Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons
Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
I want to say a word of thanks to the adults of this congregation who serve with our youth in many different ways all year long. Some teach Sunday youth classes, some serve as chaperons on retreats or mission trips, some support our youth choir, some serve as mentors with our confirmation class. If you have served as an adult supported of our youth ministries please stand so we might see who you are.
Here is our goal. There should be five adults supporting youth ministry for every young person active with our church. One of our goals over this year is to grow adult hands-on support of youth ministry.
And I want to thank our parents who devote the time and energy to get their youth here to church and who support their involvement in worship, study, retreats and mission. Would our youth parents please rise.
Theresa Thames and Dawn Hand have developed the best youth ministry plan I have seen in my years at Foundry. Either Theresa or Dawn or both have been at every youth event during the past year. So I want to thank Theresa and Dawn for their commitment to our youth.
Copies of our youth ministry plan are on the internet. We have a few hard copies for those who don’t have internet access in the office. There is a letter from our Foundry board about their support for youth ministry. I want to also thank for our board for its engagement in our youth ministry plan and the work they are doing to make sure our plan is strong and well implemented.
So thanks to everyone.
Yesterday I did something I have never done before since I was appointed pastor of a church for the first time 45 years ago. I did a baptism at a wedding.
Kathleen and Lou Ann met and fell in love six years ago before same sex marriage was legal in DC. They felt called to become parents and applied to adopt a baby. When marriage became legal their social worker told them that changing their marital status might delay the possibility of adoption so they put off getting married and put it off.
Then they decided maybe adoption wasn’t going to happen so they may as well go ahead with the wedding. The attended one of our preCana weekends, set a wedding date and almost as soon as they did they got a call that said a baby was going to be available to adopt. So just this past week the adoption was completed, yesterday we had the wedding, and during the wedding we did something I’d never done before in 45 years of ministry, we baptized Ava during her parent’s wedding.
So I want you to be aware that the struggle for marriage equality continues in the United Methodist church. It has just been announced that the Rev. Frank Schaeffer of Iona, Pennsylvania, will go on trial in a church trial for conducting his son’s same-gender wedding six years ago. The trial will be held at Camp Innabah retreat center in Spring City Pennsylvania Nov. 18 and 19th. Some of us need to be there. All of us will need to be in prayer for Frank and his family and Zion United Methodist church of Iona.
Prayer
I have just a few additional words this morning.
We are focusing each Sunday on Foundry’s core values which you will find on the last page inside your bulletin. Today, as our youth have already discussed, our core value is diversity. We celebrate diversity.
For several years I was responsible for congregational development in the Baltimore-Washington Conference. We had a number of cases where the demographics around Methodist churches were changing. The traditional white anglo church in the neighborhood would be decreasing in numbers and resources while there might be a new language congregation –Korean, Hispanic, Indiazn, African—emerging.
So one of our strategies was to have the new congregation share the same building with the traditional anglo congregation. This way the new congregation could help with the expenses of maintaining the building.
When there was difficulty making this work there was always one room the two congregation had the most trouble sharing. Turn.
Apparently traditional anglo people eat food with very little aroma.
In the book of Acts, when the spirit of God decided to end the separation between Jew and gentile, one of the hardest parts of the new era was getting people to share the same kitchen.
Because their reading of the Bible at the time was so narrow and literal, the Holy Spirit had to speak to the disciples in dreams to get them to understand that God’s goal was one humanity who live together, prayed together, and ate together.
He gave Peter a dream in which all of the non-kosher foods of the world appeared and a voice form heaven in his dream told Peter to eat it.
Peter said I’ve never eaten shrimp, I’ve never eaten bacon. I’ve never eaten anything unclean or profane.
The voice said, Don’t call unclean anything that I have made. Nothing and no one I have made is profane.
I want to say a word of thanks to Sarah Stiles and Mark Abe picnic.
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