Sermon for Sunday, September 23, 2007

Being True To Ourselves As A Congregation

by

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Scripture:  Micah 6: 8

⁸ He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

We are finishing today a three sermon series on being true to who we are. The first sermon was about each of us as a person-being true to the best in ourselves and not letting others pressure us into being someone we are not. The second was about what it means to be a true and faithful follower of the radical subversive prophet, Jesus of Nazareth.

Today we look at what it means to be true to who we are as a community of pilgrims named after Andrew, one of Jesus twelve closest friends.

Let me start by giving you a brief report of three activities this past week. Friday morning I was at a breakfast meeting of our support group for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. We had some new people present and it was a time for us as a congregation to say thank you to those who have served our country in the military.

Yesterday morning we had an inspiring time together as the new residence of Rhonda Ruud and her daughters Samantha, Amber and Ashley.

Last Monday night I was in the church building for a meeting and almost every room was in use-on a Monday night. There were new classes that had just begun and the parents of the 200 children in our preschool were here downstairs and in the sanctuary for a welcome session. Most of those families are not members of our congregation.

The building was really jumping with people. I saw a couple of you in the hallway as you came in for classes and people asked about what could be going on with the parking lot so full of cars on a Monday night-it’s not an early Easter is it, someone asked? I said I thought it was just great to be part of a congregation where the building is so well used every day of the week!

Some of you know other congregations where the building is used mostly on Sundays and stays quiet during the week. That is not true here. We probably have a hundred or so different activities going on Sunday through Saturday, and one of the new realities is that when we get requests from outside organizations to rent the building, as much as we would like to accommodate them and be a community resource, we are having to say no more often than we used to because we are so full with the variety of ministries we offer in our congregation.

We believe that we are called to be good stewards of what we have and we practice that by utilizing our building very well. If we ever changed that and let the building set idle all week, we would not be faithful to who we are.

Let’s move back one more step and think about what it means to be true to ourselves as St Andrew United Methodist Church. To be United Methodist means that we are part of a historic faith that goes back even to the church of England where the founder of Methodism came from 250 years ago.

Methodists are the largest mainline Protestant church in America with almost 8 million members. We like to say that both heart and head are involved in being United Methodist. Our faith is heart felt, passionate, connected with our feelings; old JohnWesley himself described his heart being strangely warmed when he heard of God’s love and grace directed personally for him.

And he urged  a life of the mind as well, urged Methodist people to think and learn and study and be educated about their faith. In the first 200 years of life in America the Methodist church established 200 colleges and universities, many of them still around today. Reason and learning and thinking for yourself are part of being United Methodist, and we do not see any contradiction between the Bible and reason, science and faith.

Other churches believe you have to choose between faith and reason, science and religion. That is not a Methodist belief. It is a very common belief. I heard it from a staff member at a religious high school when she called about a family from our church. I told her I had seen their school’s statement of faith where they proposed the infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible-those are not words in the Bible and they are not what Methodists believe about the Bible. I asked her how they would talk about geology and science and evolution. She said they would teach evolution as just a theory as though a theory was just a cockeyed idea instead of using it the way it is used in the scientific method as a plausible, reasonable explanation as in the theory of gravity or the theory of relativity.

Methodists see no conflict between the creation stories in Genesis and believing that God took billions of years to form the universe.

Methodists do take the Bible seriously but not literally and we have more people who have been through Bible study classes here over the past 14 years than most congregations in our part of the country because we want people to know the stories of the Bible and to see themselves in those stories. We will encourage folks to read and learn and grow in faith and not just stay where you are because most people have only a 3^rd grade Biblical and theological education. Being true to ourselves means we help people learn and grow and think and leave behind some things we used to think. Do you have any used to thinks? I hope you do.

When we are true to ourselves, we will live by that sentence on the foyer wall: God accepts us just the way we are and loves us too much to leave us the way we are. We will change and grow and have some ‘used to thinks’.

Our congregation is named after a very important person, and that name is part of being true to ourselves. Who was Andrew? He was one of the first people who became a friend and follower of Jesus. He spent part of a day with Jesus as Jesus began his ministry and he was so taken with Jesus that he went to invite his brother to come and meet Jesus. Come and see for yourself, he said. And his brother came and signed on as well. Who was his brother? Peter was his brother and Peter of course became one of the most important leaders in the early movement after Easter and Pentecost. But Andrew gets the credit for inviting Peter.

Invite is a big word for us. That is what people have always done. That is how the followers of the way spread so rapidly. Most of you have invited others to give church a try. And we use many ways to invite. We ran newspaper ads inviting people to be with us next weekend and hear Marcus Borg. We sent several thousand postcards to our neighborhood and people have been finding us for years now from receiving a postcard. If we are faithful to our namesake, we will always be inviting others just as Andrew did.

United Methodists are open. The word shows up a lot when we talk about being true to ourselves. OPEN HEARTS, OPEN MINDS, OPEN DOORS. Jesus was open-too open, the rigid religionists thought and they found his openness to be a threat so they got rid of him. If we are open, we are true to who we are.

It is a different posture from others. I saw a bumper sticker last week that was anti openness. It was against tolerance-another word for openness. The bumper sticker said, “Truth, not tolerance.” What does that mean to you? I thought it meant that there is only one truth-that person’s truth, and that to be tolerant of other perspectives or ideas was wrong. It sounded like a bumper sticker that a first century Pharisee would put on his donkey cart. “We have the truth and this Jesus fellow from Nazareth is just too tolerant of the misfits and outcasts and sinners. He is too tolerant, too open.”

I think if Jesus was open and tolerant and we are open and tolerant also, that we are in his company and that is pretty good company!

We talk about ourselves in this congregation as a high commitment church. It’s not our words that matter, it is the high commitment that Christ asks of us in the verse from last week where he invited us to come and follow, to forget ourselves and take up a cross and lose ourselves in his cause and by doing that finding the best life possible. That is commitment. That is a high expectation and it’s not something we thought of, it just comes with following Christ!

Outreach to others is important for us. Focusing way beyond ourselves. So our involvement in Habitat for Humanity and caring for the homeless and the many other outreach ministries is important. Those are part of our identity, being true to who we are, and if we ever become only concerned about ourselves, we will not be true to ourselves. We believe in putting our faith into action.

Let’s look at the description statement on the front of your bulletin. Our Vision team put many, many hours into this statement to try and describe us to ourselves and others. We begin with Christ. We are centered in Christ. It is an obvious beginning, but if people don’t start there, nothing else makes sense. Do you know that some new church buildings who are trying to reach non churched folks don’t even have crosses in the front of their buildings? I am not sure why-whether they don’t want to offend, or what. We intentionally chose this cross that is rugged and has holes in it for God’s light to shine through to say that God not only was able to defeat those who opposed Christ then, but that God is able to take what is terrible in our lives and bring hope and light and good.

We are grounded in tradition-the ancient teachings of the Christian movement over the centuries and in our 250 year old Methodist tradition as well. That Methodist movement had people meeting weekly in groups to study and support and pray for each other. They visited those who were ill and lonely and in prison, and at our best, we will do that also.

We really discussed this next phrase a lot. The word “progressive” means one thing in church circles and something else in politics. What it means in church language is that we are not concerned so much about what happens after we die as we are concerned about making a difference in God’s world right now. We are not fundamentalists or ultra conservative. Those old words may or may not mean something any more. We believe in imitating Christ in his concern for compassion for the least and the littlest and the outcast. We want to live by the words from the prophet Micah: what does the Lord ask of you but to do justice, to practice kindness, and to walk humbly with God.

Only a church with progressive theology could invite in a speaker like Dr Borg for next weekend or Roman Catholic scholar Father Richard McBrien from Notre Dame as we did a couple of years ago. We are not your grandmother’s church.

What is in the future for us? We are going to keep doing what Andrew did-invite other people to come and take a look for themselves. We are going to always be a place where people can question and read and leave behind some old ways and offer their gifts in service to God and to others.

One final image for us to live up to: we dedicated and blessed the new home for Rhonda and Samantha and Amber and Ashley yesterday. It was a holy time and a joyful time. We talked about HOME. And I thought also about how some of you feel at home in this church building, how some of our youth over the years have said that at church they feel safe and feel like they can be themselves and not put up a front like they might do at school. They feel they belong; they feel when they are here, they are at home. Dear God help us never lose that feeling for each other.

It matches a second hand report I heard this week from one of our custodial team. This team member is from Peru and he has been in the US only for a while. He tells us how much he loves working here and how when he comes into the sanctuary to do his work, he immediately feels a sense of peace. He feels, even though he is far away from his home country, he feels at home.

Dear God, may we always be faithful in being that kind of home for each other. Dear God, thank you for the chance to think about what it means to be true to our best selves as individuals, as Christians and as a whole congregation. Help us not only think about that, help us to be true and faithful. Amen

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