Fairhaven UMC – Page 11

Fairhaven Sermon 8-3-2025

August 5, 2025

Fairhaven Sermon 8 3 2023

0:00

/1247.472

Summary

In this week’s service, Pastor Michael Airgood delivered a deeply moving and thought-provoking sermon centered on the concepts of community, forgiveness, and embracing the complexities of human relationships. Drawing heavily from the biblical story of Hosea and Gomer, the sermon explored themes of flawed humanity, unexpected grace, and the courage to extend compassion even when facing challenging circumstances. Airgood emphasized the importance of seeing beyond surface judgments and embracing the messy, imperfect nature of both individuals and communities, advocating for a spirit of neighborliness and radical acceptance – a concept particularly relevant to Fairhaven’s ethos.

The sermon also addressed the unique cultural nuances of Pittsburgh and its local dialect, specifically the term “nebby,” highlighting its surprising embrace of interconnectedness and genuine concern for one another. Pastor Airgood used this local term to illustrate the need for deliberate cultivation of relationships and understanding, encouraging the congregation to move beyond performative acts of kindness and towards authentic expressions of care and support for all members of the community, even those carrying burdens of the past.

Transcript

In Pittsburgh, we use a word that they don’t use anywhere else. We have a few of them, not all that I should say from a pulpit. One of those words is nebby. Do you use nebby? Yeah.

I have lived in the Pittsburgh area longer than a decade, and I forget to say nosy when I’m outside of Pittsburgh, and I still use nebby. In fact, I think nebby is a much better word than nosy. Nosy is very confusing for non-native English speakers. I think we should hold a campaign to push for the word nebby to be used nationwide to replace the word nosy.

More than that, we don’t just say nebby, we say we’re being neighborly. That’s part of the problem. We need to pray more specifically. We really want the details.

We’d like to spill the tea. The Armenian expression is let’s sit crooked and talk straight. We like to know what is going on in our communities and to be well-informed citizens. I moved from the suburbs to the city of Clairton because I wanted to live somewhere where I know my neighbors.

And this morning, and I know my neighbors, and this morning, I’m going to be a little If I did not know who the people were, I would have thought they were kidnapping my neighbor. But I knew the people. I knew them from the community. I knew they weren’t.

But they called her by the wrong name. Unsure, a nickname going all the way back to childhood. They were yelling at her to get going, to hurry, to come on. I think they were going on vacation together.

But if I didn’t know my neighbors and I didn’t know the people in my community, I might have been on the phone with 911 just to have someone check in on what is going on in my neighborhood. Our district superintendent over the United Methodist churches in Ukraine had always lived in cities. His wife is also a United Methodist pastor as well as a doctor and a professor in Syria. English language universities for African and Indian students studying to become doctors in Ukraine.

They had always lived in big cities, had always enjoyed the life of city, and when this war ramped up a few years ago, they looked at their young daughters and realized they had to go to the mountains where their girls would be safe. Julia said that living in a small town, when you leave your house, not only do your neighbors know that you’ve left your house, they know what you had in your hands. We all do what we must do to be in the ministries that God calls us to. You know, often pastors are asked, What is your favorite book of the Bible? And I read of a colleague once who has asked this in a children’s moment, and so I know that I should not answer with my real answer.

Because like that colleague, my favorite book of the Bible is Hosea. And if you’ve read Hosea, you’re nodding up and down. It is not a story for a children’s sermon. And if you’re not nodding up and down, wow, do I have a story for you today.

Usually when I’m asked what my favorite story book of the Bible is, I answer Mark or maybe 1 John, but really my favorite book, my favorite story of the Bible is Hosea, right? Do you all remember the show Mama’s Family? We’re in the right category, right? There’s an episode of Mama’s Family where she takes a night course or community college and they’re reading the Scarlet Letter. And in class, everyone else has only read the Cliff Notes. Today we would say the Wikipedia article. But she actually had read the book.

And she sits there looking around at everyone else in the room, wondering what is wrong with them, that they are not indignant for this woman, that they truly believe she should be wearing this scarlet A on her chest. Mama doesn’t understand why people aren’t leaping to her defense. And when I talk about Hosea in church circles, and I see that people aren’t nodding along, I say we need to get our Bibles out and start reading them together. Hosea marries a woman who is unfaithful.

Dr. Wilda Gaffney, who I think is the most brilliant living scholar of languages of the Bible, asks that when we talk about this, that we use words like the ones found in the Bible, like the ones that people really use, because we tend to use a lot of euphemisms for this. But it’s interesting, we have described Hosea’s wife, Gomer, using a lot of words that talk about who she was. We have called her a harlot or a whore.

We have called her a sex worker or a prostitute. But the scripture doesn’t define Hosea in this way, doesn’t define Gomer in this way. You see, Hosea declares as a prophet that he and his family and the life that he is living is a sermon illustration for the whole world to see. God calls Hosea to marry Hosea.

A woman with a reputation. And he does. And although our scripture never, ever, ever says that she is unfaithful to Hosea after they are married, there is no indication that she continues in anything other than faithfulness. History has continued to label Gomer with words like whore and harlot.

Hosea names his children with Gomer, bold and prophetic names, And. comparing the faithlessness, the adulterousness of his relationship, the scandal of marrying a woman with a reputation, to God choosing to align God’s self with people who are so ridiculously unfaithful. Even those of us who’d like to be really good often end up doing really crummy things sometimes. We cannot get it together, and yet God chooses to be faithful to us.

Yes. If I was serving in a congregation, I’d be announcing today that I’m going to be serving a new congregation. A year ago, I took time off from serving as a local pastor. I traveled to Ukraine and then I spent the rest of the year fundraising for Ukraine.

But I have been in the candidacy process for a federated church, the Community of Reconciliation in Oakland. It’s not only United Methodists, but Presbyterian Disciples of Christ and United Church of Christ. And so they’re following all of those different processes. And it has taken many, many months, but I will have a call and a vote and all of that.

And so I will be returning to being a pastor today. And in conversations with the committee searching for a new pastor, I said something that felt weird when it left my mouth and I regretted it immediately. But I said that sometimes being a pastor feels like you are in performance art. And boy, doesn’t that feel awful coming out.

Even now, it feels terrible. But you know, it’s better to say it that way than to say, I feel like a fish in a fishbowl. And I feel so bad for Dylan with the parsonage right next to the church just tucked away. Really, a fishbowl, folks must know exactly where their pastor is and when.

You know, Jesus tells parables. He tells these stories about people, and we think that the way that Jesus told these parables was unique. It was a new invention, a new construction of unnamed people doing these things. People are acting in ways that people do not act.

A farmer is throwing seeds not just on her field, but on the sidewalks and on the roads and in the weed patches. Seeds are expensive. Farmers throw their seeds on the field. Every time Jesus tells a parable, there’s something that doesn’t quite line up for the people who are hearing it.

Why is he tearing down his barns to build bigger barns? Why not build more barns? Why not sell it and build something you really want? As soon as you hear this story, you start to pull on threads. Why did this happen? Dr. Wilda Gaffney invites us to use our sanctified imagination to interrogate the stories of the Bible with the knowledge that people act the way that people do. You know how people act if we start to look at the story of Hosea and pull on those threads.

We begin to see a bold and courageous prophet. We see more of God in Gomer than in Hosea, to use the words of Dr. Gaffney’s sermon. We see a woman who is faithful, who has a past that her community will not forget or forgive, who has a husband who speaks about her poorly.

You know, we always talk about the best stories that a pastor can share about their kids, right? But when you talk to pastors, kids, you understand there’s a price to pay. If you tell too many of those stories, those sermon illustrations, and here we have this entire book where the man says, my whole life, my children’s lives, it is a sermon illustration of God’s faithfulness, even though we are not faithful. I wonder if Hosea was always faithful. It doesn’t seem that way.

He is a prophet respected not only by Jewish people and Christians, but also by Muslims, although not mentioned in the Quran, held up as a prophet of God. But if we use our sanctified imagination, we begin to wonder who this man was and how did he make the choices he made. Missionary life is often difficult. learning the rules and the regulations of everyday life.

How do people do the things that people do day in and day out? You have to act in a way that is normal for those around you. The missionaries that I followed, in their journey, practice they cleaned on Sundays because it was the day they had off in Ukrainian culture to clean on Sunday was the biggest sin and they’d be out with their vacuum cleaners moving about and their neighbors would think these people hate Jesus they’re cleaning on the Lord’s day One time I went with a friend to her family’s for the Christmas celebration and I’d never done it. And all of a sudden we were all on our knees around the table praying. And so I’m trying quickly to get on my knees and then we’re all standing up and we’re doing a toast with a shot of vodka that Jesus is born.

And you’re just following along trying to keep up. There are all these rules. Every culture has rules and norms, and Jesus breaks all of these norms. In the same way that Hosea does, Jesus’ life is pushing back against the culture of his day, is making a bold and prophetic statement to all who are interacting with him.

Dr. Amy Jo Levine, a Jewish woman who studies people, the world of the New Testament era through the lens of the Gospels, Amen. finds it very interesting that in a culture that is absolutely obsessed with marriage, because marriage is a contract, it’s a business deal, you are uniting empires, you are preserving wealth and wealth. heritage and history and all of these things.

Marriage is such an integral part of life. Everything is about marriage. And yet in the Gospels, after the birth story, with Jesus’ parents and John the Baptist’s parents, once Jesus grows up into adulthood, There is only one or possibly two married couples in the entirety of the Gospels after the birth story. Everyone is single or widowed or it’s unknown or maybe someone might be married but their spouse lives somewhere else and you hear of them later.

In a world, in a culture that is absolutely obsessed with marriage, there’s, Jesus calls us to a bigger family, to sharing generously with all of those around us, calling us to a beloved community that sees beyond the empires that we can build by combining wealth through contracts and marriage and says, but what if we just cared for one another? Gathering thousands at the lakeside, Jesus blessed some small loaves and fish and spread them out, and thousands were fed with baskets and baskets full left over. We often joke about how the Methodists understand the non-miraculous miracles. Growing up, I was always taught that Jesus did this and it all multiplied because this is the magic. But when you start to pull on these threads, which of these families left their home with nothing? But everyone thought, Well, if I pull out my little bit, people are going to steal from me, and I won’t have enough.

But as soon as people began to share, they understood that they had more than enough for everyone. Jesus tells a parable of barns and a harvest that is greater than what can be stored. And of a man who understands that he can build even bigger barns, that barns can get so big they can hold all the grain the world has ever seen, numbers we’ve never seen of grain. That we can build bigger and bigger empires for ourselves.

But that this life is but a day. It comes and it goes. What are we doing this all for? Jesus tells these parables about wealth, What are we doing this all for? wanting us to pull on these threads to see if we are prioritizing our lives in the way that Jesus would want us to. Are we focused on our neighbors having all that they need to survive? Or are we focused on getting the next big thing that we would like? Jesus calls us to, to move away from the structures that hold us captive and to expand our understanding.

Who is our neighbor? Is it the person on our left and on our right and across the street and maybe behind? Or is it anyone we don’t like? Who should we forgive? Is it those who have given us the best apology that meets all the criteria we are looking for, or is it everyone? Or else we risk our own forgiveness. Jesus calls us to expand our understanding of who is my mother, who is my father, who is my sibling, my aunt, my uncle, my cousin, who is my family. It is as big as this room can, as many people as this room can fit and then some. And when our family is missing, we go and find them.

that when our family is sick, we go and visit them, that when our family is lonely, we make sure that they are not always eating alone, that when our family doesn’t have enough, we make sure that they do. I have blue hair and a yellow beard. I don’t know if you noticed that. Because being a pastor is part performance art, and I still hate how that sounds, But we raised money for Ukraine at Vacation Bible School, and I challenged my kids if they raised so much money that I would dye my hair, and of course they did, and it’s four to six weeks, and two to four weeks yet.

Family. When I talk about Ukraine, very often people ask me if my heritage is Ukrainian, and it is not. I don’t have one drop of Ukrainian blood, but family is bigger than blood. It’s kind of the message of our gospel, that we cannot turn our back on the other, on the stranger, on someone in prison, on someone who is hungry or thirsty or naked, because that is our family.

I’m not. And we would never let our family go naked or hungry or thirsty if we could do something about it. And so we share this good news that as the people of Jesus, we are known for the ways that we step up and make sure that those around us have enough, that spirits and bellies are fed in equal measure, that our prayers and our gifts are held with the same regard. that our spirits, our souls, and our bodies are many and one, three just as God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are many and one.

God calls us to a family that is bigger than our imagination, to neighbors that extend beyond our street, our state, our nation, to friends that don’t look like us or speak like us or act like us. But love in the same ways that we love, act in the ways that we love, get it wrong like we do, and try our best to be faithful to the God who loves us even when we are not. May we grow in our faith that we may learn to love one another as God loves us. May it be so.

Amen.
Fairhaven Sermon 7-20-2025

July 23, 2025

Fairhaven Sermon 7 20 2025

0:00

/1257.36

Summary

In this week’s service, Rev. Dylan Parson challenged the congregation to move beyond a comfortable understanding of faith and confront the harsh realities of injustice. Drawing on the prophet Amos, Parson emphasized that God’s ruling attribute is love, but a love intertwined with a demand for righteousness and justice. He critiqued the tendency to seek comfort in church, contrasting it with Amos’s message of impending judgment for Israel’s mistreatment of the poor and vulnerable, a warning applicable to contemporary society as well. Parson urged listeners to consider whether they desire to “flee from the wrath to come,” a question posed by Amos and echoed in Wesley’s early Methodist societies, rather than settling for a superficial faith.

Parson’s sermon highlighted the importance of aligning oneself with Jesus as a “plumb line,” revealing areas where individuals and society fall short. He underscored the prophetic call to action, urging listeners to defy injustice and embrace a faith rooted in love and righteousness. Drawing on Colossians, he encouraged unwavering faith and action, reminding the congregation that true Christian living requires confronting difficult truths and actively working towards a more just world, rather than seeking solace in complacency.

Transcript

I’ve never really considered myself to be a fire and brimstone preacher. And my preference generally is to stick close to the theological understanding of John Wesley, no surprise there. And Wesley insisted that God’s ruling attribute is love. That above all things, when it gets down to it, the one thing that will describe what God does, what God is, is love.

And that differs from other groups of Christians. It’s not sovereignty or power, that’s what Calvinists would usually say. It’s not righteousness or justice like Lutherans might suggest. It’s love.

Over all things, God is about love. However, I feel like I’m kind of cracking my evangelical knuckles here. I would suggest that preachers, myself included, can be a little bit too soft sometimes. We can be a little tepid in our focus on love, in confronting the powers and the principalities of a world that really is addicted to sin and to death, right? from our governing institutions all the way down to the way that we conduct our lives as individuals.

And I recognize that we all come to church for different reasons, and those reasons vary even from week to week. But one of those key drivers is often comfort. We want to hear a word that will soothe our weary souls. We want to sing some songs that will take us back to simpler times.

That’s why I’m wedging this in with a hymn singe. We want to have some coffee and donuts. And then we want to go home and relax. Church is this hour where you don’t have to think about the news.

You don’t have to think about trouble with your parents or your kids or grandkids. You don’t have to think about the stack of bills on the kitchen counter. And that’s totally valid from time to time. Your church, your faith, your preacher are doing you a terrible disservice if your overwhelmingly However.

.. predominant experience of the Christian faith is one of comfort. The Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor said that people think that faith is this warm electric blanket, but in reality it is the cross.

And I really have to remind myself of this sometimes, and Amos really is dragging us into it today. Right? The same John Wesley who staked his entire ministry on God being love above all other things, and he was correct about that, also had one single piercing question for anyone that sought to join one of his class meetings or societies that comprised the early Methodist movement. And that question was simply..

. Anybody? Okay, what? No. That’s what he asked at the meetings. But before you’re even allowed in, do you desire to flee from the wrath to come? A little harsher than we usually imagine, Wesley.

A little bit sharper than your average Methodist sermon these days. But it’s a crucial question because the Lord our God is making all things new. The old is passing away. The new has come.

And we say this together almost every Sunday. Jesus Christ shall come again to judge the quick and the dead, the living and the dead. So our goal should never be to just, you know, slip into heaven under the wire. That’s not what this is for.

Our goal is total righteousness, freedom, reconciliation in Christ. It’s to be made perfect through God working in us. We can be sure that one day, maybe in this life, maybe in the ages to come, the wicked and the righteous will both receive from God what is rightly theirs. And there are some who will indeed receive the wrath of God, and I would like to be as far away from that as possible.

I’d like us all instead to be on the ark that is Jesus when the storms roll in. And so we turn to the prophet Amos today, who is not at all shy in talking about God’s wrath, God’s justice. Now, we get a little bit of this information in the passage itself, but here’s some background as we jump in. Because we’re jumping into Amos 7 here.

Amos is basically a farmer. He’s not a priest or a prophet by trade. He’s a shepherd, to be specific. He’s a grower of sycamore trees, of sycamore figs.

And he comes from the village of Tekoa in Judah. And Judah is the southern portion of what was formerly, under David and his descendants, one big united kingdom of Israel. They split up. But the Lord has given Amos a vision, and he has sent him out as a prophet, not to his own country, but to the northern kingdom, which is still called Israel at this time.

He’s from Judah, but he’s preaching in Israel. And the time period here, by the way, just to give you a sense, is a couple decades. It’s right around the same time as Isaiah, but a couple decades beforehand. And Amos’ focus is very similar to Isaiah’s.

He’s warning the people of Israel that because of their injustice, because of their turning away from God, and particularly the way they treat the poor and the vulnerable, Okay? They’re going to be conquered. They’re going to be scattered by Assyria, this rising superpower to their northeast. The Assyrian threat is building, they don’t see it. Amos is warning them that they’re going to be taken by the sword because of the way they’re behaving.

And basically what Amos is warning Israel about is a precursor, this kind of preview of what’s going to happen to Judah a few decades later when they’re conquered by Babylon. And then we see the Babylonian captivity, the exile, all that stuff as Israel is basically destroyed. Amos is promising in his prophecies nothing less than the final end of Israel as an independent monarchy. And that was it.

This was it. It never happened again. This is apocalyptic. And he’s trying to get them to understand that there is a real reckoning coming.

So what we hear from Amos is a lot that should grab our attention. But there’s one thing in particular that strikes me as eternally true. And that is this. When someone speaking on behalf of the Lord asks the people if they desire to flee from the wrath to come, and when he even offers them a chance to do so, an off-ramp, Bye.

their response is not, great, let’s go, or, oh no, that’s terrible. It’s, shut up and go away. And that really is the crux of this story’s exchange between Amos and Amaziah, who’s the high priest of Bethel. God has given Amos this really stark vision of a plumb line.

You all know what a plumb line is. If you’ve never used one, it’s literally just a weight on a string. And it’s a tool that’s used to measure the straightness, the uprightness of a wall. You hold it against the wall and see if it’s square.

And God says that one of those has been placed in the midst of Israel as if to measure their uprightness. And the implication is they’re not straight. They’re not standing upright. They’re not the way they’re supposed to be.

They have been found wanting. And now God tells Amos he will never again forgive and restore Israel. Judgment will come in the form of the Assyrian sword. So Amos has been going around preaching this in Bethel.

That’s the religious capital of the northern kingdom. It’s like their Jerusalem. And Amaziah reports this to King Jeroboam. He’s like, something is going on here.

And he reports that Amos is engaging in this sedition, undermining the king, this treason, speaking against the kingdom of Israel like this in public. He’s getting people really upset. And they’re trying to put a lid on this because presumably it’s riling people up a bit. And Amaziah goes and confronts Amos and says, you who see things, what a way to talk about a prophet, right? You who see things, go.

Run away to the land of Judah, eat your bread there and prophesy there, but never again prophesy at Bethel. For this is the king’s holy place and his royal house. That is, shut up and go away. Amen.

You’re really ruining the vibes here, Amos. And he really is. Because the thing is, King Jeroboam II, who is the king at this time, is presiding over the absolute peak of Israelite power and prosperity. This is a golden age.

Israel is doing extremely well, as good as it will ever, ever, ever do. Even today, archaeologists looking back at this time period, confirm that during Jeroboam’s reign, Israel is the most densely populated country in the region. It’s extremely wealthy. It’s become wealthy by trading luxury goods like wine, olive oil, fine horses, and ironically mostly with the Assyrian Empire that’s soon going to wipe them out.

But things are really, really good when Amos is prophesying. So there’s a little bit of a dissonance here. You can understand where Amaziah is coming from. What are you talking about? We’re doing fine, actually.

The stock market is in excellent shape. The unemployment rate is very, very low. The military is strong as it’s ever been. Leave us alone.

And I suspect there’s another layer under this too, an implication that he’s making. Leave us alone. If things are booming the way that they are, God must be blessing us. God is giving this to us and you are wrong.

So see, there’s often this contradiction present whenever we’re in good times. Prosperity and power are accompanied by fear, not too far below the surface, that all of this could come crashing down. Who knows how much damage the shepherd could do if he just keeps talking in Bethel. It isn’t all that hard to drum up a rebellion, a market crash.

They were having assassination attempts right and left on Israelite kings at this time. It’s not that hard to make that happen. So Amaziah’s confrontation of Amos has what I read as a very noticeable tinge of frantic desperation in it. I hear some desperation.

Desperation. But in his conversation with King Jeroboam, the priest Amaziah expresses this fear of Amos’ words in a different way. And he says it like this. The land isn’t able to cope with everything that he is saying.

Isn’t that such an interesting way to put it? He doesn’t say that Amos is lying, you’ll notice. What he is saying instead is that this very land, the people, the place, the fabric of the kingdom of Israel cannot handle what Amos is saying. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, and so it has to be shut down. It doesn’t matter if he’s right.

It doesn’t matter if he’s wrong. We can’t handle hearing it. It’s not worth dealing with. It’s too much trouble.

I’m reminded of a satirical movie that came out about five years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio. Don’t Look Up on Netflix. Anybody seen it? But the president’s, in that movie, there’s a world-ending comet that looms ever closer in the sky. You know, people can see it moving towards Earth, this big rock hanging over them in the sky.

And everybody can see it. And the president’s response to the people who are worried about it is, don’t look up. That is their advertising campaign. Don’t worry about it.

Don’t look up. Keep on running over the cliff’s edge, hanging in the air like Wile E. Coyote, praying that gravity never kicks in. Don’t look at it.

And that’s a deeply sad place for a priest to be. He ought to know better. Amaziah is desperately trying to preserve the status quo. He is completely cynical.

He represents a religion that has become so flimsy that he can’t imagine that anyone genuinely speaks the word of God. And further, he refers to Bethel, a word that literally means house of God in Hebrew, Bethel, house of God. He refers to Bethel as the king’s holy place and royal house, not God’s, the king’s house. The temple in Amaziah’s eyes is not primarily God’s, but exists in the service of the king.

It’s a really blasphemous thing to say. It’s offensive to God for any ruler to think they have a say over what comes out of the pulpit, so to speak. Because this is God’s temple. It’s not the king’s.

It’s not the emperor. It’s not the president’s temple. And so when Amos defends himself against Amaziah’s allegations by saying he’s not a prophet or a prophet’s son, he’s talking about what had become a lucrative career at the time. There were people who were vocational prophets.

They were court prophets. They were hired by the king to offer messages from God to tell them what to do. And Amos isn’t a pro here. He’s not a professional prophet who does this for the money or the recognition.

This isn’t his job. It’s his calling. He didn’t want to go from Judah to Israel to prophesy. He was a shepherd.

He has this fig orchard. That’s a way easier way to make money than going to a foreign land and shouting down its king. Calling an entire people to repentance, to change, to flee from the wrath to come. He would not be doing this if he had a choice.

And so Amaziah and King Jeroboam find out that they can’t shut Amaziah up. They can’t stop him from raining on their parade, from poking holes in this golden age. Because this word that comes from God can’t be stopped. Prophets of God can be slandered, they can be criticized, they can be shouted at, but they cannot shut him up.

Pretty much the entire issue that Amos is speaking about is that Israel is mistreating the poor and the vulnerable. That’s the whole issue here. The people whom they are commanded to care for countless times in the law of Moses, the widow, the orphan, the poor, the alien, or the immigrant, they’re throwing them under the bus in the name of prosperity and power. And indeed, they actually resent that God expects them to behave with justice, with honor.

Wow. They complain in the next chapter. When will the new moon be over? So that we may sell grain. And the Sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale.

Make the ephah, a measure of grain, smaller. Enlarge the shekel. and deceive with false balances in order to buy the needy for silver, to buy the helpless for sandals, and sell garbage as grain. They hate that God wants to put the brakes on what they want to do.

And that includes committing fraud by lying about the weight of grain and the value of money. They want to milk a little bit more money out of the poor who are trying to buy food. They want to adulterate the grain. They want to add stuff to the grain so that it’ll weigh more and they can make more money off it.

They want to force people into debt slavery. They want to cause the poor to be so vulnerable that they can be bought for a pair of sandals. And any attempt to shut Amos up is not going to change the reality that God will ensure that justice is done. In fact, God is offering them grace here.

God is doing them a service by offering them a prophet, by calling their attention back to the covenant that God has made with them, offering them again this off-ramp grace. to change their ways, to avoid destruction. That’s what prophets are for, to give people a chance. But regardless of how they respond, as Amos says in chapter 5, this is what’s going to happen.

Justice is going to roll down like rivers. Righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. And that’s not supposed to be this image of natural beauty or whatever. This is supposed to be the unstoppable power of a flood, of holy justice, of righteousness, Righteousness.

washing away wickedness and sin like Pharaoh’s soldiers as the Red Sea closes on them. That’s what this role of justice looks like. And so Amos’ warning here is meant for this particular people in this particular place, but it’s also timeless because I think we’re a country that thinks we’re doing pretty well, after all. Yet our cities are dotted with tents and overdoses.

Credit card interest rates are so high that they’d have been viewed as obviously criminal 100 years ago, and we don’t even think about that stuff as immoral anymore. An uncontrolled new epidemic is emerging as gambling addiction, which is accompanied by domestic violence with suicide, is through the roof. It’s entirely illegal to lose everything you have to a slot machine on your phone. That would have been viewed as immoral by the church in the past.

Support for the poor and vulnerable is being rolled back. Foreigners in our land are being mistreated worse than they’ve been in generations. And so I ask, do we desire to flee from the wrath to come or not? We can tell ourselves like Jeroboam and Amaziah that God’s not really concerned with any of our stuff. Just with our souls.

As long as we keep on praying in his name, singing his praises, putting crosses in our houses, going about our rituals. But that’s not how it works. Because God’s ruling attribute is love. Which means that God burns with anger at the mistreatment of his people and of creation.

And judgment will come. The Lord stands in our midst as a plumb line, showing right where we’re crooked if we’re willing to see it. And that plumb line, by the way, is Jesus himself. We put ourselves up to the example of Jesus and we see where we’re right and where we’re wrong.

Paul talks about this in his letter to the Colossians about how we can move forward in the midst of this destruction. He says, Once you were alienated from God, you were enemies with him in your minds, which was shown by your evil actions. But now he has reconciled you by his physical body through death to present you before God as a people who are holy, faultless, and without blame. But you need to remain well-established, rooted in faith, and not shift away from the hope that was given in the good news that you heard.

live in the grace, the power, the reckless love of Jesus. Hold on to him and his example. Defy a world of violence and injustice. That’s what the church is for.

That’s what our faith in Christ is for. Flee from the wrath to come. Lift high the cross and pull the world along with you. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.
Fairhaven Sermon 7-13-2025

July 15, 2025

Fairhaven Sermon 7 13 2025

0:00

/1111.848

Summary

In this week’s service, Rev. Dylan Parson explored the meaning of “neighbor” through a compelling examination of Luke 10 and its connection to Mr. Rogers’ legacy. He challenged the conventional understanding of neighbor as someone who shares geographic or cultural ties, referencing Pittsburgh’s diverse neighborhoods and their unique identities. Instead, Parson emphasized Jesus’ redefinition of neighbor as anyone whose life intersects with ours, highlighting the Samaritan parable as a powerful illustration of selfless love extended to an unexpected and even despised individual.

Dylan underscored that being a neighbor, in the Christian sense, is an active choice, not dictated by proximity or shared characteristics. He challenged listeners to confront their own biases and justifications for excluding others, urging them to consider who they might be overlooking as potential neighbors. Ultimately, he emphasized that embracing this broader definition of neighbor—loving those we might instinctively avoid—is a matter of eternal significance, echoing Jesus’ call to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Transcript

You know, you’re originally going to get a sermon with both of these passages in it. I was going to do the Luke and the Amos. I didn’t want to talk for an hour. So we might go back next week and do Amos because I got about six pages in and I’m like, you know what? We’ll wait.

All right. Yes. If you use the word neighbor in Pittsburgh, there’s an image and a voice that inevitably Yes. comes to mind, right? A zip-up sweater, maybe? Mr.

Rogers defined what a neighborhood is for generations of Americans. His imprint in this region, his home in particular, is even bigger. He’s become something of a saint around here. When Mr.

Rogers welcomed us all into his living room to spend some time with the goldfish and, God help us, Lady Elaine, by asking, won’t you be my neighbor, it’s worth looking a little bit more closely to ask exactly what he meant by that. Be my neighbor, right? Obviously, you and I and millions of PBS watchers were not Fred Rogers’ literal neighbors, unless you happened to live in Squirrel Hill during that 33-year time span. Right? Maybe some of you did. Some of you might have been his neighbors.

At least that’s the way we tend to understand the word neighbor, right? But we were invited to be his neighbors in a spiritual, in a Christian sort of sense. And you can certainly, you’re probably almost certainly aware of this, rather, but Mr. Rogers’ Right? training was as a Presbyterian pastor. He was a pastor first.

He was educated at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He was ordained into the Pittsburgh Presbytery. And he never left that behind, even as kind of the venue of his ministry shifted, right? And so whenever he talked about neighbors, he knew very well what he was trying to get at. He knew what language he was speaking, and that was Christian language.

He wasn’t calling us to go buy a house in Squirrel Hill. He wasn’t calling us to rent along the miniature trolley line that ran between his home on one end and the castle in the neighborhood of make-believe on the other end. That’s not what he meant. Instead, he was helping American children and hopefully their parents and later their children He wasn’t calling us to rent along the miniature trolley line that ran between his home on one end and the castle in the neighborhood of make-believe on the other end.

start to understand this really deeply Christian concept, one that Jesus talks about most memorably here in the 10th chapter of Luke. So if I were to ask you what a neighbor is, you’d probably give me a definition that stems from what a neighborhood is. And so a neighborhood, Pittsburgh has 99 of them. We have neighborhoods as huge as Carrick, as tiny as Duck Hollow.

I feel like they’re inventing new ones every couple weeks. I learn about a new one. A neighborhood is a geographical area, right? It’s often centered around a particular landmark or a focal point. Highland Park is centered around Highland Park.

In Carrick, it’s centered around the Brownsville Road corridor. In Overbrook, it’s centered around us. Wow. I mean, the ghost of what used to be Overbrook’s Main Street back in the old days.

And especially true here in Pittsburgh, a neighborhood is also home to a particular, like, hyper-local culture. which could be ethnic, it could be racial, it could be economic, it could be something else. I mean, like, try telling someone from Overbrook that they live in Carrick and see how they respond. Think about this.

Shadyside is rich. Bels Hoover is the tight-knit center of gravity for the black community in South Pittsburgh. Beach View has this growing Latino population. Brookline is a more affordable, semi-suburban area.

Young families often buy their first house there. Right? Polish Hill used to be Polish. And now it’s known for this punk rock kind of subculture that’s there. So given all this, you might tell me that your neighbor is someone who lives in your neighborhood.

And at the very least, that would be a neighbor who would share geographic roots with you, cultural roots as well. And so that would seem to give a relatively cut and dry answer to the question a legal expert uses to try to trick Jesus in Luke 10. Who is my neighbor? Someone who lives in my neighborhood. Well, maybe not.

It might not be that straightforward. Okay. So for context as to what’s going on here in Luke 10, this legal expert serving kind of as a challenger, an antagonist of Jesus, he’s trying to catch him saying something heretical, something that’s against the law of Moses that will prove that he’s this false teacher who needs to be condemned and ignored. There are a lot of those floating around, so you see why they were doing this.

And so the legal expert is asking this sequence of questions, and each of them he’s hoping is just a little bit harder trying to trip Jesus up. So he starts with a really big picture, kind of the fundamental question. What must I do to gain eternal life? And Jesus answers, well, what does scripture tell you? Good answer, Jesus. And this is an answer that can’t be wrong since it puts the focus back on the legal expert.

It makes him answer and it makes clear that Jesus is not coming up with some newfangled theology. So the legal expert gives his answer and he says, You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. And this is verbatim scripture. This is straight out of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, the law of Moses, Deuteronomy 6.

5 and Leviticus 19.8 to be specific. That’s word for word Old Testament. And this is the centerpiece, the kind of scaffolding around which the entire law of Moses is built.

This is the law that Jews have lived by for thousands of years. And so Jesus confirms, yes, exactly. Do that. Do that and you will live.

But the legal expert pushes further. Do that. He thinks that he can maybe trip Jesus up on the details. So, ah, okay, we know who God is, but who is my neighbor? I know God, I can love God, but who’s my neighbor? Who specifically am I obligated to love? How big is this circle of care that I’m supposed to be responsible for? And I don’t know about you, but this is a question that I wrestle with constantly.

Okay. Who is my responsibility? So this is where we and he, the legal expert, think that we’re going to get some specific answer from Jesus. You got to love these people. These people aren’t your problem.

And after all, rabbis in the Jewish tradition, and Jesus was a rabbi, keep that in mind, they painstakingly debate details like this in the Torah. They come up with all these specific regulations that help people apply the law to their daily lives. That’s a lot of what rabbis do. Think about the specificity even today with which the Jewish community treats regulations around Sabbath, what you’re allowed to do, what you’re not.

How you keep kosher, what you can eat, what you can’t, what you can touch, and when. All that stuff. All of that gets hammered out in debate over the years. But Jesus here isn’t interested in debating anybody.

He’s not interested in making any kind of explicit legal argument, making a ruling on the law. Instead, and this is extremely irritating because he does it to anybody who wants to debate him, he tells a story. He says, He tells a story. He placed him on his own donkey and he brings him to the inn in order to sleep and recuperate.

He finds a motel six along the road, puts him up there, tends to him. And even then, whenever he has to leave and continue on his journey, the Samaritan keeps caring for the beaten man. He leaves money with the innkeeper to make sure that he’s still got a place to stay, make sure that he’s well fed, make sure that he gets medical care. And then he promises the innkeeper that when he comes back through, he’ll pay whatever the balance is, whatever it costs to take care of this guy, he’ll make it right.

So finishing the story, Jesus asks the legal expert, which one of these three was a neighbor? And the legal expert, again, is forced to answer his own question. The Samaritan is the one who has been a neighbor. and we can be sure that this is not the answer that he wants. Okay.

He’s forced to concede that it’s the right answer, but it’s not the answer that he wants to give. It’s not the answer that we’re going to want to give either. Because Jesus has fundamentally redefined what the meaning of neighbor is, transforming it from what we think it means to something unrecognizably different. Because the thing is, the Samaritan is literally not this beaten up guy’s neighbor.

He’s literally not. He’s not the legal expert’s neighbor. He’s not Jesus’ neighbor. It’s right there in his name.

He’s a Samaritan. He’s not even from their country. He’s from Samaria. He’s from a different place, a different ethnicity, a different religion, right? And more than that, this is something that has gotten often kind of obscured in the telling of this story over the years.

The Samaritans are some of the most hated enemies of the Jews in those days. The Jews and the Samaritans despised each other. Their history diverged from the Jewish peoples in such a way that they were like almost feuding cousins because they started as one people. But then after the exile, the Samaritans sort of changed their religion and they worshiped God on a different mountain in Samaria.

They worshiped God on Mount Gerizim while the Jews worshiped God in Judea on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, right? And this sounds small, but it’s a huge sticking point. I mean, there’s Samaritans still around today, by the way, like 700 of them. But they are completely contradictory because as far as the Jewish people are concerned, the Samaritans are worshiping a different God. They are traitors.

They are blasphemers to the God they once shared. They didn’t hold on. And so there’s this really deep ancient ethnic heritage here. It had actually increased a little bit in the 200 years before Jesus came on the scene due to a couple historical events.

This was peak Samaritan hatred time. And so the Jewish people oppress and reject the Samaritans. They hate the Samaritans. So much so, and we see this elsewhere in the Gospels, that Jews do their absolute best to go around Samaria when they’re traveling.

If they have to take a much longer route, they will because they don’t want to go there and see those people. And it’s not like it’s tucked off to the side. Samaria is like right there. we can be pretty sure that even the innkeeper in this story is probably not happy when a Samaritan walks in the door and asks to rent a room.

He doesn’t want him, with his funny accent, his different clothes. But who is the one who behaves as a neighbor? And don’t forget this part. Go back to the original question the legal expert asked. Who then is the one, by implication, who’s in the position to inherit eternal life? Because those questions were one and the same.

That was the original question. And the answer from Jesus is not the Israelite priest, not the Levite who’s another ancestral member of the Jewish religious elite. It is this heretical, hated foreigner, the Samaritan. Jesus has thrown out completely this idea that we are foremost neighbors to the people who are like us, who live near us, who share our culture, our status, our religion, our language.

That stuff might matter in the secular world, but it’s not of concern to Christians. It’s not our problem. No, if you want to inherit eternal life, Jesus says, you are to love your neighbor as yourself. And your neighbor, as far as God is concerned, is everyone whose life interacts with yours.

Neighborness is not a function of geography, of culture, of shared citizenship. And you can easily choose not to be a neighbor to the person who lives next door to you. Plenty of people do that. You can easily not be a neighbor, in Jesus’ definition, to the person who is literally your neighbor.

It’s two different kinds of neighbors. And the same way you can be a neighbor to say a child in Gaza, a persecuted Christian in Nigeria or China, a Salvadoran refugee family. Right? You can do that. You can be a neighbor to those people regardless of if they live next to you.

Fewer do that. To be a neighbor is something that you choose. It’s not dictated by where you buy a house or by where you rent an apartment. And here’s the important thing in this story.

If you’re a Christian, Jesus Christ himself requires you to make that choice. Jesus makes this a matter of eternal life and death, does he not? Because again, the original question the legal expert asked was, how do I inherit eternal life? And the final answer that they come to is be like that Samaritan. who has acted with selfless love towards a man who was raised to hate him in a country that wanted him to go back to where he came from, or at the very least, just get out of here. And so we see in this parable, and we know from real life, that religious people who should know better are often the worst at this.

Perhaps it’s because we’re deep enough into scripture, into faith, into calling ourselves Christians, that we can end up in so many situations like this legal expert. We find ourselves scrambling to come up with a good Christian sounding reason why this teaching doesn’t apply to us. It doesn’t apply to our specific situation. but we will, like the legal expert, end up confronting Jesus face-to-face, and he will make the truth unavoidable.

So I’ll ask you a question here, and this is not a rhetorical one, but I’m also not asking you to answer out loud. As you have heard Jesus’ parable about this hated foreigner who pours out his life for a stranger, whom Jesus says ends up being a better believer in God than the professionals, Who is your neighbor? And then, who is the individual in your life? The group in this world? The population that makes you ask, but surely not them, right? but surely not them, because that’s what this legal expert is thinking, but surely not them. He’s coming up with reasons. You’re coming up with reasons.

I’m coming up with reasons. Right? I’m sure that the Holy Spirit makes this specific in your heart. Look, the Levite and the priest probably had excellent, compelling reasons why they had to leave that beaten man on the side of the road. They did have good reasons.

Many preachers have speculated about this over the years. Touching him would make them impure, and they need to be pure in order to do their priestly jobs. Maybe they were on their way to deal with a life or death situation. Maybe they had to go meet a congregant who was dying, right? Right? Maybe it was reasonable to suspect that this guy lying in the ditch was there as a trap, a lure, bait, putting them at risk of being victims themselves.

That’s an age-old scam. Maybe he was a criminal himself. Maybe he was reaping the consequences of his own actions, right? Jesus doesn’t care. I think that’s very clear here.

Jesus doesn’t care. Whatever bulletproof reasons we might come up with for why someone isn’t our neighbor, for why they aren’t worthy of love, of dignity, of care, the same way that we are and our families are, well, those bulletproof reasons are our reasons. They’re not God’s reasons. They’re not.

So who is your neighbor? They’re not. Jesus tells us not to let your answer stand between you and eternal life. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Amen.
Fairhaven Sermon 7-6-2025

July 7, 2025

Fairhaven Sermon 7 6 2025

0:00

/917.28

Summary

In this week’s service, Rev. Peg Bowman reflected on her recent trip to England and France, sharing impressions from her time at Oxford and her visits to London and Paris. She highlighted the importance of kindness from strangers, sharing several heartwarming anecdotes from her travels – a waiter sharing a special dish in London, a fellow attendee providing service details for Notre Dame in Paris, and even joining a group singing “Happy Birthday” in a London elevator. These experiences underscored the profound impact of simple acts of generosity and the power of connection, particularly when encountering those outside one’s familiar circles.

Drawing a connection to today’s Gospel reading about Jesus sending out his disciples, Rev. Peg emphasized the importance of embodying that same spirit of welcoming and providing for strangers. She encouraged the congregation to be mindful of opportunities to show small kindnesses, recognizing that these acts, however seemingly insignificant, reflect God’s love and contribute to a more connected and compassionate community. The overarching theme was about recognizing and reciprocating the kindness we experience and extending it to others, mirroring God’s own graciousness and creating a more welcoming world.

Transcript

So good morning. Yes, I am back as of this last Thursday night and it’s good to be back. And I thank you all so much for helping to make this trip possible and for encouraging me on this opportunity to study at Oxford for a week. The course I attended Let’s just say both my mind and my heart are full right now and I am still processing.

So I will share a few impressions this morning, but there will be more to come in the weeks and the months ahead. So to kind of summarize where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing, I was overseas for just a little bit over two weeks. and the seminar I attended was a week long, so I arrived in England four days early and left four days afterwards. During the four days before the seminar, I was in London, mostly visiting churches, including the Methodist Central Hall.

And I was hoping to meet some of the people who work at the Central Hall and find out more about how they serve the people of London, but unfortunately that wasn’t possible and I probably should have tried to make arrangements for that before I left the States. But I learned a little bit about the Hall. The Methodist Central Hall, which is literally right across the street from Westminster Abbey, is a working church. but it also doubles as a venue for concerts and plays and meetings.

So most of it’s not open to the public most of the time. The one part of the hall that is open and that I was able to visit was their cafe, which is currently in the basement while the street cafe is being remodeled. The cafe offers coffees and teas and homemade pastries, a sandwich bar, a soup bar, basically a place to have breakfast or lunch if you’re looking for a pleasant and reasonably priced place to sit down and have a meal in London, which can be difficult to do. So it was cool to see all the people from all over the world speaking so many languages and coming to this place to share food and fellowship really was an oasis in the center of the city.

So visiting churches took up most of my first four days. Thank you. By the way, I was also, I stopped by for a service at St. Paul’s Cathedral and I noticed the statue of John Wesley below the main doors had a bouquet of flowers that had been left at the feet of the statue.

It had been some time, it hadn’t been removed, and I just thought that was cool. So there we are. And then the four days after the seminar, well, one day I used for shopping, ’cause when you’re in Europe, you have to shop, right? But the highlight of the last four days was an overnight trip to Paris, traveling by train. The journey is just over two hours from London.

I had no idea it was so close and so quick. And I had been wanting to see Notre Dame again after that horrible fire. because I’d been there once in high school and you know that feeling you get when an old friend has been ill and that desire to be there and see how they’re doing. I needed to visit an old friend, you know.

So I’m thrilled to say the cathedral is completely open. It is gorgeous. Work still continues on the outside of the building, but the interior is finished. It is stunning.

Both of the rose windows survived. So did most of the artwork. All these things have been cleaned and restored. It looks beautiful.

So I attended a service at five in the afternoon there, which of course was a Catholic service in Latin. and the service sheets were translated into French. So I was confused in two languages at once, right? I got the general idea. And I’ll have photos to share as soon as I can get them all organized.

Meanwhile, the highlight of the trip, the whole purpose, the seminar at Oxford, offered a week’s teaching on the subject of the creation. And when I signed up for this, I thought, wrongly, that this would be a week spent digging deep into Genesis, right? I mean, because we did study Genesis, but the speakers who came from around the world also shared about other aspects of creation, right? Things like what the Apostle Paul teaches about creation in his letters, what Isaiah has to say about creation, what Scripture tells us about our relationship with God’s creation, how do we work well with this creation that God has given us to tend? How do we pray for creation? How do other cultures, such as our African brothers and sisters, relate to creation? The teachings and the conversations were both deep and wide, and I hope to share highlights with you over the coming months. For today, though, I wanted to share something a little bit more personal, and something that ties in with today’s scripture reading, today’s gospel reading. The scripture for today in the Gospel of Luke talks about a time when Jesus sent the disciples out two by two to villages and towns that they hadn’t visited before to share the good news of the gospel and to heal the sick.

And the purpose of the mission trip was to prepare the way for the Lord, to get people ready to know Jesus, to receive God’s truth, and to know God’s love. And this is still our mission today, maybe not quite in the same way, but as Christian believers, our mission is to share the good news of Jesus and to bring healing into a world where people are hurting and to prepare the way for the Lord’s return. The first thing I notice in this scripture passage is what the disciples took with them. Speaking as someone who just came home from a long journey, I was amazed by what the disciples didn’t have.

They had no suitcases, no backpacks. As Jesus says, no purse, that is no money, no changes of clothing, no extra sandals, no provisions at all. And the disciples are traveling to places they’ve never been for. So for me, this past trip, it was to places I’d been before.

So I knew where to go, what to do, how to relate to the local culture. The disciples knew none of these things. They had to rely completely and totally on the kindness and generosity of strangers. Now in the law of Moses, God says to God’s people, this is in Deuteronomy chapter 10, the Lord your God is the God of gods and the Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial, takes no bribe, who executes justice and For the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing, you shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

In the days of Jesus… This law of Moses was still in effect and very much expected.

This was expected behavior, caring for strangers, in this case, caring for the disciples. Men who were not foreigners, they came from the same country, but they came from distant cities and they didn’t know anyone in town. So they were complete strangers to the people there. And the disciples came with an unusual message.

The kingdom of God is near. Their mission was almost, not quite, but almost, a litmus test to see if the people of that town would obey the law of Moses. And, of course, the disciples were depending on the people being faithful and generous because they had nothing, nothing to offer but the gospel. Jesus told them that if a village refused to offer them food and a place to stay, that they should shake the dust off their feet as they left, off their sandals, and woe to that city.

The kindness of strangers means a great deal to a person who is traveling. this And that’s the number one thing I took away from this journey. The kindness of strangers makes all the difference in the world. As a traveler, just a few examples, as a traveler, one of my greatest daily concerns was staying hydrated.

I know, I mean, you don’t have a kitchen to go to, right? I noticed that in large cities like London and Paris, where there are a lot of visitors. Bottled water is on sale almost every street corner, and it is so needed, especially this summer when temperatures have been in the 90s in London and over 100 in Paris, which is extremely unusual for both cities. People who come in frequent contact with travelers are profoundly aware of our need for water, and they help supply it. Kindness to strangers unlooked for and unasked for is a God thing in very practical ways.

And I wanted to share a few of these stories with you about people I met, just modern day stories of people caring for a stranger. The first story happened when I was eating dinner at a neighborhood Chinese restaurant in London. This restaurant was near my hotel. It became one of my favorite places to eat while I was there.

It was real Chinese, man. There’s quite a few Chinese families in the neighborhood. And more often than not, when I was there, I heard a lot of languages other than English being spoken. One night as I was waiting for my dinner, the waiter came to the table next to mine where a Chinese woman and her daughter were sitting, and he did this presentation, right? He’s like scooping food, like, you know, all this, and laying greens, and it’s just gorgeous, gorgeous.

And, And when he was done, I asked him quietly, What did you just serve? I’ve never seen anything like it. And the mother overheard my question, and switching into perfect English, she said, Hand me your bread plate, and let me give you some. There’s way too much here for us. And she scooped out onto my plate what I discovered was lobster and noodles.

It was good. The kindness of a stranger, you know. Another kindness happened when I was at Oxford. One of my fellow seminar attendees was from France, and when he heard about my plans to visit Notre Dame, and that I was hoping to attend a service on Monday afternoon, that being the only day I could be there.

He logged onto Notre Dame’s website, which of course is in French, found the times of the services for Monday, and then held up his cell phone and said, Take a picture of my phone, so I’d have a copy of the service schedule. That photo became my guide while I was there. Again, kindness of stranger. The third story was one I had a hand in.

And this one happened in London on a Friday afternoon rush hour. I was taking the subway back to my hotel, the underground as they call it, London’s subway system, which is an engineering marvel. I could go on and on. The place amazes me.

So I just wander around looking at it. The train platforms there are so deep down that they were used as bomb shelters during World War II. And because of this, people often need to take elevators to get up and down from the trains. So here we were, a whole bunch of people at rush hour, waiting for an elevator.

And I noticed a group of young women in their late teens or early 20s up front by the elevator door, laughing and giggling and chatting. And one of them was wearing a tiara that said, ‘Happy Birthday.’ And the elevator we got into, of course, is a little bit bigger than you normally find like in a hotel. It’s more like a cattle car.

You enter from the back exit to the front. And so the young ladies got on first and they were up towards the front and I was the last one to squeeze into the back. And the doors shut. And of course, as in elevators everywhere, when the door closes, conversation stops.

At which point I called out from the back, so are we going to sing happy birthday or what? And the girls up front busted out laughing. And one of them says, great idea, and starts to sing. And so on that Friday night, an elevator packed full of people started their weekend by singing happy birthday to a total stranger. Small kindnesses.

light up the whole day. And I believe that’s how God meant us to live, in our communities, in our city, in the places we visit. These are examples of what Moses meant But..

. when he said, Welcome the stranger. And that’s what Jesus was looking for when he sent his disciples out two by two. Small kindnesses that draw us together, help us enjoy being human, help us to become more the people God created us to be.

So I just want to leave this suggestion with you today. Keep eyes open in the next few weeks. Watch for ways to share small kindnesses with strangers, and be aware of kindnesses that others do for us. The world we live in can feel like a very dark place sometimes, a very lonely place.

And this is one way that we can shine God’s light into dark places. And if you happen to experience someone sharing a small kindness over the next few weeks, Please tell me about it. Tell other people too, but tell me about it so we can talk about these things. These events might sound like they’re small and insignificant, but in a very real and powerful way.

They remake us into the image of God, a God who shows us small kindnesses every day of our lives. It’s our way of becoming more like the Lord that we love. Amen.
Fairhaven Sermon 6-29-2025

July 6, 2025

Fairhaven Sermon 6 29 2025

0:00

/828.888

Summary

In this week’s service, Pastor Cindy Seifert began by honoring the birthday of John Wesley, highlighting several key aspects of his life and teachings. She shared facts from United Methodist resources, including Wesley’s grappling with doubt, his coining of the phrase “agree to disagree,” and his surprisingly strict dietary advice – a practice he exemplified by weighing only 150 pounds! Seifert emphasized Wesley’s concept of “social holiness,” stressing the importance of community and mutual support in growing faith, and connecting it to the upcoming Independence Day celebration and the concept of freedom.

Pastor Seifert then delved into Paul’s letter to the Galatians, contrasting “the works of the flesh” (a list of negative behaviors) with “the fruit of the Spirit” (a list of positive attributes). She likened spiritual growth to gardening, emphasizing the hard work required to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit – tilling soil, planting seeds, pruning, and weeding. She concluded by referencing John Wesley’s five means of grace – prayer, scripture study, communal worship, fasting, and accountability – as essential tools for cultivating that spiritual harvest and experiencing the freedom that comes from aligning our wills with Christ.

Transcript

Good morning. I wanted to start this morning by wishing a very important person a happy birthday. Yesterday was John Wesley’s birthday. He was born June 28, 1703 and died in 1791.

He lived to be 88 years old. I was reading an article on the United Methodist website that listed 10 facts about John Wesley. Now, I’m not going to relay all 10 of them to you, but we’ll point out a few that caught my attention. The first is, he had doubts about his faith.

I think we can all relate to that one. And just like we all have at different times of our lives. But a man gave him a great piece of advice. He said, John, preach until you have faith so that you find the faith to preach.

Right? Good advice. In other words, keep moving forward to find your faith so that you have the faith to keep moving forward. We learn as we go. Okay.

Point two, he coined the term agree to disagree. I never knew that one. He found himself in a position where he could not win an argument and neither would he give up his position. And so he said, may we agree to disagree, but remain in fellowship.

Oh, if we could all remember that in the world at this time. And this little fact just cracked me up. I think you may find it amusing as well. John counseled people to eat a little less than you desire.

I think if you’ve heard this advice already this morning, you have… We’ll review Paul’s letter to the Galatians in a few moments.

But John wasn’t providing us with some sort of a diet, but rather a practice to ensure that people were not ruled by their natural desires, but were exercising control over them. He apparently adhered to his advice as he weighed in at only 128 pounds. John was a little guy. But what I found amusing about this is how modern Methodism has evolved into God be with us till we eat again.

I guess John Wesley never attended a Methodist cover dish dinner. laughter And number nine on the list of facts stood out to me. Wesley said that we need to be involved in social holiness. Hmm.

This is not synonymous with social justice. Social holiness means that we can only grow as Christians when we are in community. The preface to the 1739 hymnal, he was adamant that the gospel of Christ knows of no religion but social, and no holiness but social holiness. So we need to be in community with each other to lift each other up and move forward in growing our faith.

So happy birthday, John Wesley. Know that we continue to love you and appreciate all that you have taught us. So we are approaching that celebration of Independence Day in the US. Freedom is what we celebrate.

We believe in freedom. We fought for freedom, not just in the 1770s, but over and over again in the history of this nation. We sacrificed for freedom. Yes.

It’s a powerful statement and a patriotic declaration. But it begs the question, freedom for what? Well, of course, our answer is usually something like, Anything we want. I find eight definitions for the word freedom in the dictionary, and one of them is pretty much doing whatever we desire. However, we can hear that our forefathers considered these definitions when putting together our Constitution.

Freedom is the absence of subjection to foreign domination or despotic government. The state of not being imprisoned or enslaved. The state of being unrestricted and able to move easily. The state of not being subjected to or affected by a particular undesirable thing.

The power of self-determination attributed to the will. The quality of being independent of fate or necessity. Unrestricted use of something, such as a dog having freedom of the house. Finally, familiarity or openness in speech or behavior.

Now, doing everything we desire doesn’t really work for those of us who have chosen to follow Christ. Of course, you can argue that when our wills are perfectly aligned with Christ, then whatever we want is what He would want us to do. True, I can’t argue with that, but then how aligned are we? Let’s take another look at Paul’s letter to the Galatians and the scripture from today. And I think this first verse is very important.

For what the flesh desires is opposed to the spirit. and what the spirit desires is opposed to the flesh. For these are opposed to each other to prevent you from doing what you want. And here is where John Wesley instructed us to eat a little less.

Have you ever noticed that Paul likes lists? This sermon also has three sets of lists. Paul likes to give us a list of all things to illustrate his point. Look at verse 5:19. Now the works of the flesh are obvious, and here comes the list.

sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, which I had to look up, okay? That’s opposed or hostile to something or someone. Strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, infactions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before, those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. And here Paul gives us another little list.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. Now, Paul could have shortened that list and stopped at the fruit of the Spirit is love. It encompasses all of the other attributes.

However, he wanted to guide us to the principles that provide a holy life. So now we’ve got our lists. Our stay away from this pile of divisiveness list and our gathering together and focusing our whole being into one whole self-aware, spirit-filled person list. So now what do we do with these lists? We work.

That’s what we do. To put it in a gardener’s terms, there’s soil to till. We have to break up those cold, hard hearts and get ourselves ready for the spirit. There’s seeds to plant.

We work with each other to get ourselves in line with Christ. There’s pruning to do. We need to cut off those negative feelings and those hurts and those pains. And weeds to pull.

Yes, get those old things that spring up that we don’t want in our lives and get rid of It’s not very glamorous work. It’s not sinking our teeth right into that ripe, juicy fruit of our salvation. And it’s not the mountaintop excitement of breathing the air of the Spirit and knowing without a doubt that we are alive in Christ. There are very spiritual mountaintop experiences.

If any of you have been to Jumanville, you’ve been to camp, you’ve been to the Cross of Christ on the top of the mountain, you know that that feeling of the Spirit is with you. However, we do have to come off the mountaintop and back to the real world. That’s when the work really begins to keep the spirit in your heart. There is joy when the spirit is with us.

There is enthusiasm. There is passion. But there’s work to do. There’s the daily choosing to let the Spirit lead.

The monumental effort of surrendering our will again, and again, and again. And there are tools to harvest this fruit of the Spirit. Every gardener needs tools to work on the fertile ground. The tools for this labor of sanctifying grace, letting God work in us and through us, are called the means of grace.

These are spiritual disciplines and practices that bring us back to that decision point again and take us where God would have us go. Now, John Wesley liked his list too, and he identified five instituted means of grace, not as exclusive practices, but as ones that help us understand the process of being shaped in faith. His five were prayer, searching the scriptures, communion, fasting, and gathering in groups to share our faith and hold one another accountable. These disciplines are the means by which we work toward the harvest, through which we cultivate the fruit of the Spirit within us and between us.

They are the means of living the life that Christ came to bring us, the air that we breathe so we can inhale the Spirit that takes up residence within us. They are all signs of God’s eternal spring at work in us, and we are called to the freedom that brings forth the harvest of the fruit of the Spirit. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Amen.