Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons
Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
Rev. Dean Snyder
Luke 1:30–38I want to mention two important Sundays in January so that you have time to protect your schedules. One is MLK Sunday January 19 when our special preacher will be Cheryl Anderson. Dr. Anderson teaches Old Testament at Garrett Seminary in Evanston, IL. She has written a very important book about biblical interpretation and the movement for full inclusion within the church entitled “Ancient Laws and Contemporary Controversies.”
Cheryl was a lawyer who worked for the federal government in the 1980s when she started attending Foundry. She experienced a call to ministry here, entered seminary, and today she is a teacher and leader in the United States and Africa on studying scripture to hear God’s call to inclusion.
Then I also want to announce this morning that on Sunday Jan. 26, the last Sunday of January, our preacher will be Pastor Frank Schaefer whose trial for conducting his son’s wedding was held last month in Pennsylvania. So I want you to start spreading the word among your friends. Frank will preach at 9:30 and 11 and will answer questions following the 11:00 service.
Prayer
For the next six months we are focusing on the church-wide theme of strengthening our core. In the world of health and exercise, our physical core is the muscles between our hips and our shoulders. Mark Verstegen, author of the Core Performance says there are five reasons to strengthen our physical core: It reduces and prevents pain. It Makes You Look Taller and Thinner. It Delays the Aging Process. It Improves Mental Function. It Improves Performance.
So what is our spiritual core? What are the spiritual muscles we need to strengthen to reduce pain, look taller, delay the aging process, etc.
I think one of the core spiritual muscles is the trust muscle. Trusting God. And developing communities of trust, congregations of trust, where we can trust God and each other enough to live together to change the world.
One of the key biblical personifications of trust is Jesus’ mother Mary who became a symbol for the church.
The church’s job –our job—is to trust God enough so that something of God might be born into the world through us.
Today we want to take just a moment to think about trusting God’s possibilities. God is always stretching our imagination. God is always calling us to a larger vision than we ourselves can imagine.
When the angel calls Mary into the motherhood of Jesus, she responds: How can this be since I am just a young girl?
The angel says: “Nothing will be impossible with God.
And Mary says: “Let it be…”
Mary trusts God’s possibility which is beyond her own imagination. She works her trust muscle.
One of the barriers to us living out God’s call in our lives is our limitations of what we can imagine to be possible. Our inconceivability. We can’t see it.
Amazing things happen in history once our imaginations are stretched. Impossible things happen.
Before 1954 no racer had ever run a mile in less than 4 minutes. Most people believed it was impossible. There were even books written explaining in great depth why running a mile in less than 4 minutes was physiologically impossible given the anatomy of the human body.
Then on May 6, 1954 at Iffley Road Track in Oxford, Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds, establishing the first world record for running a mile in less than 4 minutes.
Do you know how long his record lasted before someone ran a mile in less time?
46 days. Less than 2 months.
Now the sub-4 minute mile is considered the standard for the mile.
We are called to more than we can imagine. God’s call upon our lives stretches beyond our imagine.
In the spirit of Mary we are invited to step out in trust where we cannot see. The book of Hebrews says faith is the evidence of things not seen. (Heb. 11:1)
So I invite us, each of us and us together, to meditate this Advent about where God might be inviting us to take a step beyond the limitations of our imagination … to serve, to give, to sacrifice, to change ourselves, to change the world.
Many have written this week about the one sentence that Nelson Mandela spoke that shaped his life. It was during his 1962 trial in South Africa. His lawyers urged him not to say it but he did anyway. He said: “Democracy [is] an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
He spent the next 27 years in prison trusting in an ideal that it must have been nearly impossible to see.
Mary said, “How can these things be for I am only a young girl.”
The angel answered: “Nothing will be impossible with God.”
And Mary said “Let it be…”
The church said: “Let it be …”
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