //
As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be: God creates, breathes Spirit into matter and calls it good, creating one beautifully diverse human family. God strengthens weak knees and binds up the wounds of the brokenhearted, is compassionate and merciful, scooping us up from the pit to save us. God continues to lift up and anoint every sort of person to participate in the ongoing work of making the world more gentle, more just, more whole, more in the flow of God’s amazing grace. May we be daily baptized into that flow, immersed in that grace, anointed by Spirit, to receive and invite others to share in God’s liberating life and love and to pour out our own lives in humble, loving service after the way of Jesus Christ. And may we do that as steadfastly as our God is with us: namely, from beginning to end.
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Awe and Dread
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli for Foundry UMC May 31, 2020, Pentecost Sunday. “Life Interrupted” series.
Text: Acts 2:1-21
When the day of Pentecost had come, there were gathered online for worship people from many places, shaped by different cultures, inhabiting radically different contexts, each with their own language.
On this day some—like the first disciples of Jesus—are waiting to receive power from on high, the promise of something unexpected that can change everything, turn the tables, make things right, shake the foundations. Among this group, in this moment, in the wake of report after report of the disproportionate toll that COVID-19 has taken on communities of color, added to the daily indignities suffered by racist aggression increasingly caught on film, followed by breaking stories of the racist murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, our black and brown family, friends, colleagues, lovers, and leaders are gutted. Tired. And doubtful that anything will change. White words and outrage—that is, words and outrage from anyone who is not daily at risk—are a day late and a dollar short. A dime a dozen. Choose your idiom. They’re not worth much. Come, Holy Spirit and do something radical!
Others—like the pilgrims in Jerusalem, gathered for the Jewish Festival of Weeks—may come expecting the familiar ritual of a Sunday service and hoping—even desperately needing—to receive a word that helps them simply get through another week with the way things are. Some of these folks have already begun to feel themselves shut down or put defenses up at the naming the most prominent headline of the past few weeks, even some who really care but just want a break. Come, Holy Spirit and give us peace!
Different languages, different expectations, different experiences from within the same world, within the same nation—a world and nation fractured and frayed at every possible level, creation and creature trampled and abused, disease breaking bodies and revealing broken bonds of mutual concern and broken systems, family members and neighbors rejected, despised, and gasping for air.
Who can communicate what is needed in such a reality? Well, let’s look at our story for clues. You’ve got the Galilean disciples—probably around 120 women and men, mostly uneducated, working class folk. What can they possibly say that will connect, for example, with the proselytes from far-flung, rich and powerful Rome? But somehow they all speak in their own language yet communicate God’s power in ways that everyone can understand. And then there’s Peter from among them whose track record for saying the wrong thing is epic, but who, on this occasion seems to have a shining moment. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say the primary communicator in every case in this story is Holy Spirit. // It is Spirit I call upon today to make another Pentecost miracle of communication that allows my limited, privileged, white self and my imperfect offering to speak something of the power of God’s liberating and life-giving love into the hearts and minds of so beautifully diverse a gathered body. May it be so. Amen.
The Holy Spirit that is poured out upon the disciples on the day of Pentecost is the same Spirit who moved across the face of the waters at the moment of creation to bring life out of chaos and to separate light from darkness. This Holy Spirit had filled prophets and sages and holy people from the beginning of creation, empowering them with gifts and courage beyond their own. This Holy Spirit is the one who from the dawn of time had been convicting and cajoling and creating and comforting God’s people in order to keep the dream of God’s Kin-dom alive. And this Holy Spirit had been dwelling in a very concentrated way in and around Jesus while Jesus was on earth. And now this self-same Spirit, newly soaked in humanity as a result of indwelling Jesus, is poured out upon the followers of Jesus and the power of God is unleashed in a very new way. From that first day of Pentecost right down to this very moment, Holy Spirit is at work in and through those who seek even in frail and faltering ways to follow Jesus. And that means that Holy Spirit is poured out upon you and upon me.
And let’s pause and consider the fact that in this story She is not coming in gently. The church tends to tame the story, to make fire into crepe paper or felt or a few candles on a birthday cake and makes the mighty wind the gentle breeze of an oscillating fan. But the experience is described as looking and sounding like a violent wind and fire.
This is not a birthday party, this is a revolution igniting a dream. It is not a cotton candy cloud dream, but a cling-tight-to-love, hold-on-to-your-humanity, remember-what-really-matters, things-about-to-get-real, life-and-death turning-point dream. It is the dream perceived and agitated by the prophets, it is the dream kindled in Jesus’ parables of the Kin-dom, stirring our moral imagination and bursting our self-centered bubbles, it is the dream of love, peace, justice, and beauty that Spirit will not let die.
The dream is possible because Spirit is the dream-maker…and Spirit knows all our languages and knows what each one of us needs to hear—not what we want to hear, but what is needed for the dream… Spirit spins the vision of the Kin-dom which is at one and the same time both judgment for some and promise for others—a call to conscience and repentance AND assurance of justice and reparation. And no matter what part you most hear today, the Kin-dom vision is good news for all. It is not just a message of hope for one tribe. Our God is determined by the power of Spirit to draw all into a place of greater dignity and flourishing, oppressor and oppressed, poor and rich, persons of every conceivable design.
It’s a dream where Spirit falls upon all flesh and that breath is not choked out of any because of the color of their skin or the language they speak or whom they love or any other thing; where things that divide and set us at enmity are burned down; where the twisted, learned perceptions that blind us to the humanity and beauty of others are cut away like cataracts; where the layers of resentment, hatred, prejudice, and greed are blown away as in a destructive, Oklahoma tornado. And what is left, the ashes and the wounds and the destruction, provides the raw material and necessity for new creation. The Spirit who moved across the waters to bring order and life out of chaos flows, rains, blows, a mighty storm to stir and move us to do something. I am not suggesting that God is causing violence or desires it. But rather, that Spirit’s power flows to make things new and that always means that things change, really change, are lost, really lost, are sacrificed, really sacrificed from our own lives.
On the day of Pentecost, Spirit comes in hot to set us on fire, to give energy and hope to those exhausted from a lifetime of struggle and to those who are newly awake to the work, to blow out of apathy those whose privilege allows that response, to remove the scales from our proverbial eyes so that we might perceive not only the pain and rage, but the history of which this present moment is but a part. Spirit blows into all the places we are today to move us precisely as She knows we need to be moved.
And here’s the thing. We see in the story today that it’s possible to Spirit-proof yourself. “They’re just drunk!” To Spirit-proof yourself is to allow layers of gack—cynicism, hatred, control, selfishness, defensiveness, bigotry, fear, indifference, distraction and all sorts of other crusty, corroding things—to close your heart and soul from allowing Spirit to dance with you and move you and give you what you need. Spirit flows freely and God’s grace and presence is ever-present, regardless of how closed off we might be, no matter how determined we might be to sneer and scoff at signs of Spirit’s power. But God will not overpower, control, manipulate, or bully us. Part of God’s love is found precisely in restraint that allows for our freedom, our dignity. We are free to choose.
In this moment when things could so easily go even more wrong than they already are, what will you choose?
Will you choose the status quo or will you allow yourself to be open to Spirit’s power and dream? Will you allow yourself to be drawn into the center of God’s activity in the world, to live not only for “you and yours”—your family, your tribe, your nation, your issue, your experience of injustice, your vision, your 401k, your property values, your comfort, but rather to understand that any hope for this beautiful, broken world depends upon our living with and for others, the future flourishing and dignity of all people depends upon our standing in solidarity with those who are most vulnerable and hurting?
In these days, it is very tempting to be reactive instead of responsive. There is too much happening all at once. The pain, the needs, the brokenness, is all too much and it is overwhelming. Fight or flight tends to kick in. Part of the beauty and promise of this day, is that Spirit helps us recalibrate and get perspective. She is determined to move into our hearts to help the brokenness make space for more of the world to be held there. Spirit will take all the broken pieces—the ash, the wounds, the destruction—and guide each one of us to the place where our particular passion, gifts, and energy will best serve the dream of a creation and human family no longer enflamed with hatred and violence and fear, but on fire with love and compassion and with ears to hear, eyes to perceive, and hearts to understand the gift of this life and of life together.
As you are moved by Spirit to respond, I encourage you to connect to the place in Foundry where your passion serves others. The way to begin is to begin and start where you are. Washington Interfaith Network is rebuilding our strength as we imagine a new vision for DC that is more just and equitable for people of color, low-income people, the unhoused, and all residents. In June, I’ll be hosting a ZOOM with Rev. William Barber to share information about how to engage with the Poor People’s Campaign. Project Transformation, ESL, LGBTQ advocacy, Green Ministry Team for environmental justice, and more are all ways that your engagement or financial support will impact the intersections of justice that will fuel the Kin-dom vision.
We are not alone. You are not alone. When Holy Spirit is poured out upon you, you are bathed in love and grace that will hold you in your rage and exhaustion from being a person of color in this racist culture. When Holy Spirit is poured out upon you, you are bathed in love and grace that will hold you as a white person when you risk getting it all wrong while trying to make things right.
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Restored
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli for Foundry UMC May 24, 2020, the seventh Sunday of Easter. “Life Interrupted” series.
Texts: Acts 1:1-14, 1 Peter 5:6-11
Months ago, as I developed plans for this Life Interrupted series, I imagined that by today we’d be preparing to begin some kind of re-entry to in-person worship at 16th and P Street, NW. And I was struck by the fact that the word “restore” appeared in two of the assigned readings for today. “That’s a good word as we contemplate a return to some familiar practices,” she thought. As the reality of a much longer period of physical distancing began to sink in, my focus in our texts shifted.
“Wait for the promise…” (Acts 1:4) “It is not for you to know the times… (Acts 1:7) “…in due time.” (1 Peter 5:6) “After you have suffered for a little while…” (1Pet 5:10)
These words land like a thud. Weeks ago during my Wednesday FaceBook message I talked about how disorienting it is to not know how long this is going to last. Even then, I was already crying out with the Psalmist, “How long, O Lord?!” The fact that we don’t know the answer is among the most distressing and disorienting of the unknowns we’ve been dealing with. We’re such a time-driven culture, marking time with clocks and calendars and watches, with alerts to keep us tracking time and keep us on time.
When Bill Smith and I were working closely to mobilize strategy and witness at General Conference 2019, we would joke with one another that we could do anything for six months, four months, three weeks… We knew the journey wouldn’t end at the close of General Conference, but at least we knew how long that painful and difficult stretch of the journey was going to last. It makes a profound difference in the way we inhabit time right now to not know the time that is set for the end of this painful and difficult experience in our world. The lack of time-boundedness makes it easy to lose focus, to lack motivation, to lose track of things; the lack of time boundary means that things can easily spill out all over, become diffuse, fuzzy, foggy…what day is it today?
All this makes me more compassionate with the disciples’ question: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”
Now keep in mind that Jesus has suffered, died, rose on the third day, appeared to his disciples over 40 days teaching them more about the Kin-dom of God—topped off with the promise that they can expect to be baptized with the Holy Spirit at some point in the future. If we think we’ve got a lot to process, just think about that community of women and men who were the first disciples of Jesus. They were dealing with a lot of stuff. And in the midst of all the possible questions they could ask, their question is about the time. Is it time for Israel to finally get our power back, to get out from under the oppressive occupation of Rome? Is it time to finally get back to the way things were?
Jesus could have expressed frustration that, after everything, the disciples are still focused there, but instead he simply responds to their question by providing a new frame. It is not a timeframe, so much as a framework. Jesus speaks not of a “when” but of a “what” and a “how.”
The “what” is to be witnesses—to testify to the love and power of Jesus, to tell the story of God’s love, mercy, and liberation extended to all nations, to live as citizens of the Kin-dom even when the empires of this world are still acting as though they are stronger than God. And the “how” is by the power of Holy Spirit at work in and through them. (Acts1:8)
After this reframing, Jesus leaves them to it. “A cloud”—a common image to evoke the presence, guidance, protection, and glory of God in the Bible—appears and takes Jesus up. I tend to think of this moment as a thin place where heaven and earth touch. Here, the Kin-dom of heaven—always near, always “at hand,” but not always visible—opens a door, a cloudy, misty, mysterious door, and welcomes Jesus home. (This past week, I’ve heard some suggest that this story tells of the time when Jesus started working from home.)
So Jesus provides a new framework—not a “when” but a “what” and “how”—and then he makes his exit. The disciples are left there looking up like, “Wait, you’re leaving us again??” Or perhaps, for some, the reaction in the moment was “OK, that was neat, but what NOW??” And two men in white—perhaps the same ones who greeted the grieving women at the empty tomb in Luke 24—emerge to nudge the disciples to grieve as they have need and to begin to adjust their focus: You’ve been given a framework and focus. He will come again just as unexpectedly as he left—you won’t know when. All you need to do now is go to Jerusalem and wait.
I think it’s fair to say that most people don’t like to wait. Perhaps we don’t mind waiting for a while. But when the waiting seems to go past what seems the reasonable amount of time for whatever it is I’m waiting for, I START TO LOSE MY PATIENCE. You? The disciples were given this extraordinary new framework and vision for their lives: they’re going to receive power through the Holy Spirit and will be witnesses in ways and in places they’ve never imagined! And then: wait…
This past Thursday, our Bible study group zeroed in on this. What if the waiting is an important piece of the journey? What if the waiting allows for the disciples to sit with what Jesus has been teaching them all along? What if, in the waiting, they will finally begin to understand that the transformation of which they will be a part is about more than their own lives, their own histories, their own nation? // As difficult as it is to be told to wait, some part of us knows that waiting, being still, allowing space for things to simmer or to settle, is part of what it takes to deepen understanding or gain insight or listen more carefully to what we have already received. The waiting is preparation for what comes next. It may be the case that if we rush forward before waiting for discernment, cultivation of spiritual and emotional resources, and wisdom, we could do damage to ourselves and to others. We might undermine a good idea or project if we try to push it forward before it becomes clear that the time is ripe.
Much of that, however, may seem more applicable to times when we choose to wait. But where we are right now is a forced waiting, at least for those of us paying attention to the science and guidance of public health experts. And it may be that the fact of waiting, of not knowing the timeframe for when we will move from one phase to another in this time of pandemic, is its own spiritual practice. We want to come up with an action plan, to know how to adjust our budgets, to strategize for what’s next. We want to fix a new date for the wedding, the Memorial or Celebration of Life service, the retirement or graduation party, and on it goes. And there is only so much of that we can do. Over these months information has trickled out and changed often, messages have been less than clear and the reality has been emerging and evolving. Without information and a firm end-date, planning simply can’t happen. We are clearly not in control. Many of us struggle mightily in this reality. The invitation is to release constant control, planning, and production mode and just be. WAIT.
The guidance given in our texts today is first to pray—the women and men who waited in Jerusalem prayed, they drew near to God to speak and to listen. And 1 Peter reminds us to humble ourselves, acknowledging our dependence upon God; to let God hold our anxiety, because God cares and wants to help us; to be disciplined and alert—that is, to pay attention, to stay awake and open to God’s presence; to resist the devilish (literally from the Greek “slanderous”) voice that will want to distract you and fill your head with lies and destructive thoughts; to remember our solidarity with others all over the world who are suffering, too. On this last point, I hope that in our waiting we recognize what I’ve been saying for months: we are all in the same storm, but we are not in the same boat. Some of us are in secure situations that will weather the storm. Others are in situational “boats” that have been waiting for generations to receive the resources they need to mend and become more safe and sound.
Perhaps, in our waiting, we might ponder what it means to be “restored.” This word that initially drew my attention, the word translated in the NRSV as “restore” in both Acts 1 and 1 Peter 5, is not actually the same word. What I discovered is that the Greek word used in the disciples’ question, apokathistémi, means “to re-establish, give back, set up again.” It’s a word that looks backward—not necessarily in a bad way—but in a way that longs for a good parts of the past to be restored, perhaps in a way that is more just than before. The word in 1 Peter, katartizó, means “to prepare, to perfect for its full destination or use.” This word leans into the future and tends to evoke a sense of equipping for a whole new reality.
As we grapple with this time of waiting, it is OK to long for good parts of our lives to be restored—singing together, dinner parties, being able to be present with loved ones who are celebrating or suffering, giving and receiving care and service, the list could stretch on. And it is also important to pay attention to the ways God is at work preparing and perfecting us for completely new ways of living together, the ways God is restoring us in ways that will enable us to flourish in a new reality.
Perhaps the message is that we are called to be restored not after the waiting, but in it. God is at work to prepare and perfect our hearts, our minds, our priorities, our awareness, our faith, hope, and love. And for what? To be open to the power of Spirit who comforts us in our pain and struggle, nudges our conscience, stirs our dreaming, touches our hearts and inspires new vision and new life. And through the power of Spirit, to emerge from this time of waiting, isolation, and struggle ready to live more gently and justly, more aware and awake, more committed to addressing the gross inequities and injustices so starkly revealed in this time, and perhaps with a more perfect appreciation for the little things that are so easy to take for granted when time seems more in our control.
Can you actively wait, open to God’s restorative power in the midst of frustration, boredom, anxiety, and grief? The promise is that fresh power, a big vision, and new life will come not just for you, but for all. In due time…
https://foundryumc.org/
At Home. In God.
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli for Foundry UMC May 17, 2020, the sixth Sunday of Easter. “Life Interrupted” series.
Text: Acts 17:22-31
In this moment in our shared life, people are suffering in many different ways. People are suffering the ravages of COVID-19 in their bodies, people are grieving deaths of loved ones to the disease, people are losing their jobs, losing their homes, are without access to healthcare or insurance, are falling into addiction, reeling with anxiety, paralyzed by depression. People are grieving losses of all kinds, even as they continue to grapple with everything that comes with being human—messy relationships, vulnerable bodies, weighty responsibilities. Siblings of color have this collective grief compounded by exhaustion and rage in the face of ongoing, often unchecked, acts of racial aggression in our society. People of conscience who have more resources and privilege add guilt to their grief plates as they wonder, in light of what others are going through, whether it’s OK to admit that they’re struggling, too. And as is always the case, the poor and marginalized will continue to carry the brunt of the suffering; the ones already on the edge will be the first ones to fall.
Over the past many weeks, as we’ve been grappling with life interrupted by grief and suffering, I wonder how many times I have proclaimed “we are not alone,” “God is with us,” or “No matter where you are or what you’re holding, God’s with you there.” How or why, with so much that could be argued to the contrary, can I make such an affirmation?
I must admit that, at times over the past months, I’ve felt I needed to explain or even apologize for repeating it so often. I’ve wondered how many folks receive my assurance of God’s abiding presence and just get angry—because they don’t perceive that presence or feel that God has broken the promise and abandoned them. If that resonates with you, be assured of this: you share in a time-honored reaction—at least if our scriptures are any indication. There are moments in our lives when we join an ancient chorus and cry out to God—“Where are you??” “How long will you leave me alone?”
And yet, alongside this refrain, another song rises, telling stories of an ever-present God. This God is not a fairy tale, a narrative projection of the human psyche, a divine ATM machine, a macho bully, or a nebulous ball of energy. This God acts concretely in history, is relational, loving, and involved. Testimonies of this God include: The steadfast love of the Lord is present from generation to generation! God receives and responds to the cries of God’s people! Even if we try, we can’t escape God’s presence! God is with us and loves us and there is nothing we can do about it! This God proves the testimonies true by coming into the world in flesh as Emmanuel, meaning “God is with us.” Jesus reveals that “God is with us” in every experience of human relationship, joy, suffering, even death. And Jesus promises not to leave us orphaned, a promise fulfilled at Pentecost as Spirit appears with fresh energy and power in and among the disciples. It is because this particular God is the one I worship that I’m compelled to assure over and again, “You are not alone.”
The highly educated, philosophically curious people of Athens in the first century of the Common Era knew many gods but not this God. The ancient Greek gods were each connected to different parts and energies of creation. These gods had desirable qualities and special powers but were involved in all sorts of internecine drama among themselves, and—unpredictably—exacted favor or vengeance on each other and upon humans. As with many ancient religious cults, it was a quid pro quo kind of spiritual economy. You wanted to keep your gods happy! So you honor them with statues of their likeness and bring presents to their temples to curry favor. The Greeks also had to grapple with the three goddesses called the “Fates.” Clotho (the spinner) spun the “thread” of human fate, Lachesis (the alotter) dispensed it, and Atropos (the inflexible) cut the thread (sets the moment of death). This strand of religious philosophy left humans powerless. Your fate was set and you just had to suffer through it. // Buzzing in and around all these idols were many lines of philosophical inquiry, including some mentioned earlier in the story, Stoicism and Epicureanism.
It was into this religious, philosophical, and curious soup that Paul steps. After acknowledging the religiosity of the Athenians, he mentions a monument tucked among the many idols. This monument “To an unknown god,” may seem strange at first. Why would such a monument be needed? Well, if the goal was to keep the gods happy, what if you inadvertently missed one? This provides a space to cover your…bases…
In any case, Paul uses this as his opening to share that while the Athenians may not know this God, this God knows them. Paul paints the picture of this God for them: This is the God who hurled the stars into orbit and stirred the seas to make waves, who gathered stardust into earth, scooped up those crystals into shapes of creatures, breathed into them and chanted, “Live!” This God, whose name you don’t know, has known you by name from the beginning. This God, bidden or unbidden is present with you. This is the God who is not divided into discrete energies of creation, but is the life-giving energy and breath of all things. (17:24-25) This is not a God of one people, one tribe, one nation, but is the Mother and Father of all nations. (17:26) This God knows you as a parent knows their child. This God has been loving and longing for you all along. And this God, as a loving parent, is not playing with you as though your life is a pawn in a game, is not demanding sacrifices in order to give you life and blessing, but freely and joyfully provides all that you need. As a loving parent, this God doesn’t cause you suffering but draws near to you when you suffer and cries with you. And the presence of this loving God, present and at work even without your knowledge, has revealed wisdom to your own philosophers who rightly expressed: “We are God’s offspring” and “In God we live, move, and have our being.” This is the God we search and long for as a child searching for a parent, as a river searching for the sea, as a traveler searching for home.
Paul lays out this vision and then says, in essence, “Now you know! And you can choose to turn toward this God of life-giving love.” (17:30) That, after all, is what it means to “repent,” it means to turn toward love and life and mercy and grace, to turn away from the “idols” of your own making that may be beautiful, interesting, and even helpful in some ways, but that are ultimately unable to sustain you. You can turn away from the quid pro quo ways into which you’ve been indoctrinated, the ways of having to earn favor, grace, love. You can turn toward the God who loves you, whose mercies are new every morning, free of charge. You can turn away from the lie of uncaring Fates before which you have no power. You can turn toward a life of agency and creativity, participating in the mighty works of God’s mending and new creation in the world. You dwell in God and God dwells in you. And because you live and move and have your being in God who has proven to be the God of life through the resurrection of Jesus, you don’t have to fear death—because in life, in death, in life beyond death, we are in God. We are held in that steadfast, everlasting, eternal, present-before-the-world-was-a-thing love of a God who is the Lord of Lords. //
The Athenians got to ponder and wonder about what difference this newly revealed God could make. What we believe about our God—the nature of our God, the presence or absence of our God, the desire of our God—makes a difference in how we live our lives. It determines how we form community and what we do and value together.
If we believe that God is or should be formed in our image instead of the other way around, then our perspectives, desires, and prejudices will consistently, comfortably align with “God’s will!” (magic!) If we believe God is out to get us, we will live in fear and feel like victims. If we believe that God has to be paid off in order to love us, we will likely treat others as transactions, too. If we believe that the ways of God are separate from and hostile to scientific knowledge and the various arts of human discernment and understanding, then we can ignore information coming from those disciplines while claiming to be acting in faith. If we believe that God is our nation’s God and that God has destined our nation to be the best and baddest nation in the world and, further, that our nation is supposed to look, think, and worship one way, then we will dehumanize and devalue anyone or anything that hinders that vision—to the point of destruction—and we will do that in the name of God. I have written elsewhere, “In God we trust” may be written on our money, but our money serves other gods. There is growing proof that plenty of people who call themselves Christian worship at these altars.”
Today we are reminded of the steadfast presence and love and life-giving power of YHWH, the God in whom we ALL live, move, and have our being. The particular God not of one tribe or nation but the God of all, who is not vengeful or prejudiced or partial toward any (Acts 10:34), who freely gives to all love and grace, who endows all of us with minds to use well and hands and hearts to offer one another in lovingkindness. A God who has given us in Jesus an example and teacher of what life in the Kin-dom looks like, and we seek to be formed by that God instead of the other way around.
In this moment, formed in the God we know, and based on science, human study, and the teachings of our faith, our call is to love God and neighbor and that means privileging human health and life over other considerations and erring on the side of safety. This means staying home, wearing masks in public, washing our hands, sharing our resources generously if we have them so as to support those who are struggling in this time, asking for help when we need it, having patience with others, being gentle with ourselves, taking one day at a time, staying connected in healthy ways with other people—for their sakes and for our own, praying for and concretely supporting in any way we can our leaders, essential workers, and folks on the frontlines.
And staying connected with God. That last bit is in some ways the easiest of all since the assurance is that we are always, already in God. There are many unknowns in this moment in our history. But one thing that is known for sure: You are not alone. We are not alone. God is with us. Thanks be to God.
https://foundryumc.org/
Life Lost…and Found
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli for Foundry UMC May 10, 2020, the fifth Sunday of Easter. “Life Interrupted” series. (and Mother’s Day)
Text: Acts 7:55-60
When I was growing up, Mother’s Day included cutting pink tea roses from the bush at the corner of the house by the garage, affixing them to our Sunday best before going to 1st UMC, Sapulpa (where the tradition was to wear a colorful rose to honor a mother still living, and a white rose to remember a mother who’d died), then, we’d eat out! Churches I’ve served observe a variety of traditions, often involving carnations and honoring mothers in the congregation. These are lovely memories for me and cherished traditions for many in congregations of all stripes.
But other things I experienced over the years—both as a woman and a pastor—are the extraordinarily mixed and often painful emotions that come up on this day for many—for women longing to be mothers, for those whose relationship with their mother or child is broken, for those whose children are suffering or have died, and on it goes.
Further, I’ve come to understand that Mother’s Day didn’t begin as a day to honor mothers at church or as a greeting card industry. Its origins began with Ann Jarvis who lived in Appalachia mid-19th century and founded “Mothers Work Day” to advocate for health and hygiene education to mitigate child mortality. Later, she mobilized women in Appalachia to go into Civil War camps to treat the wounded soldiers on both sides and to teach sanitation and disinfection through “Women’s Friendship Day.” Inspired by Ann Jarvis and deeply affected by the suffering and death experienced in the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe wanted to bring an end to war and equality for all people, regardless of race, religion, gender or nationality. She wrote the Mothers Day Proclamation, calling mothers to leave their homes for one day a year and work for peace in their communities and in 1872 the first “Mother’s Peace Day” was celebrated.
While I certainly honor my mother and all mothers, I will ground my words today in this original spirit of Mother’s Day. Our text helps me to do so. Stephen’s story begins in a conflict in the early church in Jerusalem. Greek-speaking widows weren’t receiving their fair share of the daily food distribution, an “oversight” possibly motivated by prejudice or conflict between the Greek and Aramaic speaking disciples.
The response was to form a ministry team of seven servant leaders to care for this social justice and direct service ministry. Stephen is described as a shining light among this group. His powerful witness in the community is seen as a threat to certain leaders in one or two of the Jerusalem Synagogues and they stir up a slander campaign against Stephen, accusing him of blasphemy, a charge punishable by stoning according to the Levitical Law (Lev. 24:13-14). In Acts 6:13 it’s clear that the whole thing is a set-up, a completely false accusation. But it works. Stephen is brought before the Jerusalem Council and doesn’t mince words when asked what he has to say about the charges. He proceeds to lay out a “history of Israel that identifies two Jewish groups: those who accept God’s message and messengers and those who reject them. The comparison Stephen develops…aligns Stephen and the church with Abraham, Joseph, the prophets, and Jesus. His [accusers] are aligned with the Egyptians, Joseph’s brothers, the rebellious in the wilderness who disobeyed Moses, and the ancestors who killed the prophets.”
If you read the whole sermon of Stephen before the Council, you might start to feel worried about the feelings of the folks he’s calling out. It might seem overly polarized and harsh. And truth is that Stephen’s sermon—along with so many passages of Christian scripture—has been twisted and perverted into a diatribe against the Jewish people as a whole causing untold suffering and loss of life for our Jewish siblings over the centuries. And that is never OK.
What I want to highlight, however, is that in the narrative flow of the story, Stephen’s sermon was simply a prophetic reminder of what Jesus himself had said in various ways. It is a call for God’s people—no matter their religion!—to align with God’s message of love and justice as many had done through the ages. The facts of this case are that Stephen is unjustly accused by those who have power, arrested on a lie, then chooses to speak out in the face of the injustice, and is brutally murdered at the instigation of some religious leaders who manipulate the system to achieve their goal with the sanction of both church (temple) and state. (This doesn’t happen anymore, right?)
Stephen had a mother. I don’t know if she was present at her son’s final sermon or outside the city where he was dragged by people with stopped ears and enraged shouts (7:57)—those who wouldn’t or couldn’t hear the truth or contemplate the painful history that set the stage for this terrible moment. But think for a minute about how many mothers over the centuries have seen their children suffer indignities, violence, and often death in the wake of injustice? /
A “disease” is a particular quality, habit, or disposition regarded as adversely affecting a person or group of people. A “pandemic” is a disease that spreads over an entire country, continent, or the whole world. Right now, the COVID-19 pandemic is the reality understandably on everyone’s mind. But I pray we will see that this pandemic highlights another one that has been allowed to fester and grow for ages in our country: the pandemic of racism, a disease from which no U.S. citizen can socially distance themselves. It touches and infects all of us. From the beginning, when the First Nations of this land were betrayed, forcibly removed, and slaughtered, to the horrific and immoral buying and selling of African siblings into slavery, to Jim Crow, to redlining, to voter suppression, and more—the racist “virus” has adapted and morphed as most diseases do in order to thrive. If those of us who feel defensiveness rising as I name these things allow our ears to remain open and our shouts of protest withheld long enough, perhaps we will notice who is bearing the brunt of this current suffering.
It is often said that when white folks catch a cold, black folks get pneumonia. And what we see in the data is that black and brown siblings are disproportionately getting sick and dying from COVID-19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention outline multiple factors that contribute to the disparity, including housing, work, and health conditions. The CDC states, “Health differences between racial and ethnic groups are often due to economic and social conditions that are more common among some racial and ethnic minorities than whites. In public health emergencies, these conditions can also isolate people from the resources they need to prepare for and respond to outbreaks.” All these “conditions” are the result of a long, painful history that has created fault lines of injustice and inequity throughout our society—from lack of access to health care to food deserts to disparate education and school resources to a broken criminal justice system to voting access to economic divides and obscene inequalities in compensation between what we now call “essential” workers and the folks who make a phone call to make millions while playing another round of golf. Here in D.C., as of May 7th, we have had 304 deaths; 241 of those were black siblings; and 23 identified as Hispanic/Latinx. That is 264 of 304.
I can hear the voices rushing to explain this away, to defend themselves, to rationalize the reality, to blame the victims. Those voices get so much play—those voices of people who look like me, some voices of people I hold dear—and they remind me of my own ongoing, often stumbling journey of waking up to my privilege as a white, educated, cisgender, employed, woman married to a man. I know the arguments but will not give them air here today. What I will lift up is a very basic reminder as one author frames it. “Racism is a form of structural oppression. The most common way to think about racism is to imagine a person who harbors ill will against people of color or who believes stereotypes about people of color…Such discriminatory attitudes are not racism; they are prejudice and bigotry. Racism is not merely a matter of individual feelings and beliefs but also a matter of systemic oppression.” The virus touches every person in the system regardless of where you live or what you look like or what you have.
I keep thinking about Stephen telling the story of a nation—without whitewashing it. He told the good stuff and the ways people had done harm. And the people who felt most threatened by him and what he was saying became enraged, stopped their ears from hearing or seeing what was real, worked him through the system, and got rid of him so that his words and work wouldn’t disrupt whatever it is that they felt was more precious than his life.
Stephen had a mother who knew nothing was more precious than his life. And today I want to honor her and all mothers who know intimately how precious the lives of their children are, in particular mothers of color who—as women—carry the added weight of misogyny on their backs as they navigate racism and all the complicated intersections and mutations and indignities that trail along with it while also being asked to care or worry about the feelings of white people more than their own.
On this Mother’s Day 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I invite us to honor mothers who have been living through the pandemic of racism for generations:
- mothers whose children suffer from diseases due to poverty, pollution, or food deserts
- mothers who fear for their children’s safety every single day because the color of their skin
- mothers seeking asylum from abuse and a better life for their children
- mothers forced to leave their children on their own while they work multiple jobs
- mothers who have to have “the talk” with their sons and daughters
- mothers who stay with abusers or suffer any number of other indignities in order to keep their children housed or fed
- mothers who fear for their children’s safety because of dangers in the neighborhood
- mothers in prison
- mothers who have to help their children unlearn internalized racism and learn to love their black and brown bodies
- mothers whose children have been taken from them at the border
- mothers whose lives get interrupted with the news that their child has been killed by acts of racist violence:
- Mamie Till-Mobley (Emmitt Till)
- Sybrina Fulton (Trayvon Martin)
- Lesley McSpadden (Michael Brown)
- Samaria Rice (Tamir Rice)
- Geneva Read-Veal (Sandra Bland)
- Wanda Cooper-Jones (Ahmaud Arbery)
I especially remember Ms. Wanda today as it was Mother’s Day 26 years ago when her son Ahmaud was born. And as I prepared for today, I was struck by how many of these women I’ve just named have channeled their grief and pain into advocacy, education, and public service. They, like the women who instigated the first expressions of Mother’s Day, are not simply letting a disease—in this case the disease of racism and racist violence—continue as the normal way of things, but are rather tirelessly pressing for new practices and policies, for healing, justice, and peace.
That is the intention of Foundry Church as well. We’re not going to just flare at the outrage of another lynching. We have systematically, consistently, and more slowly than many of us would like, been laboring to arrive at this day, when we enter a time of self-assessment and discernment to identify and address how our words, practices, and both conscious and unconscious bias toward siblings of color may undermine our desire to become beloved community. This work will be akin to Foundry’s “Summer of Great Discernment” around the question of marriage equality. In order for this to have lasting impact and not just be an exercise in massaging our perceived moral highground muscles, I implore all who care about the life and witness of Foundry and truly desire a more intentional and awake expression of beloved community to engage this process even when you don’t feel like it. In a moment you will hear from servant leader, Greg McGruder, to learn more about this initiative.
I want to close by lifting one detail that may be easily overlooked in our text today. Stephen, filled with Holy Spirit as he stood before his accusers, looked up and saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God. Normally, Jesus is seated at God’s right hand. Early interpreters like Ambrose and Augustine picked up on this detail. Ambrose observed, “Jesus stood as a helpmate; he stood as if anxious to help Stephen, his athlete, in the struggle…” “[Jesus] sits as Judge of the quick and the dead; he stands as his people’s Advocate.”
As those who claim to follow Jesus, let’s stand with those he stands for, those who like Stephen are the victims of injustice… Let’s do our own work wherever we are that beloved community might become more than a dream among us strengthening us for the ongoing work to change the world for the better. Let’s let the tragic loss of life wake us up and motivate us to find a new—and so much better—way of life together.
https://foundryumc.org/