{"id":4467,"date":"2023-09-17T20:34:47","date_gmt":"2023-09-17T20:34:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/2023\/09\/17\/our-prayer-based-on-psalm-711-6-matthew-69-13\/"},"modified":"2023-09-17T20:34:47","modified_gmt":"2023-09-17T20:34:47","slug":"our-prayer-based-on-psalm-711-6-matthew-69-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/2023\/09\/17\/our-prayer-based-on-psalm-711-6-matthew-69-13\/","title":{"rendered":"Untitled"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cOur Prayer\u201d based on Psalm 71:1-6, Matthew 6:9-13<\/h1>\n
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In June, after we celebrated the life of Walter Grattidge, I was walking through the sanctuary with the intention of putting my microphone away. Three people were in the sanctuary, seemingly admiring the stained glass, which was a little unusual because Dottie Gallo’s cooking creations were available at that time in Fellowship Hall.<\/p>\n

I believe I said something incredibly profound, like \u201cI’m putting my mic away, but while I’m here, can I help you with anything?\u201d The answer was unexpected.<\/p>\n

The three people turned out to be a mother, a daughter, and the daughter’s husband. The mother was raised in this church, and was a teenager in the 1940s when Rev. Dr. Lee Adkins Sr. was pastor here. I’ve heard wonderful things about the ministry of Rev. Dr. Adkins Sr., but the story she told was the best one yet:<\/p>\n

She was a curious and thoughtful young person, and she struggled with the stories she heard in Sunday School and how she was taught to interpret them. In her frustration, she went to Rev. Adkins to ask him some pointed questions. (Already, I’m loving this story \u2013 right? She’s feisty, she’s good at Biblical interpretation, and she has access to the Sr. Pastor as she should.)<\/p>\n

She named her concerns, and in response he ask her to listen to a story. His story was this:<\/p>\n

When he was a young man he was struggling to decide what to do with his life. One day, he was hiking, and when he got to the top of a mountain, and the sky opened up before him, he saw written in the clouds \u201cPreach,\u201d and he knew his life’s work.<\/p>\n

He then told her to go home, think about his story, and come back in a week or two and explain it to him. She did. She thought long and hard about it. When she returned she said to him, \u201cI do not believe that the clouds actually said ‘preach.’ I think you were moved by the beauty and sense of awe around you, and you found within yourself clarity on your life’s work, and the best way you can communicate that is to say that the clouds spelled out ‘preach.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Now -get this \u2013 this is my favorite part. He said, \u201cOK, go home and think about it for another week or two and come back again.\u201d Now, she said that she was really wanting to give the \u201cright\u201d answer and it was quite distressing to be sent away to try again. But she did, and when she came back said to him, \u201cI stand by my answer.\u201d And he smiled and said, \u201cgood.\u201d<\/p>\n

He affirmed her capacity to think, to interpret, to use her reason, and in doing so gave her ways to approach the Bible and the world.<\/p>\n

She said that she was taking her family on a tour of her life, and they were in Schenectady so she could show them the church. (They live in Western Canada I think.) The following day we were having our combined Pride services, and they’d known about that and just walked by hoping to get in. Her family had left Schenectady soon after the story she told me, her father’s job changed. But for her that conversation with her pastor opened up the world. She is now a great-grandmother, and she talked about being formed by that permission to be curious and reasonable, and how in her family there are now 4 generations of people who are who they are because she was given permission to THINK about her faith by her pastor.<\/p>\n

I’ve been holding this story (not perfectly, sometimes it slips out because it is so good), but holding it for preaching for this day. Because when we think about Homecoming and what it means to come home to this church, I think that story has some pretty central themes about who this church has been and who this church is.<\/p>\n

This is a place where faith and reason are welcome together. This is a place where curiosity is welcome. This is a place where people know that the Bible’s truths are often shared in metaphor. This is a place that seeks to form people with permission giving, rather than limitations.<\/p>\n

Which gets me to a second central piece of how I know you, First Schenectady United Methodist Church. Some years ago now when asking parents about what color blanket they wanted for their baby’s baptism, their response was \u201cWe’d like a rainbow blanket, because we want our child to know they will be loved as whoever they are.\u201d I completely copied them when it was my turn \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

One of the many joys of being the pastor here has been the chance to get to know people who were raised in this church as I have worked with them to prepare the Celebrations of Life for their parents. I know of any stories of the church’s children of the 20th century being wrapped in rainbow. However, as I’ve gotten to know those who were raised in the church, I’ve been astounded to find some deep similarities.<\/p>\n

The men who were raised in this church are unusually kind, considerate, empathetic, gentle, and thoughtful. The women who were raised in this church are usually self-assured and able to be appropriately assertive. Let’s be honest, those things both break gendered stereotypes, but fit the fullness of the human experience. This church raised people with the space to be the best and most authentic version of who they were, and made space and capacity to reject the norms of society that put people into boxes.<\/p>\n

I was able to put my finger on what was so extraordinary several years ago now, and it has been really fun to see my theory confirmed over and over again since.<\/p>\n

Dear ones, the impact of this church in the world is HUGE \u2013 even if all we count is how the people raised in this church were given the love, space, and capacity to become fully themselves. This church has been a counter-cultural force for good for a VERY LONG TIME.<\/p>\n

This church has been doing God’s work for a long time.<\/p>\n

Thank God.<\/p>\n

And thank you.<\/p>\n

I have been reminded this week of how beautiful and delightful this world really is. And it is beautiful even while it is broken. The beautiful and the broken are simply both true.<\/p>\n

As people of faith, we are given the great gift of being reflective about how we respond to the world. So much of what we do together is reflecting on what is good, what is God, and how we can respond. We have the chance to think about, and practice, centering down with God, centering down to relationships, centering down to simply enjoy the goodness of life \u2013 and then using the energy we have gathered in the centering down to seek justice for God’s people. Isn’t that a wonderful thing to get to do??<\/p>\n

The Lord’s Prayer is full of layers of meaning, has been examined with rich study, and there are translations of it that make my heart stir. We can’t get into most of that in an even vaguely reasonable time frame, so I just want to focus today on the last line in our reading, \u201cand do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from that which is evil.\u201d The rescue is sometimes deliverance, and deliverance is interesting in the Bible because it is the original meaning of salvation. As Dr. Gafney says, \u201cSalvation in the Hebrew Bible is physical and material deliverance or rescue of an individual or community from enemies.\u201d1<\/a><\/p>\n

The rescue that we need, the deliverance that we need, changes with time, changes with the communities we live in, changes with our own needs. But the reason this prayer still resonates all these years later in all kinds of different places is that a need for rescue is a pretty common human experience.<\/p>\n

Yolanda Norton translates that line as \u201cseparate us from the temptation of empire and deliver us into community.\u201d2<\/a><\/p>\n

Thank God that God HAS delivered us, into community, into THIS community, beautiful and broken as this one is, it helps us be a part of rescuing the world. Thank God. Amen<\/p>\n

1<\/a>Wilda Gafney, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church (<\/i>New York, NY: Church Publishing, 2021), 284.<\/p>\n

2<\/a>Gafney, 285<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Rev. Sara E. Baron\u00a0
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady\u00a0
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305\u00a0
Pronouns: she\/her\/hers\u00a0
http:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/\u00a0<\/a>
https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/FUMCSchenectady<\/a><\/p>\n

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September 17, 2023<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cOur Prayer\u201d based on Psalm 71:1-6, Matthew 6:9-13 In June, after we celebrated the life of Walter Grattidge, I was … Continue reading Untitled<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34,12,38,28,39,33,1458,1265,56,57,447],"class_list":["post-4467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fumc-schenectady","tag-homecoming","tag-progressive-christianity","tag-rev-sara-e-baron","tag-thinking-church","tag-umc","tag-community","tag-first-umc-schenectady","tag-schenectady","tag-sorry-about-the-umc","tag-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}