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.

Preach the Good News

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Luke 4:14-21:

In a speech I saw by Bishop Will Willimon, he recalled the first time he went to visit a prisoner on death row.  He said he was a little nervous going in knowing that the person he was going to be meeting with had committed some atrocious crime.  After arriving at the prison he was searched and then given a long set of instructions about what he could and could not do and could and could not say, and when he entered the room he had no idea what was going to happen.  After the prisoner he was meeting with sat down, Bishop Willimon asked him what he wanted to talk about; he said “Do you think the United Methodist Church is doing enough to reach out to a new generation offering them Christ?”  That was not really the question he expected to start the conversation out with.  As they continued to talk, Bishop Willimon found out that the man had become a Christian while on death row.  When asked how he came to Christ, the man said “well I heard a lot about Jesus and he thought he and I had a lot in common.”  To which Bishop Willimon said, “are you Jewish too?”  “No,” the man said, “Jesus was on death row and was executed by the state, and I’m on death row waiting to be executed by the state, so I think we’ve faced the similar things.”

That comment came back to me this week as I was thinking about he radical claim that Jesus is making in this passage and what it actually means for us, and what it means for others as well.  We often sentimentalize Christianity, and it’s message, removing some of the teeth and the call, removing the fact that we worship a man who was arrested, tried and executed, not because he was a nice guy, the state tends not to kill nice guys, but because his message, his good news, was seen as a threat not just to the religious leaders of his day, but more importantly because he was seen as a threat to the Roman empire itself.  There are significant costs to being a prophet.  Tavist Smilley said, “You can have people like what you say, or you can offer a prophetic message, but you cannot do both.”