Role Models, Part 2

 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 

February 5, 2023 

10:00 a.m. 

*You are invited to rise in body or spirit. 

  

Prelude  

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: 

God said, "Let there be light." 

And there was light. 

Jesus said, "I am the light of the world." 

And the light shone in the darkness. 

Jesus said, "You are the light of the world." 

And the light shall not be quenched. 

 
 

*Hymn Lord, Whose Love Through Humble Service #581 

 
 

Prayer of Confession: 

Creator - Restorer - Ruler: We are prone to point the finger at others and to pervert justice by exaggerated charges. We want the rich to feed the hungry, but not to share from our own provisions. We prefer charity in principle, but in practice evade our duty even to our own kin. Some of us live in half-empty houses while there are families crowded into rooms too small for them, if they have rooms at all. Forgive our failure to live up to the best we know and to let the oppressed go free even after you have freed us. Amen. 

  

Assurance: 

Friends, hear the Good News: God gives us Divine love and forgiveness. Our faith is not built on human wisdom, but on the power of God. In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven. 

 

Scripture Reading Matthew 5: 13-20 

Salt and Light 

13 ‘You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. 

14 ‘You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. 

The Law and the Prophets 

17 ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter,[a] not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore, whoever breaks[b] one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 

 
 

Sermon Role Models, Part 2 

 

Friends, today we’re in part 2 of 4 of this sermon series I’ve put together about our role models of the faith during this month that the Revised Common Lectionary advises us to look at the Sermon on the Mount together. We’ll look at the stories of people of faith who weren’t so different from any of us, but who tried really hard to follow Christ in this life.  

Today’s role model of the faith left behind an amazing story in our relative backyard. His name was Walter Rauschenbusch, and if that name isn’t familiar yet, I’m hoping you won’t forget it. Born on October 4, 1861 in Rochester, New York, he was the son of German immigrants. He admitted later in life to being feisty and rebellious as a young person—maybe just a phase, but qualities that were putting him in danger. But at the age of seventeen, Rauschenbusch went through a religious conversion, and one that later on would feel incomplete—he focused on healing himself, but not on healing the harm he had done to those around him, or what he would later call his social sins. 

He spent a few years in his parents’ homeland so that he could be educated at a Gymnasium, a German college preparatory academy, and then returned to America so that he could study at none other than my beloved alma mater, the University of Rochester. Like me, he began feeling called to the ministry while studying at the U of R, so when he graduated, he did what I did and moved two miles up the street to attend my other alma mater, CRCDS, which at the time had a shorter name: Rochester Theological Seminary. 

Like a lot of seminary students, Rauschenbusch started learning concepts that challenged his previously held beliefs. Raised in the school of thought that the Bible is the infallible and inerrant Word of God, zapped directly onto the pages you see by the Divine Finger, when Rauschenbusch came to seminary he began studying a method called higher biblical criticism, which approaches the Bible like it’s any other ancient text and proposes theories about which human being wrote what, when, how, and why. Rather than turning from his faith, though, Rauschenbusch loved these studies and thrived in them. Those learnings made him love the Bible more. He also realized he no longer believed in something called “substitutionary atonement”, which teaches that God arranged for Jesus’ death on the cross in order to repay humanity’s debt and quell God’s wrath at our sins. A lot of us were taught something like that about Jesus’ death on the cross at some point, and many of us, like Rauschenbusch, are shocked to eventually learn that the Bible doesn’t directly say that, and that there are other theologies of the cross besides that one. Rauschenbusch turned away from that belief system because he realized that if that logic is true, then humans have no place in repaying our debt for our own actions. Jesus pays for it, God resurrects Jesus, and we do and learn nothing. It was then that Rauschenbusch started growing roots into the social gospel, which he became the father of. In these seminary years, extending into the beginning years of his ministry, Rauschenbusch clarified his own beliefs and began teaching them to others, and they were beliefs that our sins aren’t just offensive to God, they hurt our own selves and one another. Christians have a responsibility, taught to us by Jesus, to make reparations for the harm we’ve done and build a better world together. 

Beginning his first official job as the pastor of a church—a German Baptist congregation in Hell’s Kitchen in NYC—only anchored his beliefs deeper. He tended to families living in poverty, and children dying from disease and malnutrition. He resolved that he couldn’t spend his ministry presiding over the funerals of the poor, it was the responsibility of Christ followers to fix the broken systems that created poverty in the first place. He then devoted himself to cooperative social activism.  

His story ended right where it began—in Rochester, New York, where he taught at Rochester Theological Seminary. In 1907 he authored his first book, Christianity and the Social Crisis, followed ten years later by A Theology for the Social Gospel. A year after the publication of his second book, in 1918, he passed away, having rallied many clergy people behind his beliefs. In fact, his writings went on to directly influence people like Dr. King, Desmond Tutu, and Reinhold Niebuhr. 

We have Rauschenbusch, in large part, to thank for a major shift in popular Christian theology and church practice, and especially for a rethinking of what it means to build the Kingdom of God. While a broad array of theologies around the Kingdom have always existed, and while ministers who lived long before Rauschenbusch held many similar beliefs, Rauschenbusch uniquely articulated and mobilized his calling. He urged the Church to move far away from an emphasis on personal sin and holiness, fire and brimstone preaching, and teaching that the Kingdom of God is merely another way to say “heaven” and revolves around our personal virtues. Rather, Rauschenbusch professed this: 

“Religious bigotry, the combination of graft and political power, the corruption of justice, the mob spirit [being "the social group gone mad"] and mob action, militarism, and class contempt – every student of history will recognize that these sum up constitutional forces in the Kingdom of Evil. Jesus bore these sins in no legal or artificial sense, but in their impact on his own body and soul. He had not contributed to them, as we have, and yet they were laid on him. They were not only the sins of Caiaphas, Pilate, or Judas, but the social sin of all mankind, to which all who ever lived have contributed, and under which all who ever lived have suffered.” 

Rauschenbusch urged all followers of Christ to clean up our mess, the very mess that cost Jesus his life. He identified four major sources of human evil—militarism, capitalism, individualism, and nationalism—and four forces that would change this world for good—pacifism, collectivism, socialism, and internationalism. 

So...after hearing all about the life of this one man, we hold all of this against the words of this morning’s scripture reading. In this excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount, which Matthew positioned immediately after the Beatitudes, Jesus teaches his disciples that they must be two different resources for the world: salt and light. Both crucial for survival, both used very differently then than now. We think of salt as a topping, at something that flavors your pretzels. Sometimes as a tool, like when we put it on our streets and sidewalks to keep ice from forming. But we think that way because we have refrigerators. In Jesus’ day, salt was paramount for preserving food, especially meat. After repeated uses, it would lose its preservative power, not in the way that your pretzels lose their tastiness, but in the way that hard water builds up in your shower head and diminishes the water pressure. Because this image doesn’t jive with our modern technology, it’s tempting for us to think Jesus was teaching that if we’ve “lost our saltiness”, we’re useless to him. That’s terrible news. The Good News is that isn’t what he meant. How do you get that water pressure back in your shower? You clean it. How do you restore salt so it keeps your meat fresh? You clean it. You separate out all the gunk it’s picked up. Gunk that Rauschenbusch identified: militarism, capitalism, individualism, and nationalism. Boy howdy does that ring true of modern day American Christians. Imagine if we took even some of the money we dump into the war machine and Wall Street, and used it to establish universal healthcare, a living wage, and food security programs instead. We’d be well on our way to creating a world where being poor doesn’t kill you. 

Now, for light. Thanks to our buddy Thomas Edison we can flip on a light switch, illuminate our whole house, and not give it a second thought. As long as you pay the electric bill that light just keeps on coming. In Jesus’ day, they used oil lamps. Oil was an expensive and rare commodity, just as it is now. Perhaps think of this image less like our modern day light switches, and more like older homes that still have an external propane tank that you have to fill at the beginning of the winter in order for your furnace to work. Have you lived in a house like that? I did in Salem, as did a bunch of my neighbors. You had to buy fuel at the hardware store. And it was really, really, really expensive. If you couldn’t afford the bill, you had no heat, and you’d have a crisis on your hands in the winter, especially with weather like we had this weekend. Oil in that sense is a matter of life and death. In Jesus’ day, oil was the difference between some meager indoor illumination, and total pitch blackness at night. No oil lamp could do much on its own. But it could do something. And its fuel was precious. We are oil lamps. What we have within us is deeply precious. We have it at a high cost. And we can’t do everything. We can’t fix all the problems in the world. But we can do something. Each of us, on our own, can provide enough of a glow to see the next step in front of us. But if we combined our strength, we’d see so much further together than alone. 

Be salt. Preserve what is good in the world, the love you see, and rid of yourself the garbage you’ve picked up. Be light. See a step in front of you, and guide others toward something brighter. And together, let’s be the Kingdom, as Rauschenbusch envisioned it: not a place full of perfect people, but a reality we’d see on earth if we helped each other more. 

Amen. 

 
 

*Hymn Pass It On #572 

 
 

Offering  

Offertory  

*Doxology #94 

*Prayer of dedication             

 
 

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer 

 

Gracious God, 

we thank you for the light that shone in Jesus, 

revealing unto us your holiness and our righteousness. 

We deplore this gap, yet we rejoice 

that you chased the darkness that kept it hidden from our eyes. 

By your light we are both encouraged and condemned. 

We are reassured to see your face turned in our direction, 

bidding us to come unto you. 

But we shudder at the sight of us turning our backs on you, 

resisting the light that could mirror your glory. 

We thank you, O God, for leaving your light in the world 

even though we have not always heeded your summons 

to become the light of the world. 

Instead of illuminating your character, we have blurred it. 

You have commanded us to love you with all our being, 

but we have consigned our love to the pigeonhole of religion. 

You have commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves, 

but we have been too preoccupied with ourselves to find them. 

You have called us to be peacemakers, 

yet we have encouraged the arms makers 

with our fears and our fortunes. 

You have summoned us to be wall breakers, 

yet we have supported the wall makers 

with our silence and our sympathy. 

We have seen the light, but we have refused to walk in it. 

Yet we long, O Lord, to keep your law and do your will. 

We ask forgiveness for our rebellion, 

not merely for the sake of the joy we have denied ourselves, 

but also for the joy we have denied others. 

Keep ever before us the needs of the world into which you sent Jesus 

and for whose sake he gave himself to the uttermost. 

Let us feel its pain as our own, 

seek its good as our own, 

and work for its transformation 

in the name and spirit of him who came into the world 

not to condemn but to redeem it. 

We listen now, O God, for your word. 

Let its message illumine our minds 

that we may will as Jesus willed. 

Let its spirit quicken our hearts that we may love as Jesus loved. 

Let its power speed our steps that we may do as Jesus did. 

~ posted on the Ministry Matters website. http://www.ministrymatters.com/all/article/entry/4658/worship-elements-february-9-2014 

 

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. 
 

The Lord’s Supper 

 
 

*Hymn Be Thou My Vision #451 

 
 

Benediction 

 
Postlude  

 
 

Staff 

Natalie Bowerman Pastor 

Betsy Lehmann Music Director 

Joe White Custodian 

Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant