God's Toy Box, Part 5: Lite Brite

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

March 17, 2024

Fifth 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 finds us like little pegs in the box: separated and in darkness.

One by one, God chooses us.

The Holy creates art in the Divine mind, and puts Sacred fingers to work.

The Creator puts us in place.

The Divine tells us to trust the process while pushing the “on” button and lighting up the night behind us.

We didn’t know it, but God was making us into a masterpiece.

*Hymn I Want to Walk As a Child of the Light #206

Prayer of Confession:

God of the Light, we don’t always trust you, and this world can be a scary place. Chaotic and unpredictable, we toss about in the dark void, convinced we’ll never see the sun. Forgive us when we lack patience in the night. Help us to hold on for brighter days.

Assurance:

Hear the Good News: No matter how long the darkness lasts, the Divine hand is never more than a moment away from lighting up the night. Amen.

Scripture Reading Psalm 51: 1-12

Psalm 51

Prayer for Cleansing and Pardon

To the leader. A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.

Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy,
blot out my transgressions.

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.

For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.

Against you, you alone, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence
and blameless when you pass judgment.

Indeed, I was born guilty,
a sinner when my mother conceived me.

You desire truth in the inward being;[a]
therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.

Hide your face from my sins,
and blot out all my iniquities.

Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right[b] spirit within me.

Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a willing[c] spirit.

Sermon God’s Toy Box, Part 5: Lite Brite

Friends, we’re now in the 5th week of this sermon series that I put together, inspired by the book Toy Box Leadership by Ron Hunter and Michael Waddell. In the book, Hunter and Waddell lift up toys we played with growing up as examples of good business leadership. For our purposes, we’re looking at those same toys, and thinking about what they teach us about our faith, our Church, and our Creator.

Today’s toy, the Lite Brite, goes back to 1967, to a man named Marvin Glass. Marvin thought he had a fun, new idea that children could use to create art. He sold his idea to Hasbro, and they loved it. Hasbro saw the Lite Brite as capitalizing on an increased use of electronics in toys, but without losing young kids in the mix, and also as a less messy way for kids to make pictures.

It’s really ironic that Hasbro saw the Lite Brite as a “clean” way to make art, because if you dump out all these little pegs, you’ll make a way bigger mess than you ever would have with a box of crayons. As much as clutter and mess are the scourge of my motherly existence, you don’t get playtime without mess. That’s why we have a toy room at home, with a door I can close when I’m overwhelmed by the 200 Japanese monsters on the floor. You don’t get childhood without mess, and lots of it. Messes are so often the only way kids learn the most valuable life lessons. You don’t get art without mess, and if you think you do, you’ve barely dipped a toe into the ocean of expression that awaits you. You don’t get people without mess. You don’t get deep, trusting relationships without the mess it takes to get there. And most of all, no matter how much we the Frozen Chosen want our churches to be clean, tidy, orderly, quiet, distraction-free centers of calmness, you don’t get faith like that. You get faith through the mess of searching and getting lost and finding your way back and building and deconstructing and rebuilding, all in the presence of messy people with their own journeys. You don’t see God face to face until you’ve waded through lots and lots of mess.

We see David struggling pretty hard with these realities in this morning’s Psalm. If there’s anyone who has seen how messy life and faith and art and parenthood can all be, it’s David. His life started out relatively tidy, at least as tidy as it could be when he was surrounded by sheep all day. He was the cute, youngest son of a farmer named Jesse, spotted by Samuel who saw promise in him after a whole lotta royal muck was thrown about by Saul. David was small, but he had a lot of potential.

From there he killed a Philistine with a slingshot, which the Bible describes as a chaotic battle culminating in a gruesome, messy death. Publicly, he wins the courts and the commoners over with his beautiful harp playing and singing. But privately, as he writes the music, he unpacks the mess inside of him. He rises in power and esteem. But then he sinks to his lowest after a messy affair with the wife of one of his soldiers. He orchestrates the death in battle of that soldier, marries his widow when he finds out he got her pregnant, and then the baby dies as a newborn, and he gets in a heart wrenching fight about all of it with one of his best friends.

David knew victory, elation, honor, regalness, wealth, power, and love. He also knew sorrow, heartbreak, loss, hopelessness, shame, and grief. If that sounds like a messy emotional roller coaster, then just read the Psalms. David took his highest highs and his lowest lows to the safest place he knew, his music, and sang them all to God. I don’t hear this come up very often in discussions of the Psalms, but I think it’s a tremendous loss that we no longer have that music. I think it would tell us a lot. But, at least we have a translation of the lyrics.

This morning’s Psalm is a well known one, and it’s used most often during Lent. In this season when we’re preparing ourselves for the joy and new life of Easter, we’re washing away the messes we’re stuck in right now. We want clean hearts, like David. We want clean reputations with one another, and clean slates with the Divine. We want to look in the mirror and see our faces without shame. We want our friends and loved ones to see us without baggage. And we want the Holy to see us as good enough.

I feel David’s heart when he wrote that. And I hear and honor all of our desires to have our pasts wiped clean. I understand how nice it sounds, to be spotless and blameless, and I know why we’re seeking that.

The thing is, we already have what we’re seeking without getting rid of the mess. The mess is just life. But you don’t need to live in shame of anything you are, have been, or will be. People who really understand love will deliver it without strings and grudges. And the Holy has never seen us as anything other than a beloved child who bears the Imago Dei.

Maybe what we need is to transform the way we understand the messiness of faith, of life, of humanity, of relationships, of art, of free play and expression. What if, instead of looking at all the misadventures, hard feelings, bad dreams, tough conversations, and severed Godzilla heads and arms all over the playroom floor as “mess”, a word with a negative connotation, we looked upon all of that as a word with a positive connotation–energy. You’re not surrounded by mess, you’re not covered in mess. We don’t see mess around you or in you. There isn’t mess between us, keeping us apart. There isn’t mess looking back at you in the mirror, and God doesn’t look at you and see mess.

All of that is energy, and all we have to do is allow the Divine to convert it, and make it usable for Sacred purposes.

And that, at long last, brings us back to this toy I’ve been playing with. The Lite Brite. This toy works exactly like what I just described to you. There’s a giant light panel in the back of this device. It would be a big, bright mess if you didn’t get creative and get to work. Instead it’s energy. It’s potential. It’s a million different images, messages, works of art all waiting to be expressed. Then a black piece of paper goes over all that energy, a blanket of darkness. That ream of black paper that this toy comes with doesn’t look like anything fun. It looks a little macabre. But It’s a tool that the Creator uses to filter all the energy in that back panel into a masterpiece.

Then come the pegs. So many of them, all different, all diverse. You don’t see their brilliance yet, their potential. Not like this. They look dull and dark. What brings out their beauty is that big light panel, the thing that you might have mistaken for a disorganized mess. The raw energy that God turns into art.

You go from mess to art when you put your entire trust in God. The Holy chooses us, one by one, each for our own purpose, and asks us to be patient and suspend judgment while the Creator works. All we can see is the hole we got stuck in, and a bunch of dim bulbs sitting around, doing nothing. If we only knew. The Divine is standing a hundred feet back, looking at the big picture.

If only we could see ourselves, and one another, the way God sees us.

We spend what feels like an eternity on the black paper, stuck in a hole, with nothing but a big mess behind us. We sit in our grief, in our loss, in our conflict, in our broken relationships and lost dreams.

And then God flips the switch. And the mess that we have to be part of in order to be alive becomes exactly what energizes and motivates the art we become. It pulls us all together on the same board. It makes us diverse and brilliant.

Imagine if we didn’t trust the process, if we didn’t stay where God asked us to go, if we refused to be in the company of the pegs around us. We’d ruin the whole picture. It would be woefully incomplete if every single one of us weren’t here.

We’re already clean enough. God will take all the rest, and use it to make us shine.

Amen.

*Hymn This Little Light of Mine #585

Led by the Front Porch Rockers

Offering

Offertory

*Doxology #94

*Prayer of dedication

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

I arise today

Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,

Through a belief in the Threeness,

Through confession of the Oneness

Of the Creator of creation.

I arise today

Through the strength of Christ’s birth and His baptism,

Through the strength of His crucifixion and His burial,

Through the strength of His resurrection and His ascension,

Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.

I arise today

Through the strength of the love of cherubim,

In obedience of angels,

In service of archangels,

In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,

In the prayers of patriarchs,

In preachings of the apostles,

In faiths of confessors,

In deeds of righteous men.

I arise today

Through the strength of heaven;

Light of the sun,

Splendor of fire,

Speed of lightning,

Swiftness of the wind,

Depth of the sea,

Stability of the earth,

Firmness of the rock.

I arise today

Through God’s strength to pilot me;

God’s might to uphold me,

God’s wisdom to guide me,

God’s eye to look before me,

God’s ear to hear me,

God’s word to speak for me,

God’s hand to guard me,

God’s way to lie before me,

God’s shield to protect me,

God’s hosts to save me

From snares of the devil,

From temptations of vices,

From every one who desires me ill,

Afar and anear,

Alone or in a multitude.

I summon today all these powers between me and evil,

Against every cruel merciless power that opposes my body and soul,

Against incantations of false prophets,

Against false laws of heretics,

Against craft of idolatry,

Against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul.

Christ shield me today

Against poison, against burning,

Against drowning, against wounding,

So that reward may come to me in abundance.

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,

Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ on my right, Christ on my left,

Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,

Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,

Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,

Christ in the eye that sees me,

Christ in the ear that hears me.

I arise today

Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,

Through a belief in the Threeness,

Through a confession of the Oneness

Of the Creator of creation.

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 Shine, Jesus, Shine #2173

Benediction

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

Postlude

Staff

Natalie Bowerman Pastor

Betsy Lehmann Music Director

Joe White Custodian

Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant

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