“Things Might Get a Little Messy”
Preached Sunday, September 8, 2024
This morning is a joy as we have a critical mass of our children here and blessed them and their backpacks, prayed for them, gave out Bibles… And, if I’m being honest, it was just slightly chaotic, right?
This whole week I have been on edge about this morning - mainly, will I make it to Sunday morning? I am almost 39 weeks pregnant, 4 days away from scheduled surgery to have this child, and having regular contractions. I kept on asking myself - will I really make it to Sunday? My assurance to myself was - it will be okay, even if I don’t. Sure, it might be a little more chaotic…but our DS Edgar or a gifted lay person would be more than capable of managing the chaos…I mean, leading worship and making it through the children’s moment activities. I did leave notes for someone else - just in case.
But let’s be honest - life with children - whether that’s birth, parenthood, grandparenthood, aunt and uncle-hood, or church life and ministry with children - life with children is going to be a little messy. Life is messy - period. Life with children…well, I wish I could go back and see how clean my house was 4 years ago.
And - that’s okay. Jesus calls us, invites us, into the mess.
This whole week I have been on edge about this morning - mainly, will I make it to Sunday morning? I am almost 39 weeks pregnant, 4 days away from scheduled surgery to have this child, and having regular contractions. I kept on asking myself - will I really make it to Sunday? My assurance to myself was - it will be okay, even if I don’t. Sure, it might be a little more chaotic…but our DS Edgar or a gifted lay person would be more than capable of managing the chaos…I mean, leading worship and making it through the children’s moment activities. I did leave notes for someone else - just in case.
But let’s be honest - life with children - whether that’s birth, parenthood, grandparenthood, aunt and uncle-hood, or church life and ministry with children - life with children is going to be a little messy. Life is messy - period. Life with children…well, I wish I could go back and see how clean my house was 4 years ago.
And - that’s okay. Jesus calls us, invites us, into the mess.
As United Methodists, we tend to like things nice and clean. Just look around our gorgeous sanctuary and church! Our founder, John Wesley, was very meticulous. He was an extremely neat and orderly person. He kept a detailed journal down even to the minute. Some scholars have speculated on whether Wesley had OCD tendencies - although we should always be careful about diagnosing historical figures. But there was no doubt he liked things orderly…but that didn’t keep him from wading into the mess of ministry.
He said he “submitted himself to be more vile” when he transitioned to outdoor preaching - a venue that at the time was considered scandalous if not sinful but was the most effective way of reaching the masses.
He preached in mines and to miners - and I’m sure in the process got some dust on him.
He visited the prisons and the poor houses.
He preached against the slave trade in areas where there was still strong support for it - getting items thrown at him and narrowly escaped being tared and feathered.
For a man who liked things in a certain way - there is a reason we are called “Methodists” because of John Wesley’s meticulous methods for spiritual growth - but for a man who liked things a certain way, he certainly was still willing to wade into the mess of ministry.
And it is into the mess of ministry that we too are called - and today especially, on our “Kick-Off” Sunday, we are going to talk about the mess of ministry, focusing on the mess of ministry with children.
As we raise our children and grandchildren - and as the whole congregation raises children - after all, in our baptismal vows we are all accountable to raising and loving all the children in our midst and our congregation. Raising children to know God and to know that God loves them - the responsibility does not fall solely on their direct caregivers. Although there is responsibility there. The whole congregation vows before each other and God to take that on for themselves as well.
And this can look like a lot of different things:
It can look like celebrating every time a family shows up in church instead of shaming them for the times they couldn’t get here.
It looks like volunteering for our children’s ministry if that is a spiritual gift you have.
It looks like supporting budgets and staffing positions that help us minister to children and their families.
It looks like celebrating, appreciating, and even giving thanks to God for the noises and motions of children in worship - because that means children are here.
It looks like agreeing to commit to walking with children in their journey of discipleship just as you walk with those who are in your same season of life.
It looks like looking for ways to become the village and support systems that so many young families lack these days.
It looks like flexibility and changes in the way “things have always been done” to make room for the present of the way things are and the future of how things could be.
It may even look like personal sacrifice, putting aside your own desires and preferences, to put the desires, preferences, and needs of children and young families before your own.
And it can look like so many different ways - as many ways as there are people and their unique spiritual gifts
We are called to help raise children of God. We raise them to claim the faith of Jesus. We raise them to show no partiality to others, as our Scripture from James says today. We raise them to love all like Jesus loves. We raise them to follow Scriptures, like Matthew 25 and our reading from James today - to make Scripture come alive through care and love for others. We raise them that their faith may be alive and not dead - for good works to accompany their faith.
And as we do all this…Things might get a little messy.
Things are already getting a little messy over here at Boardman UMC - and that’s EXCITING.
He said he “submitted himself to be more vile” when he transitioned to outdoor preaching - a venue that at the time was considered scandalous if not sinful but was the most effective way of reaching the masses.
He preached in mines and to miners - and I’m sure in the process got some dust on him.
He visited the prisons and the poor houses.
He preached against the slave trade in areas where there was still strong support for it - getting items thrown at him and narrowly escaped being tared and feathered.
For a man who liked things in a certain way - there is a reason we are called “Methodists” because of John Wesley’s meticulous methods for spiritual growth - but for a man who liked things a certain way, he certainly was still willing to wade into the mess of ministry.
And it is into the mess of ministry that we too are called - and today especially, on our “Kick-Off” Sunday, we are going to talk about the mess of ministry, focusing on the mess of ministry with children.
As we raise our children and grandchildren - and as the whole congregation raises children - after all, in our baptismal vows we are all accountable to raising and loving all the children in our midst and our congregation. Raising children to know God and to know that God loves them - the responsibility does not fall solely on their direct caregivers. Although there is responsibility there. The whole congregation vows before each other and God to take that on for themselves as well.
And this can look like a lot of different things:
It can look like celebrating every time a family shows up in church instead of shaming them for the times they couldn’t get here.
It looks like volunteering for our children’s ministry if that is a spiritual gift you have.
It looks like supporting budgets and staffing positions that help us minister to children and their families.
It looks like celebrating, appreciating, and even giving thanks to God for the noises and motions of children in worship - because that means children are here.
It looks like agreeing to commit to walking with children in their journey of discipleship just as you walk with those who are in your same season of life.
It looks like looking for ways to become the village and support systems that so many young families lack these days.
It looks like flexibility and changes in the way “things have always been done” to make room for the present of the way things are and the future of how things could be.
It may even look like personal sacrifice, putting aside your own desires and preferences, to put the desires, preferences, and needs of children and young families before your own.
And it can look like so many different ways - as many ways as there are people and their unique spiritual gifts
We are called to help raise children of God. We raise them to claim the faith of Jesus. We raise them to show no partiality to others, as our Scripture from James says today. We raise them to love all like Jesus loves. We raise them to follow Scriptures, like Matthew 25 and our reading from James today - to make Scripture come alive through care and love for others. We raise them that their faith may be alive and not dead - for good works to accompany their faith.
And as we do all this…Things might get a little messy.
Things are already getting a little messy over here at Boardman UMC - and that’s EXCITING.
Our volunteers have been working tirelessly to create dedicated spaces for children’s ministry here at BUMC. Spaces that are for use for our children on Sunday mornings. And there was some literal, physical mess accompanying that - although we had to clean up some dirt mess instead to make a good productive mess of new paint and waxing floors and moving furniture. Right now we’re going to be “under renovation” for at least a year. We are making usable dedicated spaces now - with the hope that over the next year, with congregational wide support as part of a capital campaign, we can make the rooms fully what we dream them to be. The same with a dream and a vision for a pray-ground space in our sanctuary for our youngest children and their caregivers who prefer to stay in worship together. We are also working on a dedicated nursery and preschool aged space for Sunday mornings - with the hope that we can start offering childcare on Sunday mornings for those 4 and under and allowing 5 and up to be in Sunday School. And with the hope that we will start offering that childcare every Sunday morning by the end of this month! We have a new curriculum we’re starting today. We have new staff as Miss Allison and Miss LaToya starting a new position. We have new volunteers - did you know over the last year we went from having zero Sunday School volunteers to now we have over a dozen background checked and Safe Sanctuary certified volunteers? Friends, this is HUGE. And worth celebrating.
And up to this point…none of this has been super clean. There have been to-do lists and lots and lots and lots of conversations. And having people willing to jump in and figure it out as we go along. And people willing to jump in and paint ceiling tiles and move furniture down three flights of steps and so much more. We’ve started welcoming and embracing the mess. And there will be more mess to come - not just the room renovations but the mess that comes from raising children who know God loves them unconditionally. And that’s such a GOOD thing.
We’ll get back to this a little… And I want to reassure you that messiness is just part of the reality of following Jesus and our Gospel reading from today is a great example of that. We actually have two very messy stories in our 13 verses today.
At first we have the dialogue with the Syrophencian woman and the healing of her child. Some background on this that wouldn’t be obvious to us as modern readers.
This passage starts “From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre.” Tyre was “gentile territory” - it was considered “outside the realm of Jesus’s ministry.” And it was not a region - both area and people - that was looked on favorably by the disciples of Jesus. It would have been on the other side of the fence, the wrong side of the tracks - and all the prejudices that come with that.
And it is there that a woman starts begging Jesus. In this same story in Matthew, she is called a Canaanite woman. Now, Matthew, right away, by singling out this woman as a Canaanite is communicating that she is not only an outsider but the enemy. In the time of Jesus, Canaanite was already an outdated term to describe someone. Theologians and preachers talking about this text often refer to her as the Syrophoenician woman - a term describing where she was from, her ethnicity. But probably of Canaanite descent. And the Canaanites were the historic and well-known enemy of the Hebrew people - but it wasn’t really used to describe people living in Jesus’s day…unless perhaps someone wanted to clearly mark someone as not only an outsider, but the worst of the outsiders. One of them. And the Syrophoenicians, the Canaanites, let’s just say that there were a lot of religious, ethnic, and racial stereotypes about them. Bigotry against them by the Israelites was well-known and often played a role in every interaction between an Israelite and a Canaanite.
And this interaction gets messy. There is begging, there is…perhaps some testiness from Jesus. There is a lot of tension. This could have gone very badly for this mother, so desperate for her child to be healed. The onlookers likely watched this interaction play out with held breath - things were about to get messy…
But things didn’t get messy in the way many of them expected. Things got messy not because this interaction escalated into violence or shaming or even more of a public spectacle - as it very well could have. Things got messy BECAUSE Jesus healed her daughter.
Things got messy because Jesus just erased the line separating “us” and “them.” It got messy because Jesus just threw out all the perimeters and barriers of who he came to heal and minister to. It gets messy because Jesus just widened the circle of who he was in ministry with. We like our neat and comfortable boxes. We like our lines separating us and them. We like borders. And Jesus, in this act of healing, threw out the boxes, erased distinctions of us versus them, and ignored all human-made boundaries. This is something we continue to see Jesus do as he progresses in his ministry and something we definitely see the Spirit do in many interactions with the early church - willfully and joyfully stepping into the mess of ministry because the mess means more people, more diverse people, are welcomed into the family of God.
This story of Jesus embracing the mess of ministry is then followed by another messy healing - one this is way more obvious to us as being messy. Because it involves bodily fluids. The epitome of messiness. Jesus meets a deaf man with a speech impediment and he puts his fingers in his ears, spits, and touches his tongue. First of all, I am very against people touching my tongue? Just putting it out there. That’s not a socially acceptable thing to do, really - then or now. And I kept on trying to do research…where did Jesus spit? Did Jesus…spit on the ground, spit on his hand, spit…into the man’s mouth??? Uh…either way, things got physically messy in this healing.
Both healings were messy in different ways…because ministry is messy. Life is messy. Sometimes the mess is metaphorical, less definitive, the chaotic mess of interpersonal relationships and welcoming all sorts of people with all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of needs into the church - and sometimes we can see the mess with our eyes. Spit. Or wet paint on walls. Or crumbs from communion bread on the ground. Mess is an inherent part of following Jesus.
We as a church have expressed the desire to expand and reach new people, younger people, and be in ministry to and with young families. We may not realize this…but if we have this desire, then we also need to accept the NEED for, the reality that, things are gonna get a little messy.
Our children and grandchildren, the children we raise in our community, may take the faith in directions we didn’t anticipate or expect, like Jesus did with the Syrophencian woman. They may take their faith and how they live it out into directions that previous generations aren’t ready for - that we aren’t ready for. That’s a kind of mess…but a good, beautiful, and holy mess. If they are expanding the faith out of love of God and love of neighbor - making their faith come alive - we are called to welcome the mess - invite it in - let the children lead the way.
And up to this point…none of this has been super clean. There have been to-do lists and lots and lots and lots of conversations. And having people willing to jump in and figure it out as we go along. And people willing to jump in and paint ceiling tiles and move furniture down three flights of steps and so much more. We’ve started welcoming and embracing the mess. And there will be more mess to come - not just the room renovations but the mess that comes from raising children who know God loves them unconditionally. And that’s such a GOOD thing.
We’ll get back to this a little… And I want to reassure you that messiness is just part of the reality of following Jesus and our Gospel reading from today is a great example of that. We actually have two very messy stories in our 13 verses today.
At first we have the dialogue with the Syrophencian woman and the healing of her child. Some background on this that wouldn’t be obvious to us as modern readers.
This passage starts “From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre.” Tyre was “gentile territory” - it was considered “outside the realm of Jesus’s ministry.” And it was not a region - both area and people - that was looked on favorably by the disciples of Jesus. It would have been on the other side of the fence, the wrong side of the tracks - and all the prejudices that come with that.
And it is there that a woman starts begging Jesus. In this same story in Matthew, she is called a Canaanite woman. Now, Matthew, right away, by singling out this woman as a Canaanite is communicating that she is not only an outsider but the enemy. In the time of Jesus, Canaanite was already an outdated term to describe someone. Theologians and preachers talking about this text often refer to her as the Syrophoenician woman - a term describing where she was from, her ethnicity. But probably of Canaanite descent. And the Canaanites were the historic and well-known enemy of the Hebrew people - but it wasn’t really used to describe people living in Jesus’s day…unless perhaps someone wanted to clearly mark someone as not only an outsider, but the worst of the outsiders. One of them. And the Syrophoenicians, the Canaanites, let’s just say that there were a lot of religious, ethnic, and racial stereotypes about them. Bigotry against them by the Israelites was well-known and often played a role in every interaction between an Israelite and a Canaanite.
And this interaction gets messy. There is begging, there is…perhaps some testiness from Jesus. There is a lot of tension. This could have gone very badly for this mother, so desperate for her child to be healed. The onlookers likely watched this interaction play out with held breath - things were about to get messy…
But things didn’t get messy in the way many of them expected. Things got messy not because this interaction escalated into violence or shaming or even more of a public spectacle - as it very well could have. Things got messy BECAUSE Jesus healed her daughter.
Things got messy because Jesus just erased the line separating “us” and “them.” It got messy because Jesus just threw out all the perimeters and barriers of who he came to heal and minister to. It gets messy because Jesus just widened the circle of who he was in ministry with. We like our neat and comfortable boxes. We like our lines separating us and them. We like borders. And Jesus, in this act of healing, threw out the boxes, erased distinctions of us versus them, and ignored all human-made boundaries. This is something we continue to see Jesus do as he progresses in his ministry and something we definitely see the Spirit do in many interactions with the early church - willfully and joyfully stepping into the mess of ministry because the mess means more people, more diverse people, are welcomed into the family of God.
This story of Jesus embracing the mess of ministry is then followed by another messy healing - one this is way more obvious to us as being messy. Because it involves bodily fluids. The epitome of messiness. Jesus meets a deaf man with a speech impediment and he puts his fingers in his ears, spits, and touches his tongue. First of all, I am very against people touching my tongue? Just putting it out there. That’s not a socially acceptable thing to do, really - then or now. And I kept on trying to do research…where did Jesus spit? Did Jesus…spit on the ground, spit on his hand, spit…into the man’s mouth??? Uh…either way, things got physically messy in this healing.
Both healings were messy in different ways…because ministry is messy. Life is messy. Sometimes the mess is metaphorical, less definitive, the chaotic mess of interpersonal relationships and welcoming all sorts of people with all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of needs into the church - and sometimes we can see the mess with our eyes. Spit. Or wet paint on walls. Or crumbs from communion bread on the ground. Mess is an inherent part of following Jesus.
We as a church have expressed the desire to expand and reach new people, younger people, and be in ministry to and with young families. We may not realize this…but if we have this desire, then we also need to accept the NEED for, the reality that, things are gonna get a little messy.
Our children and grandchildren, the children we raise in our community, may take the faith in directions we didn’t anticipate or expect, like Jesus did with the Syrophencian woman. They may take their faith and how they live it out into directions that previous generations aren’t ready for - that we aren’t ready for. That’s a kind of mess…but a good, beautiful, and holy mess. If they are expanding the faith out of love of God and love of neighbor - making their faith come alive - we are called to welcome the mess - invite it in - let the children lead the way.
A commitment to young families and kids always sounds good on paper - it’s what every church “wants.” But not every church is willing, ready, or able to accept the mess that comes with it. I think we are ready, or getting there, as Boardman UMC. The reality is messy - (giving birth is MESSY) and that’s what we’re doing, really - giving birth to a new thing - to reach a new generation with God’s love.
It’s messy. And it’s also all beautiful - and filled with love.
So friends, my prayer for us, my exhortation, my blessing for us is this: Let’s live into the mess, the beauty, and the love of teaching children about God’s love for them.
Amen.
It’s messy. And it’s also all beautiful - and filled with love.
So friends, my prayer for us, my exhortation, my blessing for us is this: Let’s live into the mess, the beauty, and the love of teaching children about God’s love for them.
Amen.
