It’s Not About You

March 22, 2009
Rev. Patricia L. Liberty
4 Lent Sermon

It’s Not About You

Thank you for calling the Church of What’s Happening Now. Your call is important to us. Please listen to the following options and chose the one that’s just right for you. Press one if you are a liberal, press two if you are middle of the road, press three if you are conservative. Press four if you’re not sure.

Thank you for identifying yourself as middle of the road and welcome to our ministry designed especially for you. Here at the Church of What’s happening now you can join us for worship at the time that’s right for you.

Saturday at 1:00 so you can sleep in on your day off

Saturday at 3:00 so you don’t have to hurry through brunch

Saturday at 6:00 before you head off for that special evening.

Sunday at 8:00 so you don’t have to ruin your entire day.

Sunday at 11:00 because when you were a child it was the god-ordained hour for worship

Sunday at 2:30 incase you partied just a little too hearty on Saturday night

Sunday at 6:00 our last call worship designed to make sure you don’t feel too guilty

Press 1 for study opportunities to enhance your self esteem

Press two for mission projects designed to help you feel better about the sorry state of the world

Press three for a pre-recorded prayer designed for your busy life style

Press four to hear about this month’s specials which include a three day white water rafting trip with a personal spiritual consultant to teach you about prayer as you hurtle down class four rapids.

Our second special is a one hour facial featuring minerals from the dead sea, while listening to the meditative music of our own new age choir

Press five to speak with a personal spiritual consultant

Press six to hear the latest release from our praise choir.

And remember here at the church of What’s happening now…It’s all about You

RUN CLIP (It’s All About Me from Sermon Spice.com)

Walter Brueggemann writes, “The Christian community of North America has so bought into the world’s economics, its psychology and its standards of morality that visitors from outer space would have a difficult time discerning the difference between the social and political culture of the day and the church.” We have confused tolerance with indulgent permissiveness. In our effort to offend no one we become irrelevant.

It’s not exactly the original design.

Three rules of church

It’s not about you

It’s all about you.

Get a Life

Part Two, It’s all about you.

Church is the place where we bring our doubts and fears and brokenness. This is the place where our deepest loneliness is met with companionship; our hunger for community is fed. This is the place where questions are welcomed and we can struggle with the profound questions posed by the complex joy and pain of life. We come here to bless our children and bury our dead, to commit our lives in the covenant of marriage. All of us lead with our need at times and the church is a place where a word of welcome is spoken. Who ever you are and where ever you are on life’s journey you are welcome here. That is our truth and as a gathered community we are challenged to live it each time we gather together.

As we are fed and nurtured and healed and held in this place and by this place it is for a reason….

Get a Life…the life we are to get is a life of service. Sacred Circles…Stretched. We are stretched for others and by others. We gather here for a purpose bigger than ourselves for something besides our own self interest.

The church is always about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable and not just for the heck of it….for the mission of it.

That’s where it all hits the road. It’s not about anyone’s way it’s about God’s way and seeking that way together. Share mission and shared purpose that is larger than whether or not you get your way or I get my way. We are stretched by God and by others for the sake of what the church is all about. And it’s not all about us.

I am sending you out as sheep among the wolves…The marching orders for the people who would follow Jesus…

Scripture tells that story over and over again; of not knowing but trusting and the point of every story is God’s faithfulness, God’s stretching us beyond ourselves for what is bigger than ourselves.

Stretched by others…prophetic voices that challenge us and shake us out of our comfort zone for the sake of God’s truth, and here in the United Church of Christ, we have a strong and long tradition of folks in our midst who head on out ahead and hold up a light to shine the gospel out in courageous and faithful ways.

Congregationalists in Massachusetts opposed slavery long before it was fashionable. In the year 1700.

A leader in the fight for freedom and liberty, Old South Church in Boston set he stage for the Boston Tea Party led by deacon and brew master Sam Adams.

In 1773, Congregationalist Phyllis Wheatley was the first Black woman whose writings (poetry) were published.

The all-white Congregational church in Granville, Massachusetts called the Rev. Lemuel Haynes as minister. He was the first African-American ordained to Christian ministry in a mainline tradition (1785).

And in 1839, Congregationalist John Quincy Adams argued before the Supreme Court for the freedom of the Amistad captives –Africans who mutinied aboard the schooner Amistad after having been kidnapped and illegally sold into slavery.

This was the first human rights case that was successfully argued before the US Supreme Court. Congregationalists also led the effort to form the Amistad Committee to educate and care for the captives – a committee that later evolved into the American Missionary Association. After the Civil War, the AMA worked with freed African-Americans to found hundreds of schools and churches all over the south to educate freed slaves and their children. These became the first inter-racial schools in the country, as white New Englanders traveled to the south to teach in the schools attended by both the children of freed slaves and the teacher's own children.

Continuing the legacy begun in the 1700's, the United Church of Christ was in 1989 the first Christian denomination to name racism as a sin.

In 1853 Antoinette Brown was ordained as minister of a Congregational Church in New York, making her the first American woman ordained into Christian ministry.

In the early 1960s the UCC Office of Communications brought suit against the Federal Communications Commission for systemic racial discrimination. The landmark decision first opened our federal airwaves to people of color.

A United Church of Christ ordained minister, Benjamin Chavis, working in the UCC Office of Racial and Justice Ministries, first coined the phrase, "environmental racism" to describe the practice of placing toxic and waste facilities near poor, ethnic communities, targeting Native Americans, African Americans and Hispanics.

The United Church of Christ was the first denomination to ordain an openly gay person. The San Francisco Association ordained Bill Johnson in 1972. The United Church of Christ was the first Christian Denomination to affirm marriage equality and equal access to marriage. The passage of the CT equal marriage act was actively supported by our UCC lobbyist in Hartford and most of the Open and Affirming Churches of the Ct Conference.

We are a just peace church, a radically welcoming community, a place where judgment is balanced with mercy and from a place of faith and passion we step out to lead the way in radical love.

It is an invitation to stand for what we believe and to do so unapologetically and yet with humility and clarity.

We believe that Jesus reflects the truth of God, Jesus was radical life giving love. He turned no one away, challenged religious authorities that were more likely to judge than to love. He ate with those others despised and feared. He touched people with leprosy. He treated women like people and not property. He kept company with prostitutes and politicians healed those no one had time to bother with and welcomed anyone who wanted to know more about what he was all about.

You are welcome here. You will not find exactly what you are looking for, hopefully you will be challenged and aggravated as much as you are consoled and comforted.

Here you will find your deepest hungers fed and your deepest prejudice challenged.

This is a place where brokenness is healed so you can go and invite other broken people to be healed.

The gospel community is a place to discover and claim life, but only if you risk losing the life that is familiar.

We are always a work in progress.

We stand in an ever moving river…doing our part and affirming those who went before us and those who come after us. Kristina Malins, writes;

"Ours is the pain of constantly pitching our tent and folding it up again, of befriending strangers and bidding them good-bye, of loving the world but never being truly satisfied with it, of pouring our heart and soul into a project others have begun and still others will finish. If we would not be torn in two by the tension of this truth, we must learn to live provisionally -- to measure the road well. We need to make the most of occasions when we can gather by the roadside to break bread and compare directions. Joy must be discovered in the going as we never really arrive, not even in a lifetime."