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Foundry United Rev. |
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Sunday, March 5, 2006 |
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Matthew 13: 13-17 Rev. |
Prior to this day’s sermon, Rev.
Snyder delivered a statement regarding House of Representatives bill, HR 4437,
regarding immigration law. To read this statement, click here.
~ Here
are just a few words to prepare our minds and our hearts for this Holy
Communion and this season of Lent. In
the complicated thirteen chapter of the Book of Matthew, Jesus uses three
simple verbs that I’d like us to focus on this Sunday…listen, understand, and
be healed. These
three verbs first spoken by Isaiah and then by Jesus are, I’ve been thinking
this week, at the heart of our decision to become and to be a reconciling
congregation. Our decision can be
summarized as a conviction that, rather than prejudge each other or anyone,
we will try to listen to one another and to understand one another. We are convinced that, if we are willing to
do this, the divisions between us as a human family can eventually by God’s
grace be healed. This
is, of course, not easy or simple work because listening long enough and with
enough openness to really understand another is a discipline that does not
always come naturally to us, and we do not always do it well. But it is our commitment as a congregation
to learn how to listen and to understand rather than to judge in the hope
that we will be healed as a community and as a society. I would
like to ask us this morning to turn this basic principle and practice –
listen, understand, be healed – inward to the divisions and brokenness within
our own selves. Like the society of
which we are part and like the church of which we are part, we too have
divisions and brokenness within our own selves. Carl Sandburg used to say, “There is a zoo
in me.” Perhaps the divisions and
brokenness within us is actually the cause of the divisions and brokenness
around us in society and church. So
let us apply these three words to our inward lives, to our spiritual
lives. Listen to our own selves. Understand our own selves. Be healed within our own selves. The
season of Lent is the cycle of the Christian year when we encourage one
another to make space within our lives and to listen to God, sure, but also
to listen to our own inner selves where it is that God most often speaks to
us. How often we understand little
about what is inside our own hearts and spirits. We spend enormous energy, most of us,
avoiding listening to our own selves.
We have created a world where it is almost impossible to find space
and time and quiet to listen to our own selves. I
struggled for quite a while as to what I would do as my discipline for the
spirit and the season of Lent this year, and I came to the conviction that I
wanted to give up something. I
wrestled with it and decided that I needed to give up sitcoms. For the season of Lent, I will give up
Seinfeld reruns. I will give up Cheers
reruns, which I must confess I still watch if I can find them. And I will give up,
I’m embarrassed to admit I watch them, even reruns of Friends. After a
day of business and a day when you come home and inside of you there are
things churning, after a day when there is pain and sadness and frustration
churning inside of you, it’s so easy to turn on something that will be
mindless as a way of avoiding listening to my own self. However, if we do not listen to our own
pain and sadness, we will also lose the capacity to listen and discover our
own joy. Like any addiction, mine to
sitcoms is a way of avoiding listening to my own self. It’s a way that I failed to come to the
place where I might understand my own self and be healed. Lent is a time for all of us to replace
whatever it is we use in our lives to avoid attending and listening to our
own selves with space and quiet and reflection. To
begin every season of Lent, on Ash Wednesday night, most clergy read an
invitation to Christian discipleship and Christian discipline during the
season of Lent. What it emphasizes is
self-examination that we as individuals and a people find space and time and
quiet and place during this season for self-examination. Self-examination means listening, listening
to our own inner selves so that, of all things, we might not live this life
failing to understand who we and what we are and confident that if we will
listen and understand our very own selves, we will be healed from our
brokenness and our dividedness – from the zoo in me and you. www.foundryumc.org |
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