May 18th, 2025 - The Message - Bishop Laura Merrill

Matt Nelson: Welcome to the Sermon podcast from First United Methodist

Church in downtown Bentonville.

If you have questions related to what you hear today or just want to find

out more about the ministries at First United Methodist Church, please visit us

online at FUMCbentonville.org or check us out on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

Bishop Laura Merrill: What a joy to be with you!

Last summer in August, I was trying to get here and, and

be with you for some occasion.

That would've been wonderful, but I caught COVID and so I'm

here with you now instead.

And I have to say that having waited for the confirmation class seems

like the right thing to have done.

So it is a privilege to be with you in this holy space,

this historic house of worship.

I wanna thank your senior pastor for this invitation.

And for her generous hospitality during my stay already.

This has been great.

Sometimes, uh, the trip from Oklahoma back to Arkansas, I get

to do something good on the way and this is, this is that good thing.

I know that there are a lot of you here who make ministry happen in this church.

You help worship happen.

Some of you're paid, some of you're not, most of you're not.

And then on the other days that aren't Sunday, you make a lot of

important things happen in ministry.

And I wanna thank you.

On behalf of the whole church, so it is good to be here and to greet you

joyfully in the name of our risen Christ.

This day, our scripture today comes from the letter to the Ephesians, the sixth

chapter, beginning in the 10th verse.

And if you haven't read that letter in a while, I encourage you to go back.

Now, there's some parts of it that we, as I'll talk about later, some parts that we

have to unpack, um, that aren't as good, but there are some really great parts and

so read it and weigh it in your heart.

But this is kind of bringing it to a close at the end of the letter.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power, put on the whole

armor of God so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

For our struggle is not against blood and flesh, but against rulers,

against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present

darkness against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

Therefore, take up the whole armor of God so that you may be able to withstand

on the evil day and having prevailed against everything to stand firm.

Stand therefore, and belt your waist with truth and put on the breastplate of

righteousness and lace up your sandals in preparation for the gospel of peace.

With all of these, take the shield of faith with which you

will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one.

Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.

Pray in the spirit at all times, in every prayer and supplication.

To that end, keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all

the saints, this is the word of God.

For the people of God, the be of God.

Recently I attended a meeting of the Council of Bishops with our

own retired Bishop Max Whitfield.

So glad that you're a part of this body.

He was present as well as United Methodist Bishops from across the world.

And one morning in worship in her sermon, one of the bishops

described her husband's experience of learning the martial art of Tai Chi.

He describes this as there being a difference between soft

and hard energy or strength.

And let me say now that I heard just enough to be dangerous, though

not in the martial arts sense of dangerous, which I definitely am not,

but dangerous in getting it wrong.

But my understanding is that the way to strengthen Tai Chi.

Is not through brute force, but through, instead that it flows right

from this disciplined, yet relaxed, non distracted alignment of mind and body.

Doesn't that sound wonderful?

Non distracted alignment.

The bishop described it as being loose enough to be ready for

whatever they bring, however they bring it, and as much as anything

it takes unlearning what not to do.

Replacing the overreach of aggression and the tenseness of that with a softness that

is revealed in the end as true strength.

Now, I know that you know that we face a most disorienting, unbalanced

moment, distracted to be sure as Christians and as the church.

I believe that's true whether you have been here for years and years,

or you're just being confirmed today or some place in the middle.

It feels though unbalanced in particular to those of us who've been around

for a while because we know pretty well what church used to look like.

We know how we used to do ministry.

You know, if you go back to the middle of the 20th century, that

was when the world just brought people to the church and dropped off

at the door, and in they wandered.

Right.

And we hope we did a decent job so that they would wanna stay and we had

good, you know, cookies and stuff.

And so, you know, like that was enough sort of, we were operating in

a culture that was sympathetic to our institution, our forms and our practices.

And it's not that way now.

It's harder now, you know, today's social context is less welcoming to us.

It's less inclined to accept what we say at face value to accept that we really

are well intended to accept that we can maybe offer something fresh or true.

That we are not just used car salesman trying to get people in the door.

And then there's our political moment as a nation.

Lord have mercy In that sphere, we've encountered a

whole nother challenge, right?

For now, we find interests and powers and voices expressing themselves as what's

being called Christian Nationalism, where you try to wrap Jesus in the American

flag and wrap the American flag in Jesus.

And those voices are coming at us from a different direction,

different from the one that says we're passe or irrelevant or empty.

The challenge from this corner is provocation.

It's even a gauntlet thrown down at the feet of the people called

Methodist and our well-intended people of faith who live alongside us.

We watch the news and we ask ourselves every day, what in the world, right?

What can this mean?

We're thrown off, right?

We're not on balance, we're not centered.

We're dizzy.

Where we hear unbelievable claims thrown about in the names of somebody's

church, and they become true merely through repetition at high volume.

One term thrown recently into our national debate that I found perplexing.

The first time I heard it was weaponized empathy, also known as toxic empathy.

This is the claim that western civilization itself is being put at risk.

By the exploitation of people's concern for one another.

Just as a grammatical review, you've got sympathy and empathy, and

they're related, but according to the internet, they differ in focus, right?

Who needs a dictionary, right?

Sympathy is primarily a feeling of compassion or perhaps pity for the

suffering of someone else while empathy involves actively sharing

in their emotional experience.

Now I know empathy best as a tool.

I used as a mom trying to raise decent human beings out of the little feral

creatures who lived in my house.

Like, where did these people come from?

How would you like it if someone did that to you?

I would ask them after a punch or a kick or an unkind word, how would you feel?

If someone did that to you, right?

Most of us learned this from Jesus or Sunday school or mom

or dad, or teachers or somebody.

We learned that there's this wiring in us that connects us with other

people, that helps us live well in the world, helps us get along, and helps

us actually find peace within ourselves by helping us treat other people.

Considerately.

Kindly yet, the value of this basic fundamental truth that most

people start learning at about age two is apparently up for debate.

Now, I'm not gonna outline all the terms of that debate for you.

You can use the internet yourself and go look it up.

But what I will name is this accusation that human empathy has

somehow become a weapon for doing harm for breaking down community.

And you can trace that back to an associated connection, another accusation

called the feminization of the church.

Now that we've let all these women into roles of spiritual leadership,

we're apparently ruining everything with our soft, squishy hearts.

You know, we'll let anybody do anything apparently.

I don't know.

All these moms out here teaching children to be nice to other people, and then

dads who clearly got confused by the moms and have, you know, forgotten what

they're supposed to be doing and are teaching their children to be nice too.

This supposed y'all dads are part of the problem teaching people to be nice.

I mean, the alleged point is that this supposed feminization of the church,

which may I just add, if you do any study of the history of the church, I mean

your pastor has a degree in some things.

She could probably help you unpack why that term makes no sense.

That this is what's resulted in the breakdown of the moral character

and integrity of the church.

It's stunning, it's mystifying, it's disequilibrium, and yet this

is the world in which we serve.

It is the world in which our confirm mans will live as new

disciples of Jesus Christ.

Now, when I first processed the thought of empathy as a weapon,

today's ephesian text, Ephesians text came immediately to mind for me.

I have to say that this hasn't always been my favorite passage.

Fun fact, many years ago I arrived at seminary loaded with a whole bunch of

scripture passages that I don't like.

Now, some of them are in Ephesians.

There's one about wives submitting to their husband.

There's another about slaves submitting to their master.

That's all in there too, right?

Now, some of those passages, you know, are known as clobber

passages or bully passages.

Passages used by some people as weapons, telling people what's wrong with them.

Telling people, you know, how they need to get in line in a particular

way in the name of the Lord.

And all of those needed unpacking for me, and I'm grateful to say my

education helped me do that work.

I learned to love or at least respect or understand scripture that I didn't think

I could love or understand or respect.

I hope the same is true for you and your journey of faith, but this text,

which we could say paints the gospel in militaristic terms with armor and sword

and flaming arrows and forces of evil.

This one could be on an unpacking list because one problem with today's text.

Is that when you're all suited up in armor with sword hanging from your belt,

people can start to look like targets.

When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The scripture is clear that this war to be fought is not against flesh and blood.

It's not against people.

It's against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

But y'all's spiritual evil comes at us in embodied ways.

It comes at our bodies, right?

And it's easy to see other people as the evil one, just as they might see

us, whoever we, and they might be suiting up for battle in our minds

and hearts can make us tense up our muscles and get ready to punch first.

Now, of course, there's another way to read this image, hence the unpacking.

It is deeply comforting to me to imagine myself wrapped bodily in the powerful

protective love of God in the face of evil and death, which are real things

to be wrapped in a love that is bigger than anything I might be able to muster

up by the clenching of my teeth and the flexing of my own muscles, right?

This love that's powerful that rose Jesus out of the grave,

that to be wrapped in that.

I clinging to the thought of the breastplate of righteousness, the

shield of faith, covering my vulnerable heart, the helmet of salvation, the

saving grace that covers my head, and the spirit preparing and leading

my feet to walk in the way of peace.

These are defensive tools at best, not offensive ones.

The one actual weapon in this picture is the sword of truth, which we must only and

always wield with care and humility for.

It does not belong to us Christian people.

Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power.

The letter teaches us, but we also know that in another part of the Bible,

another letter teaches us that his power is made perfect in weakness.

His power is made perfect in the sacrifice, made for the sake of love.

Good Friday teaches us that his power is made perfect, not through emotion

or manipulation or domination, but through choice, aligned with purpose.

Love as an act of the undistracted will a relaxed, disciplined alignment

of the body and mind, word and deed.

The full armor is not a weapon, it is an identity.

So I wanna testify to you today that you are part of a church that is earnestly

seeking to put on this identity.

What I am privileged to see from the place I now occupy, even if at

light speed at 35,000 feet, I still get to see in Oklahoma and Arkansas

and across our worldwide connection.

Is a body of believers who want to live a life of ministry that looks like love.

You may have seen recently that the United Methodist Church unveiled

a new guiding vision statement, and you can just look that up.

UMC guiding vision statement.

It says, the United Methodist Church forms disciples of Jesus Christ, who

empowered by the Holy Spirit, love boldly.

Serve joyfully and lead courageously in local communities

and worldwide connections.

It's a beautiful statement, and what I want you to know is that it

wasn't just dreamed up by a couple of church bureaucrats on Zoom,

although that's not out of the realm of imagination, but that's not

how this happened, this happened.

It's the fruit of a conversation with United Methodists over a year or more.

Who are members of congregations that extend across the globe.

It's a self description that looks and sounds like who we

believe we were called to be.

Of course, it's aspirational as any good vision statement must be, but

there is a common energy behind it that is remarkable to me when I think

about the diversity of our context.

Norway, Zimbabwe, Vermont.

Ukraine.

Did y'all know the United Methodist churches in Ukraine right now?

Democratic Republic of Congo, North Dakota, thousands of Philippine Islands,

Alabama, all of us United Methodist.

Now, we are certainly not aligned on every matter, but we agree on this.

We were called to be a church that does these things as disciples of Jesus

Christ love boldly, serve joyfully.

And lead courageously.

We say these things about ourselves because we are witnesses, we see it,

and then we say what we have seen right in the face of shifting circumstances

around the deployment of clergy, in particular in more isolated areas.

I laity raising their hands to be formed as Wesleyan leaders and as servants

who are vital to the church's ministry.

It is happening across Arkansas right now.

These lady are tired of people talking bad about their church and

they're figuring out how to be a blessing to somebody in real time.

In Jesus' name, in the face of divisive fear and suspicion that shouted from every

social media rooftop, I see neighbors in real communities walking across

real streets to meet new neighbors.

To ask new questions of welcome and curiosity to form relationships

where none existed before.

As our demographics change and the support of the church comes from

different generations, I see church property and resources that were given

to us by our ancestors now being used by church people to repair harm in

their communities and to teach the value of graciousness to new generations.

That's happening here.

There is no simple solution to the challenges that we face

at this point in our history.

We have things we need to learn and things we need to unlearn, and neither

of those activities is anybody's first choice of a thing to do.

I'm just saying, but you confirmation class of 2025.

You first United Methodist Church of Bentonville, you have been

wrapped in the Belt of Truth by your study of the scripture.

You have been raised up by the living word of God.

It has trained you up.

It has given you life and purpose for things that I can't begin to

imagine yet that I don't know where that's gonna go, but I trust it.

Even so, I trust what we know in the face of what we don't know.

We do know the distinction between Christian worldly hegemony or power

dominance, and the endless love of God revealed in the life, death

and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We know that the Christian faith is not an irrelevant worn out trope.

Nor is it a tool for the preservation of Western civilization, which is

of course its own code, speak for a certain kind of power, a certain form

and color, may I say, of power, right?

That creates itself and then defends itself through cruelty and brutality

and oppression and dominance.

That is not the purpose of the church.

We are people who know instead.

The power in which we stand finds its greatest strength and tenderness of heart

in softness, aligned and focus that turns out to be the greatest power of all.

And in the empathy that may I remind us lies at the center of Jesus's

great commandment to his people.

How would it feel if that happened to you?

Weapons are created to inflict harm and injury and defeat and destruction.

The love of God in Christ comes to birth and to bless and to heal.

So on behalf of the church, I ask you in the words of the scripture to

pray in the Spirit at all times and every supplication for the saints.

And y'all know you're the Saints.

We are it tag we're it.

I mean, they're up there in the balcony too, but we are it.

I beg you.

In your life of faith, to be honest about your life, to be honest about

what's happening in your soul, and to make spaces where other people can do

the same and trust that they are loved.

I hope that you will always nurture the joy of being with one another and

cherish the gifts that God has given you by making you the way you are.

You are a gift to the world.

I encourage you to stand firm in what you know.

Clothed in everything holy and good, ready for whatever they

bring, however they bring it.

I commend you to continue ministering this place as Christ's faithful.

Merciful, empathetic people, all in the service of love.

May it be so we pray this day in Christ's holy name, amen.

Matt Nelson: Thanks for listening to the sermon podcast from First United

Methodist Church in downtown Bentonville.

If you would like to let us know you were here, follow the link below.

to connect.

To participate in worship through giving, you can give online at fumcbentonville.org

or on Venmo @FUMCBentonville.

FUMC Bentonville welcomes all.

Because we believe the communion table is God's table, we invite

everyone into our church family.

We welcome and celebrate every race, gender, gender identity, sexual

orientation, marital status, age, physical and mental ability, national origin,

economic station, and political ideology.

We come together in action and outreach, aspiring to

follow Jesus' example of radical hospitality.

love, and grace as a transformative

Matt Nelson: movement in our community.

Please join us for worship on Sunday mornings at 9:00 AM, 10:10 AM, and 11:00

AM, live and on our YouTube channel.

Grace and peace.