God's Toy Box, Part 1: Legos

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 18, 2024

First Sunday in Lent

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, “I will be your God.”

God has promised. God remembers. God is faithful.

God said, “I will lead you in the paths of truth.”

God has promised. God remembers. God is faithful.

God said, “I will forgive you.”

God has promised. God remembers. God is faithful.

God said, “My kingdom is near.”

God has promised. God remembers. God is faithful.

*Hymn Lord, Who Throughout These Forty Days #269

Prayer of Confession:

God of the rainbow,

you made a covenant with all creatures,

promising life and hope.

God of pathways,

you show us how we should walk.

Yet we forget our connection with one another

and think that we are the center of the universe.

We wander from your paths of truth

into paths of deceit and pride.

Forgive us and lead us back

into the arms of your love. Amen.

Assurance:

God is merciful and full of steadfast love.

God will not forget us.

God will wash us clean,

and lead us on paths of steadfast love

and faithfulness.

Scripture Reading Genesis 9: 8-17

8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, 9 “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark.[a] 11 I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” 12 God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: 13 I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” 17 God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

Sermon God’s Toy Box, Part 1: Legos

Friends, I’m taking a leap of faith and doing something kind of different with you guys for Lent. I’m revisiting a great book that I read, and then preached from, back in 2018, when I was serving in Avon. The book is called Toy Box Leadership, and it was written by Ron Hunter Jr. and Michael E. Waddell. Hunter and Waddell both approach the book primarily from a business standpoint, and in every chapter they engage how the lessons we learned as kids playing with different toys carry over into real adult wisdom. Both authors work for Randall House publications–Hunter is the CEO, and Waddell is the chair of the board of directors. So, although their primary lens throughout the book is toward how various toys serve as a sort of allegory for success in a secular business, their advice has lots of applications in a church like this one. Turns out, that’s for good reason: prior to getting involved with Randall House, both Hunter and Waddell worked as ministers.

Admittedly, I’m asking you all to take a risk throughout this Lenten series, as we look at a different toy every week, and unpack what that toy teaches us about God and our faith. I’m very aware that, save for a few, I’m talking to a room full of grownups, and most of you no longer play with any of the toys I’m going to engage with (at least not that you’re willing to share publicly). Hunter and Waddell were aware of the same reality with their audience in writing the book. However, the earliest lessons we all learned in life, the ones we absorbed as children, were some of our most formative, and play was the backbone of our learning back then. When we played with dolls we practiced empathy. When we took turns playing a game we learned about sharing, rule following, and generosity. We copied the behavior of grownups around us, and mimicked what we admired on a smaller scale with our toys. I’m reminded of this whenever I’m classroom helper at Xander’s preschool. His BFF Lilah loves to pretend she’s a doctor to baby dolls, because her mom is a pediatrician. Xander makes monsters out of play-doh because Daddy is a big Godzilla fan. And a few weeks ago Xander and several of his classmates wanted me to help them with their Legos, the toy of this week. Their goal was to build the perfect house, which ended up having a slide, big windows, an indoor pool, an outdoor track for racecars, and, for some reason, an elephant. Play teaches us to go with it, figure out how to make the picture in our head a reality, and to make whatever comes from our experimentation as awesome as an elephant in the living room.

On that note: Legos, today’s toy. They date all the way back to 1932 in Denmark, and the name comes from the Danish phrase that means “play well”. In my house standard size Lego bricks are still a bit of a choking hazard, and often get lost between couch cushions, so I’m opting to play with Duplos up here instead. As a bonus for you guys, they’re much easier to see. The math geeks in the room will enjoy this one: if you have six 8-studded Legos like this one, there are 915,103,765 different ways to arrange them. Legos give you a huge amount of versatility and tremendous possibility–just like people do. And critically, just like people, individual Legos can only do so much, but once they start connecting, they can build great things.

We’ll get back to the Legos in a second, but first let’s talk about today’s scripture passage from Genesis that Desiree just read for us. These verses are the very end of the Noah story. By chance, Noah was our lectionary-appointed Old Testament lesson today. The Noah story is one of those odd Bible stories that we think we know well, because there’s lots of animals and that makes it look fun to teach to small children. If you’re teaching Noah to a room of little kids you can build a boat together, and then you can have everyone put on adorable animal costumes, and you can sing songs about the animals going two by two. Stay in cutesy territory and the kids will love it, but you’ll conveniently bypass that the Noah story is actually incredibly violent.

At the beginning of Noah’s journey, people have done so much to disappoint God that God regrets even making them. If you look around at this world, sometimes I get that perspective. God decides to wipe all the humans out with a big flood and start over, and further decides that Noah and his extended family are the only people on earth that God wants to see survive the big flood and regenerate humanity. So Noah builds a huge ship, he, his family, and two of every animal get on (not gonna ask how), it starts raining, and the people and animals on the ark wait it out while everyone around them drowns.

I promise I didn’t set out to depress everybody this morning, but you have to really feel the loss at the beginning and middle of Noah’s story in order for the ending, what we’re contemplating today, to land. Everyone gets out of the ark, the ground is all muddy, and the people and animals on board are all that’s left on earth. God puts a rainbow in the sky and announces that that’s a sign of the Divine promise: no matter what, we’re never wiping everyone out with a flood again. No matter what, the people on the earth right now have to make it work. No matter what, we’re in this together to the end of our days. It’s time to rebuild.

Like with Legos, building humanity is all about connections. Legos connect with friction between the studs on top and the tubes on the inside. Like Legos, sometimes people connect through, and in spite of friction. In other words, sometimes adversity brings us together. We’re in February of 2024 right now, and we really want to believe we’ve put the pandemic behind us. But the CDC warns that we’re in the second deadliest wave of covid cases ever, and just shy of 7 million lives have been lost globally to Covid-19. Last Wednesday, in celebration of their victory in the Super Bowl, the Kansas City Chiefs led a big parade in their hometown. An argument broke out in the crowd, got heated, and firearms were drawn. One person died, and 21 others were injured. At what was supposed to be a party. Some days I wonder if we just can’t have nice things in America. The CDC calculates that that incident was the 50th mass shooting to happen in 2024. And up to that point, there had only been 45 days in 2024. Lord have mercy.

And sometimes the hardest hitting adversity is what you’re facing in your own life. My dad has been in the hospital all week. The “why” is complicated. He’s losing more and more of his mobility with age. The arthritis in his hips and knees has really taken a toll, especially in the last month, and lately just changing positions is very painful for Dad, never mind getting up and trying to walk. Add in his high blood pressure and his not-so-well-managed diabetes, and Dad’s got himself a tower of problems that quickly caused a few infections, the need for some IV meds, and doctor’s orders for some physical therapy. It makes Dad feel small, like this one Lego guy over here, and Dad doesn’t like feeling small. He likes feeling like he’s in charge of everything. When he was my age, he was a computer engineer who worked 80 hours a week, took long business trips, and was super in demand. He was on top of the tower. Now he feels trapped in the basement of this skyscraper of health problems, and he can’t get out of it because he can’t walk. Meanwhile I’m this Lego girl over here, and I’m 800 miles away, on an island.

Maybe life has been a big flood lately, and maybe we have to make the best out of what’s left over. But even if we think we have nothing but a muddy mess, love and human connection always turn that mud back into fertile soil. For one thing, I’m never alone, I have a life partner. We’ll make Sean this adorable Lego guy. And we’re not alone. We have my sisters and my brothers in law, showing up in the Lego car, and when we’re all working together we’re so much more than we are separately. We have wheels, and we can close the distance between Dad’s tower and my and Sean’s island.

And then we have you guys, and your love, and even better your prayers, that go together like a Lego train. And the Lego train slowly but surely provides my family with what we need, at least to get through the day. And, foundational to it all, Jesus holds us all together, and we build the house together, the dwelling place for Creation that God told us to live in in harmony after the flood. And maybe Dad’s chronic health issues mean there’s always an elephant in the living room. Fine, so be it. He’s a cute elephant. With one another’s help we also have the indoor pool, the slide, and the outdoor race track. When we connect with one another, when we work together, when we support each other, the Kin-dom of God forms just like this. And even if my dad is still in the hospital yelling at his nurses, and I can’t be out there to see him until some time this summer, and I’ll have to wear a mask when I go, and my heart will be heavy with the brokenness outside of me, on the inside, I’ll have my perfect house, built by love. And so will you.

Amen.

*Hymn Lead Me, Lord #473, sung twice

Offering

Offertory

*Doxology #94

*Prayer of dedication

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

Loving Lord,

at the beginning of this Lenten season,

we are met with the challenge of handing over

every bit of our lives that do not come from You.

To rid ourselves of what clutters our lives,

and all that distracts us from the simple truth

of Your love for us.

Your prophets have called us to change the way we worship—

to make internal sacrifices instead of external ones.

To seek justice, and love kindness,

and walk humbly with You

each and every one of our days.

If we don’t give anything up for Lent,

then let us at least give up this:

that we might live cease living in ways that disconnect us from You,

for every one of our steps is like a circle around Your temple.

Perhaps this Lent,

we can give up our way

and give ourselves to Your way for us.

So, lead and guide us on this Lenten way.

May we walk with Jesus toward the hill just outside of Jerusalem.

May we like Him take up our cross and follow,

spending each moment of our lives living responsively to You,

just as Christ Himself did.

For that is the faithful way. Amen.

~ written by Patrick Ryan, Pastor at Kuhn Memorial Presbyterian Church in Barboursville, West Virginia.

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 Thy Holy Wings #502

Benediction

Postlude

Staff

Natalie Bowerman Pastor

Betsy Lehmann Music Director

Joe White Custodian

Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant