April 13th, 2025 - "Mitigated Disaster: Disaster Is Here!" - Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris

Welcome to the Sermon podcast from First United Methodist

Church in downtown Bentonville.

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This week's podcast begins with a clip from a short video that

was aired during Sunday service.

Arrived at the church, obvious damage all over the place.

Trees down.

Everything else had to reroute like five times.

Come in here.

But the interesting experience was, uh, pulling up and initially

thinking that everything was okay in regards to the sanctuary.

And as I was doing a walk around the, the front corner here at, uh, third

Street and Elm, we had this really nice sign that was in Masonry, uh, and the

sign itself was totally blown apart.

Uh, so all these massive stones we're talking, they're, they're heavy.

It's, you know, solid work out to try and pick one of 'em up.

This archway of stone that was holding a metal sign in

place had totally blown apart.

I looked at the church steps and the.

South facing doors were, were fine.

They were locked.

Nothing was wrong with them, but our east facing doors.

When I, when I got to those steps, I noticed that there was this big

cross that, that normally sits on our usher stand in our Nar X,

and it was sitting outside, which I knew it shouldn't be outside.

So I walked up closer to the door and realized that it had been pulled open.

What we think happened, um, that caused the damage in here to the sanctuary

was that the tornado passed overhead.

Uh, headed east and it sucked.

The doors facing east open tore the doors open, even though they were locked shut

and, and, and everything was locked down.

And a pressure wave moved through the whole building that shut fire

doors, all that kind of stuff.

Upstairs, the roof of the sanctuary on that, that corner, the opposite

corner, um, pressure breaks, blew off.

And then this stain, this stained glass window actually got sucked into the room.

It was like somebody had.

Uh, put a, put a string right to the center of it and yanked it to

the, to the point that it came out like 12 inches or so, uh, a foot.

And, and the woodwork's actually still out of plane right now.

That's what all that bracings for.

But that was, that was kind of the day of everything else was a, a barrage

of, you know, we, we locked down the building as best as we could to make

sure that everything was secure.

There was no power or anything like that.

There wasn't power around most of the town.

Um.

Some church members helped secure the doors that had been blown open

'cause they were, they were ripped open so violently that there was no

way to actually get them to stay shut.

We had to board the doors shut, uh, in order to, to keep everything safe inside.

We didn't really know what had happened, but it was, it's hard to even describe.

It was crashing, breaking of wood, breaking of glass, the house shuttered.

Uh, we didn't know what had happened, but almost immediately it was, uh, outside air

and insulation blowing around our feet.

And rain and rain.

So we knew.

Something bad had happened, and at that point we went downstairs.

Flew downstairs.

Yeah, we flew downstairs.

At that point, the guests were already up and she was trying to text me to

tell me to come downstairs, but they, uh, her texts wouldn't go through.

Um, and then we just waited for the storm to pass.

I think Brad went upstairs first.

We, we waited about 10 minutes.

And then I'm like, Shirley, it's gone by now.

And um, I went upstairs with one of our guests and looked down the hallway

with my, uh, flashlight and I could see a tree hanging in our bedroom.

And then I looked in, um, our daughter's room and there was a tree hanging

in her room, so I knew it was bad.

He came back downstairs and told me our bedroom's gone.

Yeah.

And I was, it was gone.

I was like, what does that mean?

So we tried to go outside and look around, but it was so dark.

All we could really see was just trees down.

Yeah.

Everywhere.

We couldn't really see, we, we couldn't get out the front door without ducking

under the tree that had fallen from the back of the house all the way

to the front of the house, and there was water gushing into the basement

and we thought it was from the rain.

Because of the storm, I quickly got a phone call off to my sister and,

uh, brother-in-law who, who lived not far from us, uh, and to my mom

telling them that they needed to take shelter immediately as well, and then

grabbed our dogs and went downstairs.

Underneath the stairs, I should say, downstairs.

And we watched, you know, the storm roll in on TV for as long as we could.

And then the lights flickered and then the power went out.

And, um, then it just got really loud.

I mean, we, we, even in our basement, it sounded like we.

Had just a tin roof above us.

Um, and hail that rained down for what seemed like forever and he really couldn't

hear anything else at that point in time.

So that was pretty scary.

And then that part passed and I called my sister back from the basement room

and she said that they'd been hit.

And um, and that was pretty scary.

Got everything plugged in and ready to go, and it was like 11 o'clock at

night, which is late on a Saturday night to be dealing with things.

And I just collapsed in my bed happy and exhausted and still in my clothes,

thankfully, because about one o'clock in the morning she called me and said

There's a tornado and we have to go.

We have to get to my son's house and get in the basement.

And so I hopped in her car and we went over there and

we got in the basement and I.

Met some new people who had been strangers, but are now family.

And I sat there with my phone watching the track of the storm and watching

so many of you in the path, and I remember how scared I was for all of us.

We got the all clear, but the all clear is not really true.

Was it?

It was very clear that we were not going to gather in this space for

worship that morning, but I had to find out what I was gonna do, what I was

gonna say, and how to find you all.

Sometimes I think when we read stories in the Bible that we struggle to

relate to them because they talk about things that are not in our everyday

lives anymore, and Holy Week is.

No exception to that.

I mean, we don't really celebrate big things that happen in our

community by grabbing branches and waving them in the air.

We are Christians, not Jews, so we don't celebrate the Passover meal.

Yes, people are still arrested in our world, but not with people who

carry swords and not with those who represent the Roman Empire.

And we don't tend to have trials that involve both religious and

state authorities at the same time.

And we sure don't get to just trade criminals.

We don't see people whipped.

People don't die from crucifixion, curtains don't

just rip themselves in half.

It's strange.

It was really very strange until we went through what we went through a year ago.

And I started to think, well, if I don't drill down to the specific details,

but I think about the experiences that happened in Holy Week, then most certainly

we know what that week felt like.

For instance, I don't know how many of you drove down Central Avenue

and paid attention to the canopy of leaves that had been over us.

Sheltering us and even calling out about the glory of creation.

I didn't really notice them until they were at my feet all around me dying in

the heat, and I watched as authorities were scrambling to get everything back

into order and pleading with people to please make reasonable choices.

Choose for the good.

And I certainly felt the palpable feeling of a people scattered and

separated, a family divided, and the experience of some who were right in

the center of the disaster, and some who were watching from just outside

adding to that pain of separation.

Knew what it was like to feel trapped, to feel as if the world had become

a prison, and certainly to feel a world that was overwhelmed with fear.

Even as we talk about the two events, we can think about them in similar

ways when we listen to Reverend James Turlock talk about the pressure

wave that that just flew through.

One Rogers, imagine the pressure wave that flew through Jerusalem in Holy Week.

And when we talk about the loss of power, there was a very

real reality to that, right?

We did not have electricity, but without electricity in our

world these days implies a lot of other kinds of losses of power.

Losses of the ability to find the people that we're trying to find, to continue

to work, to even feel a sense of routine and sanity to keep our food cool.

All of that fell out of our control.

We lost power in different ways than just the absence of electricity and certainly.

There was a tension of loss of power that Holy Week.

The disciples who had felt like they were the big men on campus, right as

they walked through and palm leaves and cheers, then to turn around

and be the subject of a manhunt.

They've lost their power.

Religious authorities were scrambling to maintain their power.

Government officials are scrambling to maintain their power.

There were all these power vacuums that were at work in Holy Week as well.

We all felt the weight of wood.

Luke is one of the gospels that talks about Jesus needing help to carry

his cross, that they grabbed someone to help him lift the wood up off

his back, and we could not have gone anywhere without the help to lift the

wood that was crushing on all of us.

There are even members of our congregation who had to get cranes to get the wood

off their houses, including one who had to get a crane to pull a 22 ton tree.

Off their house.

We asked questions like, how does this happen to innocent people?

How do the innocent suffer?

We remembered how loud it got, how the sound of rain and

hail and wind beat upon us.

And is that any different than how loud the sounds of crucify?

Him Must have battered pilot's, ears.

We had to take shelter, we had to run, we had to hide, and we prayed a prayer

to your father and to your hands.

I give my life.

Darkness covered the earth, and that curtain over our security and safety

was ripped into, and I think we're still trying to figure out what happened.

Just like the disciples must have been mystified.

How did we get from Palm Sunday to Good Friday?

We didn't know what had happened, but we knew something bad had happened.

The truth, my friends, is that life is full of Holy Weeks.

Moments when everything seems like it's going great, we're on top of the world,

and then all of a sudden something happens that changes our world dramatically.

Maybe it's the loss of a loved one.

Maybe it's a divorce.

Maybe it's a job loss.

Maybe it's something like a tornado hitting.

There are holy weeks in our lives when it goes from things being great to

all of a sudden we're in the ditch.

And we're scared and we feel lost, and we can't imagine that we'll

ever get out of this situation that we're in as we go through this week

with these highs and these lows.

Let's remember that.

Let's remember that Holy Week, yes, happened 2000 years ago, but Holy Week

takes place all the time, all around us, to ourselves and to our neighbors.

It's real, that struggle.

We're not promised.

Safe haven.

But in the midst of that, let's also lay claim as the people of faith, as the

people of faith, that we also follow a savior who knows exactly what that's like,

who lived the fullness of that holy week.

And let's also remember that we follow a God.

Who won't leave us in the storm.

And I mean that in both ways.

God will ride through the storm with us, will not abandon us to that

struggle, but will be right in the midst carrying us through and then.

God will not forever leave us in that storm place, but carry us to a place of

hope, a place of renewal, a place where the Sunday morning sun rises because

Christ rises and we will rise too.

We will not be left without hope.

We will not be left alone.

When I was thinking about that time that we were all going through

together, there's a moment in the midst of that that for me encapsulates

that we will not be left alone.

And there is hope.

And that was for those of you who are here, remember the Sunday

after the tornado that we had a potluck like good Methodist.

And it was such a strange potluck because half of us couldn't even make food.

We still didn't have electricity.

But I said, the church has food.

We'll buy some pans of lasagna and bring whatever you can bring.

Right.

And we actually ran out of, this is one of the few times ever that a Methodist

potluck has run out of a main dish.

We ran out of lasagna.

We boiled some hot dogs to get us by.

But you know what?

We didn't run out of.

Dessert.

We had so many desserts.

We could eat as much sweet things as we wanted to.

We did not run out of dessert.

And if there is ever a sign.

For God in the midst of struggle, it's that the potluck didn't

run out of dessert, right?

We kept eating of the sweetness of God and the sweetness of family and

community and love for one another.

It's a sign of provision in the midst of scarcity, a sign of hope, in the

midst of loss, a sign of love when everything felt like it fell into chaos.

We were not left alone just as how sweet that bread must have been in the

midst of a week when it felt like the breath was sucked out of the earth,

that Jesus stopped with his people and said, we will eat together and I will

give you my body and my blood to sustain you, and they could breathe again.

So my friends, let's remember that, that whatever we're going through, we

will get through it with Jesus and we will get through it with each other.

Because after all, we are all people who were one strangers and are now family.

Thanks be to God.

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