Searching for Sunday, Part 5: Confirmation

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

March 21, 2021

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

Lord make me a channel of your disturbance.

Where there is apathy, let me provoke,

Where there is silence, may I be a voice.

Where there is too much comfort, and too little action, Grant disruption.

Where there are doors closed and hearts locked, Grant me the willingness to listen.

When laws dictate and pain is overlooked . . .

When tradition speaks louder than need. . .

Disturb us, O Lord, Teach us to be radical.

Grant that I may seek rather to do justice than to talk about it;

To be with as well as for the poor;

To love the unlovable as well as the lovely;

To touch the passion of Jesus in the Pain of those we meet;

To accept responsibility to be church.

Lord, make me a channel of your disturbance.

 

Psalm 51: 1-12

Psalm 51^[a]

For the director of music. A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.

¹ Have mercy on me, O God,
    according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
    blot out my transgressions.
² Wash away all my iniquity
    and cleanse me from my sin.

³ For I know my transgressions,
    and my sin is always before me.
⁴ Against you, you only, have I sinned
    and done what is evil in your sight;
so you are right in your verdict
    and justified when you judge.
⁵ Surely I was sinful at birth,
    sinful from the time my mother conceived me.
⁶ Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb;
    you taught me wisdom in that secret place.

⁷ Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean;
    wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
⁸ Let me hear joy and gladness;
    let the bones you have crushed rejoice.
⁹ Hide your face from my sins
    and blot out all my iniquity.

¹⁰ Create in me a pure heart, O God,
    and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
¹¹ Do not cast me from your presence
    or take your Holy Spirit from me.
¹² Restore to me the joy of your salvation
    and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.

 

A Message

Searching for Sunday, Part 5: Confirmation

 

Friends, we’re now up to part 5 of this sermon series, and Evans titled this section of her book “confirmation”. Confirmation is an interesting practice across our churches. Some of us were confirmed at age 10, some of us were confirmed at age 18, some of us were confirmed as adults upon joining a church, and some of us never went through confirmation. Some of us took two years of confirmation classes, and some of us spent just a few weeks preparing to take confirmation vows. Some of our churches had enormous confirmation classes, and some of our churches had so few children that there were never enough at one time to put together a confirmation program. All of our experiences with this word “confirmation” are different, and all of our experiences are valid.

 

As with much of this book, it’s not so much the literal practice of confirmation that Evans reflects on here, but rather what we could learn from it, and how it could transform our faith. At this point in the narrative, Evans is officially “unchurched”. She has left the church she grew up in, she tried to start a New Faith Community and it fell apart, and now she doesn’t go anywhere in particular on Sunday mornings. Because she has some free time on the weekends she visits a monastery and learns a very deep lesson after hearing the faith stories of those who lived there, and after examining their mosaic art. Evans realizes all this time she had been way to hard on herself. She never needed to have this totally solid, single-trajectory faith. God never expected her to spend her whole life in one church, or to build a faith life from only one kind of material. She was a “cobbler of faith”, and that was a beautiful thing. She had pieced together a faith story that was all her own from all the different little moments of searching. She learned from every church she visited, from every attempt she made to search for something greater, from everything success and every failure. And all those little moments prepared her for some big things.

 

This is what the practice of confirmation is, if you experienced it. Many little moments prepare you for that big moment when you answer the questions and take the vows in front of your congregation. Every encounter you ever had with the Divine went into it—every bed time prayer, every song you sang in Sunday school, every episode of Veggie Tales you watched, every picture you colored of Jesus. Every time you picked up the Bible and read, every time you sang a hymn, every time you laughed or cried with a believer. Every hand you held, every praise you lifted up, every moment when you felt God in your heart—all those little things built you up to use your faith for something big.

 

But here’s the thing. That “something big”, so often, isn’t a day when you wear a pretty dress to church, answer some questions in front of your parents while they snap pictures, and then go eat cake. Or, if nothing else, that is neither the only nor the most important “something big”. More often in this messed up world, all those little moments where you learned how to listen for the voice of the Creator in this world prepared you for a day when you needed to invoke your faith in order to stand up for God’s love and justice.

 

A day like last Tuesday.

 

A white man from Atlanta invoked his faith as he visited three area spas and murdered eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent. The man admitted to a cyber sex addiction, and proclaimed that the spas were sources of temptation that he felt called to eliminate by any means necessary. That this man so strongly associated women of Asian descent with pornography that he felt justified in murdering them in the name of God, and that he was arrested without a hair on his head harmed, tells you everything you need to know about toxic religion, misogyny, and white supremacy, all wrapped into one horrible act of violence.

 

People who love Jesus, this is the tragic irony we face in this world—just like how our faith builds little by little to a big moment, so to does racism escalate. Racism doesn’t begin where it did last Tuesday. Racism begins with small thoughts, comments, and “jokes” that we allow to fly under the radar. Those things, when we’re consistently exposed to them, stick. They pave the way for bullying, microaggressions, and pervasive prejudiced attitudes. Those things build up to discriminatory laws and practices. This justifies calls for violence from hate groups, who then carry out acts of violence, like we saw last Tuesday. We’ve spent our whole human history climbing up this pyramid of white supremacy. It’s especially painful that those in power dismiss this hatred as “a guy having a bad day”, and as “not clearly racially motivated”. The only block of the pyramid above the one this man reached is genocide. Do we need to see him reach the peak before we speak up?

 

Truly, friends who follow Jesus, we are being called upon to utilize all those smaller moments of growth in our discipleship to use our big voices right now. And we need to call up the fortitude to speak out against all those smaller incidences of racism before they ever escalate to the taking of lives.

 

I wasn’t originally going to preach on Psalm 51 this week. I had other plans. And reading it, it’s the type of Psalm I hesitate to use in worship because the content is challenging. Verse five, in particular, makes me very uncomfortable: “Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.” The last thing I want to plant in any of y’all is shame, and that’s what I take upon first glance from that verse. But, when I read that verse through the lens of horrible days like last Tuesday, it makes a tragic amount of sense.

 

We live in a world that has taught us deeply racist lessons since before we were born. None of us gets to claim we’re “not racist”, or “color blind”, or “not like that.” Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. Our society is like a huge house with a fire that started in the basement. People who occupy the rooms closer to it—our BIPOC friends—have suffered first, and hardest, from burns and smoke inhalation. If you say you’re color blind, then you’re ignoring the inferno that is ravaging through your friends’ bedrooms. And I’ve got news for you—we white people may occupy the higher floors of the house with the pretty view out the windows, but it’s all the same burning house. If we just sit here in our sofas watching racially charged old cartoons and telling our kids “it’s only racist if you insist on seeing it that way”, that smoke will slowly seep into your home until it suffocates you. The forces of white supremacy, far from the rallying cry of “all lives matter”, value no lives at all, and will come for yours in time. For you to think none of this has anything to do with you is like saying you somehow don’t breathe air. The smoke will only rise.

 

Like the Psalmist, who pleads for God to cleanse him of all of his transgressions, we must turn to our Creator and ask for Divine help in cleansing every facet of our lives of racism. It’s neither an easy nor fun process. We have to be willing to summon our collective strength of faith to put that fire out, and then we have to clean up the wreckage. Many things we always enjoyed the privilege of having access to will be so charred that we’ll have to throw them away. The waters of mercy for those engulfed in flames will also destroy things we’re very used to. Like the Psalmist, we must closely examine not only what we see around us in the world—ongoing discriminatory laws, neighbors with backwards attitudes—but also the thoughts and attitudes we see within. Fighting racism, first and foremost, means fighting it within yourself.

 

This is the big moment, Church. Like Esther, God has prepared us for such a time as this. Our AAPI siblings have suffered not only the terrorism of last Tuesday, but a recent spike in hate crimes and an entire year of being blamed for the coronavirus pandemic. They can’t wait another minute for our help, and they shouldn’t have to. In the immortal words of the old hymn, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”

 

Amen.

 

I invite you to receive the benediction: Our God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, will guard our going out and coming in from this time on and forevermore. As all of God’s people we say together: Amen.