This service and sermon were co-created for Glencliff United Methodist Church’s (Nashville, TN) Sunday, November 8, 2020. worship service. Holy Spirit designed all of this on Wednesday, November 4. The sermon (text is available at the bottom of the bottom) was completed in writing and recorded on Friday, November 6. You can view the full service here. (Shout-out to Colleen Curlee for her gift of video editing!)

Fun Tip: The key points in the sermon text are bolded. You can scroll through for the highlights <3

Call to Worship | The First and Final Two Verses of Aurora Levins Morales’ ‘V’ahvta’:

“Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up,
when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning
and in times of joy. Inscribe them on your doorposts,
embroider them on your garments, tattoo them on your shoulders,
teach them to your children, your neighbors, your enemies,
recite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of empire:
Another world is possible…

..Don’t waver. Don’t let despair sink its sharp teeth
Into the throat with which you sing. Escalate your dreams.
Make them burn so fiercely that you can follow them down
any dark alleyway of history and not lose your way.
Make them burn clear as a starry drinking gourd
Over the grim fog of exhaustion, and keep walking.

Hold hands. Share water. Keep imagining.
So that we, and the children of our children’s children
may live.”

Hymn #1 | ‘Stand’ performed by Grace Virtual Choir for the CNBC Ecumenical Service

Scripture Text | Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25 (NRSV)

Sermon Text is at Bottom of Page

Hymn #2 | ‘God is in Control’ by Ricky Dillard and the New Generation Chorale

Benediction | A Small Adaptation of the Thomas Merton Prayer (original text)

“My Lord God, we have no idea where we are going.

We do not see the road ahead of us.

We cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do we really know our selves or one another

And the fact that we think that we are following your will does not mean that we are actually doing so.

But we who desire to be faithful with you believe that the desire to please you does please you.

And we hope we have that desire in all that we are doing and living.

We hope that we will never do anything apart from Your desire.

That we continue to pray and discern that we are in your desire, and so to recognize when we are not. To celebrate with you when we are. And to confess, receive loving and transformational accountability, to heal, and to return with you and one another when we find we are not.

And we know that if we do this you will lead us by the right road though we may not ourselves understand it.

Therefore will we trust you always though we may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. Even when we are lost, and in the shadow of death.

We will not give into fear, we will not be led around by fear, God, for you are ever with us, and you will never leave us to face our perils alone.”

May it be so: May we believe it. May we live it. Amen and axe.

Sermon Text | God IS in Control--So Let's Gone Head & Put Away Our Idols

I think this passage stuck out with me more than any other because I've been doing Bible study with my mom since April or May. In COVID-19, I think we're finding that we have more time for family and loved ones than we previously had. We started out with the Book of Judges and are now in Samuel. And there are these recurring themes that come up over and over again: That the people of God are constantly putting their faith into someone or something that isn't God. And that is not very different from today.

This is not a commentary on our current election, which if anything is just a microcosmic representation of who we are as a society, and how glaring our misalignment in and with God is in so many events of the last year. The state of affairs of our country and society at this moment are simply a harbinger of us recognize that if we don't get together in God, we're choosing to stay our course in unhealth with one another, and misalignment in and with God.

For example, COVID-19 is not something that any of us created. But the ways in which we make it worse is in our hands. And we're choosing to stay that course of making things worse, though we didn't manifest it.

So I look at this passage in Joshua when he's talking to them about putting away idols, and ask myself: What are the various idols that we worship as a nation and society that we put ahead of God so often that are driving the ways that we are, and where we are right now?

The most obvious one--I think everyone would agree with this: Money. The Bible passages says "Man cannot serve God and mammon." The point, of course, being that we can't more than one God. Period. You have to pick a god--God or something else. Period.

This also includes white supremacism.

And it also includes--this might jar folks a little bit--Safety. It includes the idol of safety, and what that pushes us to when we allow the drive for safety to control us.

Who and what we worship is who we place at the our center of or soul--this is what determines what draws the boundaries for our lives and living.

If God is at the center, our boundaries are inherently loving and uplifting embrace, accountability, encouragement, and support, and healing justice with and for one another.

With money at the center, the sacredness and well-being of human beings (and the planet) get trampled on so someone can make another dollar.

With white supremacism at the center, persons of color and various cultures are often left out and ignored, and so inherently harmed by both intentional abuse and negligence at the hands of all of those--of any race--who believe that whiteness--which a manmade up "culture"--is the best and most brilliant thing that's ever happened to humanity. In everything. At all times.

With safety at the center, we find our selves absolutely behaving like this group of people of God in throughout the Old Testament. Everything that they do becomes about ensuring their basic survival, rather than standing firmly in the trust and love of God that all is well. Yes, things sometimes hurt and are hard and outright suck, because life. But when we drive towards safety, we create more hurt and harm for one another, and even for ourselves, than we actually create the safety that we're driving towards.

One of the stories that stands out of me is in this is the last 2 chapters of Judges. A man of the Israel initiates a war that nearly destroys all of the Benjamites. Why? Because he generally treated his wife poorly, and when a particular group of Benjamites wanted to harm him, he gave them his wife instead. To ensure his safety, he gave up hers. (There's more to the story than just, "He's a bad man," because I said to my mom, "There are no "good guys" in this story--most of the people are villains!")

He calls all of the Israel together is like, "Hey, the Benjamites are bad dudes, we gotta go handle them, because this is not who we are." He's so certain that he's in the right, and it's just the Benjamites who had done wrong and need to be corrected that he lies. He murders his wife, and tells the rest of Israel that the Benjamites did it, to call them to war against the Benjamites. In the ensuing war, the entire tribe of Benjamin is nearly wiped out--600 men survive.

So what does this group of people of God do when they realize, "Oh my God, we wiped out nearly an entire tribe of us in haste and foolishness?" Instead of going to God and saying, "Lord, we were really overjudgmental and who did wrong and how"--they were so concerned with safety of the honor of Israel, and what that meant about them, so they wanted to purge those they saw as offenders. When they realized after what they did, they decide to "rectify" the situation by kidnapping women from other tribes at a holy festival to give as wives to the 600 remaining Benjaminites. Their answer to their harm was, "Let's create more harm."

Why would this happen among a people of God? Because outside of God's beautiful design and will of healing and justice, inside of which we were created and exist, but with the capacity make choices and decisions without God--Adam and Eve taught us that--Anything that we do unto ourselves and without God is inherently harmful and unjust.

Absence of God is absence of love, healing, and justice. If we're struggling to live love and healing justice together, nobody's really doing it well, that's a sign that we are struggling without, that we're in a struggle with God God--no matter what we claim our nation's or communities or families ideals are. Ideals are literally aspirations--they are who we believe we are called to be and the journey that we're on, not what we have fully fulfilled. And if we act like we've already done it when God says we need to keep going--we're listening to us and not God. And that's the big explanation of where we are--because the collective of our decisions is where we are together.

So we ultimately have to ask our selves this question: Why is holding onto our idols and the self-destruction that comes with them more important than loving and trusting with God?

What is that we are actually receiving that we need so badly to scrap for dollars--because monetary greed, or even just having money as our primary focus, and simply as important, doesn't benefit most of us. But most continue to be lured into believe that we have to drive for that almighty dollar. We have no sense of, nor are trying to develop a sense of God's holy Enough. Every person doesn't need the same amount of money to live the fulfilled life to which they are called.

If we each knew our Enough--and that our family and even community doesn't also need this and that and that--and we can still have some nice things--what amount of contentment do we receive back in our lives? If we look at Ecclesiastes, the Teacher tell us that we are supposed to do meaningful work and rest. How do we get to rest and to play more with those we love? To have greater capacity to heal more with those with whom we struggle? To have more time to build up our communities in life-giving ways, and not simply to invest and be entertained to blow off steam…from constantly working?

What is the benefit of the idol of white supremacism? Of blocking out the diversity that God planted and ordained in the Garden of Eden? (PS - Historians and anthropologists have long-concluded that the Cradle of Life would be in Mesopotamia or Africa, and so Adam and Eve--were not white.) What is gained from the deaths of the living and lives of persons of color, from the denials of the beauty and brilliance of more than half of the human population of the planet? In seeking alignment with God, even if persons of color had done something to be so maligned and mistreated by, and societally situated beneath, whiteness--a belief in which would blatantly ignore hundreds of years of theft, rape, murder, and mistreatment of indigenous and persons of color groups all over the world to take resources and our own bodies.

That God created diversity as a part as a part of their healing and just design should compel anyone who claims and believes themselves to be a faithful follower of God to want to help all us heal and restore cultural diversity--because peoples are cultures, not just skin colors--regardless of how we got to where we are today.

And this idol of safety. Dear God. Can we explain the purpose of the idol of safety…when to idolize safety means we are constantly living in fear? Because that is the flip side of the coin of safety. That's the unhealthy and unholy slide that it gets to. God tries to explain to this people--throughout history--that 100% safety is not the purpose of our faith.

And yet, particularly in our country and our Christian faith, that seems to be what we're always fighting for. Money and white supremacism are for many folks about safety--about the assurance that what we know and believe will continue on world without end, for no reason other than we feel affirmed, it makes us feel good. It's gives us a sense of safety in knowing something, and that it reflects our human mentality that this is the way the world must work.

If I have to be safe--safety is important--but if safety is the center, I fear new things. I try to keep out all people, experiences, things that are new. Including when the Holy Spirit is constantly calling us to renewal, and newness.

And when I can't keep them out--when I am reminded that the world is bigger than me, bigger than us as humans--I go to fear. Y'all know what? I have yet to meet one single person who has ever made a good decision out of fear. Fear is real and its understandable--it's an inbuilt warning God has given us that something is not necessarily wrong, but is off from what we typically know--at the very least, things are shifting and changing. So fear is itself not the problem.

The problem is that we don't go to God in faith and lay our anxiety at their feet and ask, "Lord, we feel, we sense, we see that things are happening differently--what is the next faithful step you would have us take?" And allow God to articulate in love and in strength, "This is what this fear is inviting you to understand. This is what I am asking you to do next." And knowing that this is not a one and done. Every time that fear arises again--and this is when fear begins to become constant anxiety, we responsible for taking it back to God; laying it at their feet again; and having this conversation all over again.

The United States as country, our communities, even families--we are largely a "safety" and fear-driven people. And this is our actual problem. This is what are really facing down right now.

2016 election survey data--as in studies that had been done, some started well before the election--confirmed overwhelmingly that many of the folks who voted from the Republican nominee for our president were in fact driven by fear. The two primary fears: economic anxiety and change in racial/ethnic make up in the country. So we can factually name that this half of our country has their motives and actions driven by fear of what could happen to them, not things that are happening.

Unfortunately, we didn't do the same research studies with those who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate. Not surprising, but still unfortunate and dismaying, because study everyone. What was driving them? Being on that side, knowing many of our own rhetoric and motives, I would tell you that it fear is driving us to. I think we have genuine concerns that we're talking about worrying about children being locked in cages, and racism, people being left out are legitimate concerns. A lot of this has been happening to us for decades.

And the problem that we have to face is that we have allowed our concerns to be controlled by fear. We, too, are making many of our decisions from fear, rather than from and with our God of love, healing, and justice. We see people falling down around--in despair, in sickness, in literal death from the human-created ills of our society. And we want us to hurry up and be well. We want the greedy to stop being greedy. Right now. And the racists to stop being racists, Right Now. And the hateful to stop being hateful, Right Now. The ambivalent to actually care, Right Now.

But we don't believe is that time it will take to transform in God's spirit is fast enough. We don't believe that God has enough people answering the call. We don't believe that the ways in which we are answering the calls are enough. We don't believe that what God has asked us to do today without killing our own selves with overwork, greed for credit, and power to sway the masses is enough.

We don't believe that God is enough.

Ironically--it's not God who's making it take the time it takes--it's humanity. Because the longer it takes for us to show up with God, the longer it will take us to actually transform and heal.

So we have a fear-filled country, communities, and families, wherein many of us claim God's transformative love, justice, grace, accountability, and peace--90% of Americans identify as a person of a faith--but too few of us seem to actually believe in God enough our selves to live these dynamics in community beyond the people we already like and agree with.

I'm right there my self, so this is not a call out--it’s a call into accountability. We are at yet another moment in this year, this decade, this millenium, wherein we having a glaring invitation built by the overt failures constructed of our human frailties to remind us that almost none of us standing with God, because we're foolishness enough to think that God's choose sides, and They're standing on ours.

God is not standing where we are. We are supposed to be standing where They are.

Human beings have been harming one another since we ate that apple--we turned on each other with the quickness when called into accountability with one another then. Our entire existence has been hurting and harming one another--and so here are today. We need to live with urgency towards love and healing, and--we're not about to solve six thousand years of human relational violence and confusion about what is, and what good leadership is in six weeks or six years--by immolating our selves or one another.

And it's important that we see that ways that we are growing and doing well together. We have to see them, because that's our muscle, right? We use our good muscle to help build up our other muscle. And we build upon those to help reduce and ultimately transform the pain we create--which we also have to see so that we can reduce it and transform it.

What idols do we need to give up to genuinely stand with God not in safety, but in Their love, strength, grace, peace, and healing justice? I can't tell you what anyone else's answers are, but I can tell you that the answers lie in asking:

What fears do we need and are we going to give over to God, so that we can truly be with and in God? What do we need to confess and lay at their feet that we've allowed to become center over Them?
What of our selves will we have to allow the Holy Spirit to transform--our mindsets, our hearts, our actions, our human definitions of success and fulfillment--so that we can genuinely agree with our Wesleyan journey towards perfection?
What lamentations and accountability do we need to engage for who has been lost, what has been lost, how we have harmed, and how we have been harmed?

So that we are transformed to genuinely love and love with one another? So that we are doing no harm with one another, so that we are doing God's good with one another, and staying in love with God--with one another?

What idols are we going to need confess and relinquish so that we can truly believe and live: God is in control?