Yesterday afternoon, a group of clergy and lay leaders gathered at a Regional Gathering to hear from our Bishop, Tom Berlin. All this week and next he is meeting at a handful of churches to share his vision for the rebirth of the United Methodist Church in Florida. We met at First Church Melbourne and had worship and a time of listening and preparing for our upcoming Florida Annual Conference the first week of June.
The Bishop started with the image of how he had seen a video of a diver in a cage in open water surrounded by feeding sharks and then one actually got into the tank and everyone wondered if the diver survived. The diver did survive and the shark eventually got out, but there were some tense moments when that shark was in the cage with the diver and it felt like all hope is lost. And then he said, that we are living in times now, where there is a giant shark in our cages and the church needs to be ready to respond. The Bishop went on to explain that there are several areas in our current culture that feel like an angry shark is thrashing around. One place is in our economy, one place is in our constant stream of the news cycle and the other is in the way we respond to the divisiveness of politics as people who love Jesus.
The Bishop then asked the question I tried to ask this Sunday in my sermon: What do we do as Christians living in this divisive country? And his answer surprised me, it shouldn’t have, but it did. He said it is time for us to reclaim our unique identity under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and surrender to him as Lord. We all are pretty comfortablecalling Jesus Savior and asking to be saved from our sin, our broken circumstances and saved for eternity; but it is another thing entirely to surrender ALL of our lives to Jesus as Lord. Every great story in our tradition starts with Surrender. And we surrender not by engaging in the doom and gloom of our reality but in turning those divisive conversations into opportunities to share a witness both with our words and actions.
Then he invited us onto the rooftop with him and asked us to get onto the proverbial rooftops of our churches and to take a few minutes to look outside the walls of the church to see the homes, apartments, schools, communities and concerns that are right around us. The Bishop reminded us that Jesus came to set the oppressed free and to love and serve the vulnerable. In our current economic realities with the shark in the cage, we will have even more vulnerable and oppressed people closer to the zero margin of not knowing if they can pay for rent, feed their children or afford medicine. We are inching closer and closer to this and his advice for us, the people called United Methodists, is to allow that witness of our faith to take action as well. It is not helpful in these times to bury our heads in the sand or assume someone else will fix it. But his encouragement to all churches in the Florida United Methodist Conference is to prepare now for what is coming and to be ready to feed the hungry and speak for the vulnerable and lift up the oppressed when the time comes.
I share a picture with you of Bishop Berlin standing in front of a bunch of food items that he and one other person bought this week that they plan to donate to a church in their area. It was a challenge for us to think about how we can encourage our children and grandchildren and neighbors and friends to be more generous. For Mother’s Day this year, I have asked my kids not to buy me a gift, but to use that money to buy food and contribute to a food pantry or church that is meeting the needs of the most vulnerable and I invite you to join me.
As we ended our time together we prayed through these verses in Proverbs that most clearly articulate the heart Methodists have for personal and social holiness.
Proverbs 14:21 says:
21 It is a sin to despise one’s neighbor,
but blessed is the one who is kind to the needy.”
I pray that this Scripture, these devotional words and the Holy Spirit will speak to you this week as you continue living into the person God has called you to be and that you may be strengthened to live out that call to feed and tend the sheep.
AMEN
