Play Doh Formation

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was

Today we begin a new worship series that will take us to Lent looking at what toys can teach us about leadership and life. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to be doing for the beginning of the year, and so was talking with Phillip if there was something that would be helpful for our faith development activities, and he said that we might look at our goals. One of our goals is to build up our leadership, and I had in my list of potential worship series ideas a note about a book I read a long time ago called Toy Box Leadership, and to let you know how long ago, they use Blockbuster Video as an example of a company facing a leadership challenges, and they say that the decisions they make will decide if they survive or not, and we now all know how that ended. And so, I am indebted to that book and its authors Ron Hunter and Michael Waddell for providing the inspiration. And with that, today we begin with one of the staples of childhood, Play-Doh®, which was inducted in the inaugural class into the National Play Hall of Fame, whose museum in Rochester, NY, is absolutely fabulous if you ever get up that way to visit.

Now I have to say that of all the toys we will look at, Play-Doh®, is my least favorite, at least as an adult. When our children get Play-Doh®, which they invariably do, I sort of bow my head and think, oh great, thanks. Not because Play-Doh® isn’t great, because it is and I enjoyed it as a child, but it’s the fact that we end of with little pieces of dried Play-Doh® that end up all over the house, which then have to be cleaned up and invariably I’m still finding it in strange places days later. And so, I guess, it’s sort of ironic then that that is exactly the thing with which we are starting because of what Play-Doh® and baptism and leadership all sort of have in common with each other, and I bet you never thought of that combination before.

Our Father Who Art in Heaven, Hallowed Be Thy Name

Here is my message from Sunday. The texts were Exodus 3:1-15 and Matthew 6:5-13:

Most of you know by now the importance that I place on prayer, including our expectation that everyone will engage in prayer at least once a day, although doing it even more than that is even better. That expectation is based not just on our membership vows that we will pray, but also that we have said that prayer is one of our core values as a congregation. Richard Rohr, who is a Franciscan priest and author, takes it a bit farther and has said that “The church that does not teach its people to pray has virtually lost its reason for existence.” And so when I recently asked for ideas that I might preach about, it wasn’t surprising that I had some people ask me to talk about prayer. Indeed, that is a perennial request from people, because although it appears to be easy to do, the fact is that praying can be hard. Now some of that, I think, is because we sometimes make prayer harder than it needs to be, or, worse, we compare our prayer lives or what we say against others and we find ourselves lacking. But, that’s nothing new, because the disciples have the same problem. And so in the gospel of Luke, we have an account in the 11th chapter that Jesus has gone off to pray, and when he is done, the disciples say to him “Lord, teach us to pray.” Apparently what they are doing in prayer doesn’t look like what Jesus is doing, and the result of that question is Jesus giving what has become known as the Lord’s prayer. And so we are going to be spending the next six weeks looking at the Lord’s prayer and what it teaches us not just about prayer, but also about God and what we are called to as disciples.

The Lord’s Prayer appears only in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and we are going to be primarily using Matthew’s version because it is closer to the prayer that we say at least once a week. In Matthew’s version, as we just heard, it is part of the Sermon on the Mount which is sort of a summation of Jesus’ teachings as well as instruction about the Kingdom of God, which, of course, plays a role in what we pray in the Lord’s Prayer. And because it’s only found in Matthew and Luke, and not included in Mark and John, scholars believe that this prayer was originally recorded in a source known as Q, from the first letter of the German word for source, which is a document that we no longer have but which Matthew and Luke had access to. And because Matthew and Luke give different settings for where the Lord’s Prayer was taught, we don’t know how and where Jesus originally taught the prayer, and perhaps he even taught it multiple times in multiple places.

Core Values: Prayerful

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 1 Timothy 2:1-7  and Matthew 6:5-15:

A Pastor had a kitten that climbed up a tree in his backyard and was afraid to come down. The Pastor coaxed, offered warm milk, etc. but nothing worked – the kitten wouldn't come down. The tree was not sturdy enough to climb, so the Pastor decided that if he tied a rope to his car and drove away so that the tree bent down, he could reach up and get the kitten. That's what he did, all the while checking the progress of his car. He then figured if he went just a bit further, the tree would be bent sufficiently for him to reach the kitten. But, as he moved the car forward, the rope broke. The tree went "boing!!!" and the kitten instantly sailed through the air---out of sight. The Pastor felt terrible. He walked all over the neighborhood asking people if they'd seen a little kitten. No. Nobody had seen a stray kitten. So he prayed, "Lord, I just commit this kitten to your keeping," then went about his business.  Later that day he was at the grocery store and met one of his church members. He happened to look in her shopping cart and was amazed to see cat food. This woman was a cat hater and everyone knew it so he asked her, "Why are you buying cat food when you hate cats so much??" She replied, "You won't believe this," and told him how her little girl had been begging her for a cat, but she kept refusing. Then, a few days earlier, the child had begged again, so she finally told her little girl, "Well, if God gives you a cat, I'll let you keep it." She told the Pastor, "I watched my child go out in the yard, get on her knees, and ask for a cat. And really, Pastor, you won't believe this, but I saw it with my own eyes. A kitten suddenly came flying out of the blue sky, with its paws outspread....and landed right in front of her!!!"  Never underestimate the power of prayer or of God’s unique sense of humor.

For the past two weeks as we’ve been working our way through the core values that we have articulated as a congregation, we’ve been talking about our baptism and what happens as a result of being a baptized people. Now, if we had gone a little farther in the baptismal liturgy when we renewed our baptismal vows, we would have come to the membership vows which are that we will support this congregation with our prayers, presence, gifts, service and witness. As I have said before, I believe that prayer is at the top of that list because it is the most important, and start of all of the other vows. It is key to the development of our faith and our relationship with God, and it’s definitely important for it to be a core value for the congregation. But, before we get into that, let’s say our values together again. We are Christ-centered, prayerful, inclusive, growing spiritually, compassionate and caring and in service and mission. Now, just as prayer comes first for the membership vows, Christ-centered comes first for our values because it centers and directs everything else that we do. Buddhists pray, but their prayers are obviously not about Christ, or through Christ, and so when we talk about prayer it’s a particular type of prayer that we are discussing. It is Christ-centered prayer, and it’s not just individual prayer but also corporate prayer, what we do alone and what we do together, and all of those things are what make us prayerful. As we were talking about this as a core value it was that sense that we are going to bathe everything in prayer. That prayer will be a part of every gathering, that when we are seeking to make decisions that it will have prayer involved, that nearly everything we do will have prayer as a part of it.

Core Values: Inclusive

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was John 1:43-51 and Galatians 3:23-29:

Several years ago we were on vacation in the Denver area because we had gone to the mecca that is Ikea, and went to a local United Methodist church in the area. Now we are the ideal that most churches say that they want a family with young children, but as we walked in no one said anything to us, other than the ushers who gave us our bulletins and said welcome. We went into the sanctuary, and no one said anything to us. After worship we went into the coffee time because the girls wanted donuts, and no one said anything to us. And then as we were walking out, just before we got to the parking lot, someone finally said hello and stopped to talk to us and said they were new to the church but they really liked it because they were so friendly. And we just wanted to laugh because we had just witnessed the exact opposite. Now every church likes to say that they are welcoming, but if you’ve ever been to other churches you know that’s not true. There are some that do a good job, and some do an absolute terrible job, and some you can tell that they haven’t had a visitor since Jesus was a baby because they swarm all over you or are utterly shocked to see you. But, even excelling at welcoming people the first time they walk through the doors, doesn’t mean anything about how they might be welcomed and included into the community. As one youth who was LGBTQ said, “I don’t want to be welcomed, I want to be accepted.” And that is something radically different than being simply welcomed. 

And so we continue in our series looking at the core values that we have established as a congregation. And so before we dive in, I’d like us to say them together again, so that hopefully they will become part of what we know. So we are Christ-centered, prayerful, inclusive, growing spiritually, compassionate and caring, and in service and mission. Last week we started with what it means to be Christ-centered, and if you didn’t hear that message, I would encourage you to go listen to it. But I said that while these values could be listed in nearly any order, I believe that Christ-centered had to come first because it is what flavors everything else. If we don’t do Christ-centered well, then we won’t do anything else well either. And, as I said, that journey of being Christ-centered begins when we are baptized and is firmly rooted in our claim as baptized people. And as it turns out, our claim of being inclusive is also rooted in our baptism. Now we have jumped ahead and are doing inclusive this week, rather than prayerful, since we are also celebrating the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this weekend, and we should remember that he received his Ph.D. from Boston University, my alma matter, which is also a United Methodist school, and was also the first majority-white university to have an African-American dean of the chapel Howard Thurman, which was one of the reasons King went to BU, and Thurman was the one he introduced King to the idea of non-violent resistance as practiced by Gandhi.