In this presentation, Faith Lutheran Church in Okemos Michigan reaffirms and gets recognized for being a RIC (Reconciling in Christ congregation) from the ELCA church.
Faith Lutheran Church's Welcoming Statement:
We, at Faith Lutheran Church, welcome you as a child of God. As Paul said in his letter to the Galatians, “for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.” (Galatians 3:26) We strive to be a place where everyone is welcomed and affirmed.
No matter your age, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, marital status, faith background, political leanings, or mental or physical ability - you are welcome as you are. As children of God, we are all one in Christ Jesus and rely on the unconditional nature of God’s love and grace to be our help and guide.
Before I begin, I want to dedicate this message, the service today, and the work we are doing to Stanley, Amanda, Oscar, Rodolfo, Antonio, Darryl, Angel, Juan, Luis, Cory, Tevin, Deonka, Simon, Leroy, Mercedez, Peter, Juan, Paul, Frank, Miguel, Javier, Jason, Eddie, Anthony, Christopher, Alejandro, Brenda, Gilberto, Kimberly, Akyra, Luis, Geraldo, Eric, Joel, Jean, Enrique, Jean, Xavier, Christopher, Yilmary, Edward, Shane, Martin, Jonathan, Juan, Luis, Franky, Luis, and Jerald. And to Josie, Mesha, Jamie Lee, JoJo, Jaqarrius, Keke, Chyna, Ciara, Alphonza, Chay, Kenneth, Sherrell, and Kenne. Also for Trayvon, Sandra, Kathryn, Sean, Eric, Rekia, Philando, Amadou, Mike, Kimani, Kenneth, Travares, Tamir, Aiyana, and Freddie.
Next, I have to let you know that I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe Jesus Christ existed and died for our sins, and I don’t believe the Bible is the word of God. Now that pastor Ellen is questioning why she let me preach today and some of the congregation may be in shock, let me explain. These statements aren’t true right now and not true most of the time, but I have my moments of doubt when I truly feel I don’t believe. Many people may find that strange and question what type of Christian I am with such doubt, but I can tell you there is one that loves me and supports me no matter how much I doubt, and that is God. God loves me for who I am, a doubting sinning gay male Christian. We all fall short of perfection no matter how hard we try, but God still loves us. It is because of this love that, especially in my darkest moments, I continually return to God.
That is the beauty of God’s love - it knows no bounds and is unlimited. God loves all. Period, end of statement, no exclusions. God may not love some of our actions, but even with those actions, God loves us deep down and wants us to be reconciled together. God’s unbounded love allows us to enjoy the beauty of diversity. If God loves all, then how can we not also love all. While pastors and others with education on the bible can easily find and quote scripture or other people’s analysis of scripture, I turn to something I know and love - Star Trek. From an episode of The Original Series, Miranda says “The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity.” to which Spock responds, “And the way our differences combine to create meaning and beauty.” This reflects the basis for Vulcan philosophy, IDIC or Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.
You can also think of diversity by thinking of a piano or other musical instrument. A piano has 88 keys for 88 notes. That is all, just 88 different notes. It doesn’t take long to play them one at a time and the end result isn’t all that interesting. It is when you combine them in various ways, chords, rhythms, dynamics, etc. that you create a very diverse sound. Think about all the songs that have been written and played over the years. No two exactly alike - all from 88 little notes.
Each of us has various aspects about who we are - our age, gender identity, marital status, race, height, weight, education, and so many more. There are many that are the same age as us, the same gender, same education background, etc. However, it is the very unique combination in each of us, that makes us a special unique child of God. No one else is exactly like us, but yet we are all alike in that God loves us exactly how we are. As I said before - God loves all. Period, end of statement.
I’m going to take a little sidebar here to explain something you’ll find the service during the prayers. You’ll notice that our normal response to the prayers isn’t “Hear our prayer.” but instead, “Receive our prayer.” I first remember hearing this response at our recent synod assembly and also at the worship service we had yesterday as part of the Lutherans Always Reforming synod event at University Lutheran. Our synod’s Bishop - Craig Satterlee explains it best when he says “The deaf community said to me, what does it say to us when we talk about God hearing our prayer when many deaf people don’t hear of course and they don’t speak their prayers, they might silently make them.” Bishop Satterlee asked them what they suggested instead of Hear our prayer, and they said to use Receive our prayer. This is one of many ways we can minorly tweak a worship service to help be more inclusive to allow people to more easily feel God’s love for them. Another example is to use the phrase “siblings in Christ” instead of “brothers and sisters in Christ” since some people don’t identify as either male or female so they might struggle viewing themselves as a brother or a sister.
So, now we know God loves us, what do we do? We are called to share God’s love with others. Today’s gospel says “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” So just as Jesus saw this and called the disciples, we are being called to go out to the world being a shepherd and to spread the good news of God’s love for all. While all deserve to hear the message of God’s love, reality is there are certain communities of people where the message needs to be shared louder and harder as they have and continue to struggle to believe that there is a loving and caring God out there for them, since so often society and sometimes churches tell them the complete opposite.
This brings me back to the list of names I dedicated this message to. These are the 49 people who were murdered about one year ago in Orlando, most of them part of the LBGTQ community and most Latinx. Also the 13 (that we know of) transgender individuals who have been killed this year, and a list of some black people that people feel were killed unjustly. It is because of these and the hundreds and thousands more people whose lives end too early simply because of who they are, that we must hear God’s summons to us to spread the message of love and peace. These people and many other people struggle knowing that God’s love is real, because society around them often tells them they aren’t loved because of some aspect of their diverse nature. In fact, growing up I struggled greatly with the duality of my personality - being gay and being a Christian. For the longest time I lived almost two separate lives because I could not reconcile the two worlds together in my mind. Living in the Upper Peninsula and the silence from the church didn’t help matters. When I turned to the bible for help that really didn’t help matters either. When reading Leviticus 18:22 “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination.” I thought that the notes provided would help me understand and reconcile how this pertains to my life and feelings, but I was wrong, since the notes said “Several abominations, or wicked actions, are listed here: …. Having homosexual relations…. Society today takes some of these practices lightly, even trying to make them acceptable. But they are still sins in God’s eyes. If you consider them acceptable, you are not judging by God’s standards.”
This is why we as individuals and we as Faith Lutheran Church and we as the universal Christian church are called to share God’s love - people need to know that their creator loves them unconditionally and wants to be in relationship with them. I must say, that when reading through today’s bulletin, I am very pleased with how we share God’s love through our actions to all kinds of diverse people. We serve the young through VBS, we serve the more life-experienced people through our 60 +/- group, we serve the economically less fortunate through the Arrow Tree Food Pantry, we serve those who care for others with our caregiver support group, we care for those with physical or mental concerns by providing worship services at the Willows and the Dobie Road center, we care for people of all races with events planned by our forum planning team, and through today, our welcoming statement, and the RIC designation we show that we care and love all God’s children - no questions asked.
Now, why do we do this? Well, to summarize, we do it because we are Christians who are Lutheran. The start of the 2nd reading today gives us a big hint as well, “Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.”
A few years ago, I was having a conversation with someone about why I did so much for the church and the community - the conversation lead to doing good works to gain favor with God. I said “No, that isn’t why I do it, we don’t need good works to get into heaven.” They then asked me what motivated me to do this if it wasn’t required. I said, which I think is a good summary of the core Lutheran belief (Pastor can correct me later if I’m wrong), that “God loves me, God sent Jesus to die for my sins, I am therefore saved by God’s grace through faith alone. This frees me from the bondage of sin.” Ok, so that still doesn’t quite say why I do good works - but think of it this way - someone gives you a wonderful gift, something so expensive you could never buy it yourself. How do you respond? With thanks! You are probably willing to freely do something for the gift giver as well. Thus, why I work to serve my Lord - I have been given the biggest and best gift ever - unconditional love and eternal life in peace and glory - so I respond with thanksgiving by working to take care of God’s world.
Or to put it another way, that fits perfectly with today, Paul, in his 2nd letter to the Corinthians, says “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.” (2 Corinthians 5:17-20)
So, as Christ’s ambassadors, as we are reconciled to God, let us reconcile the world to God by sharing God’s love for all. Amen!
This was a special musical presentation by the mens choir at Faith Lutheran Church in Okemos Michigan as they celebrated Diversity Sunday.
Martin Luther once said, "To try to deny the Trinity endangers your salvation, to try to comprehend the Trinity endangers your sanity." And, John Wesley, when talking about the Trinity said, “Bring me a worm that can comprehend a human being, and then I will show you a human being that can comprehend the Triune God!” The doctrine of the Trinity is difficult to comprehend and, consequently, as a church we have somewhat ignored giving the Trinity any significant focus. It is so much easier to think of a monotheistic God then try to understand God as three, and three in one. As a result, theologian Richard Rohr suggests the Holy Trinity has been “missing in action” for much of the past seventeen centuries.
And, yet, we need to think about the Trinity to gain a better understanding of God. Episcopal Bishop and theologian, Frederick Houk Borsch, when talking about the Trinity and our understanding, or lack thereof, writes:
There are probably a number of people who imagine that the idea of the Trinity was thought up by ivory-tower theologians who, typically, were making things more complicated than they needed to be and were obscuring the simple faith of regular believers. In fact, it seems that the process worked pretty much the other way around. Practicing believers and worshipers were driven by their experiences of God's activity to the awareness that God related in several different ways to the creation.... Thus, what these believers came to insist upon was 2 that God had to be recognized as being in different forms of relationship with the creation, in ways at least like different persons, and that all these ways were divine, that is, were of God. Yet there could not be three gods. God, to be the biblical God and the only God of all, had to be one God. This complex and profound faith was then handed over for the theologians to try and make more intelligible. They have been trying ever since.
Yet, the truth of the matter is that for us to better understand the God in whom we believe and place our trust, we need to maintain some understanding of the mystery of the Trinity. And key to that understanding is relationship. Relationship is the most compelling aspect of the Triune God. As Richard Rohr says, “Whatever is going on in God is a flow, a radical relatedness, a perfect communion between Three – a circle dance of love. And God is not just a dancer; God is the dance itself.”
God is absolute relatedness and God is the dance itself. A dance is made up of many different entities – motion, emotion, resonance, rhythm, beat, energy, creativity – all of which have to relate to each other and come together in order to create the whole. We dance on the edge of mystery when we look upon this Ultimate Triangle of the Trinity – a model of interactive and open, loving relationship. And, there is no way we humans can fully grasp the doctrine of "God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity." But, one helpful description that stands out for me comes from the New Zealand Prayer Book: God the Earth Maker, Jesus the Pain Bearer, and 3 Holy Spirit the Life-Giver. The Trinity is an Ultimate triangle that relates these three aspects of life that carry us to that which is foundational and true. God exists in our lives in those three intertwined ways: to create, to bear pain and to continue to offer new life—every day, in mystifying, surprising, and sometimes even terrifying ways.
God is the dance of relatedness. This divine dance of relationship is about the coming together of power and majesty, love and tenderness, presence and movement, in the divine — and joining with the raw and everyday reality of life. The divine dance is an active, physical and sweaty, rhythmic and pulsing, life-giving metaphor — and it is a reminder that as God lives among us, we participate in the dance of life.
In today’s gospel reading, as we hear Jesus command his disciples to go, make disciples, and baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, he calls believers to participate in this divine dance of intertwining characteristics and relational rhythms. The greatness of this great commission is not just found in the geographical expansion of the mission that says go and make disciples of all nations. It also has to do with the expanded personal and community vision and courage to live into the whole nature of God. This God, this divine center, understands and lives in creativity, in standing with the pain of life, and in the sharing and the lifting 4 up of life to one of hope and forgiveness. As we participate in this divine dance, we are immersed and embedded into the whole being of God, whether we understand it or not. We are not powerless in the world; we are not disconnected from God as Creator, or from the redeeming work of God in human flesh, or from the very presence of that same God in the Holy Spirit, who dwells within us and among us and sometimes outside of us.
The baptism Jesus describes to his disciples on that mountain-top in today’s reading is an invitation for us to join in the movement and mystery of this earth-making, pain bearing, life giving center to our lives. Although this divine dance has been in existence since the beginning, it is with the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that we now get to do a new dance. The promise that Jesus gives in our reading from Matthew this morning is that we need never fear looking foolish, or executing the wrong moves or failing to find the rhythm in this dance Jesus invites us to participate in. We do not need to fear because Jesus himself shows us the moves and provides perpetual coaching as He leads us in the dance. As we follow him in this dance of relational love, we do not need to fear. We do not need to fear because Jesus says to us, “I am with you—and I trust you to be my hands, feet, and life on this earth.” We do not have to fear 5 because we have been commissioned by the risen Jesus. And, the heart of our discipleship is bound up with the very life of the Trinity. Our lives and our discipleship are embedded in the relationship of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. As we participate in this dance with the Triune God – we who are saints and sinners, worshipers and doubters who don’t have all the answers – we have been commended by Christ to go and make disciples. We have been commended and commissioned to invite others – people who are saints and sinners, worshipers and doubters and who don’t have all the answers either – to join us and enter into the dance. We have been commissioned to invite others into this dance that is all about living together in loving relationship and living life that truly matters.
Come, join the dance of Trinity!
This is a special musical performance by the Faith Bell Choir of Faith Lutheran Church in Okemos, Michigan.
This is a special Musical Performance by the Chancel Choir and Joyful Noise Childrens' Chorus at Faith Lutheran Church in Okemos, MI
This is a special Musical Performance by the Joyful Noise Childrens' Choir at Faith Lutheran Church in Okemos, MI
This is a special musical performance of Shout Amen by the Faith Lutheran Joyful Noise Childrens' Choir at Faith Lutheran Church in Okemos, Michigan.
This is a special musical performance of How Beautiful by the Faith Lutheran Chancel Choir at Faith Lutheran Church in Okemos, Michigan.
Today, we celebrate the birth of the church. And, as we gather for this celebration, our party is a dangerous one. In fact, this party has been a dangerous event from day one.
Our story begins on an ordinary day, roughly 2,000 years ago when a small group of believers isolated themselves all together in one place. These disciples huddled together in isolation because they were afraid. It is quite likely they were afraid of outsiders so they stayed clustered and cloistered together as one group. Had they known what was about to happen, they would likely have separated and spread out. You see, after all they had been through, what was about to happen would have freaked out even the bravest amongst us. As they clustered together in their small group, they were in danger but not from outsiders. The danger they were in as they huddled all together in one place, was from a God who was about to crash the party and bring in everyone they were trying to avoid.
Yes, God did crash that party and, with the force of a mighty wind and flames and voices speaking in many languages, God brought into that small gathering people from all nations. And, in the midst of their bewilderment, their amazement, the chaos, and the cacophony of voices, 2 that gathering exploded into the church – something the world had never before witnessed. It was a new creation!
Quite frankly, I think the present-day church has, in many ways, been gathering in fearful isolation from society, from culture and from the world. By keeping ourselves isolated from the world and not connecting with others, we try to keep our little gatherings comfortable, cozy, neat and tidy. Friends, in many ways nothing has really changed all that much from that gathering 2,000 years ago. You see, people are people and we still live in fear. Among our cloistered gatherings we find the emotional ones, the naïve ones, those who insist on naming others and reducing people to labels, those who see us and them, and those who see people who are different as “other.” As we gather together we have the flawed, the smug, the confused and the amazed. But, in this gathering of broken, diverse people and personalities, we discover we are the very people to whom God sends the Spirit. And, guess what! God has not changed! And, God still crashes our parties, abolishes our carefully chosen guest lists, and invites into our gathering the people we often try to avoid. And, yes, the people God brings into our midst are going to change us! You see, when God enters and works in our midst, we are always going to be changed! We may want to always have a nice, warm, peaceful, fuzzy feeling kind of a 3 gathering. But, when God crashes our party, warm fuzzies are not what we get. I love what Lutheran pastor, Nadia Bolz Webber, says about this. She writes:
The Spirit, while called the comforter, does not bring the warm chocolate chip cookies and a night-night story kind of comfort. The Spirit brings the comfort of the truth – and if you’ve had any experience of the truth whatsoever you can testify that it’s not exactly cozy.
Friends, as we gather together we are much like those early disciples: fearful, flawed, confused, and even amazed. And, yes, we are the very people to whom God sends the Spirit to mess everything up! God has not changed and God is always going to be crashing our comfortable parties, messing things up, and moving us into God’s future where God’s guest list includes all. We are being changed as we open ourselves to welcoming the stranger, as we intentionally work to engage the greater community, as we open ourselves to diversity and as we become a Reconciling In Christ congregation.
Yes, God still crashes our parties and invites in the people we are trying to avoid. As Nadia says, this is “the thing about the Pentecost Spirit of truth: it feels like the truth might crush us. And that is right. The truth crushes us, but the instant it crushes us it puts us back together into something real. Perhaps for the first time. Because the radical and 4 mysterious and dangerous thing the Spirit does has always been to form us into the Body of Christ. Sometimes despite us, sometimes against us, but always for us. Because it is only the Spirit who can turn us from a “they” into a “we.”
So, today as God crashes our party, we receive the same Spirit as that community of believers 2,000 years ago. That Spirit has been loosed into the world. And, that Spirit opens us to newness, and utilizes our authentic voices, gifts and skills to love and serve others.