Spectating or Participating? - Sermon Transcript

Well, good morning, friends.

My name's, good morning, good morning.

My name's Mitchell.

I'm the senior minister here at First United Methodist Church of Dallas, and if this is your first time worshiping with us, welcome.

We are delighted, really delighted that you're here, and we hope you come back.

 and worship with us in the weeks to come.

And it is a big Sunday for us as a church.

You know it's a big Sunday because we have balloons.

And anytime we have balloons, that means something important is happening.

It is back to school season.

Amen.

All right.

And seriously, there is nothing, and I mean literally nothing, that lets you know that DISD starting is just two sleeps away from

 then going to Target on a Saturday.

This past Saturday, I snuck away.

We'd already done all the school supply shopping, but I was there to try to find some sports cards and totally forgot it was tax-free weekend.

 And it was incredible how difficult it was to find a parking spot.

I swear I saw a woman crying tears of joy as she shut the back hatch of her oversized SUV, thinking about reduced grocery bills now and finding some peace between like 8 a.m.

on Tuesday and when she sits down at her desk for work.

And don't get me wrong.

 I love summer.

I really do.

It fits my personality well.

The slower mornings, the lack of a schedule, the way everybody in this building seems a little more relaxed for about 10 weeks.

But by the time August rolls around, we are ready for the routine to come back.

I am.

The backpack's all being packed.

The lunch is being made.

And

 The color-coded calendar on the refrigerator that we pray will bring tranquility to our lives.

And that calendar, that has my attention, I think our attention,

 this morning because somewhere between the last day of school and the first day of school, most of us did this thing.

We sat down maybe with a spreadsheet, maybe with one of those planners that have stickers.

I don't know what it is for you, but you built out your fall schedule and you have soccer practice on Tuesday and Thursdays, guitar lessons on Wednesday, the tutor's schedule.

Then you have like a travel team maybe for one of your kids' sports.

 And then you have that thing your kid begged you to sign them up for in May, but now they are dreading it in August.

That's real.

To parent in 2026 is actually to work as hard as you can to optimize your household.

 To be a grandparent is probably to giggle a bit at how hard your child is working to optimize their household, but we do optimize our kids' extracurriculars like we're building out their resume already for college instead of raising a 10-year-old who mostly just wants to play in the backyard.

 And this isn't just a parent thing, okay?

It's not a sermon about just parenthood, because I think we've all fallen victim to this cycle in some ways.

We optimize our mornings.

We optimize our workouts, or at least we try to.

We optimize our vacations and our routines.

And I know that many of you optimize your doctor's appointments week in and week out.

 And look, I do want to be careful here because I'm not about to stand up here and tell you that wanting good things for yourself is inherently bad or wanting good things for your family is bad.

It's not.

But I do think it's worth naming what's happening underneath all this optimization because we live in a moment that is rather obsessed with getting better.

Getting faster.

 Getting more efficient.

Did you know that AI can write your email for you now?

Trust me, I read a lot of AI written emails.

It can plan your meals.

It can apparently tell you the fastest route to raise an emotionally healthy child.

 You have to ask it the right way, but eventually it will come out with some pretty good suggestions.

And I say that not as some aspiring Luddite, because the AI boom in 2026, it's really, it's not new.

Well, I mean, it's new, it's new technology, and it may destroy the entire world, but it's just the newest tool in a very old project of optimization.

We've been trying to optimize ourself

 Since long before anyone could ask ChatGPT a question, walk into any bookstore and it proves my point, you'll find an entire wall dedicated to becoming a better version of yourself.

 better parent, better leader, better spouse, five habits, seven principles, 15 steps to the best life ever.

Somewhere in that pile is probably a few books about becoming a better Christian too, written like it's some sort of productivity hack.

And none of that in and of itself is evil, by the way.

Some of it is genuinely useful.

And I've read some of those books and I've tried some of those habits and I failed at most of them, but it's not because the advice was bad, right?

 But here's the thing that I've come to notice about really all of it.

The calendars, the obsession with getting everything just right, the self-improvement, almost all of it is aimed inwardly.

It's about my growth.

My kid success.

 my schedule tightened up, my life upgraded or leveled up.

There's an age-old theological phrase for this, actually, centuries old.

Actually, Augustine used it first, and then Martin Luther picked it up and ran with it while he was writing his lectures on the book of Romans, which we're going to get to here in a second.

The phrase is incurvetus in se, which simply means curved in on oneself.

 Luther used it to describe what sin does to the human heart.

It doesn't always look like rebellion or cruelty.

Sometimes it just looks like a slow inward curve where even the good things, even the noble things, even our faith start bending back towards ourself.

We can optimize our schedules.

We can improve our parenting.

We can read the right books.

We can download the right apps and still end up exactly where we started.

 curved inward, facing ourselves.

 And I don't think most of us are like avoiding this sort of spiritual growth necessary to bend our attention back outwards.

I think a lot of us have quietly built a version of it that never requires anyone else.

An app for your morning scripture, a podcast for the commute, a book that's on the nightstand that you've been meaning to finish.

All of it is real, some of it is good, and all of it is something you can do entirely alone.

 which is exactly the tension we're going to sit in for the next few weeks.

We're calling this series Participation Required, and here's why.

Because I think for all of us, but especially for young families in this room, church has quietly become one more optional item on an already impossible calendar.

 Not because you don't love God, not because you don't want your kids to grow up in a faith community or become spiritually nurtured, but because everything in your life right now is asking you to choose the most efficient use of your time, the most efficient use of your Sunday morning.

And church doesn't always win because the math isn't mathing.

It just, there's not enough hours in the day.

And over these next four weeks, we're going to look at what actually, what it actually means to show up.

Not just physically, like being present, although...

 There is something to that.

But to participate in something that was never designed to be optimized in the first place.

Church was never designed to be optimized.

Curated.

Faith was never meant to be done alone.

We're going to talk about being sent out in week two.

In week three, we're going to talk about...

 believing one thing and doing another.

And then in week four, we're gonna end with a story of a fig tree that's really strange and good, it's good.

But we start here with an inward curve of the heart.

In a letter that Paul wrote to the church in Rome, believe it or not, this church never had an attendance problem.

And so we're gonna get into it.

Romans 15, verses one through seven.

This is what Paul is telling this community.

 We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak and not please ourselves.

Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor.

For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.

For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness

 By steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope, hope being a really big theme for Paul in this book.

 In verse 5, he says, may the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another in accordance with Christ Jesus so that together you may with one voice glorify God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, welcome one another, therefore just as Christ has welcomed you for the glory of God.

 for the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, and for the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

Will you pray with me?

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer.

For you are the one who calls us to bend our gaze outward, help us to see, to live in a way

 that truly honors you.

Amen.

Now, if you had only heard this passage once, you might assume that Paul is writing to a church full of people that have checked out.

 weak faith, strong faith.

It sounds sort of like he's talking about spiritual effort, like some of them are trying hard and some of them aren't.

But that's not what's happening here in chapter 15.

The church in Rome that Paul is writing to, the church is not lazy.

They're not a lazy church.

It's not empty on Sundays.

If anything, they have the opposite problem.

 The church is packed with people who care deeply, who show up every week, who have very strong convictions about what faithfulness looks like.

The trouble is that they've split into two camps, two competing camps.

One group believes you shouldn't eat meat.

There was sacrifice to idols because in their world, that's basically all the meat.

And so they're sticking to vegetables.

The other group says that's ridiculous.

An idol is nothing.

Meat is meat.

Eat what you want.

 One group treats certain days as holy.

The other says every day belongs to God equally, so why bother making one off from the rest?

Paul calls one side the strong side.

It's not a football term, just how I wrote it in my sermon.

Paul calls one side the strong side and the other side weak.

 Not because one group is trying harder, but because one side has the freedom of conviction to do whatever they want, and the other side's conscience won't let them.

And here's, I think, what's easy to miss.

Both groups are fully participating in the life of the church.

Nobody's skipping worship over this.

They're showing up every single week and using their time together to...

 fight, to make their case, to convince the other side they're wrong, to defend their own practice as the right one.

They are the most engaged and opinionated present congregation you could imagine, and Paul still has to write them a letter about failing one another.

 which tells you something important right out of the gate, showing up and just participating or showing up and just being present, that's not the actual finish line.

I mean, it helps, but that's not the finish line.

Because what we know is that you can be in this room every single week

 of your life and still be doing exactly what Paul is correcting here.

Because look at what Paul actually asked for in verse one.

We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.

That word please, it's the same word you'd use for satisfying your own appetite.

Paul isn't asking the strong to change their theology.

 He's asking them to stop building their participation around their own preferences and start building it around what actually serves the person next to them.

 That's the whole point of the passage.

Not attendance, rather an embodied faith.

A faith that begins to shift from inwardly focused to outwardly experienced because here's Luther's fuller description and it's worth, I think, reengaging with it and not just sort of depending on my shorthand.

Martin Luther said, our nature is so deeply curved inward

 curved in on itself, that it doesn't just bend the ordinary things of life toward our own satisfaction.

It bends even the good gifts of God.

It bends even our religion.

Even our faith becomes something we use for ourselves, something we enjoy on our own terms.

And we do it so instinctively that we don't even notice that we're doing it.

 And if we read Romans 15 again, the strong believers in Rome aren't unfaithful and they're not lazy.

If anything, they're theologically confident, sure of their freedom, sure they're right.

And Paul's entire correction is that their certainty, their certainty has curved them inward.

Their faith has become about being right.

 about their own liberty, about their own comfort with the practice instead of about the person sitting across from the table from them who sees it differently.

And that is what a curved faith looks like up close.

It doesn't look like absence necessarily.

It looks like a fully committed person who has quietly made their faith all about themselves.

And that's not just a first century problem.

 We live in a culture that has built an entire economy around personal optimization and becoming better, and the church is not exempt from this.

We want a sermon that speaks to us, but not too loudly.

We want a worship style that moves us, but only in the right ways.

 the service time that fits our schedule, the Sunday school class with people that we like, and a group of folks who already agree with us

 and won't push back too hard, folks who make us comfortable, we have without really meaning to started treating our faith like a subscription service, something curated entirely around our own preferences.

And the good news is we can cancel it anytime we want with no long-term commitment required.

We essentially come in and out of church life

 based off of the seasons that we're in and the preferences in which, I don't know, the preferences being met or not.

And into that, I think Paul says something that lands, well, it's rather offensive in its simplicity.

And I'll say it very clearly here.

Paul says, serve your neighbor, not yourself.

 And this right here, this idea of serving someone else over yourself is a challenge modernity doesn't love because we're drawn to partial participation.

We want the parts of faith that are convenient and none of the parts that cost us anything.

We want community on our terms, discipleship on our schedule, spiritual growth that fits neatly around everything else we've already decided matters.

 We would much rather be a spectator on the sidelines than someone who participates.

And Brene Brown says the same thing about courage, right?

That people in the stands never have to risk anything.

They just get to have opinions about those who are in the arena.

 But there is no version of this that Paul offers halfway.

He's not asking the strong to tone it down a little bit or the weak to just sort of loosen up.

He's asking both sides to frankly be all in.

 not on their own preference, but on each other.

And in verse 7, we kind of get the heart of it.

Welcome one another, Paul says, just as Christ has welcomed you.

And that's not a suggestion for the highly motivated.

That's the actual shape of what it means to follow Jesus in community, which brings me back to the truth.

I think this whole series is going to keep circling

 back to, so I should say it as clearly as I can right at the start, right here.

And Anna, this is what should go on the Instagram slide, okay?

Spiritual growth does not happen in isolation.

 It does not happen in isolation.

It cannot happen in isolation because you cannot sanctify yourself.

You cannot form yourself into the likeness of Christ through sheer personal discipline.

It cannot happen.

 You can't form yourself into a follower of Christ, one good habit at a time, alone in your house with your app open and your headphones in, and that is not a moral failure on your part.

It's just how this whole thing works.

We were never designed to develop ourselves in isolation.

 and you cannot spiritually form yourself

 Doing this thing alone, you just can't.

John Wesley, and if you've been here for more than a few weeks, you've probably heard me say this before, put it as sharply as anyone ever has.

There is no holiness but social holiness, not private holiness that happens to occur near other Christians, holiness that only happens because of other Christians, because they see what you cannot see in yourself, because they carry what you cannot carry alone.

 because your faith left entirely to your own management, I hate to say this, Martin Luther was very right on this, will eventually curve back towards you.

There is no way around it.

When you live your life in isolation, your world begins to curve back inwardly.

So I don't know exactly how we solve for that.

 I don't know how to fix that.

I certainly don't know exactly what that looks like for you this week.

I'm not going to stand up here and give you three steps to fix it by Friday because if I had those steps, I'd put it in a book and sell it to you.

But honestly, I don't think it works that way.

There's no quick fix here.

There's no three things you can do to sort of begin paying attention to others.

 And I don't think it's easy because if it was easy, Paul wouldn't be insisting on this as much as he does.

So while I don't know how we address this in this moment in time, I will leave you with this.

And this I absolutely believe to be true.

Somewhere in this sanctuary right now, somewhere in this room, there is someone whose faith needs you.

 needs you to show up, to care, to be present, and they don't need your opinion.

They don't need your correction, just your presence, curved outward instead of in.

 Welcome one another, Paul says, the way Christ welcomed you.

May we actually have the courage to be curved that way, to be oriented that way toward each other and through each other toward God, even when it is inconvenient or doesn't fit nicely into our schedules or makes us uncomfortable, because that is the difference between spectating and participating in

 And friends, the world needs a lot more participation these days.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.