Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 25, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Five years ago yesterday, March 24, 2002, was a remarkable day in my life. I don’t remember much about it. I remember coming here to lead worship for the first time as you pastor. It was Palm Sunday, and we participated in a palm procession from the Methodist Church down Lewis Street past this church and back. I really don’t remember much of anything else about that day. I suspect my emotions were running so high that everything just became a blur. The important thing right now is that today I begin my sixth year as the pastor of Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ. Last Sunday I shared with you my vision of how far we have come in these past five years together. Today I want to share with you at least part of a vision of where we go from here. And somehow I feel like I got some divine help with that task. I’ve known for a while that that’s what I wanted to do on this Sunday, so I approached the lectionary readings for today with a specific question in mind. Is there anything, I wanted to know, in those reading that would work as well for my looking ahead sermon this week as well as last week’s passage from II Corinthians worked for my looking back sermon last week? As soon as I read the passage from Isaiah that we just heard I said “Thank you, Lord!” A better text for this sermon could hardly be imagined than Isaiah 43:18-19b. Those verses read: “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” NRSV On the Sunday when I want to look ahead the Scripture from the lectionary has the Lord saying don’t look back, look forward. On the Sunday when I want to think about where we are going together and what new thing God is calling us to do, Scripture has God say: “I am about to do a new thing” and call on us to discern what it is. It’s enough to restore my faith in divine providence.

The providential concurrence of this passage from the lectionary and what I want to do this morning tells us something important. It tells us that God indeed calls us to look forward for something new. Our future will not be the same as our past. God does not stay stuck in the past, and God doesn’t want us to stay stuck in the past either. God calls us forward to newness of life and newness of witness. God does not call us to forsake our past to be sure. That past, the most recent portion of which we discussed last week, has made us who we are. Nonetheless, God is never satisfied to have us stay where we are. Our passage from Isaiah this morning comes from the time when God was leading God’s people out of exile in Babylon and back to the Promised Land in Judea. Yet God was not leading them back to what had been before. God was returning them to the land of their roots so that they could create something new that would grow out of those roots. It’s the same with us. God is calling us to create something new that will grow out of our roots, the roots of our time together over these past five years, the roots of this church that go back to 1905, and more importantly the roots of the Christian faith that go back 2,000 years to Jesus Christ Himself. So today we ask: What new thing is God about to do with us? And just as important: Do we have the wisdom to discern it and the courage to do it? What that new thing is we must discern together. It is not for me to discern alone. Nonetheless, bear with me as I share a few thoughts about what our future might look like and the challenges that lie before us.

Last week I said that when I began my service here as your pastor finding our identity as a congregation of God’s people was the key to solving the other problems that we faced. We found that identity when we officially became an Open and Affirming Church. Yet the task of defining a church’s identity is never finished. We are not the same church we were in 2003 when we embraced being Open and Affirming. We have new people with new passions, and we have all grown and changed—or at least I hope we have. None of us lives our calling to be disciples of Christ fully and perfectly, but the life of Christian discipleship calls us always to consider how we may be ever truer to the one we call Lord and Savior. For us that means living ever more fully into our identity as an Open and Affirming Church. We’ve done a lot. How can we do even more to welcome all people into the family of Christ? Here’s one idea: There are young people in our community, teens and young adults, who are struggling with the question of their sexual identity or who have already discerned that they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. They do this in a culture that remains radically hostile to sexual minorities. How can we become a safe place for all young people to learn, explore, discern, and grow in all aspects of their lives, including their sexual identity? There is a need out there, and we aren’t meeting it. Let us work together to discover ways in which we can.

We have established our identity as Open and Affirming, yet Christian identity is not limited to any one issue. Christ calls us to be His disciples in all aspects of our lives—our personal lives, our life together as a church, and our life together as a society. In a book I read recently—actually, in a book I wrote recently—it says that Christ calls His followers to faithfulness in three main areas, inclusivity, social justice, and nonviolence. We’re doing pretty well on the inclusivity piece with our signing on to the Open and Affirming movement in the UCC. There is another movement in the UCC that we haven’t paid any attention to that deals with the other two major parts of Christ’s call. It is called the Just Peace movement. Ten years ago or more the General Synod of the UCC called on all the local churches to discern whether or not they are called to be Just Peace churches. A Just Peace church is one that commits itself to working for peace in God’s world by working for justice for all of God’s people. Some Just Peace churches emphasize the justice part and focus on issues of social and economic justice. Some emphasize the peace part and focus on nonviolence and opposition to war. They don’t all do it the same way, but they all respond to Christ’s call for justice and for peace. Does our future lie in the direction of becoming a Just Peace church as well as an Open and Affirming one? Let us work together to answer that question in the years ahead.

There’s another identity movement in the UCC too that I believe we should look at. Some churches have declared themselves to be Whole Earth churches. These churches have committed themselves to caring for God’s creation as part of their Christian discipleship. They adopt environmentally healthy policies and practices themselves, and they work in their communities to protect and improve the health of the environment. They discern that the Spirit calls them to make responding to God’s command that we be stewards of creation a major part of their Christian identity. Does our future lie in the direction of becoming a Whole Earth church as well as an Open and Affirming one? Let us work together to answer that question in the years ahead.

Moving ahead into newness of Christian discipleship means continuing to work on our identity, but it means other things as well. We are called not only to create an identity as disciples of Christ but to be Christ in the world for people in need. We are starting to do that more and more. The food programs that we are doing together with our ecumenical partners are pointing the way. In addition to the things we’ve done for a while, like the Outreach Committee’s periodic food drives that are such an important part of what we do, projects like Katie’s Knitting for Peace, Heidi’s Families for Social Action, and Delena’s new work to benefit foster families are all new ways in which we are reaching out to people in need. Clearly our future will and must include continuing to reach out to make a difference in the lives of those people.

Any healthy Christian church will look outward at the world, as the things I’ve mentioned to far do; but any healthy Christian church is also a community of faith. There are two parts to that statement—community and faith. Both parts are important. We are a changing community. We are growing. Our demographics are changing. One challenge was face is the challenge of integrating new people into the church family so that we remain one family and avoid any division between newer members and older ones. This is especially important in a small church like ours. The small group dinners that the Outreach Committee is sponsoring can help in this regard as long as they become an opportunity for people to meet new friends from the congregation. The wonderful willingness of so many of our new people to jump right in and serve on our various boards will help with the integration of our church family as well. One of the wonderful things about small churches is the way they can truly be community. Let us work together in the years ahead to make sure that we remain true community for all of our members and friends.

Faith community is about community, but it is also about faith. We celebrate and practice our faith every Sunday in our worship together. We live out our faith in the work we do in the larger community. Yet faith is no more static than is the life of a healthy community. It’s a cliché to say that faith is a journey, but like most clichés this one has a lot of truth in it. We are all on a faith journey. We are all at different places on that journey. A healthy faith community tends to its members’ faith. It does that in worship that strengthens faith, and that may mean exploring new types and styles of worship as the community changes. It does it through education in the faith, and that education can take many forms. Let us work together in the years ahead to cultivate our faith that we may grow in our knowledge of the love and grace of God in Jesus Christ.

Thus says the Lord: “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” It’s a good question. Do we perceive new things that God is doing with and through us? I’ve tried to suggest what some of those new things might be. You probably have other ideas about what they are. My prayer for us as we begin our sixth year together is that we will remain open to the Still Speaking God, the God who does new things and who calls us always to newness of faith and newness of life. God has brought us safe this far. God will lead us safely into the future if we only have the courage to follow. Amen.