God's Toy Box, Part 2: Slinky Dog

 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 25, 2024

Second 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:

Welcome this day to the second step on our Lenten Journey.

We come with great hope and expectation as we walk the way of Christ.

Today’s journey will demand much of us.

Lord, make us ready to offer ourselves to you.

Come, let us begin again the wondrous excursion.

Let us place our lives in God’s abiding love. AMEN.

*Hymn                         I Want Jesus to Walk with Me                        #521

Prayer of Confession:

Merciful God, we confess that our choices turn us from you

again and again. We long for help and direction, but don’t want to give up our self-interest. Forgive us, and help us do better.

Assurance:

The journey of discipleship is never easy, but we’re also never on it alone. Jesus will always lead the way. AMEN.

Scripture Reading Mark 8: 31-38

Jesus Foretells His Death and Resurrection

31 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again. 32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

34 He called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, “If any wish to come[a] after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel,[b] will save it. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words[c] in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

Sermon                            God’s Toy Box, Part 2: Slinky Dog

Friends, we’re now in week 2 of this sermon series I’ve put together for the season of Lent, based on a book called Toy Box Leadership by Ron Hunter Jr and Michael E Waddell. In every chapter of that book, Hunter and Waddell use a toy that a lot of us played with growing up as an analogy for the business world. We’re going to look at those same toys and consider what they teach us about our faith.

Today’s toy is our dear friend Slinky Dog. My kids really didn’t want to give this one up so I could preach with it. The invention of this toy, of course, started not with the dog element but with the spring in the middle. Back in 1945 a man named Richard James was serving the US Navy as an engineer. He was utilizing tension springs and experimenting with how you could measure horsepower with one, when, by accident, one rolled off of his desk, and bounced on the floor, and James realized how much fun you could have playing with one of those. He also discovered that he could make more money selling toys than serving in the Navy, so he quit that job and went full speed ahead on slinky production. However, while Richard may take credit for the original idea, his wife Betty was absolutely instrumental in making slinkies the sensation they became, and the idea to put a head and tail on the slinky and turn it into a little dachshund was all hers.

Everything about what makes this toy so fascinating comes down to physics. Our friend Slink is a moving system composed of many interconnected parts. He has a head, and a little leash you can pull. He has wheels on his four paws. He has an end, and a springy tail. And holding that all together, of course, is the slinky. But, also, and harder to see, is this white string in the core that pulls out and gives some slack, and then instantly retracts, similar to a tape measure. Every single piece of this system has an important job, but the whole system only works if each part does its own job. So, for starters, Slink will follow you around very nicely, but only if you pull him from the front. The front has to lead the way. Also, if you try to pull Slink straight forward, he’ll collapse. He has to be led from above. If you try pushing Slink from the back, he’ll face plant. If you try picking Slink up in the middle, he’ll flop to either side of your hand. The whole rest of the system will do everything the head does because of the way the spring in the middle reacts to waves of movement. So don’t worry about Slink’s little caboose, even if it’s way behind the head, it’ll catch right up, and it’ll stay right on the path set by the head.

Let’s take a look at this morning’s scripture reading. They’re familiar words from Mark, and this Gospel pericope frequently comes up during Lent. It starts with some doom and gloom: Jesus is preparing the disciples for what he’s going to experience, and for what they will go through, too, by association. He’s going to suffer. He’ll be rejected and betrayed by everyone around him, and he’ll die a truly terrible death, and then he’ll rise again. 

Jesus is the head of this system, the Slinky Dog that is the Church. The Spring in the middle remembers and passes down all the movements of the head, so as long as we stay either in the spring or in the tail, we’ll stay behind Jesus. For his First Century Disciples, this unfortunately means witnessing everything Jesus experiences, and then facing their own persecutions in due time. Their lives were as hard as Jesus’. For 21st Century disciples (us), we’re following a fully human man, and we’ll experience humanity and mortality right along with him. We’ll lose friends. We’ll get our hearts broken. We’ll face rejection, and abandonment. People won’t understand our priorities, and too often we’ll pay the price for that. And since these meat suits have a shelf life, we’ll die someday, too. But we’ll also end up in heaven alongside Jesus. It may take a while, but if we stay in the slinky we will get there. The back always catches up with the front.

But Peter doesn’t hear any of this as Good News, and he tries to step outside of the slinky and bend it to what he wants. He does it politely, by pulling Jesus aside and talking to him privately, and he really means well. But no matter how you slice it, when Peter says “C’mon, Jesus, that can’t be true,” he attempts to grab Slink by the middle and collapse everything. And what does Jesus say? “Get behind me.” He also says “Satan”, a bit harsh, but he’s trying to get Peter’s attention, and he wants him to understand that his words are adversarial to everyone he cares about. If he wants everyone to thrive, to live, die, and rise again, and find eternal life in Jesus’ love, then he has to claim the only appropriate space for him: behind Jesus.

Jesus realizes that if Peter is struggling with this then everyone else likely is, too, so he faces the whole crowd and tells them that they will only thrive if they get over their own agendas, their own egos, their own ideas, their own prejudices, and their own superiority complexes, and get behind him. If it’s really hard for you to understand what Jesus means when he says “pick up your cross and follow me,” then imagine instead that he said “pick a coil in the slinky and follow me.” There’s nothing at all easy about a life of faith. The Slinky Dog is not a comfortable ride, it practically goes out of its way to hit every pothole on the road of life. But if you stay the course, and stay on the coil, you’ll always be no more than a string’s length from Jesus.

But you know, a slinky is a hard toy to keep in good shape. Most of our slinkies, over time, don’t look like Slink. They look like this messed up slinky my son Xander got in a goody bag for Valentine’s Day. This is what happens to us, and our churches, when we stop following Jesus. This isn’t unfixable, but it takes some major patience and then some God-level rethreading to get the slinky functional again. 

But also, it’s okay to end up in a knotted slinky. Most of our churches feel like one right now, even if they’re not saying so out loud. So many forces in this life throw us off course, and make us start grabbing the slinky from every direction instead of just following behind Jesus. We get worked up about money, about dwindling worship attendance, about “the good old days” and chicken barbecues, we get political and divisive and split along lines of culture and tradition, and then the head is going one way, the tail is taking off in the opposite direction, and a hundred people are yanking the spring coils all over. 

Even in the face of that, I promise there’s still Good News. It’s worth thinking to yourself every once in a while where you think you are in the Slinky Dog. Do you feel closer to what Jesus is calling you to right now? If so, Jesus may be calling you to step a few coils closer and help lead. Do you feel like you’re bumping along in the middle? Do you feel like you’re a lot closer to the tail right now? When we’re feeling like we’re further behind Jesus than others, it may be appropriate for us, for a season, to follow the leadership of someone closer to the front. But I promise you, every piece of this system has power.

In order for you to wrap your heads around that, I’m going to invite you to think about the most famous use of the Slinky Dog toy: the first Toy Story movie that came out in 1995. It’s ok if you haven’t seen it, just stay on the slinky and you’ll catch right up. In the finale of that film, Buzz and Woody are trying to catch up with the moving van so they don’t get separated from the rest of Andy’s toys. They’re sitting on a remote controlled car, and Slinky Dog helps out. Buzz and Woody hold Slink’s head, and the toys on the truck hold Slink’s tail. But the moving van is way faster than a remote controlled car, and Slink gets way over extended. The toys can’t pull Slink any more, he’s stretched as far as he possibly can. But what happens when Buzz and Woody let go of their end? The tension in the spring makes Slink fly right into an unsuspecting Mr. Potato Head on the moving van, like a sling shot. Put differently: you still have a lot of power in moments when you feel like you’re stuck on the Dog’s butt and the spring has stretched way out and you can’t even see the head anymore. The way this system works, as soon as it’s time for you to get closer to the head, you’ll spring there so fast that no one will see you coming. You can never stay “behind” for long. We all find our place, no matter what, because Jesus holds us all together. And even when we get stretched and tangled, we never break.

Now, friends, there’s three more things I want to point out about the Slinky Dog, because they’ll help you understand what Jesus needs from the Church. Law of averages says that most of us are somewhere in the middle of the slinky. But it’s a reflective metal. Look what happens when I hold it up to the light. Look what happens when I bounce it around in the light. No matter where we are on the spring, we’re all capable of reflecting the light of Jesus, and we’re the only ones who can. Also, do you hear that noise the slinky makes when it moves? That’s the sound of the Gospel. Only we can share that. Lastly, see the tail? It’s a tiny tension spring. Maybe this doesn’t feel like a great season of faith for you. It’s heartbreaking how many people really feel that way. Maybe you’re dangling on the end of the tail and just trying to stay on the Slinky Dog. Well guess what? If you’re hanging out on the tail, you have a job no one else can do: you get to pull the spring and make the doggy wag his tail! And even the smallest influence of your joy will keep that tail wagging for a while, and the back of the dog will follow, and it will reverberate through up to the front. Even on your hardest day, I promise you’re doing so much more to lift up everyone else than you know. No matter who you are, no matter where you are, you matter. We aren’t us without you. And if we stay together, we’ll all get to where Jesus wants us to be.

Amen.

*Hymn                              Take My Life and Let It Be                        #399

 

Offering

Offertory

*Doxology #94

*Prayer of dedication           

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

Though people may turn

their backs on us,

you do not hide

your face from us.

Though others may try

to take away our hope,

you assure us of

that future waiting for us.

You speak your name,

Inscrutable Creator,

and it is enough.

When we try to dictate

our fears to you,

you invite us to follow you

into self-denial and service.

As we struggle to shape

our lifestyle to yours,

you carry us with you

wherever we go.

You speak your good news,

Teacher of open hearts,

and it is enough.

Though we have done

nothing to earn them,

you pour out the gifts

of grace and mercy upon us.

When we stumble

over our lack of trust,

you set us back on our feet,

to follow you into the kingdom.

You speak your peace,

Breath of Holiness,

and it is enough.

God in Community, Holy in One,

it is enough that you hear us

even as we pray as we are taught,

Our Father . . .

— written by Thom Shuman, and posted on his wonderful Lectionary Liturgies blog. http://lectionaryliturgies.blogspot.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, the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.

*Hymn                                  The Summons                                    #2130

Benediction

Benediction Response  God Be With You ‘Til We Meet Again    #672 v 1

Postlude

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Staff

Natalie Bowerman Pastor

Betsy Lehmann Music Director

Joe White Custodian

Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant