God's Toy Box, Part 7: Bubbles

 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 31, 2024

Easter Sunday

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:

Early in the morning, it was dark and still.

The open tomb unsealed the bottle.

Mary thought Jesus was gone forever, but then he called her by name, and the first bubble left the wand.

Mary knew Jesus deep in her heart, and her faith made a cascade of bubbles take flight.

Mary proclaimed the Risen Christ to the disciples, and the bubbles filled the sky.

The disciples spread the news, and there were bubbles everywhere.

We thought Jesus was sealed in a tomb, but nothing can contain him.

His love always comes bubbling through.

*Hymn                        Christ the Lord Is Risen Today             #302, v 1-3

Prayer of Confession:

Risen Christ, we come to you this morning with our bubble solution tightly sealed. We’re weary in the face of so much hurt, disappointment, loss, and death, that we don’t know if we can believe in your miracle. As you opened that tomb, open our solution bottles. As you gave Mary the courage to proclaim your resurrection, show us that we have just enough air in our lungs to put the first bubble out there.

Assurance:

Hear the Good News: the Lord is Risen, and his life makes us live, too. Let that Good News multiply a thousand times over, and watch the bubbles rise.

Scripture Reading John 20: 1-18

The Resurrection of Jesus

20 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2 So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” 3 Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. 4 The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5 He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7 and the cloth that had been on Jesus’s head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8 Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed, 9 for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10 Then the disciples returned to their homes.

Jesus Appears to Mary Magdalene

11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look[a] into the tomb, 12 and she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13 They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14 When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir,[b] if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew,[c] “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). 17 Jesus said to her, “Do not touch me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ” 18 Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and she told them that he had said these things to her.

Sermon                      God’s Toy Box, Part 7: Bubbles

Alrighty, folx: for those of you who were following along during the season of Lent, you know that the last six weeks I’ve been talking about a book titled Toy Box Leadership, bringing the toys the authors of that book wrote about into this worship space, and showing y’all the spiritual lessons we learn from these toys a lot of us grew up playing with. We’re at the very end now, because it’s Easter!

And this week’s toy is the only one from this sermon series that’s actually not from the book I’ve been telling you about. This morning we’re talking about bubbles, and I was inspired to use them for the very end of this series when I saw my kids playing with a bubble wand a few months ago. It’s really such a simple toy that I hardly think about bubbles as a toy at all. But Lily was gifted a bubble wand in a goodie bag at some point, and she and Xander looked at that wand the way I look at the Chipotle menu when I’m tired and starving. It was the perfect thing that their souls longed for. Lily started waving the wand around, Xander chased after the bubbles, and in that moment I questioned if I’ve ever been as happy to do anything at all as they were to blow bubbles. It was pure joy.

The loving relationship between kids and bubbles seems to go back to time immemorial, and we have evidence, via art, of parents creating homemade bubble solutions as far back as the 17th Century, using soap. In the 19th Century, the idea of bubbles being the source of delight for all children got a boost when the Pears’ Soap Company in London created an ad campaign with paintings of kids playing with bubbles. And then, in the 1940s, a Chicago based cleaning company called Chemtoy changed the game forever when they realized they could just put detergent in small bottles and sell it as “bubble solution”. A few weeks ago, when we had Lily’s birthday party, I needed to keep Xander occupied for a few minutes while I helped the bigger kids, so I did my mom trick of putting some dish soap in a big bowl and filling it up with warm water so Xander could play with the suds, and then I turned to another mom there and pondered aloud why on earth I’ve spent so much money on toys for my kids when they’d rather play with soapy water. Oh well. One thing I know for a fact about this toy is how easy it is to make it, multiply it, and share it.

Let’s switch gears for just a second and take a look at what is likely in the top 10 for Bible passages you’ve heard the most of throughout your life. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, naturally, all wrote narratives about Jesus’ resurrection, but I almost always choose to preach from John. While the other three evangelists all tell us Mary Magdalene was the first person to see and proclaim the Risen Christ, only John takes this intimate approach of having us see this entire story through Mary Magdalene’s eyes. She saw the stone was rolled away from the tomb when she came to anoint Jesus’ body, so she turned for help from two of the disciples: Peter, and a second disciple whose name we don’t know, we only know that, apparently, Jesus really loved him. In other words, anticipating a big crisis, Mary turned to the two men who were the closest to Jesus. They both saw as much as she did at first glance–a rolled away stone, and linen wrappings neatly folded and left there, with no body of Christ. But neither Peter nor the disciple Jesus loved thought there was anything else they could do. Heartbroken that, on top of losing their beloved teacher, someone also desecrated his grave and stole his body, Peter and the other disciple hung their heads and went home. Their deep sorrow was like an air tight factory seal on their bubble solution. They didn’t engage with Jesus in that moment.

But Mary stayed at the tomb, just like she stayed at the cross on Friday afternoon after all the men ran away. She’s sorrowful, like Peter and the disciple Jesus loved. Then she goes to the bargaining stage of her grief. She sees a man that she assumes works there, and begs him to tell her where Jesus’ body is, so she can take care of it herself. We hear her fear, her desperation. She’s shaking up her own solution, and she doesn’t know it yet. There’s so much hope for the Gospel to spread through Mary, because unlike the men, who have given up, Mary is devoted, and she’s not going to stop caring. All she needs is a faint glimmer of the Good News, and she gets that in the sound of her name coming from Jesus’ vocal chords: Mary.

That first beautiful bubble.

Should she have recognized Jesus’ face? Yeah, maybe, but she was in shock. And besides, we all know people that we recognize faster with our ears than with our eyes. I know what the footsteps of all three of my kids sound like. I can hear “MOMMY” yelled from across the house, and I can tell you which kid needs a snack. Mary’s love wasn’t for Jesus’ face, it was for the way he called her. His voice made her more than a poor woman, more than someone accused of being “full of demons”, more than a rumored sex worker that people gossiped about. She was Mary, a disciple of Christ.

The bubbles. How joyous it is to know who you are, and to know that someone loves you.

One major drawback of bubbles: they’re kind of fragile. The slightest touch will pop them, and for how much joy and elation they bring to the hearts of children, you don’t know rage until you’re consoling a kid whose little brother just accidentally dumped out all of her bubble solution. Or so I would imagine. It’s so easy to make those first bubbles. Just dip the wand in the solution and blow. When my oldest, Daniel, was very little and struggling with his speech, he blew bubbles with his speech therapist because the breath control and shaping of your mouth that you have to do to blow bubbles help you learn how to use all those same muscle groups to talk. Perhaps Jesus was Mary’s speech therapist: he blew those first bubbles right there in the garden with her, and then showed her that she could do the rest of the work with her voice.

But don’t touch him, he warned her. She can’t do that. She’ll pop those bubbles with her fingers before they’ve had a chance to go high in the air. Don’t hang out with him in a cemetery, he urges Mary. If she knows that Jesus is alive and she spends all of her time next to his tomb, she may as well dump out all her bubble solution on the ground. She needs to leave, and find other people who love Jesus and find joy in the Good News of his life. Mary, then, blows a bunch of bubbles with Jesus’ eleven surviving disciples. But they can’t all stay confined to that Upper Room and blow bubbles indoors. They’ll hit the ceiling and pop. They need to take their love and joy in the Risen Christ to the streets.

Now, not everyone is going to have a lot of success “blowing” bubbles. That can get tiring, and it can be pretty hard for you depending on your fine motor control. Lucky for you, if blowing doesn’t do the trick, just waving the wand around will usually whip up a bubble storm. Put differently, there’s a lot of ways to share the Good News that Jesus lives, even if you get tongue tied real fast and giving a speech isn’t your thing. You can tell the world as much about Jesus with your body, and maybe much, much more, than you can with your voice. Those arms waving that wand can also hug someone who needs it. They can stretch out and give food to Street Soldiers, and feed at risk families. They can punch ballots, and sign petitions, and write letters to local representatives, all in support of the people Jesus told us to protect, the most vulnerable among us.

And maybe making bubbles with your hands and arms isn’t your thing, either. Maybe you need to find another way, and maybe you need help. That’s just fine, bubble machines were invented for a reason: they’re a ton of fun, and they make a white lotta bubbles really fast. So, maybe modern technology helps you tell people about the Risen Christ. Maybe you like using social media, or maybe you worship with us online, or help with our livestream. We can’t let old fashioned sensibilities put limits on a limitless Jesus. 

Because the Good News is this: whether you say it with your mouth, with your hands, with your arms, with your feet, with a machine, with the help of a friend, or some other awesome bubble-blowing method I don’t know about yet, the violence, hatred, betrayal, and apathy that killed Jesus on Friday succeeded for a weekend, but failed within three days. There’s loud voices of harm out there. They want us to believe they’ll overpower everything we try to do, and they might succeed at first, but love is a lot stronger than that negativity, and it always rises to the top. And the love that Jesus taught us, the love we pass on to one another, the love that Jesus rose to preserve, and the love that we can give the world can live forever if we keep it alive. If I’m the only person blowing bubbles up here, mine won’t last very long, and eventually I’ll need to go refill my solution bottle, and the bubbles will stop. But if we’re all continually blowing these bubbles, these bubbles of Jesus’ love, and we take turns keeping that going, we can just keep these ascending, and spreading. And I gotta tell you, I’m a jaded millennial, and there isn’t much out there that gets my attention. But if I saw a bunch of grownups at church blowing bubbles, I’d wanna know what’s going on in there. Wouldn’t you?

In the end, it’s just like my Sunday School teacher taught me, in the form of song, when I was a little kid:

Oh, you can’t keep Jesus’ love in a box,

Love in a box,

Love in a box.

Oh, you can’t keep Jesus’ love in a box,

For his love will come a bubblin’ through.

Amen.

*Hymn                       Easter People, Raise Your Voices                    #304

 

Offering

Offertory

*Doxology #94

*Prayer of dedication           

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

Almighty and Eternal God

Whose goodness and grace overflowed when you raised Jesus from the dead,

Let your goodness and grace continue to flow upon your people.

We pray for those, like the women of old,

whose lives have been stopped

because they couldn’t roll away a stone

that was blocking their path to new life and hope.

Roll away the stone

of despair and hopelessness

that the light of Jesus Christ may shine

into the darkness

to bring joy and warmth again.

Roll away the stone

For those still stuck at Good Friday

those whose strength is failing through ill-health

whose spirits are flagging through depression,

whose determination is being sapped through addiction.

Lord God roll away the stone

that they might better see the path stretching out before then

a path unused except for your footprints

etched out in the morning dew.

In the light and the glory of the resurrection

We pray for our world

For areas of violence and hostility

For lands where famine and disease are rife

For peoples who look in vain for the rains to come to guarantee a harvest

For all those who today would struggle to find joy in the resurrection story.

We offer these prayers to you Lord God always mindful of the great company who compass you about, the ransomed and the redeemed of all the ages. As once they inspired us by their living so may they continue so to do till the day of our won homecoming to you through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

— written by the Very Right Rev. David Arnott. Posted on the Church of Scotland’s excellent Starters for Sunday website. 

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                                           He Lives                                       #310

Benediction

Postlude

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Staff

Natalie Bowerman Pastor

Betsy Lehmann Music Director

Joe White Custodian

Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant