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  Episode #534

  No Outsiders Here: Radical Welcome

  Aug 11, 202624 min

  A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, August 2, 2026, tenth Sunday after Pentecost. “We Know Who We Are”series. ​​​ Texts: Romans 15:5-7; Luke 19:1-10​​​​ For days now, I’ve been ruminating on what it means to say of Foundry: “No outsiders here…” The clear intent of the phrase is to suggest that no one will be turned away, ignored, left out, or treated as less than. It’s one of Foundry’s corevalues to “make especially sure that people who feel excluded elsewhere are welcomed and invited to be an integral part of our congregation.” As Guy preached so powerfully last week, our biblically-rooted convictions around inclusion, affirmation, equity, and diversity are clear—regardless of the critiques those convictions draw. Our goal is to practice what we preach—to mean it when we say you are welcome here “no matter what.” As I study our texts for today it becomes clear that, to do that, we can’t rely on our banners outside or the words of welcome we repeat at the beginning of every service to carry all our welcome water. We can’t settle for our core values tucked onto a webpage to be the only communication of our commitment to cultivate a certain kind of community. We can’t get so comfortable that we forget what it is like to be a stranger in a strange land, or to forget that souls tend to be shy and that people carry wounds that are often invisible to the eye. To truly advance our goal of radical welcome, we need a more muscular strategy, theologically and biblically grounded, physically embodied, and embedded in the very DNA of our congregation. And our texts provide the guidance we need. The few verses from Romans 15 that were read aloud today are a summary of at least two chapters of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. That community was experiencing deep tensions between Jewish and Gentile Christians—driven by disagreements related to Torah observance, holy days, and dietary practices. These issues were flashpoints for deeper questions: Who belongs? Whose interpretation of Torah is correct? What practices are central to our shared life? Paul writes to a diverse people who are all trying to follow Jesus. They have different backgrounds—some began as highly observant Jews and others as pagan Gentiles. But here’s the thing they have in common: they have all been welcomed “προσλαμβάνω (proslambanō)” by Christ. And because of that, Paul teaches, they need to welcome one another in the same way. The question then, is how does Christ welcome people? Our familiar text from Luke 19 helps us answer the question. For those who may not be familiar with the story of the “wee little man,” Zacchaeus, here’s some context. Just before our story Jesus has welcomed children his disciples tried to send away, taught a rich ruler what it would take for him to enter the kin-dom, and showed mercy to a begger at the roadside who asked Jesus to restore his sight. Then Jesus enters the prosperous city of Jericho where his reputation precedes him. People know he is coming by. And Zacchaeus, a rich, chief tax collector wants to see him. Now to be a tax collector in that time and place was to be associated with the exploitation, violence, and ritual impurity of the Roman empire. A “chief” tax collector was at least in middle management—if not the CEO of collusion. All of that to say, Zacchaeus was not popular or trusted, but rather seen by the general public as an enemy and a threat. The crowds must have been shocked when the CEO climbs a tree— high profile, wealthy men didn’t climb trees. Zacchaeus’ willingness to do so suggests something in him was already stirring. Jesus picks up on that and proceeds to invite himself over. The text says, Zacchaeus “hurried down and was happy to welcome Jesus.” The crowds were not so happy. Why is Jesus going in to share table fellowship with this sinner? Because Jesus makes it his habit to welcome and befriend those whom others want nothing to do with. Children, beggars, the ill and disabled, women; and with those others judged as sinners—including rich tax collectors. Jesus puts it this way: “I came to seek out and save the lost.” And based on the whole story of Jesus, the “lost” include both those who inflict harm and those who suffer it. So which category of “lost” is Zacchaeus? In one sense, he’s the one doing harm as he supports an exploitive and unjust regime. But the crowd has also written him off as unworthy of fellowship with Jesus and beyond the possibility of change. Jesus’ action creates an opportunity for transformation—not only for Zacchaeus, but also for those who have decided that he is nothing more than a hopeless sinner. That day salvation comes because everyone is reminded that Zacchaeus is also a son of Abraham, a beloved child of God, worthy of mercy and care, capable of growth and change. Jesus’ welcome is fueled by the love of God: love strong enough to receive each of us as we are, and strong enough to call us toward growth, change, and restored relationship. That means Jesus’ welcome is not a cheap welcome characterized as indiscriminate acceptance and “anything goes.” Nor is it conditional welcome that requires change as the price of admission. It is welcome offered not simply for comfort, but for transformation through God’s embrace and mercy. So back to us, what does it mean for Foundry to say, “no outsiders here?” We rightly celebrate that people who have been excluded elsewhere often discover a home at Foundry. But every church eventually develops its own insiders and outsiders. We instinctively know whom we trust. And, if we’re honest, we instinctively know whom we’ve already decided not to trust. If Jesus were walking through Washington today who would make us grumble if they showed up to see him? Whose house would surprise and disturb us if Jesus said, “That’s where I’m going to dinner.”? Part of the invitation for us is to consider if there are those we really want to remain “outsiders”—if there are limits to our welcome. // That question leads us to something Fr. Greg Boyle says. After decades in Los Angeles accompanying gang members through violence, incarceration, and new beginnings, Fr. Boyle writes: “Human beings…settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all.” Our wildly inclusive God asks us to enter into kinship with all. Even when it’s hard. Through his journey with those whom others fear, judge, or write off as hopeless cases, Fr. Boyle knows something about that kind of kinship. Paul doesn’t ask the diverse members of the church in Rome to agree on every matter of faith and practice, but to learn how to enter into kinship with one another in the manner of Christ. He asks believers to become more committed to welcoming one another than they are to winning every disputed argument. Jesus creates space for people in Jericho to remember that even public enemy #1 is a sibling and a beloved child of God who is not beyond God’s capacity to save AND that they are also the “lost”—the recipients of harm, the grumblers, the judgy ones—who Jesus came to seek out—and who need some saving as well. That is the pattern of Christ’s welcome. And it is the pattern our welcome is meant to follow. Radical welcome—which is Christ’s welcome—is neither cheap welcome nor conditional welcome. At Foundry, everyone is welcome. No matter what. No conditions required. // But no one is welcome to deny someone else’s belovedness. No one is welcome to demean another child of God. No one is welcome to make this community unsafe for those Christ has welcomed. And no one is welcome to declare a person beyond God’s capacity to save while forgetting that we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). The boundary, then, is not ideology. The boundary is love. And that means radical welcome asks more of us than hanging banners and opening the doors. It asks us to notice who enters and still feels invisible. It asks us to cross the room, learn a name, make space at the table, and remain curious about a life we do not yet understand. It asks us to confront harm when it occurs—not because we have stopped loving the person doing harm, but because love refuses to abandon either the one being wounded or the one whose soul is being diminished by the wounding. It asks us to believe that transformation is possible, even in people we have given up on. And perhaps most difficult of all, it asks us to remain open to our own transformation—to the possibility that Christ may expose the limits of our welcome, unsettle our assumptions, and lead us into kinship with someone we would never have chosen for ourselves. This is the more muscular welcome to which we are called. Not mere politeness. Not tolerance from a safe distance. Not the pride of believing that we are already the welcoming people and everyone else needs to catch up. It is the patient, courageous, embodied work of becoming a community where strangers become neighbors and neighbors become siblings; where those who have been pushed aside are drawn into the center; where harm is named and interrupted; where repentance is possible; and where grace keeps making more of us than we believed we could become. The measure of our welcome is not whether people like us feel comfortable. The measure is whether people unlike us encounter the welcome of Christ through us. That is a demanding call. But it begins not with what we are able to accomplish. It begins with what Christ has already done. Christ has welcomed us. Christ has come looking for us when we were lost. And Christ has not given up on us. So we do not practice radical welcome in order to prove that we are good people or the right kind of church. We welcome because we have been welcomed. We make room because Christ has made room for us. We enter into kinship because, through grace, Christ has already made us one. “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” Amen. Benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

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  Episode #533

  If God Is For Us

  Aug 11, 202622 min

  A sermon preached by Guy Cecil with Foundry UMC, July 26, 2026. “We Know Who We Are” series.

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  Episode #532

  We Remember: A Story Bigger Than Ourselves

  Jul 28, 202627 min

  A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, July 19, 2026. “We Know Who We Are” series.

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  Episode #531

  A Well In A Strange Land

  Jul 21, 202637 min

  A sermon preached by Rev. Dr. Yongchi Rhie with Foundry United Methodist Church, July 12, 2026. "Sermon Series Part II: The United Methodist Way". Scripture: Exodus 2:15–22; Hebrews 13:1–2 On a hot July day in 2014, I stood in a long line outside the United States Embassy in Seoul. All around me, people were checking their documents, whispering the latest rumors about American immigration policy. Some were praying. Others were quietly rehearsing their lines. When my number was called, I sat down across from a consular officer who read through my papers, jotting notes, pausing on certain pages longer than I would have liked. My pulse rose with every pause. Finally, he looked up and asked, "Ms. Rhie, I see you have just returned home after living in England for quite some time. You already hold a Ph.D. Why do you wish to study theology in the United States?" He had a fair point. What could I say? That after seven years of dissecting the Bible within an inch of its life, I had finally realized what Scripture is for — not an object of intellectual indulgence, but a word meant to be lived out in the lives of people? Should I describe my grief at preaching to empty pews in an increasingly secular Britain, where so many considered the Bible, faith, and God simply no longer relevant? I had to be careful. I had been denied a visa once before, for this very reason. The officer asked about my story, but he seemed to be working from a script of his own, testing whether my story would hold. Every visa interview requires delicate tuning: you must convince them you have real plans for their country while assuring them you have no intention of staying. I truly desire to come to your country! I see abundant opportunity there! Will you let me in? But don't worry — I will never get comfortable enough to call it home. A month later, my passport came back with a visa stamped inside. It declared me a legal alien. That word “alien” always makes me laugh. Ever since I left my home country, I have been a legal alien. And I have learned that it doesn't take green skin, an oversized head, or extraterrestrial powers to be counted an outsider. Sometimes the way I look, the way I speak, or simply the way I carry myself is enough to register as a threat, or at least a discomfort. I could learn the customs of a new land. But would I ever be permitted to call it home? For most of my adult life, I have lived as a stranger in a strange land. A Man With No Country Moses knew that feeling so intimately that he engraved it into his son's name: "She bore a son, and he named him Gershom; for he said, 'I have been an alien residing in a foreign land'" (Exodus 2:22). Hey, Moses, did you ask Gershom about this? Did his mother agree? I feel for the boy. Imagine carrying your father's loneliness as your name. Let's step into the story and meet Moses by a well in Midian. His whole life, up to this moment, has been an exercise in not belonging and his very name tells the story. Pharaoh's daughter called him Moses, "because," she said, "I drew him out of the water" (Exod. 2:10). Drawn out: a Hebrew baby lifted from the Nile, out of a death decree, into a palace that was never quite his. Hebrew by blood, Egyptian by upbringing, Moses grows up belonging to neither world. And when he finally goes out to "his people," as the text pointedly calls them in verse 11, everything unravels. He sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave and strikes the Egyptian down (2:11–12). The next day he tries to reconcile two Hebrews who are fighting, and one of them turns on him: "Who made you a ruler and judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?" Do you hear the wound in that question? Yes, Moses committed a crime the day before; out of anger, perhaps, but also out of compassion for an enslaved kinsman. Today he steps in again, and his own people read his help as a grab for power: the palace insider playing ruler over the enslaved. His act of deliverance is recast as a threat; his sacrifice, as ambition. When word reaches Pharaoh, the king seeks his life. So Moses flees - rejected by Egypt as a criminal, rejected by the Hebrews as a pretender - a man with no country, no people, and a name that only reminds him he was pulled out of one world without ever being planted in another. That is the man who collapses, exhausted, by a well in Midian. What Happens at a Well Now listen closely to how the text tells what happens there, because every detail is doing holy work. Scripture says, "he sat down by a well" (v. 15). In the Hebrew Bible, nothing significant ever happens by accident at a well. Wells are where Abraham's servant found Rebekah, where Jacob met Rachel, where Jesus met a Samaritan woman: places of encounter where God's providence quietly gathers up displaced people and gives them a future. When the original audience heard "Moses sat down by a well," they leaned in. Something is about to begin. Seven daughters of the priest of Midian come to draw water, and rough shepherds drive them away. Hear the Hebrew: the shepherds vayegarshum — they drove them out. It is the very root, garash, from which Moses will later coin the name Gershom, the driven-out one. And here is what astonishes me: Moses inserts himself again. Consider what meddling has already cost this man- his home, his standing, very nearly his life. The prudent thing would be to keep his head down, drink his water, and let Midian's troubles remain Midian's troubles. He owes these women nothing, and no one in this town even knows his name. Yet the one who has been driven out cannot sit still while others are driven out before his eyes. And what does the text say he does? "Moses stood up and saved them" (v. 17) — vayoshian, from yasha, the root that will one day give us the names Joshua and Jesus. Here, at a foreign well, in a single unrewarded act - defending strangers, drawing water for distressed people and their animals - the fugitive rehearses his calling. This is the man through whom God will save a people. Then comes the irony. The daughters run home and report, "An Egyptian delivered us from the shepherds." An Egyptian! Moses is a Hebrew raised in Pharaoh's house, a man belonging fully to neither world, and even his good deed is credited to the wrong identity. Why Bother? And then the young women are gone, and Moses is alone again. No thank-you. No name asked. Not even a drink of fresh water from the well he had just defended. Three times now he has stretched himself for others, and three times his actions went unacknowledged, his words were rebuked, his authority was denied, his very identity was questioned. Sitting in the dust by that well, Moses might well have wondered: Why do I keep doing this? Why can't I just mind my own business? When your act of hospitality is met with silence — or worse, resentment — the temptation whispers: Why bother? I could just live for my own interest, my own comfort, my own happiness. Going the extra mile only makes you tired and pushes you further from your home. Friends, be honest: have you been there? Why do we help others? What is going on inside us when we stretch ourselves for people who may never stretch back? The One Who Noticed But even in the middle of this mess, someone notices Moses. Hearing what happened at the well, Reuel asks his daughters: "Where is he? Why did you leave the man? Invite him to break bread." Reuel is a Midianite priest - a foreigner, an outsider to Israel's story —- and yet he is the one who models the hospitality that the daughters, and Egypt, and even Moses' own people had failed to offer. This foreigner does not interrogate the stranger's papers. He sets a table. And at that table, the fugitive becomes family. Moses marries Zipporah and holds a son whose name tells the truth — ger, stranger. It is no accident that the Torah will later command Israel more than thirty times to protect the ger: "You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." We lament the loss of this entire ethic of welcome in today’s world. And notice: it all happened around the well. The well was already there. Before Moses arrived - before he had done anything right, and long after he had done something terribly wrong - the water was waiting. This is the heartbeat of our United Methodist way. John Wesley called it prevenient grace: the grace that goes before us. Before we repent, before we believe, before we even know God's name, God's love is already at work ahead of us, digging wells in the deserts of our lives. Moses thought he was a fugitive stumbling upon a random watering hole. In truth, grace had arrived before him; with a family, a vocation, and, on a nearby mountain, the God who says, "I have observed the misery of my people, and I have come down to deliver them." Two Loves, One Gospel Our second reading today, the letter to the Hebrews gathers this whole story into two luminous verses: "Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it." (Hebrews 13:1-2). The Greek translation is even better than the English here, because it names two different loves. Mutual love is philadelphia — the love of brothers and sisters. Anyone from Philly here? Did you know your city's name means the love of kinship? Philadelphia is the affection we give people who are already ours: family, friends, fellow members — the ones who look like us, pray like us, vote like us. That love matters. "Let it continue," Hebrews says. But then comes the harder word: philoxenia. Literally, love of the xenos — the stranger, the outsider, the one who shares nothing with you but a common humanity. Philadelphia loves the person already inside the circle; philoxenia widens the circle. Any club can manage philadelphia. Only the gospel produces philoxenia. And we know the opposite word all too well, because it is one of the few Greek words English never bothered to translate: xenophobia — fear of the stranger. We see it whenever an entire people is reduced to a threat: when immigrants are spoken of as terrorists and criminals rather than as mothers, fathers, and children of sacred worth; when a teenager sits in a church pew and learns to hide who they are, because the sanctuary feels less safe than the street; when a synagogue or a mosque must hire armed guards just to gather for prayer; when a job application is quietly set aside because the name at the top sounds too foreign. Xenophobia is the world's oldest sickness. It built Pharaoh's brickyards, and it is still building walls that separate children from their parents today. But friends, I have also seen philoxenia — and so have you. I have seen it in congregations that furnished apartments and stocked refrigerators for refugee families they had never met. I have seen it right here in this city, when buses of migrants arrived at Union Station with nothing, and churches and neighbors showed up with food, coats, and cots — before the cameras did. I have seen it in church basements turned into English classes and legal clinics, and at kitchen tables where someone simply said to the new family on the block, "Come, eat with us." Hospitality, Scripture insists, is not charity flowing downhill from host to guest. It is "entertaining angels without knowing it." It is the doorway through which God's love slips into our lives, often unannounced. Holy Meddling Now, this is the final Sunday of our series on the United Methodist way. Who are we? What defines us? What is our calling — as Christians, as United Methodists, as members of Foundry? I want to name something about Moses that we United Methodists have always claimed as our own: Moses meddles. Three times in one chapter he inserts himself into conflicts that were, strictly speaking, none of his business: an enslaved Hebrew, two quarreling kinsmen, seven harassed women at a well. He refuses to stay in his comfort zone. That holy meddling is our family trait. Our Social Principles declare of our public witness: "The United Methodist Church believes God's love for the world is an active and engaged love, a love seeking justice and liberty. We cannot just be observers." There is no private faith that hoards grace and calls it piety. As Desmond Tutu warned us: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." Friends, this is who we are. We are the people who refuse to mind our own business when God's children are being driven out — from lunch counters to detention centers, from housing courts to hospital waiting rooms. We wrestle with Scripture, we wrestle with our assumptions, we wrestle with our faith and our calling — and like Moses, we stand up. Because we serve a Lord who said, "I was a stranger, and you welcomed me." From Gershom to Eliezer Church, watch what grace does with a meddler. Moses named his first son Gershom: "I have been a stranger in a strange land." But his second son he named Eliezer: "My God is my helper." Between those two names lies an entire conversion. The stranger became a host. The man who once sought water at a well became the one through whom God drew a whole people out of bondage, through mighty waters, into freedom. God still loves to do this. God takes our Gershom — our alienation, our wounds, our wandering — and rewrites it as Eliezer: my God is my helper. Helper: not in advancing my ambitions or protecting my own wealth, family, and safety, but in teaching me to love God and to love my neighbor as myself. People often mistake "with God, all things are possible" for a guarantee of personal fulfillment. No. God helps us toward something far greater: to serve higher purposes, to forgive and to love, to give and to build, to lay down our lives for friends who were once strangers. We can live out the radical, divine, universal love of God — because God is with us, and God helps us. The Invitation So here is my invitation: this week, don't leave the town of Philly just yet. It is good to stay connected to the love of kin — philadelphia. But intentionally seek out and practice philoxenia. Is there a newcomer in the pew near you, or new to your building, your office, your block? Don't wait for the welcome committee - go say hello, learn their name, and remember it. Does someone need prayer? Don't merely promise to pray for them; ask if you may pray with them, right there, for two holy minutes. Is a neighbor navigating a new language, a new diagnosis, a new grief? Set a table, the way Reuel did: "Invite them to break bread." Philadelphia is dinner with your sister; philoxenia is adding a chair for someone whose story you don't yet know. One helpful discipline for the coming week: each evening, ask yourself two questions. Who did I love today who already loves me? That's philadelphia — good, keep it up. And: Who did I welcome today who could give me nothing back? That's philoxenia — the stretch. If the second column stays empty for a few days, that's the invitation talking. And now, before we close, one more invitation, because sermons about wells should end at one. If today you are the one in the wilderness - if you walked in this morning feeling like a stranger in a strange land - hear the good news: the well is already here. Grace arrived before you did. Before you ever learn to love yourself, before you learn to love your neighbor as yourself, you are already loved by the God of living water…not because of anything you have done, but because of whose you are. If you doubt this grace, then as we sing our final hymn, I invite you: come. Come to this altar, and let us pray with you. You don't need the right words; Moses didn't have them either. Just come and stand by the well with us. And perhaps you came in this morning already full. Then I invite you to consider the many ways you can become a living well for others: a place where people come to know and experience the way of philoxenia, the love of the stranger. The name you have yet to forgive. The prayer you will offer on the spot. The table you will set for the weary. The grace you will give without asking anything in return. Whether you come forward or stand still, the invitation is the same: Come to the well, and then go and become one. Amen.

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  Episode #530

  Holiness is Public: Faith that Does Justice

  Jul 14, 202628 min

  A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, July 5, 2026, sixth Sunday after Pentecost. “We Know Who We Are”series. Texts: Jeremiah 22:13–16; Luke 14:12–24 This weekend our nation marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. This is an occasion for celebration. It’s also an invitation to reflection. Moments like this invite us to look backward with gratitude, to look honestly at who we have become, and to consider what kind of future is still possible. This year those reflections seem incredibly important. Ours is a nation of extraordinary gifts and extraordinary contradictions. We inherit remarkable democratic ideals alongside a history that has too often failed to live up to them. We are living through another season when many of us are deeply concerned about our common life. Because our nation is broken. We see division deepen, neighbors dehumanized, militarism, cruelty and violence normalized, power abused for personal gain, and disregard for the rule of law. Perhaps you’d describe our situation differently, but I can’t imagine anyone would argue that everything’s OK. And while it doesn’t make it any better, I think it’s helpful to remember that what’s happening in our nation and world right now has happened many times before. If the prophet Jeremiah were to wander into our capital city he would feel right at home—surely to his dismay. Let me explain by telling you a story. Jeremiah is preaching in the final decades before Jerusalem falls to Babylon. Assyria has collapsed. Egypt and Babylon are competing for power. Judah is caught in the middle. The world order is shifting dramatically and it is a time of profound national anxiety—about security, identity, economic stability, and the future. In our text, Jeremiah is speaking not to the people, but specifically to the king, Jehoiakim. And he’s none too pleased with what is happening. But to understand why you need some backstory. Jehoiakim’s father, Josiah, had been one of Judah’s finest kings. He wasn’t perfect, but he loved God, took the covenant and the laws established during Moses’ time seriously, and sought to govern with justice. As Jeremiah remembers him, he “judged the cause of the poor and needy.” Then Josiah died unexpectedly on the battlefield. It was a devastating national loss. The future suddenly felt uncertain. Egypt quickly asserted control over Judah, deposing one of Josiah’s sons and installing another—Eliakim, whose name Pharaoh changed to Jehoiakim (a classic power play). Jehoiakim wasn’t in an enviable position. He was set up to do the bidding of Pharoah, required to pay tribute, and anxious about survival for himself and his people. Maybe it was the pressure or maybe it was pure opportunism, but Jehoiakim made a choice. Rather than “judging the cause of the poor an needy,” he consolidated power, exploited labor, and built a magnificent cedar palace as a symbol of royal prestige. Jeremiah looked at that palace and didn’t celebrate its magnificence but instead says, “Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness...” He asked a different question than everyone else. Not, “Isn't it impressive?” but, “How did it get built? Who paid the price? Who was harmed in the process?” And then this: “Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness?” This may seem a random question, but it reveals that Jeremiah’s critique isn’t about having wealth or a comfortable life. In other words, Josiah wasn’t a monk. He enjoyed the ordinary gifts of life. The difference isn’t that one king denied himself while the other indulged himself. The difference is that one understood leadership as doing justice and practicing right relationship, while the other understood leadership as entitlement. One king governed as someone who knew God, while the other governed as though power itself could save him. Jeremiah continues, clarifying his critique: “Your father judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well. ‘Is not this to know me?’ says the Lord. But your eyes and heart are only on your dishonest gain, for shedding innocent blood, and for practicing oppression and violence.” Again, the question Jeremiah asks it key: “Is not this to know me?” If someone asked you to finish the sentence, “To know God is...” what would you say? To worship regularly? To believe the right things? To pray? I imagine all of those can be valid answers. But Jeremiah offers this: to know God is to set your eyes and your heart on what God cares about; to attend to the needs of the most vulnerable, to use power wisely, generously, and compassionately, to treat workers with fairness, to do justice. Is not this to know me? In every age there is a dominant story about what will make things in your life “well.” There are temptations and pressures to sacrifice the good of the “we” for the benefit of only “me.” And in every age, God’s faithful are called to offer a counter-testimony. And just to finish storytelling time, Jehoiakim made his choice. He went to a lot of trouble to try to make himself and Judah look strong. He builds his palace, projects confidence, accumulates wealth, uses forced labor. But within about twenty years, Jerusalem is destroyed. His dishonest gain and self-serving choices did not make things well. The palace doesn’t save anybody—not the nation and certainly not the people. Jeremiah saw that writing on the wall. And his message to the king is one we need to hear again and again: A society cannot create security—a nation will never be great—while abandoning God’s call to compassion and justice. There is no separating our love of God from care of our common life. John Wesley would agree wholeheartedly. He insisted there is no holiness but social holiness. He didn’t mean that we’re saved by activism. He meant what we discussed last week: that grace blesses me AND creates “we,” forgives me and sends “us.” Ours is not a private practice. Grace always creates community, reshapes relationships, and spills over into the way we use money, exercise power, welcome neighbors, and seek the common good. Personal holiness overflows into public holiness. That’s one of the gifts of being United Methodist. Our tradition has never imagined that following Jesus ends at the sanctuary door. For more than fifty years we’ve had something called the Social Principles—not as a substitute for Scripture or as a party platform, but as a guide for Christian moral discernment. They are our denomination’s attempt to ask, together, “What does faithful discipleship look like in the complexities of modern life?” And in 2024, our worldwide church thoroughly revised them. That revision wasn’t simply updating language. It reflects the wisdom of the faithful from our whole denomination—disciples from Africa, Europe, the Philippines, the United States, and beyond—asking together how the Gospel speaks into economics, creation care, technology, war and peace, migration, human dignity, and public life. The principles guide our action and advocacy, but we don’t pretend every faithful Christian will reach identical conclusions about every public question. We also refuse to pretend that the Gospel has nothing to say about public life. Our United Methodist Social Principles remind us we don’t have to figure all this out alone. We inherit Scripture. We inherit tradition. We inherit the wisdom of Christians around the world. All helping us answer Jeremiah’s question: What does it mean to know God? Jeremiah says that to know God is to care about what and who God cares about. Again and again Jesus shows us how to live that. He sits down at tables with all kinds of people. And in today’ Gospel, while dining with a prominent Pharisee, he quietly begins rearranging everyone’s assumptions about belonging. “Don't invite only the people who can return the favor,” he says. “Invite those who cannot repay you.” Then he tells a story about a banquet where the invitation keeps widening until there is room for everyone God longs to gather. ...the invitation keeps widening until there is room for everyone God longs to gather. The table is big enough. Grace is abundant enough. And everyone—from the richest to the poorest, from stranger to friend—is invited to be filled. And then things are well. As we celebrate our nation’s birthday, the question before us is not simply what kind of nation we want to be, but what kind of people God is calling us to become. Christians have always loved their country best not by confusing it with God’s reign, but by measuring every nation—including our own—against God’s justice, God’s compassion, and God’s welcome. So we keep listening for Jeremiah's question, “Is not this to know me?” And we keep allowing Jesus to reshape our imagination around his table where there is always another place and the invitation keeps reaching farther than anyone expected. Friends, we’re about to come to that table. Every time we gather here, we embody a different story from the one our world tells. The world teaches us to ask: Who deserves a place? Who has earned it? Who belongs? Jesus asks different questions: Who still needs an invitation? How can we make more room? And then he places bread in our hands and sends us back into the world to live the answer. Amen. + + + Sending: This week, take one faithful public step. Maybe it is serving. Maybe it is giving. Maybe it is speaking up for someone whose voice is overlooked. Maybe it’s inviting someone who wouldn’t expect an invitation. Maybe it is reading a section of the Social Principles and asking where they challenge or deepen your own thinking. Not because the church is trying to tell you what to think, but because discipleship asks us to think faithfully about the world God loves. Just take one step. Because that’s where holiness always begins. God in peace and power…

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