Because the World Needs Something Different (Traditional) - Sermon Transcript

My name is Anna Bundy Hagler, and I am one of the associate ministers here at the church.

And I really am so grateful that you are worshiping with us this morning.

Now, many of those in our congregation are pastors, retired or serving in other places.

And admittedly, I'm so grateful none of my previous seminary professors are here, mostly because there are very few books I remember reading in seminary.

 I remember spending an unreasonable amount of money and time highlighting sentences I was convinced would change my life.

I could barely tell you what most were about today if they weren't United Methodist books.

But there is one book I remember vividly.

It's called God's Hotel, written by a physician named Dr. Victoria Sweet.

You should add it to your list if you'd like.

 Dr. Sweet spent 20 years working at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, caring for people who often had nowhere else to go.

Many needed long-term care that the healthcare system struggled to provide.

 Sweet began noticing how much modern medicine valued efficiency.

How quickly could a patient receive a diagnosis?

How soon could they leave the hospital?

But what happened when treating an illness became more important than noticing the person who was ill?

 She became interested in an older understanding of medicine that thought about the body less like a machine needing repair and more like a garden needing attention.

If a machine breaks, you identify the faulty part.

A garden asks something else of you.

You have to understand the conditions in which life is trying to flourish.

 I remember reading that book and wondering whether the church sometimes makes a similar mistake.

We're capable of identifying someone's immediate need and finding a way to meet it.

But how often do we stop there without learning much about the person whose life is affected?

That's connected to the question we're asking this month.

Why church?

 I think that one answer is we live in a world remarkably good at dividing people into categories, and the church is called to practice something different.

Just think for a second about how our lives are arranged.

We spend much of our week around people in similar professions.

 Our social media feeds get better and better at showing us voices that reinforce what we already believe.

Our days make it surprisingly easy to avoid people who are different than us.

And Dallas makes this especially convenient.

You can live in one part of the city, work in another, and spend your time in places where almost everyone shares your educational background or has a similar amount of money to spend.

 Some of that is personal choice, and some of it is the result of decades of decisions about housing, investment, transportation, and whose neighborhoods were considered worth supporting.

There are people in the city living only a few miles apart whose experiences of Dallas barely overlap.

What if one reason we need the church is that it interrupts our ability to stay comfortably inside those separate worlds?

 What if our faith calls us into relationships we would not necessarily have chosen for ourselves?

Why church?

Because the church is called to become a community where divisions that organize so much of our lives no longer get the final word.

 We gather with people we might not otherwise know.

We learn to see one another as whole people with bodies, histories, needs, gifts, and dignity.

And as we learn to see one another differently, we begin to recognize what needs repairing in the world around us.

 That doesn't mean relationships alone will solve injustice.

It means we cannot do the work of justice faithfully without listening to the people who live with its consequences.

And that brings me to our scripture this morning, coming from Isaiah 58, verses 6 through 12.

Hear these words.

Is not this the fast that I choose?

 to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house when you see the naked to cover them and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn and your healing shall spring up quickly.

Your vindicator shall go before you.

The glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard."

 Then you shall call and the Lord will answer.

You shall cry for help and he will say, here I am.

 If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like noonday.

The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your needs in parched places and make your bones strong.

And you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never fail.

 Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt.

You shall raise up the foundations of many generations.

You shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.

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

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

 The people Isaiah addresses are frustrated with God.

They've been fasting and observing religious practices, but they don't feel like God's paying attention.

And God, speaking through the prophet, points out that while they're busy fasting, they're still exploiting their workers and mistreating one another.

They've convinced themselves that their devotion to God can exist independently of their treatment of their neighbors.

And guess what?

God isn't having it.

 The problem isn't that they have been worshiping.

It's that worship hasn't changed how they live.

So Isaiah describes a fast that looks like loosening the bonds of injustice, sharing food with hungry people, and welcoming people without shelter.

Worship that never reaches our neighbors has missed something essential.

Then comes this instruction.

Do not hide yourself from your own kin.

 John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, pays particular attention to that phrase in his notes on Isaiah.

Some people, he says, limit it to our own relatives.

But Wesley pushes beyond that.

Whenever we look at another person, he argues, we see someone who shares our flesh.

He asks us to imagine their hunger as our own hunger and their need for shelter as something we could experience ourselves.

 That sounds simple.

And so we consider how much of our world depends on convincing us that other people's circumstances have nothing to do with ours.

In seminary, one area of study is theological anthropology, which is just asking what we believe a human being is.

Across Christian history, theologians have debated the relationship between body and soul.

 Some, influenced by Greek philosophy, emphasize the distinction between them.

But much of the Hebrew biblical tradition describes human life as deeply integrated.

In Genesis, God forms the human from dust, breathes life into that dust, and the human becomes a living being.

 Our physical circumstances aren't detachable from our emotional or spiritual lives.

Hunger affects how we move through the world.

Illness can reshape our relationships.

And belonging can change what we believe is possible for ourselves.

We're not souls carrying around empty bodies until something better comes along.

God loves and creates whole people.

 And if that's what we believe about human beings, we cannot approach someone's hunger as though it has nothing to do with their dignity or treat their spiritual well-being as unrelated to the conditions in which they live.

 But I wonder if this understanding of wholeness has something to say about our community too, because we've become so comfortable separating ourselves from other people.

We categorize each other by the neighborhoods we live in, the work we do, the opinions we hold, and then we act surprised when it becomes hard to recognize our shared humanity.

 The church shouldn't erase those differences, but it can become a place where they don't determine whose life matters or who gets to belong.

Here, we're invited to encounter whole people, including parts of their stories that don't resemble our own.

Wesley's ministry, sorry, I'm giggling because of what I'm about to say.

Man, that would have been a good punchline, but oh well.

 Wesley's ministry reflects this conviction in an interesting way.

He was fascinated by medicine, and in 1747, he published The Primitive Physic, a collection of medical guidance and remedies intended to make basic care more accessible.

Did you hear what I just said?

John Wesley wrote his own medical journal.

 Now, I wouldn't recommend getting your medical advice from an 18th century preacher.

Still, it's worth noticing that Wesley considered people's bodily suffering as a concern for Christian ministry.

 That conviction also shaped the United Methodist understanding of works of mercy.

Wesley taught that caring for people who were sick, feeding people who experienced hunger, and visiting those who were in prison weren't optional extras.

They were means of grace, practices through which God could change the person offering care to.

 In his sermon on visiting the sick, Wesley distinguishes between sending assistance and actually showing up.

Both can matter, but presence puts us in a position to learn something from a person whose experience might challenge our own.

This gets uncomfortable here in Dallas because we're pretty good at giving money.

 We have extraordinary generosity in this city, and what a gift.

I don't want to dismiss that.

People need resources, and someone who needs a meal should never have to share their story to earn one.

And you can and should learn about our RISE Fund and who your money goes to when you give to missions here at FUMC Dallas.

 But money can also provide a convenient distance.

We can write a check to an organization across town without ever asking what life is like in the neighborhood it serves.

We can help maintain a program while remaining unchanged by the people involved in it.

So perhaps the question isn't whether we should give money or build relationships.

We need both.

 The harder question is whether our generosity allows us to remain safely separated from the people whose lives could teach us something about our own city.

Of course, people need help now.

A hungry person needs food today.

Someone without shelter needs somewhere safe to sleep tonight.

We should never make immediate care wait until we've solved every larger problem.

It's going to take a while.

 But Isaiah's vision doesn't stop with meeting today's needs.

This scripture imagines ruins rebuilt and streets made livable again.

The prophet asked not only whether we will care for people who are suffering, but whether we will participate in the conditions that keep producing suffering.

 The church needs both kinds of faithfulness.

Mercy that responds to the person in front of us and justice that asks why so many people are left in need.

The people Isaiah addresses are called repairers of the breach.

A breach is a place where something that should be connected has been torn apart.

Repairing it means asking what caused the division and who has been living with its consequences.

 It means listening to people who know those consequences firsthand and not assuming we already know what their community needs.

And this brings me to our mission here at First United Methodist Church of Dallas.

To magnify God's love for all people by creating space for belonging, purpose, justice, and joy.

We say those words a lot.

But think about how much they ask of us.

 Belonging is more than greeting someone warmly when they enter this building, although that is very important.

It asks whether we are willing to make room in our lives for people whose experiences don't mirror ours.

And justice is more than meeting a need when we notice one.

It asks whether we're willing to confront the conditions that keep producing the need.

I don't think we can fully practice one without the other.

 Relationships help us see what needs repairing, while justice challenges the barriers that make genuine belonging so difficult in the first place.

There's a moment in worship that illustrates this better than any theological definition I could give you, and that's one of my favorite parts of worshiping together each week.

 Every Sunday, our acolytes bring the light of Christ into the sanctuary.

Fourth and fifth graders, if you're in the sanctuary where you raise your hand, it might just be you two.

Our acolytes are over here, folks.

Oh, I see one up there.

They are our acolytes.

Friends, we watch that light come forward as we gather to worship in this sacred space.

But think about what happens when worship concludes.

 The acolytes take the same light out and carry it out before us.

We don't leave the light in the sanctuary as though God only lives here.

We know better than that.

It goes out ahead of us, reminding us that God is already at work beyond these walls, inviting us to participate in that work of transforming the world.

 And I think that movement is especially important in a city where it's easy to leave worship and return immediately to our familiar pockets.

The light doesn't simply lead us back to people who are just like us.

It calls us into the life of the city, including places and relationships we might otherwise avoid.

Near the end of today's text, Isaiah describes the faithful community as a water garden.

 I can't hear that image without thinking of Victoria's Sweet and what a garden requires of its caretaker.

You have to pay attention to the conditions that allow life to flourish.

And you have to be willing to keep tending it.

Why church?

Because we're called to practice a way of being together that the rest of the world makes easy to avoid.

 We gather as whole people and we learn that our neighbors are whole people too.

Then we're sent into a divided city to participate in God's work of repair.

The world doesn't need more noise about everything that's broken.

It needs people who are willing to be a part of the healing.

May we be that kind of church.

In the name of our creator, redeemer, and sustainer.

Amen.