Role Models, Part 1

 Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church 

 
 

 

 A warm welcome to each worshiper today. We celebrate you and offer you our friendship and love. We are a congregation of people who seek to grow spiritually, to become more like Christ in His compassion and acceptance of everyone while growing more aware of what it really means to be Christians today. 

As a Reconciling Congregation, EPUMC affirms the sacred worth of persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities and welcomes them into full participation in the fellowship, membership, ministries, and leadership of the congregation. 

  

943 Palmer Avenue, Schenectady, NY 12309 / 518-374-4306 epumc943@gmail.com / www.easternparkway.org 

 

 

 

Order of Worship 

January 29, 2023 

10:00 a.m. 

*You are invited to rise in body or spirit. 

  

Prelude Menuet Elisabeth de la Guerre 

 
 

Greeting and Announcements 

 
 

Mission Statement: 

We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ. 

 
 

Call to Worship: 

People of God, who do you come to worship? 

We come to worship the one true God. 

How will you worship? 

Not with words alone, but by living lives 

of justice and love. 

Come, you who belong to God. 

Come, you who are foolish in the eyes of the world. 

Come and abide in God’s tent and in God’s heart, 

now and forever. 

Joanne Carlson Brown 

 
 

*Hymn O Master, Let Me Walk with Thee #430 

 
 

Prayer of Confession: 

Far too often, O God, 

we desire to look wise 

in the eyes of the world. 

We have not spoken truth with our hearts. 

We have said and done hurtful things to our friends. 

We have forgotten our true identity, 

wandering into ways that are not yours. 

We have lost the path of true worship, 

focusing on form and words rather than deeds. 

We have forgotten what true discipleship is. 

And because of this, you have a quarrel with us. 

Forgive us and help us live into becoming 

the people you have created and called us to be: 

people of justice and love and truth 

and humility, and yes, even foolishness. 

May we be fools for Christ, 

embracing our true identity, 

even in the face of the world’s scorn and derision. 

  

Assurance: 

God has called us and blesses us 

when we live God’s ways and not the world’s. 

God’s love embraces us 

even when we fall short of what God desires 

for our lives and actions. 

Know that the God of blessing 

loves and forgives us with a fierce tenderness. 

And in so knowing, may our lives and souls 

be transformed. 

 
 

Scripture Reading Matthew 5:1-12 

 

The Beatitudes 

5 When Jesus[a] saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2 And he began to speak and taught them, saying: 

3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 

4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. 

5 “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. 

6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. 

7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. 

8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. 

9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. 

10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 

11 “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely[b] on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. 

 
 

Sermon Role Models, Part 1 

 

Friends—over the next four weeks, in this space between the end of Epiphany and the beginning of Lent, the Lectionary invites us to explore this series of teachings recorded by Matthew that we have come to call the Sermon on the Mount. The teachings are all found in Matthew chapters 5 through 7, a passage that begins with today’s reading, in which Jesus sits down in the presence of his disciples and starts talking about the things he found the most important. These chapters, and especially these first twelve verses, which our tradition has nicknamed “The Beatitudes”, are dearly beloved among followers of Christ. Our love for these chapters are a huge reason for why Matthew is the first book in the New Testament. This love, and the faith this love builds in us, is also the reason that my youth group leaders told me to memorize “Matthew chapters five through seven” when I got confirmed, telling me if I ever had questions or struggles I should look there first. 

Thus, I have read these chapters thousands upon thousands upon thousands of times, as, I suspect, have many of you. I have read them quietly and loudly, while happy, sad, grieved, angry, excited, full, and empty. The #1 time these particular verses, the Beatitudes, this list of attributes that Jesus lifts up as blessed, have come up in my ministry, has been funeral services. It’s been abundantly comforting to friends and family of those who have passed on to life eternal to hear what are among the most familiar words in scripture, words that detail a life well lived, and then to talk about how your loved one did all they could to live that kind of life. It’s the greatest thing any of us can aspire to in this life, to live as Jesus commanded us to. None of us is perfect, and we hold that truth dear in Wesleyanism. We are “striving toward perfection”, as John Wesley himself proclaimed. We do our best. We have good and bad days, selfish and selfless moments, choices made with love and choices made without, sunny and shady sides of our hearts. But every time I come back to these three chapters in Matthew, I like to lift up people that didn’t live up to these ideals perfectly, but tried really hard. So over the next four weeks, I’m going to lift up stories of people just like that, who weren’t perfect, but who tried really hard. 

Today’s role model of the faith was born on March 20, 1928 in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, forty miles outside of Pittsburgh. His dad worked at a very successful brick factory, and his mom volunteered for the local hospital, and regularly knit sweaters that she donated. An only child until the age of eleven, when his parents adopted his sister, he had a difficult and lonely childhood. Overweight and suffering from asthma, he experienced bullying, didn’t have many friends, and had to miss a lot of school. In the absence of other children to call his friends, he started “making friends”, as it were, of his own, and got interested in storytelling with puppets. He was also very interested in music, and started taking piano lessons at the age of 5. 

He began to flourish more in high school when, by his own account, he made friends who “found out the core of him was okay”. He learned how precious a thing it is to be loved for exactly who you are. He graduated from college in 1951 with a Bachelor of Music degree, and then felt a calling to the ordained ministry. He went on to Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and was ordained by the United Presbyterian Church in 1963. His original goal was to work in educational ministry settings, because he really loved teaching and nurturing children. 

However, his ministry ended up taking a huge turn owing to the jobs he worked between college and seminary, at a TV station. He learned the ins and outs of the television industry during that time, and also learned just how much he hated TV, especially the cartoons that were marketed to children throughout the ‘50s and early ‘60s. Fast paced, devoid of educational content, and loaded with commercials for snacks and toys, he was offended that networks thought children were that shallow and impulsive. After finishing his seminary work, despite his best intentions, he discovered that television was exactly where he needed to be to minister to children as he felt called to. He wanted to slow down the pace of kids’ TV shows, make music and songs central, provide educational and moral content, address the big questions and issues that kids faced, and incorporate the puppet animal characters that he had developed over the years.  

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I was talking about Fred Rogers, a central figure of my childhood, and a man who planted such a huge legacy in public access educational programming for children that it will live on for a very long time. There’s so many wonderful things to lift up about Mr. Rogers that I could keep you here all day listing them, and nobody wants that. But what I admire most about him, that I lift up here, is that he believed children needed to learn a few core truths that would carry them through their lives—he believed kids needed to learn that they were lovable exactly as they were, that they could deal with their feelings without hurting themselves or others, and that kindness is world changing. If you’re of an age to have grown up watching any era of Mr. Rogers, then you know that those lessons stuck for a reason. They were prophetic. They were ministry in action, the mouth of God speaking to our ears. They were lessons that taught us we, too, could be peace makers, that our meekness was not a lack of strength, that the pure heart of a child has value in seeing God like no other can, that we deserve comfort when we mourn and we can give one another that, and we learned a palatable form of righteousness that we can take to this world today, as adults. 

And boy, do we need that now. As I wrote the manuscript for this sermon, my phone pinged with a terrible headline: three dead and four injured in a Saturday morning shooting in Los Angeles, the fourth mass shooting that California has experienced just this month. It’s been only a week since the last California mass shooting, one at a dance studio in Monterey Park that took eleven lives and injured nine others. CBS News estimates forty mass shootings have taken place in just this calendar year. In case your heart is too heavy to do the math, that’s more than one a day. 

This follows weeks of unrest over the conferring of the new Speaker of the House, classified documents being discovered at Former Vice President Mike Pense’s home, the death of 29-year-old Memphis resident Tyre Nichols at the hands of law enforcement, the state of Utah moving toward banning gender-affirming medical care, and, right here in Schenectady, our City Council refusing to recommend the Clean Slate Act to NYS Legislature, a bill that would have protected those who have served jail time from discrimination when searching for a job and housing. And that’s just the tip of what the internet availed me. This is a very broken world. We hunger and thirst for righteousness and look to be filled. We’re poor in spirit. We destroy peace instead of making it. And we cloud up our hearts with prejudice and violence so much that we no longer see God in ourselves or one another. 

The first bit of Good News I have for you is that Jesus taught that when we mourn, we will be comforted. It’s a certainty. When we hunger and thirst for righteousness we will be filled. And when we’re poor in spirit we will receive the kingdom. All those promises are at our finger tips, but we have to work very hard to be able to touch them. The push that will help us get there may come from words so beautiful and wise that they could only have been spoken by an ordained minister with a TV show who was also a musical puppeteer: 

"We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It's easy to say 'It's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.' Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes." 

The greatest obstacle to a better world isn’t all the evil we’re drowning in. It's that we’ve gotten way too used to it all. We’ve become inward focused and self-centered, and we’ve left others to fend for themselves. We fail to understand that we have to help others thrive so that they’ll be around to help us when we need it. Communities are interdependent. Let’s take some serious responsibility for what we see around us, starting right here in Schenectady, and create a merciful, just world. 

Amen.  

 
 

*Hymn The Gift of Love #408 

 
 

Offering Be Thou My Vision Craig Courtney, arr. 

 
 

Offertory  

 
 

 

*Doxology #94 

*Prayer of dedication             

 
 

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer 

 

God of the prophets, 
God of Christ: 
we are reminded today 
that your blessings do not necessarily follow the logic of the world. 

The world believes that the rich are blessed, 
but Jesus reminds us that it is the poor who are blessed, 
the poor in spirit 
and the materially poor as well. 
We pray for a more just world 
in which all have enough and none are left behind. 

Though we fear death and avoid its inevitable arrival, 
Jesus tells us that those who mourn are blessed. 
Help us to experience the truth of this mystery; 
bring healing and wholeness to those who are sick; 
and comfort those of us who have lost loved ones. 

While people covet power, 
Jesus blesses the meek; 
instruct us, O God, in the ways of humility; 
help us to stand in solidarity with the oppressed and marginalized; 
show us your presence in the faces of those the world forgets. 

Give us a hunger and thirst for righteousness; 
fill our hearts with love, overflowing with mercy; 
make our hearts pure, and give us a vision of your glory. 

In a society divided by race, gender, class, ideology, sexual orientation, 
and so many other labels we alone have created, 
remind us that we are created in your image, 
each of us a beautiful reflection of you, 
each of us your beloved child. 
Help us then to end our conflicts and wars, 
help us to be peacemakers and agents of reconciliation. 

Gracious God, 
you have so richly blessed us with life, 
with love and joy, 
with hope in the midst of despair. 
Help us to be the salt of the earth. 
Help us to be the light of the world, 
sharing with others that which we have received, 
boldly proclaiming the good news of your love, 
finding the seeds of your kingdom within us 
and letting your way grow in our lives and throughout the world. 

Give us eyes to see the ways you are changing the world in which we live. 
Give us ears to hear your call to join with you in the great transformation. 

Hear us now, o God, 
as we pray for the coming of your kingdom, 
following Christ as he taught us to pray: 

Our Father…  
 

~ posted on Literature & Liturgy. https://jesusscribbles.wordpress.com/ 

 

Our Father, Mother, Creator God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Lead us, not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen. 
 

*Hymn O God, Our Help in Ages Past #117 

 
 

Benediction 

 
Postlude Oh, How He Loves You and Me Mark Hayes, arr. 

 
 

Staff 

Natalie Bowerman Pastor 

Betsy Lehmann Music Director 

Joe White Custodian 

Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant