worship
Molten Moments
Rev. Robyn Murphy
Good morning All God’s Children MCC! I have the marvelous and slightly unnerving sense that everything God has done in my life to prepare me for service, has brought me to this very moment in time.
I am so honored, so humbled and so happy that God has called me to this place known as All God’s Children. How perfect a name for this community of spiritual travelers? Truly the Gospel of love is unconditional and available to all or it is conditional and available to none. Your name tells me YOU know it to be available to all.
It is why you are here. It is why you serve. And if you are new to this community, it is why God drew you here today.
Today begins a MOLTEN MOMENT in the life of All God’s Children. God is doing something new-- in, with and through this church. Not because I am here. But because we are here together.
More about molten moments in a moment.
The Psalmists prayer in today’s lectionary reading is timely. It is a prayer of thanksgiving for the return of the Babylonian exiles. I’d like us to hear the prayer again. I have inclusified it for emphasis.
O give thanks to God, for God is good; for God’s steadfast love endures forever. Let the redeemed of God say so, those God has redeemed from trouble and gathered in from the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south.
Some wandered in desert wastes, finding no way to an inhabited town; hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted within them. Then they cried to their God in their trouble, and God delivered them from their distress; God led them - until they reached an inhabited town.
For you and I, this church IS AN INHABITED TOWN.
As gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer Christians we know what it means to be an exile. If you are an ally, God bless you. It takes guts to stand with the exiles.
Some of us wandered away from God on purpose, perhaps out of misplaced anger for the biases of the world. We have stories of coming out, and stories of coming back…back to ourselves and back to God.
Some of us were driven out, excommunicated, exiled—from our churches, from our families, from our jobs. If that applies to you, you remember the pain of that. When it happened to me it felt like an emotional short circuit! If I had been a piece of machinery, there would have been smoke!
I loved God! How could who I am be in conflict with God? It made no sense. It made no sense because it wasn’t true! Gradually over time my witness of God strengthened my spirit and trumped the garbage I was being told by my former church. I came out and in that, God led me out of exile. With that in mind, hear the psalmist’s prayer once more, paraphrased a little differently.
Now I give thanks to my God, for God is good; for God’s steadfast love does endure forever.
I am redeemed of God and I SAY SO!
God has redeemed US from trouble
and gathered you and I in from the lands,
from the east and from the west,
from the north and from the south.
We had wandered in desert wastes, finding no way to an inhabited town;
We were so hungry and so thirsty, our souls fainted within us.
When we ran out of ourselves, we cried to our God and God delivered us from our distress;
God led us- until we reached an inhabited town.
And so it is. For me that first inhabited town was MCC Greenville South Carolina. My friend Jude dragged me there kicking and screaming. I didn’t need church! Going to church meant taking my pain back to its source. Who needed that?!
But I did go and I remember watching in utter amazement. I could not believe my eyes. This sanctuary was filled with worshipping GAY Christians. Was it an oxymoron? Gay Christians? Jumbo shrimp? Military intelligence?
The Spirit of God was in that place and my healing began. Listening to my GLBT brothers and sisters sing praises to God, brought tears to my eyes. My late father was an opera singer and an organist. Hymns were part of my earliest church memories. I could hardly contain the joy of the possibility that I could finally integrate my sexuality with my spirituality. I was home. That began a wonderful ten year journey of study, Bible College and eventually Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary. My exile was over!
Let’s go back for a moment to the Babylonian exile.
In Jeremiah 29 there is a beautiful letter. My son was named after the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah so often proclaimed warning but he is loving and pastoral in this letter. He is writing to the captives.
Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.
As comforting as those words might have been, they also stung. These were conquered people, led out of the familiarity of their homeland into Babylon. Do we get that? Even for us, as awkward as we may have felt in our lives before coming out, our lives were familiar and it was scary to leave what we knew! Amen?
To understand their pain even more, we need to put a few things into context. Do you remember after 9-11 how painful it was to look at the changed skyline of New York? Where once stood two magnificent towers, now stood rubble, death and terrorism. The presence of the absence was enormous. All you could see was what was not there!
When Jerusalem was conquered the temple was destroyed. Like New York, their skyline would never be the same. The temple was the center of their worship. To them it represented God’s presence. Not only was it rubble, they were now being led out of their home, captured to live in a foreign land. The time is 586 years before Christ. People in 586 BC did not believe in one God. They believed each and every nation had their own God. The temple was destroyed, geographically and emotionally, God was abandoning them. They would now live under the jurisdiction of the conqueror’s God. How incredibly awful that must have been?
Does this resonate with you? I grew up with a certain and familiar view of our God, then when I was ready to come out, I know I was conquered by the biases of well meaning but misinformed people--again exiled to a foreign way of thinking about God.
So back to Jeremiah. He tells them to build houses? Marry off their children? Multiply?
Oh no. A prophet from “OUR TEAM” is telling us that this exile ain’t gonna be short! In fact, put your tent pegs in deep because this exile is going to last about fifty years. They could not see tomorrow from there.
As the exiles leaned into that molten moment, they realized that their God had not abandoned them and for the first time in human history, they began to talk about God in terms of universality. They began to experience and talk about God in new ways!
They began to find enrichment as they re-imagined God and when they finally returned to their home, they brought their expanded beliefs with them. Their faith went through a traumatic but refining process. Does that sound familiar? Have we not been through a refiner’s fire and had our faith strengthened as we re-imagine God?
This is a good time to say something about the Bible. The Bible is more than a book. It is a library. It’s a library of various authors, who spoke for their time, informed by their unique context, charged with carrying a theme or a message along the seas of time. The Bible is a history of humankind’s maturing understanding of their relationship with God. When we understand the bible this way, we can liberate the scriptures and liberate God! The inconsistencies and dead ends in the Bible can be attributed to human beings, not God.
I doubt the Babylonian exiles ever dreamed their circumstance would change the world’s view about God. As surely as they were called into service for such a time as THAT— You and I are called to service for such a time as THIS. In MCC, we re-imagine God every day!
That is why this is a molten moment. What is God doing in, with and through us? How will we respond? Can You see tomorrow from here?
I told your search team and your board that although I am a Lutheran Seminary graduate, I am unabashedly UFMCC. There are many churches that will welcome you. They are good churches. But you will seldom if ever hear YOUR calling as GLBT Christians lifted up from the pulpit. UFMCC is the only denomination that celebrates our lives, our history, and our calling 365 days a year. Sermons can comfort the afflicted or afflict the comfortable. Our afflictions and our ways of getting comfortable are unique, AMEN.
As GLBT Christians we are called to:
Do justice, show kindness, and live humbly with God
We are called to explore life’s questions with open hearts and minds
We are called to raise our voices in sacred defiance against religious, political or systematic exclusion.
We are called to reach out to those with no hope.
And we are called to lift up new generations of remarkable, far-reaching spiritual activists.
WOW. I think I can see tomorrow from here!
As a UFMCC pastor it is my sacred call to liberate the scriptures and re-image God for you in my preaching, my teaching and in my counseling. By doing so my goal is to deepen your faith in Christ; expand your heart; challenge your mind; and energize you for mission.
Earlier I mentioned the term “molten moment”. In metallurgy there is a molten moment when the metal is at the perfect temperature for molding, forming and creating. What is different about All God’s Children today in this molten moment isn’t that you now have another staff clergy who is female. You will learn what holds the center for me is Jesus Christ, but I also have a new age/metaphysical side to my spirituality. What is different now is that the chemical formula, the cellular makeup, of all of us has just changed as a result of adding me to the mix. And for those of you who raised your hand as first time visitors, it has also been changed because you are here!
Together we are a NEW CREATION. God is constantly taking the chaos and making new creations. Together we are co-creators of something sacred and extraordinary in the Twin Cities and beyond. By speaking this intention, we call it into existence. And so it is.
Are you ready to claim and participate fully in God’s new creation? Can you get excited and tell your friends that something new is happening at All God’s Children? If they ask you “what is happening?, say “ I don’t know yet but it’s going to be good!” Amen!
Here’s the bottom line for you and maybe some of your friends that don’t come here yet. It’s why the healing I have heard you speak of is so important. You cannot carry the good news of the Gospel through clenched teeth.
All God’s Children Metropolitan Community Church is the place to be healed, lifted up, affirmed and made fresh and useful. There are people who need us, who need to know that there is a place where they can exhale.
Jeremiah said, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you and in their welfare you will find your welfare.”
That applied to the Babylonian captives and it can apply to us here in the Twin Cities. We have so many ways to serve other people living in and out of the margins. We live daily in the margins so our vantage and our vision is decidedly more acute. We are in a unique position to see the margins because we are IN the margins.
I believe it is our call to bring OUR newly expanded ways of talking and thinking about God to our community and the community at large.
Our world needs sanity and grace! What a concept that is? Sanity AND grace! I spent over 25 years in marketing and public relations. You could say that sanity and grace is our product.
Evangelism to me is sharing that product with others. Are you glad you’re here? Then pass it on and pay it forward. If you are still hurting, sign up for a class or a group. As I grow in my calling to create and facilitate Christian education here, attending a class or group is a great way to be liberated, learn and experience what it feels like to be held by your community.
We do have a molten moment here. I pray God’s richest blessings on our community as we claim and share the healing we experience here. I can’t wait to get to know you. I love that you are now my faith community. Amen. Namaste.