Calvary United Methodist Church November 16, 2014 Rev. Dr. S. Ronald Parks Children s Sermon Matthew 18:21-22 The great news of God is given to us. We welcome the children to the front of this worship space because, why not? Good morning, Guys! How are we doing? (Good!) Last week I talked to you about the Strong National Museum of Play and the fact that last week there were three new inductees into the Toy Hall of Fame. Do you remember what the three were? The first was Bubbles. The second was the Rubik s Cube. And the third was little green army men. And I mentioned last week that there were no Bozos. I had my Big Bozo Bop Bag here and we learned a little bit about forgiveness last week because God always keeps coming back no matter what we dish out.
Do you think puzzles are part of the National Toy Hall of Fame? (yes!) You do? Well, they are not! In the 17 years that they have been inducting toys into the National Toy Hall of Fame, puzzles have never gotten in. What is so great about puzzles? Has anyone here ever put a puzzle together? Put those hands up. Look at that! There is not a person here that hasn t put a puzzle together. Puzzles are, as we know, they are fun for all ages. You probably have somewhere in your house a puzzle that you put together when you were even younger than you are now. And the older you get, the more difficult the puzzles are that we put together. But they also teach us some cool stuff in addition to being fun. If you stop to think about it, there are also some pretty cool lessons we can learn about life and about ourselves. The first one is every piece is different. By the way, I came across a puzzle in which this is not true. I ve seen a puzzle which is a circle. It is a red circle with no texture, nothing on it to distinguish one piece from another. That s crazy! That s a recipe for insanity. Give me a puzzle in which the pieces aren t different and expect me to put it together. I didn t buy it. Anyone buy that puzzle? Nobody s bought that puzzle. Some sick mind designed that puzzle. Each piece fits together into the others. If you look at a puzzle as you start to put it together you realize that the piece that you are holding in your hand fits only in one place and it fits into the pieces around it.
Every piece is needed. If you ve got a puzzle and you put it together and you realize that one piece is missing, doesn t that drive you crazy? And you just turn the place inside out looking for that one piece of the puzzle that you can t find. And every piece is part of a larger design, whether it is an animal or a landscape or anything, it is always part of a larger design and each piece is just a small part of that big picture. Puzzles are fun and they teach us cool stuff also, not only about ourselves, but about our church and our God. Listen to these words from Matthew 18, Jesus kind of has an inkling about this whole puzzle thing. He says: You have a body, right? Your body plays. You guys like to play, don t you? Of course. Your body works. You love going to school, don t you? (yes, no ) uh huh. Your body eats, right and your body sleeps, and your body laughs. Can you laugh for me? Alright, stop it. And your body cries. And it does all those things as one body. And there is only one you. So every part of you is unique and special just like you are. It takes a lot of different pieces working together in your body, right, to do all of that stuff. And each one is special and each part of your body does it own special thing. Your eyes see. Your noses smell. Your hands hold. Your feet walk. Your ears hear and your elbows bend. Of course. If you were one big eye, you could see, but that s all you could do. If your body was one big foot, you could walk, but because you can t see you d walk right into a wall. The church is the body of Christ; many pieces put together by God and we need every piece to be the body of Christ that God wants us to be. So, as I said before, puzzles are fun, they teach us cool stuff about the church and about God. Speaking of a cool puzzle, four years ago we created a puzzle that was based on a photograph that was taken in 2008. We handed out all the different puzzle pieces to everybody and asked them to bring it back. One year ago, somebody brought their puzzle piece back. They couldn t find it for three years and when they brought it back, they said to
me Is it too late? Well, yeah, it was, because we boxed up all the pieces that somebody brought back. If you look closely at this you ll see Sue Zearing, Betty Aston, Betty Miller and Carol Mitchell. Neither one of those four people had the piece. Somebody else did. But you can see that those four people were missing from the puzzle that we put together four years ago. Last week you saw out in the square the photograph from our congregation last year and you also saw that it was turned into a puzzle. There are 600 pieces that were carved out of that photograph and this week, four women with nothing better to do, actually four women with a lot of generosity and patience in their heart, they got together and the took the puzzle and the flipped it upside down and they numbered every one of the pieces. Then they flipped the puzzle right side up, they took every piece out individually and traced around it and they wrote the number on the back of the piece on this big template which is right out there next to the picture of the congregation. And then they collected all the pieces of the puzzle and they stuffed them in envelopes and those envelopes have in them a couple of things. They ve got a letter, they ve got the puzzle piece and they have a commitment card, which Mr. Mader is going to talk about in a few minutes. Those letters were then stuffed in envelopes and they were addressed with every one of your and my names on it and they were put into bins which are on the tables as you exit the sanctuary. So if you re really good with the alphabet, it won t take you any time at all to find yours. And the really cool thing is you can take not only yours, you can take any family, friends or neighbors who you know aren t here today and you can deliver it to them because that saves us the postage.
But the idea is we send all these different pieces of the puzzle out and we invite you to bring them back along with the commitment card next week and the week after that. It helps us remember the most important things that we need to know about the church and about God and here is what they are: it has everything to do with being part of the puzzle. People, just like puzzle pieces, they are all different. All of our gifts, everything we can do, they are all very different from one another, that each of us fit together in this place called Calvary and that our gifts are very significant and important to each other. Every person is needed just like every puzzle piece is needed to complete the picture and every person is part of a much larger design. We are all complete in and of ourselves but when we come together in the name of Christ, we come together to form his body and here in this place and in this time, this body is called Calvary and you are a very important piece of that much bigger picture. Thanks for sharing in our time this morning. And as you leave, I welcome Mr. Mader to the podium and he is going to share some thoughts about what it means to be a part of a church called the body of Christ called Calvary. Message Colossians 1:15-20 In February of last year you all joined with me in celebrating my grandmother s 97 th birthday. It doesn t seem like it was just 18 months ago. We brought a cake and all kinds of noise makers for everybody and we all had a great time and she was really moved by it. And then two months later, we took her to Dublin United Methodist Church, where she was buried.
My brother and sister and I made the pilgrimage together in the beginning of May of that year and for us it was a great time of celebration, some sadness, of course, whenever you lose somebody who has been a part of your family all of your life, of course, you miss them. But we had the opportunity to gather everybody who came to the memorial service together and asked them to stand up front at the end and we took a photograph because we wanted to be able to remember all those faces, family members that the three of us hadn t seen in decades, some relatives we had never met because we lived in Pennsylvania and most of our family is from the south. And we went to place her ashes in the mausoleum and as we drove home, we had a great conversation about all the things that we remember separately in our experience with our grandmother and grandfather and all the different things that we had done with them that bound us together as a family. That was a year and a half ago. So, I go to Kohls on Tuesday because I have one of those spend $50 and get $10 back right away. You know that stuff. That s the work of the devil, those things from Kohls. So, I am standing there in the men s department looking at a couple of antiquated sweaters which I tend to gravitate toward and suddenly over the PA system comes Walkin in a Winter Wonderland by Johnny Mathis. Now, Johnny Mathis may not mean anything to you folks, but in my household from the time I can remember anything, that particular CD, which was then of course a vinyl album, was on the stereo from Thanksgiving all the way through Christmas and it had been on my stereo as a kid because it had been on my father s parent s record player when he was at home. Johnny Mathis was like a staple in my grand Johnny Mathis and Elvis, ok? Now, if you have heard Elvis do Christmas music, Johnny Mathis is the way to go. This song comes over the PA system and its very distinctive beginning, the strings, and tears just start running down my face in the men s department at Kohls on a Tuesday afternoon. I immediately duck into the dressing rooms and as I am standing there crying like an infant, I go back to all the losses that somehow connect to my life at Christmas time. The first two dogs I owned were given to me as presents on Christmas morning. I remember Pugs, Pug dog; I remember Joy, small white Poodle. I remember my father, who died on Christmas Eve. I
remember friends. I remember Pastor Harper who died right around Christmas. I remember people and places and things and sadness that I had very neatly tucked away into some small compartment in my mind, but Johnny Mathis just yanked it right out of me. And I wasn t ready for it. And it overwhelmed me. And as I m standing there in the dressing room chiding myself for being such a wuss, I asked myself a very simple question: Where s your faith, dude? Where did it go? Why is all this sadness something that you refuse to put down. You just keep carrying it with you, time after time after time. And I don t know if you have had this experience where sadness and sorry and grief just kind of sneak up behind you, POW, right in the back of the head. Sometimes it happens with a smell; sometimes it happens in a place; sometimes it is something you see; sometimes it is something you hear. And it was as immediate as though it happened earlier this morning, that s how close it came. And I wondered to myself, look, I m a person of faith. I believe in God, I believe in the promises of the scripture. I believe in these words that I share with families time and time again when I conduct memorial services for their loved ones. You ve heard these words before: Friends, I know you have questions about those who have died. I don t want you to be in the dark any longer. Your grief should not be like those who have no hope. That s what my grief felt like, like those who have no hope. Many people live as though they have nothing to look forward to, as if death has the last word, but Jesus broke the grave wide open, therefore, God will bring new life to all who die in Christ. They didn t leave us behind, they went on ahead of us to the next place and they ll be there waiting to welcome us home. That s what I said to myself as I am standing there in the dressing room at Kohls. And it helped a little bit, but as I thought through the remainder of the day about this embarrassing breakdown in a public place, I also started to process what my faith really tells me, what it is that I truly believe and even though what happens in the next place is something that I ll never know until I arrive, I do find a challenge in grabbing a hold of those ideas and in making them real for me, especially when the sadness of life, when the parting grief of a loss, is so immediate and so re-
al to all of us. What is it that we affirm as we share the words of the Apostle s Creed which we have done over the past several months? Well, let s remind ourselves what we confess to: I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried. The third day he arose from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sittith at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Even though I don t understand what those last two phrases mean, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting, even though I know literally what that should mean or could mean, I ve been to cemeteries and everybody that I know who has been put in the ground stayed in the ground. The resurrection of the body and life everlasting is the ground, is death, is the grave, is the coffin, is the tombstone, is the mausoleum and the ashes and the urn. Is that it? You see there is nothing wrong with my faith except that it is not big enough. The only thing wrong with my faith is that it is not finished growing. And I have to be pushed and I have to be tested and I have to grieve time and time again until I begin to understand with eyes that are not trapped by what I think is reasonable or by what I think is logical or possible. You see, I always think of that stuff, these promises, through the eyes of a pragmatist, a realist, a scientist. I love to watch stuff grow and change. I love to see the seasons change, although not so much this winter thing that is coming. I love to see things go through their process, through the cycle and I ve felt what death feels like, at least from this side and I need to hear again the words that Paul shares with the church of Colossi. We look at Christ and we see the God who cannot be seen. You see, God is way bigger than any of us can ever imagine and in Christ, the Son of God, the Word made Flesh, we look at Christ and we can see everything about God that we need to know. Not maybe everything
we want to know, but everything we need to know. And in Christ we see God s original purpose in everything that God created. The way Christ lived and taught us to live, the grace that he shares, the love that he connects with others, the dignity and respect with which all people are treated, the invitation to welcome all, that s the way God intended us to be together, to fit together, to be one with one another. And when it comes to the church, to this body of believers that you are a part of, he organizes all of us together as pieces and he brings us all together. God brought me here 15 years ago. Before I walked into the door of this place, I had no idea it existed. I knew where Harrisburg was because I grew up in York, but just like all the other places that I got sent by the Bishop, I never knew they were there until I got there and I never quite knew how I was going to fit in until God fit me in. You see, that s the joy of being together as the church. You don t have to worry about how you fit in with those people next to you, the ones who can t sing worth a darn, but God brought them here and God put them here and put you right next to them. He leads the resurrection parade onto the next place. You know that part of John where Jesus says he is going on to prepare a place for us, this is the other thing you hear in every memorial service. He s leading the resurrection parade onto the next place. His embrace is so big that everything and everyone finds its proper place in him. Everything and everyone, all the broken and dislocated pieces of the human family, all the brokenness, all the grief, all the pain and the sorrow and the confusion and the hatred and the prejudice and indifference, all those busted pieces that are part of who I am and are part of who you are and a part of every person that you know, all these broken and dislocated pieces called you and me, they are all brought together in a new home in his resurrection fellowship of new life. It is all about not what is, but what shall be and the newness and the recreation that comes when we put our faith in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. I believe in the resurrection of the body even though I can t tell you what it looks like. Now, Brothers and Sisters, that s called faith. If I m telling you I believe in it, yet I can t explain it to you, at least to my satisfaction. Look, I could stand here and say Well, you know it s golden streets, it s wings, it s halos You ve heard all that stuff, you ve seen all that imagery and, yes, there are places in the Bible
where you get inklings of some kind of a glorious act, I don t know what that is. I m being honest. It sounds good, but I have no experience like that here, so when I say that I believe in it, I just trust God that it is going to be cool and that it s going to be what God intends for all of us. And this life everlasting thing my gosh, I get bored hearing me talk for twenty minutes on a Sunday morning. Life everlasting? Isn t it your worst fear that your part in eternity is going to be sitting in that pew listening to me talk endlessly? What is this life everlasting thing? I don t get it. I don t understand it. But I know that my faith is growing and I listen to you share your faith through the years, as I listen to people on their deathbed tell me that they have a faith which gives them peace and I listen to the sounds of young parents welcoming a child into the world that they know is not perfect and yet still they give thanks for life and they believe. And I watch people in every possible circumstance of horror and indifference and rejection and somehow, somehow, new life and resurrection is what I m to share with them. My faith grows as I hear that witness in others and as I listen to the voice of God in myself. When I got back from Kohls on Tuesday afternoon, I went and found a book in my office, a book I ve had for a good while and I got it out. It is a book that I have given to parents who want to try to explain to children what this resurrection of the body and life everlasting might be like. And I pulled that book off the shelf and I opened it up and I read it, because for me the imagery that it shares is something that helps me come to terms with these promises, promises I ll never fully understand. But promises that make all the difference to me about the next place that God will lead us to.
The Next Place The next place that I go will be as peaceful and familiar as a sleepy summer Sunday and a sweet untroubled mind. And yet it won t be anything like any place I ve ever been or seen or even dreamed of in the place I leave behind I won t know where I m going, and I won t know where I ve been As I tumble through the always and look back toward the when. I ll glide beyond the rainbows. I ll drift above the sky. I ll fly into the wonder, without ever wondering why. I won t remember getting there. Somehow I ll just arrive. But I ll know that I belong there and will feel much more alive Than I have ever felt before. I will be absolutely free of the things that I held onto That were holding onto me. The next place that I go will be so quiet and so still That the whispered song of sweet belonging will rise up to fill the listening sky with joyful silence, and with unheard harmonies of music made by no one playing like a hush upon a breeze.
There will be no room for darkness in that place of living light Where an ever-dawning morning pushes back the dying night. The very air will fill with brilliance, as the brightly shining sun & the moon and half a million stars are married into one. The next place that I go won t really be a place at all. There won t be any seasons---winter, summer, spring or fall------- Nor a Monday. Nor a Friday. Nor December. Nor July And the seconds will be sanding still while hours hurry by. I will not be a boy or girl, a woman or a man. I ll simply be just, simply, me. No worse or better than. My skin will not be dark or light. I won t be fat or tall. The body I once lived in won t be part of me at all. I will finally be perfect. I will be without a flaw. I will never make one more mistake, or break the smallest law. And the me that was impatient, or was angry or unkind, Will simply be a memory, The me I left behind I will travel empty-handed. There is not a single thing I have collected in my life That I would ever want to bring... except...
The love of those who loved me, And the warmth of those who cared. The happiness and memories And magic that we shared. Though I will know the joy of solitude I ll never be alone. I ll be embraced by all the family and friends I ve ever known. Although I might not see their faces, all our hearts will beat as one & the circle of our spirits will shine brighter than the sun. I will cherish all the friendship I was fortunate to find, All the love and all the laughter in the place I leave behind.. All these good things will go with me. They will make my spirit glow. And that light will shine forever In the next place that we go. Let us pray: We thank you, O God, for the gift of this place and for the promises of the place. Bless us as we wonder about all the glories that are part of your eternal grace. Help us to be comfortable in our mystery. Help us to celebrate your majesty. Help us to be faithful in our journey from here to there and may we sense the presence of the one who walks with us, who has gone on before us to prepare us a place and who is ready to bring us home, Jesus the Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen