The Sacred and the Profane

 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

July 23, 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:

O Lord, you have searched us, and you know us.

You know when we sit and when we stand, you know our thoughts before we think them.

Before we speak a word, you know what we’ll say.

You hem us in, and care for us.

Your love is too big for us to understand.

Search our hearts, and know us more, and lead us on.

*Hymn               Come, Ye Thankful People, Come          #694

Prayer of Confession:

It is said that confession is good for the soul, but there are times, O Lord, when we just don’t want to confess, we don’t want to own up to the many ways in which we have failed to be your faithful disciples. We have turned our backs on those in need. We have sought after power and riches, believing that these things bring true happiness. But you know us far too well. You know what is within our hearts and our spirits. You seek the very best for us that we might grow to be fruitful plants in your garden. Be with us. Forgive us when we have failed to love and treat others with respect and compassion. Turn our hearts back toward you, who always reaches out to us offering healing and love. These things we ask in Jesus’ Name. AMEN.

Assurance:

Great news has come to us, dear friends. God, who is faithful and just, who cherishes us as we are, seeks restoration and healing for those broken places in our lives, forgives and loves us unconditionally. Receive that good news!

Scripture Reading Matthew 7: 6

Profaning the Holy

6 “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you.

Sermon   The Sacred and the Profane

Alright, here we are, the beginning of Stump the Preacher 2023, going from now until the end of September! Sermons requested by you, and then researched by me! We’re kicking off Stump the Preacher with something that our friend Rich casually emailed to me a while back–what’s up with this weird verse in Matthew? These oddball words about not throwing pearls to dogs? About not giving nice things to that which we deem not so nice? It’s one of many Jesus sentences that makes you raise an eyebrow and go…huh. Rich thought I’d write back a one or two sentence email, but y’all know I’m not that succinct. The more I thought about this, the more I realized there’s enough here to unpack for an entire sermon. You got that right–an entire sermon about just one verse.

But before I say more, I have a funny story for you about my 7 year old daughter, Lily. A few weeks ago we were running errands together, and driving around the neighborhood. Lily’s working really hard on improving her reading, and she loves to test out her knowledge by reading signs on the road. Suddenly she got upset. She said, “Mommy, why does that sign have a bad word on it?” Assuming she saw a political sign in someone’s yard, or a crude bumper sticker, I said, “honey, what sign?” She responded, “that green one right there.” “You mean that one welcoming us into town, Lily?” “Yeah, Mommy, why does the name of this town have a bad word in it?” 

The sign said “Welcome to Rotterdam”.

For the record, she’s also offended by “Amsterdam” and “Chittenango.”

Lily and I had a talk about how, yes, in one kind of sentence the phoneme “dam/damn” is a mildly bad word. But a “dam” is also a natural structure that a beaver makes, so context is really important when you’re deciding what’s offensive and what’s simply the name of a neighboring town. 

My apologies to the fine inhabitants of Rotterdam.

This is the same point made throughout a book titled The Sacred and the Profane, written in 1957 by Mircea Eliade, an historian who spent his latter years teaching at the University of Chicago. Eliade was fascinated by this human phenomenon of categorizing the things around us. As a survival mechanism, humans naturally sort out their encounters and experiences into the dichotomy of “good” and “bad”, and religion springs from this impulse when we narrow down the broad categories of “good” and “bad” to “sacred” and “profane”. We have holy, wondrous moments, and seek to protect those moments by drawing a line around them and keeping the stuff around them out. From there we get rituals, sacraments, sanctuaries, and bigger and more ornate systems of keeping the garbage away from God.

But, like I explained to Lily while driving through Rotterdam, it’s not that simple. Context is everything. In the same college course where I read The Sacred and the Profane, we talked about how what I call dirt in my living room I call soil in my garden. I was also reminded this week of a Polish proverb that teaches us that the same boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg. 

And you know that both of those nuggets of wisdom came from seasoned old ladies, and I love that. But despite the lessons from Grandma, every person of faith has to deal with the question of what feels good, holy, and righteous, and what doesn’t. What brings us closer to God, and what pulls us further away? The truth is that there are no hard and fast rules, as much as we may want them. Only a few words of advice from Jesus: don’t give away the things we value to those who would react with aggression and destruction. Remember that, because we’re going to circle back there in a minute.

Struggling to understand the mysterious words of Jesus, but wanting to make him happy, and protect our faith, we do what comes easily to humans: we make arbitrary rules. For some, the rules are “men wear jackets and ties to church; women wear white gloves and cute little hats.” I didn’t grow up in that kind of church, but my mom did, and, especially since I was a kid in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, she adored dressing me and my two sisters in matching burgundy velveteen dresses with those huge, lacy bib collars. They were hot and itchy, and we were very overdressed, but to mom, the bigger the lacy collar the closer to heaven, and she preferred listening to us grumble about those dresses for a few hours to the idea of disrespecting the Holy by sending us to church in play clothes. In some church communities, there’s unspoken rules about all the women getting their hair and nails done on Saturday so they look their best on Sunday. In some churches, there’s pressure to have designer labels visible on brand new outfits. In many churches, there’s huge pressure to make your kids look as nice as possible. All of these customs link us today with our ancestors from 2,000 years past, Jesus’ friends and neighbors, who had a stringent purity code. What that purity code, and the fancy-dress customs of many of our contemporary churches, have in common is that the more elaborate our rules become, the more inaccessible our house of worship becomes to the poor, to the disabled, to the gender non-conforming, and to women and children. And y’all know I’m speaking from motherly experience here, because I struggle to get my kids to wear shoes to church, so they’re definitely not showing up looking like they just stepped out of an Osh Kosh B’Gosh catalog.

Then we get to the non clothing related rules around what people of faith should do, sound like, and look like to separate ourselves from what we deem profane. Rules about drug and alcohol usage, about food and eating, about dating, sex, and reproductive health, about music, parties, and dancing, rules about TV, movies, and other media we can consume, rules about money, business, and gambling, and of course, in addition to all these rules, there’s this ongoing debate about whether Christians are allowed to say bad words and if my daughter should start a petition to get our friends in Rotterdam to change the name of their town.

When it comes to that last point–yes, the Ten Commandments tell us not to take the Lord’s name in vain, and in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus advises us not to swear, but to make our yes a yes and our no a no. Even though many, including my own Sunday school teachers, have taught that both of those verses are about what you say when you stub your toe, I’m going to argue that the Holy is little concerned with how often you’d get bleeped if you were talking on network television. Rather, our Creator cares about when we use our religion as a reason to hurt other people, and when we make promises we can’t keep. And that sounds like Rotterdam good advice to me.

As far as what choices we make when we’re presented with some controversial options and we don’t know what’s right, I go back to this verse that Rich asked about: don’t throw your pearls to dogs. Decide what you value the most–family, love, honesty, loyalty, to suggest a few things–and don’t take those pearls of your life and subject them to aggression and hostility. If there’s a choice in front of you that will harm your values, don’t do it. I get that that’s really open ended. Our friends in other kinds of churches who have really strict rules often find some comfort in the certainty they provide. But I think humans are capable moral agents.

And in all moments, know that the Sacred is far too great, too vast, and too strong to be stopped by the borders we put around it, and that the same Jesus who ate with sinners always mingles with what and whom we deem profane so that all may feel Holy love.

Amen.

*Hymn Seek Ye First                                 #405

Offering

Offertory

*Doxology #94

*Prayer of dedication           

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

Holy and Gracious God,

we give you thanks for family, friends, life, love—

for all the blessings (name blessings and thanksgivings)

you have bestowed upon us.

In Your mercy, hear our prayer.

God of our Mothers and Fathers,

your desire for us leads the way,

may we have the ears to hear the cries of this world -

responding with Your hope.

In Your mercy, hear our prayer.

Compassionate One,

fill us with your love

that we may see deeply into all the needs around us,

(name the hurts, needs, and hope you are carrying.)

Help us to care with Your heart.

In Your mercy, hear our prayer.

May Your love, Your grace, Your compassion, Your mercy,

carry us away, this day

and lead us with love

to be Your hands and heart in the world.

Amen.

~ posted by Terri on RevGalBlogPals. http://revgalblogpals.blogspot.ca/

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, the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.

*Hymn                     Love Divine, All Loves Excelling                    #384

Benediction

Postlude

---

Staff

Natalie Bowerman Pastor

Betsy Lehmann Music Director

Joe White Custodian

Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant