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.
So, as we think about being inclusive, there might be no
better place to start than with King who said, “In a real sense all life is
inter-related. All men (and women) are caught in an inescapable network of
mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly,
affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what
you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I
ought to be... This is the inter-related structure of reality.” That quote is
thoroughly rooted in King’s faith and understanding of God, which is rooted in
his baptism into the body of Christ, and into Paul’s understanding of what
happens when we are baptized. That when we clothe ourselves with Christ, and in
the ancient church people would put on special clothes after baptism, which is
what this is making reference to, when we leave the waters of baptism and put
on Christ, then “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or
free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ
Jesus.” It is widely believed that that statement is a baptismal statement, that
was part of the baptismal rite at the time, to help people remember exactly
what it meant to be baptized, to become one in the body of Christ. And there is
an incredible radicality to that, an overcoming of everything we think we know
or are told about societal divisions.
And we see this first in the disciple call story we heard in
the gospel passage from this morning. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth,”
Nathaniel asks? There is no way that Jesus could be the messiah, because there
is no one good coming out of Nazareth. Isn’t that a judgment that all of us
have made in some way or another? The belief that our group is right and good and
proper and others not so much? That there are some people who just don’t
belong, or some people we could just never be friends with, or some group that
is just inherently different and not welcome? Can anything good come out of
Nazareth? But, Philip’s response is what changes everything, “come and see.” Come
and see. And so we can expand Paul’s list to be there is no longer democrat or
republican, no longer conservative or liberal, no longer rich or poor, no
longer white or black, no longer Hispanic or native, no longer straight or gay,
no longer cis-gendered or trans-gendered, no longer non-disabled or disabled, no
longer Los Alamos or White Rock, no longer hilltop or valley, no longer Ph.D.
or GED, no longer scientist or support staff, no longer white collar or blue
collar, no longer home owner or renter, no longer old-timer or new-comer, no
longer online or in-person worshipper, no longer contemporary or traditional,
no longer old or young, no longer native born or immigrant, no longer Yankee or
Red Sox fan, and the list could go on and on, because we are all one in Christ
Jesus.
Now when Paul says this, he is not saying that these
realities no longer exist or that we should ignore differences. Because when we
try and ignore differences it either means that we are going to try and make
everyone whatever is normative, or at the top of the hierarchy, which in our
culture is straight, white, males. It’s like when people say they don’t see
color, and that’s almost always a statement made by white people, not by people
of color, because in saying that it diminishes and dismisses the uniqueness, as
well as the reality of who people are. As Paul tells the church in Corinth, who
are wanting to create a hierarchy of spiritual gifts, that everyone is necessary,
all gifts are necessary. In order for the body of Christ to be full and
effective we have to see the uniqueness in everyone else. And so Paul is not
saying that we eliminate differences in Christ, but that we eliminate dominance
in Christ Jesus. No one is preferenced and has power because they might be what
is considered normative, or at the top. They have lost the power to divide and
oppress or exclude. Our distinctions remain, but they are not determinative for
our faith because our faith is not built upon those particularities but upon
the response that we have made, and what God has done for us in making us a new
creation in our baptism. And so can anything good come out of Nazareth?
That’s the difference between being welcoming and being
accepting, or welcoming and inclusive. And to claim that we are going to be
inclusive means as a core value means that we have to live by that. As King
said, “The ultimate measure of a [person] is not where [they] stand in moments
of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stands at times of challenge and
controversy.” That’s what core values do, is that they say this is who we are
at our core and what we are going to hold onto when we might be tried and
tested. Rachel Held Evans tells the story of a church in Canada who said that
they were going to be inclusive and not only welcomed a gay couple into their
congregation, but allowed them to join, which was forbidden by their
denomination, and even worse let them move into leadership, and so the denomination
stripped them of their church, and while shocking and distressing, they were
okay with that because they had stayed true to who they were and who they said
they were going to be. They could have said that their church was more
important and asked the couple to leave, but they remained true to who they
were and as a result lost their church. That’s what it means to have core
values. Are we willing to lose our church to stay true to what we believe? Or
are we willing to lose members because they refuse to include others with whom
they may disagree or don’t like, for whatever reason?
The Rev. Dr. King said that the most segregated time in
American life was 9 am on Sunday morning, or 10 am or 11 am, or whenever
worship is beginning and he was and is correct. Although we have made dramatic
strides in the last few years, still only 12% of protestant churches are
multi-ethnic, which means that more than 15% of the congregation is of a
different ethnicity than the majority of the congregation. There are many, many
reasons for that, but a large one is that of acceptance. If I go to a
congregation that doesn’t look like me, the question is not whether I will be
welcomed, but will I be accepted. Is the congregation inclusive? Now in a county
that is nearly 90% white, having racially diversity is going to be pretty hard.
Although we as a church, and as a community, might do more work on exposing the
realities of the difficulties that persons of color, and women as well, have in
entering the sciences, let alone earning advanced degrees and decide that we
are going to work to change that. That could be a challenge, and perhaps
another message for another time, but maybe something we do to say that 25
years from now our congregation will be more inclusive by ethnicity.
But inclusion doesn’t just have to do with color, obviously,
it’s also about gender. Who are in leadership positions? Who do you see at the
front of worship every week? That says a lot about a congregation. And it’s
about age. Who makes up the congregation age wise, and are all those faces
visible in the congregation? And it’s about ideology. Do we represent a
spectrum of theological positions? To say that we are inclusive means that we
are not welcoming of everyone, but we are accepting of everyone, and when we
say at the beginning of worship that whoever you are and wherever you are in
your journey with God that you are welcome here, that we truly mean it. And
that includes, is inclusive of, those who may not even be on a journey with
God. I the churches I’ve served, I’ve had and agnostics and atheists attend.
I’ve even had some Jews in the congregation, and they have all been strengths
of the congregation. But this is where our values may come into conflict, and
we have to decide which is the priority. We can say that being inclusive is our
priority, and other things can take a back-seat to it. But, as I said I think
being Christ-centered is our priority, and so while we are inclusive, we do not
compromise on our vows to Christ in order to include others.
What that also means is that we are not going to tolerate any behavior that people want to do because we say we are inclusive. Christ talks about destructive behaviors in a community and how to deal with them. Or as Seth Godin says, you get the behavior that you tolerate. We will not tolerate destructive behavior simply in order to be inclusive. And so again, we have to ask the question are we willing to lose members to be true to what we say we believe and cherish? If someone says nothing good can come from Nazareth, what are we going to do? Because by saying that we are going to be inclusive it means that we believe that Christian unity is not built upon us all thinking and looking and acting alike. But our unity is based upon our baptismal vows to one another and to God, our mutuality and our respect for difference. Being inclusive is firmly rooted in our sense of being Christ-centered, that we are all in need of God’s grace and mercy, that we are all in need of God’s forgiveness and healing, and that all of us are made in the image of God and all are, in bound in that web of mutuality that King talked about.
At
Pentecost, I believe I quoted the Rev. Cecil Williams, who was pastor at Glide
Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco, which may be the most
diverse and inclusive congregation of any denomination in the US, who said any
church can grow as long as you don’t care who shows up. And there are people
who are broken and wounded, who are deeply in need of God’s love, to know of
God’s healing available for them, but who wouldn’t think of crossing the
threshold because not only don’t they think they would be welcomed, but
definitely not included or told that they are loved and beloved. To say that we
are going to be inclusive means we have to be seeking them out. And to do that
means saying come and see, and living and practicing humility, to hear
another’s story, to listen and take others seriously, even if we don’t agree
with them, and seeing that tie of mutuality that binds us all together as one
body, one people, one world.
Being inclusive means that we will have disagreements and
some of us may not get along, and being okay with that. And really we need look no further than
Christ and his disciples to see that inclusivity played out. As I have said
before in the twelve you have Simon the Zealot and Matthew the tax collector,
who probably did not like each other very much, and yet they sit at the table
and break bread together, for they are united in Christ Jesus. And our
inclusiveness can also be a witness to the world. Because the simple truth is,
if we in the church cannot get along than our society doesn’t stand a chance.
And what our country needs right now is a witness of that mutuality, or seeing
that in our differences we can still be united, that in our uniqueness we can
see the brilliance of God in God’s creation. That our differences don’t
diminish us, they strength us. They cause us to be better, to be challenged and
to be strengthened in our faith and our understanding of what it means to be
Christians, to be the church and to be a holy community. Or as John Wesley, the
founder of the Methodist movement said, “Though we cannot think alike, may we
not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion?
Without all doubt, we may. Herein all the children of God may unite,
notwithstanding these smaller differences.”
Our baptism makes us a new creation, united in our faith and united in Christ. Some of you will know the hymn that says, “In Christ there is no East or West, in him no South or North, but one great fellowship of love, throughout the whole wide earth.” It is that fellowship of love that our value of inclusivity calls us to live out, for Christ says that we will be known as his disciples by the love that we show to one another, for in Christ there is no Greek or Jew, slave or free, male and female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.
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