The Sermon for the Valley Ridge District Conference
Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I lived within a certain set of assumptions, ones that were rarely, if ever questioned, explored, or critiqued. They just were. These assumptions were taught to me in school and reinforced at home, or taught to me at home and reinforced at school, and the children and youth of my generation were expected to consistently abide by them. These assumptions included things such as being told at the dinner table that when I said I was full, I must at least finish the meat on my plate. When I competed in little league baseball and was standing in the batter's box, a pitch was a strike if umpire said so, regardless of how obviously low and outside it was.
Perhaps the most unquestionable assumption of my childhood, one that no matter where I found myself, at school or at home or anywhere else, was that it was always dangerous to swim less than an hour after eating. If you did this, I was told, you were guaranteed to drown. I am the descendant on both sides of my family of more Chesapeake Bay watermen than I can count, and I assure you that you do not have a childhood infused with this kind of influence without hearing terrifying stories of people drowning, which made all of this worse.
When I was a child, my family were members of a local pool and during my elementary school summers, before I was afforded the privilege to ride my bike to go swimming, my mother would pack lunches and accompany my brother and me for a day at the pool. On those days, this was the kind of conversation that would occur after we had eaten our sandwiches:
"Now boys, I want you to go sit those chairs until I tell you to get in the pool."
"It's hot. Why can't we swim now?"
"You just ate. You need to wait an hour before you go swimming."
"Why?"
"Because you will drown."
"But if that is true, why does the pool have a snack bar?"
"Go sit in your chair. I will let you know when it is 1:30."
As an aside, I once went on a cruise and saw people eating and swimming at the same time. Do with that data point what you will.
The thing is, children do not hear about this anymore. They no longer live with this assumption, because at some point, people who study the human body researched it, discussed it, and separated facts from the things that were assumed because they had always been assumed, and they had always been assumed simply because they had never been questioned.
In my vocation as a pastor currently serving as a district superintendent, I see this manifest in assumptions not uncommon in local churches, the ones here on the Valley Ridge District, as well as in churches across the Virginia Conference. Specifically, I sometimes encounter these unexplored assumptions when I am meeting with Pastor-Parish Relations Committees of congregations who are anticipating a change in who will serve as their appointed clergy for the next season of their church's life. In these meetings, I have leaders speak to me about the current mission of their church or charge, their opportunities for new forms of ministry, and the kind of clergy leader they will need to help them live into all that is to come.
"Talk to me about the gifts, not attributes like age, race, or gender, but the gifts your next pastor will need in order to best serve you and the community in which you are located."
It is always surprising to me how often, at some point, someone will say to me "We want someone who preaches from the Bible." One would think that preaching from the Bible would be the free space on the appointment-making bingo card, but not always. I keep waiting for someone to say to me, "Our current pastor keeps preaching from Where the Sidewalk Ends, but what we really want is the Book of Jeremiah."
To be clear, if that ever were the case, the congregation would undoubtedly have a point, and that pastor and I would definitely have a conversation about it.
The other thing that I hear with increasing frequency in these meetings is "We don't want someone who preaches politics." This is yet another one of those common, unquestioned, unexplored assumptions that more and more, is characterizing our life together in Christian community. For years, this stated assumption would be yet another item that I would write in my notes without much analysis, and that would become yet another facet of how I would comprehend the self-understanding of that particular congregation.
The other thing that I hear with increasing frequency in these meetings is "We don't want someone who preaches politics." This is yet another one of those common, unquestioned, unexplored assumptions that more and more, is characterizing our life together in Christian community.
However, for the last few years, I have been finding myself increasingly troubled by this assumption. In particular, I have found myself troubled by how unquestioned this assumption is for those of us who are tasked with the weekly means of grace that is preaching the word of God.
What does it say about us that we have carved out of our lives something that we refuse to examine in the bright glow of scripture? What does it say about us as the body of Christ, that we have given the world permission to have an arena of complete immunity from being held in contrast to the coming reign of God revealed supremely in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ? Isn't the space of differentiation between the way the world is and the way God dreams for the world to be exactly the space where God calls for the church to most visibly reside?
I largely understand where congregations are coming from with this "no politics from the pulpit" assumption. I do. While we occasionally find clergy with degrees in political science, United Methodist clergy are generally not trained in it as part of our theological education. Such courses are not requirements for clergy credentials in the United Methodist Church. Likewise, our culture is saturated with political rhetoric, and for many, time spent at church is time to be spent finding refuge from so much partisan noise.
Furthermore, in a world where so much time is spent doomscrolling hundreds of short, inane videos, to stand before a congregation and speak and be given its attention is a rare and immense privilege that should never be taken for granted and never be used in service to any power or principality other than bringing to bear God's kingdom in this time and place.
Therefore, I do not regard Christianity's dearth of critique of the political realm as a political issue, and as such, this is not exactly a sermon about politics and political matters. It is a sermon about our spiritual health and our spiritual issues. Our politics are broken because we, the people who bring them to bear are broken. Things like elections tell us a great deal about who we are and what we truly love in a "Where your treasure is there your heart will be also" kind of way.
Our spirits, our lives, and our souls are broken, and we know how in the unfolding sweep of the biblical narrative, when God's people are broken, when they are in wrong relationship with God and one another, and especially when they worship the things that they and not God have made, everything falls apart, often in ways so spectacular that it is God and only God who can heal what is broken, mend what is torn, and illumine God's ongoing promise of a future with hope.
I have been an ordained United Methodist pastor since I was 25 years old, and something a life given to this work has taught me, a refrain I have heard over and over again, is that the things we refuse to talk about will never improve. Failure to openly and honestly discuss hard things is the lubricant that allows the gears of so many harmful behaviors to continue to turn. This refusal is the fuel of the status quo, and it is a guarantor of generational trauma.
When I was serving as the pastor of a local church, I opened my email one afternoon to find a request for a meeting from someone who I did not know. He wanted me to meet with himself and a woman who he would bring with him so I could help them navigate difficulties they were working through, so we arranged a time to meet in my study in the church. When I responded to his email I asked how he found me. I had no idea who he was. His email address was not in my database, and his name was unfamiliar. "We know some of the same people," was all he would ever tell me.
Failure to openly and honestly discuss hard things is the lubricant that allows the gears of so many harmful behaviors to continue to turn. This refusal is the fuel of the status quo, and it is a guarantor of generational trauma.
When this young man and woman arrived for our meeting, it was clear to me that they were attempting to work through something deeply painful. I could see it in their body language, especially hers, with her slumped shoulders and vacant expression. As we began our time together, the man explained to me that they had established a ground rule for our discussions, which was that we could never discuss what the specific issue was that they were dealing with. I was not to ask about it, and they were not going to tell me.
I should have known then that this was not going to work, but may nature is to try to be helpful and my hope was that the Spirit was going to be in the room too, and when the Spirit is present, anything is possible.
We met three times before I stopped hearing from them. In our time together, we got nowhere. It felt like flying without instruments or building a house without tools. It was heartbreaking.
Again, what we do not talk about will never change or improve. It is one of the many reasons that Christianity is so characterized by community. God has so ordered this common life so that no one gets out of wilderness unless everyone does. And modeling what that looks like is one of the greatest gifts the United Methodist Church can offer to this world right now. Who knows better than United Methodists the deep harm that poor communication and persistent division can do? These are painful lessons that I hope we have learned through our most recent internecine battles.
In the fifteenth century, a German monk named Thomas à Kempis wrote a devotional book that would become the most widely-read Christian spiritual work after the Bible, a book called The Imitation of Christ. It includes one of my favorite quotes, one that all these centuries later still speaks to the human condition. It reads "Who wages a stronger battle than he who labors to overcome himself?"
Who wages a stronger battle than he who labors to overcome himself?
The Christian gospel treasurers the power of God to change our minds. In fact, the word "repentance" comes from the Greek word metanoia which literally means "to turn our minds around." Yet even in a world of limitless access to information, the availability of new ideas and the ability to hear new perspectives, changing our minds is not rewarded. It is scorned. It is seen as failure, as selling out. In our time, vulnerability is regarded as weakness, when Paul writes in his second Corinthian epistle that weakness is the environ in which God's strength is made perfect.
It is a spiritual issue, and it must be treated as such. A new, better, Kingdom reality will not built without the proper tools.
If our religion cannot critique our politics, it means our politics have become our religion, and there are few disasters revealed in scripture that are not somehow rooted in idolatry. This is why our fundamental assumptions must always be subject to the gospel as revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of the one who had his own share of political entanglements, who like the prophets before him, spoke truth to the powerful, and who died a political death at the hands of an empire hungry to prove a point. By uplifting the meek, he shook the palace gates of the mighty, knowing all the while exactly where it would land him.
Nicolas Poussin, The Adoration of the Golden Calf, 1633-1634
Yet, he counted the cost, choosing courage at the expense of comfort, even safety, for nothing less than the salvation of the world, for nothing less than you, me and our shared life and witness. In response, how can we do any less?
Anytime I have interviewed someone for a job, anytime I have interviewed a candidate for commissioning or ordination with the Conference Board of Ordained Ministry, I give people the benefit of the doubt, and trust that they are going to do what they say they are going to do. I take them at their word.
So, without any analysis or prognostication or concerns about bias, agendas, or spin, in his own words, our President-elect has promised to employ the levers of government in ways that will have an immediate, severe, direct, and negative impact on historically (and presently) vulnerable populations, the same kinds of people who Jesus not only names in this morning's text but with whom he assures us he has chosen to most uniquely identify, the very people who he tells us will reveal our love for him in our ongoing treatment of them.
If our religion cannot critique our politics, it means our politics have become our religion.
An important thing to remember about today's text is that it is a rare scripture that is spoken at once in the past, present, and future tenses. Jesus envisions addressing people in the present about their actions in the past and how through these actions, they have directly revealed their love for him. He then goes on to speak to the disciples of the future about the specific places where we will find him, saying to us not "I was" but "I am:" I am hungry, I am thirsty, I am the stranger, I am the naked, I am the sick, I am the prisoner."
Fritz Eichenberg, Christ of the Breadlines, 1952
The twentieth-century psychotherapist Carl Jung writes "Modern man can not see God because he doesn't look low enough." What if he is right?
I believe there is a way through this, and I will tell you what it is.
When we became United Methodists, we stood before God and our congregation and we promised that we would "resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves." To be clear, this resistance does not merely speak to time when these things are done to us personally. It speaks to when they are done at all.
No one gets out of the wilderness until everyone does.
Of course, there will always be voices around us that say this is an impossible mission, a fool's errand, that the Christian church's moment has long since passed, that we are too irrelevant, too out of touch, that we are nothing more than our most egregious mistakes, that we have sold our birthright as sign-acts of God's reign for the weak broth of the world's political power. And I am here to tell you that those voices are wrong.
When we became United Methodists, we stood before God and our congregation and we promised that we would "resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves." To be clear, this resistance does not merely speak to time when these things are done to us personally. It speaks to when they are done at all.
I am here to tell you that I am done with letting other people tell me who I am, and I am done with letting the desperate voices intent on sowing chaos and division tell me who my church, who our church is.
I am done being told it is over.
Over the years, I have seen things happen in churches that would make your hair turn white. And yet, I have seen the laity and clergy of local churches like yours be bold, courageous agents of God's transformation in ways that would never be possible without their partnership with one another and their partnership with God.
It is not over for the church, and I am here to tell you why, because I am here to tell you things I have seen, here in the living, visible faith of the churches of the Valley Ridge District of the United Methodist Church, churches including yours.
When I was still a relatively new District Superintendent appointed to the Roanoke District, I was challenged to find someone to serve a church in Riner called Mt. Elbert, the furthest western church in the Virginia Conference. An individual in the church, someone no longer there, had chased away two pastors in a little over a year. The lay supply I sent them had to leave for health reasons, and the half-dozen elderly members they had told me that they only were able to worship nine months out of the year because of their concerns about driving on mountain roads in the wintertime.
One day, as I sat in my office, I received a phone call from a woman named Dinah Akers who told me she knew Mt. Elbert was without a pastor, that she knew the people there and she knew the community. She told me she was discerning a call to ministry, and would I please assign her there as lay supply. "I have some ideas of things we can try," she told me.
I tried to talk her out of it, but quickly learned it wasn't going to work, so I did assigned her, and she went. She went into that community and she talked to people and she listened to people and she built relationships in Riner, and before long, she had developed a small children's ministry and community outreach in that tiny neighborhood, and before long, there was a kernel of hope.
And then the much larger United Methodist Church down the road, a Holston Conference church, split over disaffiliation and half the congregation came to Mt. Elbert and they stayed. Last winter, Mt. Elbert took sixteen teenagers to the annual Holston Conference youth event called Resurrection, and two of those teenagers professed faith in Christ for the very first time.
Don't tell me it's over.
Let me tell you about the work of congregations led by the Revs. Joanna Paysour, Warren Carswell, Jeff Wilson, Jennifer Fletcher and Chuck Cole. In the last two years, three pairs of churches on this district have merged into new faith communities. Huntington Court merged with Southview and created a new faith community called Genesis, then Trinity joined Greene Memorial, and Jollivue merged with St. John's. In doing this, brave saints of the church left behind what they had helped build, that which had been their holy ground for decades, and they walked away from the familiar while making room for God to do a new thing in their midst.
When the Trinity-Greene Memorial merger uprooted a United Methodist literacy ministry called KidsSoar, Windsor Hills UMC took them in so this important ministry could still live and transform lives. The former Trinity UMC building is now being developed in a way that will allow it to meet a serious need in the Roanoke area, which is the need for affordable housing for vulnerable senior citizens.
Don't tell me it's over.
Almost exactly a year ago, I received a phone call from a lay supply named Yoonsik "Bright" Lee. He was lay supply because he had surrendered his clergy credentials in the Korean Presbyterian Church in order to become a pastor in the United Methodist Church. He called to ask me to baptize some people for him. When I asked him if these baptisms were children or adults, he told me "both."
"How many baptisms are we talking about?" I asked.
"Twelve," he told me.
These people lived in Highland County, the least populous jurisdiction, including counties and independent cities in the entire Commonwealth of Virginia. Bright had been serving them for less than three months.
Don't tell me it's over.
While I am in Highland County, the two churches of the Blue Grass Charge, Blue Grass and Hightown, where the Rev. Andre Crummett is the pastor, in less than two weeks, raised funds to support UMCOR's hurricane relief in North Carolina, an amount totaling $15,000. The three churches of the nearby Monterey Charge, led by lay supply Bobbie Jo Gardner, raised another $12,000 for the same cause.
Don't tell me it's over.
In Waynesboro, the former Wayne Hills United Methodist Church is now known as Embrace Center for Community, a mission of this District, where the Rev. Jenelle Watson has created a kingdom outpost making God's abundant grace visible to the world, to and with vulnerable people. It is a place where the sick receive medical care, the hungry are fed, veterans gather together for mutual support, clothing is provided and people in need in the community are connected with resources even beyond Embrace to help them live in a world blessed with God's provision.
It is a diverse community of rich and poor and young and old and differently abled people who serve God together and who gather together each week for a community meal where the gathered are blessed and Christ is glorified, a visible witness to God's peace and justice and shalom for all people.
Don't tell me it's over.
A year ago, Christ UMC in Covington realized they had reached the end of their season of ministry as a United Methodist congregation. There were about a dozen people left and they could no longer support their large, beautiful facility and ministry to their community. They were fed up and angry; angry at the UMC, angry at the bishop, angry at the General Conference, and angry at me.
The night we gathered in their sanctuary for the church conference where they would cast their votes to cease worship and close their doors later at Annual Conference, I could tell that they were up to something. They were passing around a sheet of paper, and before they voted, they handed it to me. It was a petition requesting that their church building be kept by the Valley Ridge District and turned into another Embrace so that after they were gone, their legacy would be to serve and bless people in need in their community and beyond.
This year at annual conference, we did just that, appointing the Rev. Greg Kropff to serve as the first director of a new district ministry called Embrace Alleghany Highlands.
Don't tell me it's over.
At Asbury UMC in Christiansburg, council chair Rhonda Rogers asked their pastor, the Rev. Lance Presley to give a summary presentation of the work done this spring in Charlotte, North Carolina by the United Methodist General Conference. When his presentation was over, she remarked "This feels like it did the day when my father went out into the churchyard and put the word "United" on our sign.
She was referring to 1968. She was referring to the death of the overtly racist Methodist Central Jurisdiction, which was established in 1939 in order to segregate our black churches into their own administrative group in order to keep their voices out of our white churches. She was talking about the day that ended and we all became United Methodists.
Don't tell me it's over.
On September 11, 2001, the Rev. Dr. Dale White, our district Director of Congregational Excellence was serving as a United Methodist Navy chaplain, a Captain who was inside the Pentagon when a hijacked jet was flown into it. He has told me the story of surviving that attack, about finding his way out of the building, breathing the acrid flames of burning jet fuel, stepping over luggage and toys to get out of the building and on to the lawn to minister for days without going home to anyone who needed it. He saw humanity at its absolutely worst, its most broken and depraved, and still believed in the power of God's Holy Spirit manifest in the power of God's love to propel him to continue his work for peace and justice in this broken world and in doing so, to reflect the gleaming light of God that cannot ever be extinguished.
Don't dream it's over.
I could go on and on, but you see what I mean This is not an exhaustive list, just one that demonstrates that the Spirit is already afoot amongst us.
In order for our life together to truly reflect God's light, in order for our life together to be hope for the hopeless, faith for the faithless, healing for the hurting, and a place of reconciliation for families, friendships, communities, churches, nations, and the world, this world must see the living Christ, the Crucified Redeemer, revealed in us, by taking him at his word when he tells us that he has chosen to be incarnate uniquely in the lives and the suffering of the vulnerable.
So here's hope: all that I have seen, and all that I have heard, all that I have experienced, and all that I know has convicted me that of all the Christian disciples and the Christian congregations who I have served alongside over the course of the last twenty-eight years, there are none more gracious, none more generous, none more creative, and none any more faithful than the ones represented by the people in this room right now.
Our mandate is clear, the living Christ is present with us, and he has told us where and amongst whom we can find him. Let us never again be satisfied with simply asking God to bless what we are doing. Let us instead resolve to do that which God is blessing, and let's do it together, day after day, going into this world, to kick the darkness until it bleeds daylight.(1)
Take heart Christians of the Valley Ridge District. Christ has overcome the world.
~~~
"Lovers in a Dangerous Time" by Bruce Cockburn from the album Stealing Fire, 1984.
Sermon Posted on Rev. Forrester's Website Here