March 30th, 2025 - "Mitigated Disaster: Response" - Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris

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.

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

was aired during Sunday service.

Roy and Shelly Lee: We

got in bed looking at, at the news before we went to church that morning.

And as soon as we got out of church, we drove up here and we got a motel

and we visited the affected areas, uh, clicked in with the people who were

on the ground, checked in with our conference and, um, started our process.

Big part of early response are called Marx, the multi-agency Resource Centers.

Uh, those were held, I think there were, or were there,

five of them were five of them.

Five.

Five of those across the area where survivors could come and check in

with agencies to see what resources they offered and to get what they

needed and to get on the list for things that were important to them.

Adam and Rebecca Kingree: During our recovery,

um, we had help from so many people, um, immediately the next day.

You know, I think, uh, what we saw all over northwest Arkansas,

but here too was neighbors helping neighbors really quickly.

The church reached out to say, who's impacted, who needs help?

Um, and so the church provided help for us.

I had texted our parents in the middle of the night and said, Hey, you

know, tornadoes are hitting Arkansas.

We're all okay.

Our house is damaged.

And Adam's dad drove through the night and was here the next morning.

So immediately following the tornado, it was really that

sense of just your strongest community being there to help you.

Rev. James Kjorlaug: After everything had passed, it was a sea of making

sure that my family was comfortable in the room, but then going around my

neighborhood with a lantern to check and see how my neighbors were doing.

The odd, surreal experience of seeing kind of the varied degrees

of damage around the neighborhood.

Uh, everybody kinda standing out really kinda in shock at at what

had HA unfolded and just checking in on everybody that you camp, right?

That, that process of, of processing what you've just been

through, but also being aware of.

You know, Hey, what's, what's happening with my neighbors?

Um, that sort of stuff.

In fact, actually a block and a half away, um, a couple doors down from some

church members actually got a lot of church members that live in our, in our

vicinity, like a block and a half away was a, a house where a significant gas main

ran through and it had been bust open.

So.

Walking around the neighborhoods, there's somebody standing out in their yard

warning people, don't use your cell phone.

Don't, don't do all this kind of stuff.

We're okay.

But if you hear that sound, that sounds like a water faucet running on high.

That's, you know, it's, it's a gas pipe that's broken and spraying everywhere.

Once the sun finally came up and I had kind of done the quick once over

of the damage at my house, uh, it was a process of navigating my way

here to check on everything at the church in the immediacy of everything.

It was trying to navigate, uh, the priority list of, of what, what can be

done right away, what needs to be done as fast as possible in everything else.

In that regards, I was really.

Thankful for, uh, our board of trustees.

They did an absolute banger of a job.

It was fantastic.

And their priority list was beautiful.

I mean, we wanted to find some way to be able to get back in worship with

each other as quickly as possible.

Uh, but beyond that, the primary focus was less about

getting right back in this room.

We knew it was gonna take a while, that that was gonna be a long-term project.

So, so the focus was what, what can worship look like?

What will worship look like, um, as fast as possible.

And as safely as possible.

And then the immediate conversations after that were, how can we get back

to feeding people in the community?

How can we get back to hosting Boy Scouts?

How can we get back to hosting, uh, our, the Narcotics Anonymous group that

meets here in our facility like it?

How can we get our childcare back up for people that need to

go to work and need to, need to take care of stuff on their own?

Like all those were the concerns, the concerns blatantly turned to, to the

full community, uh, that is impacted by the life of the church, not just the

idea of being back in our sanctuary.

Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris: We are in this series called Mitigated Disaster,

and we are looking at how we respond in disasters as people of faith.

And today we reach response and I can think of no better passage

to talk about how to respond.

Then this one from the Gospel of Luke, a legal expert stood

up to test Jesus teacher.

He said, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

Jesus replied, what is written in the law?

How do you interpret it?

He responded, you must love the Lord your God, with all your heart,

with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind

and love your neighbor as yourself.

Jesus said to him, you have answered correctly.

Do this and you will live.

But the legal expert wanted to prove that he was right.

So he said to Jesus, and who is my neighbor?

Jesus replied, A man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.

He encountered thieves who stripped him naked, beat him

up, and left him near death.

Now, it just so happened that a priest was also going down the same

road when he saw the injured man.

He crossed over to the other side of the road and went on his way.

Likewise.

A Levite came by that spot, saw the injured man, and crossed over to the other

side of the road and went on his way.

A Samaritan who was on a journey came to where the man was, but when he saw

him, he was moved with compassion.

The Samaritan went to him and bandaged his wounds, tending them with oil and wine.

Then he placed the wounded man on his own donkey, took him to

an end and took care of him.

The next day, he took two full days worth of wages and gave them to the innkeeper.

He said, take care of him, and when I return, I will pay you

back for any additional costs.

What do you think?

Which one of these three was a neighbor to the man who encountered thieves?

Then the legal expert said the one who demonstrated mercy toward him.

Jesus told him, go and do likewise.

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Thanks be to God.

Let us pray.

Lord, open our hearts, our minds, and our eyes that we might see and know

the word you have for us this day.

In your holy name we pray, amen.

So, I've mentioned this before, but I have a tendency to occasionally be

accused of being a heretic, and I just think that that is proof that I'm a

very good Methodist because the reality is that, and I've shared this before

as well, I had a professor in seminary who said, if you wanna understand how

Methodists understand church, it is this Methodists understand church as

we have these hard and fast rules.

Except when we don't.

And the reality is, is that we, we do have rules.

We have a method for doing everything, and we're very good at that.

But what we do is we throw those rules out when it gets in the

way of truly loving our neighbor.

Or it gets in the way of loving God.

And most recently, I have been accused of being a heretic

in my relationship with God.

I relate to God most closely through the Holy Spirit.

That is how I've encountered God.

That's how God has moved me.

That's how God called me.

And so there's a piece of the Trinity that I lean on.

It's the Holy Spirit, and we have a good relationship, me and

the Holy Spirit do, which means that, you know, I can be honest.

And so I was sharing in a blog one time that I was really mad at the Holy Spirit

for calling me to do something, and I thought the Holy Spirit was being a jerk,

and some well-meaning person wrote to me and said that I had blasphemed the Holy

Spirit, which I said, no, blasphemy is when you don't believe in the Holy Spirit.

Clearly, I believe in the Holy Spirit.

Otherwise, I wouldn't think the Holy Spirit was being a jerk.

Right.

And so it was during this time when in the immediate days after the tornado that at

some point I turned to the Holy Spirit and I said, well, now, now you're just showing

off because I wanna share with you some of the things that happened in those days.

And I share these with permission from the people whose stories I lift up.

So in the middle of the tornado, regular life went on,

including premarital counseling.

So I was working with a couple, Ben and Carolyn Diggins, getting ready for their

wedding, and we were coming out of our.

Counseling session as Tony was coming out of her office and

said, someone just called and they're desperate for a generator.

They really need a generator.

And Ben and Carolyn said, oh, we just got our electricity back.

We have a generator.

So we just handed them the message and said, go take.

There was one day I turned to the staff and I said, look, I'm gonna go grab lunch.

Who wants it?

I took down orders, and as I was getting ready to head out the door,

I got a text from someone who said.

My neighbor is in desperate situation.

He has a generator, but he is running out of gasoline and he has to have the

generator in order to power his oxygen.

If he doesn't get help soon, it's going to be a serious situation.

And I was like, okay.

And as I was standing there trying to figure out how am I gonna get gas

for this man, someone walked in the door and handed me a hundred dollars

and said, I just was nudged by God to bring you this a hundred dollars.

I don't know what it's supposed to be for, but use it for whatever you need it for.

And I'm like, I know what I'm gonna use it for.

So I went and got gas cards and then discovered that the neighbor that

I was taking gas cards to was real close to where I was picking up lunch.

I mean, holy Spirit makes it that easy.

There was one day I left the madness of the church, went down the street

to Table Mesa, pulled up a chair at the bar just to have lunch and there

was another man there and we were both just frantically in our phone answering

text after text after text, and I finally looked up and said, boy, this

is crazy Isn't Then he goes, oh yeah.

He said, I'm right now trying to figure out how to get.

Housing for the women at Haven Wood.

They don't have any electricity and they're staying in a hotel right now,

but they're running outta money in order to be able to keep at that hotel.

And we neither need to find places for them to live or I need to

find some more money for them.

And I was like, I think I know some people.

And I introduced myself to that man and said, I'm the pastor at

First United Methodist Church.

I bet you we can help.

And you may remember those of you that were around during that

time, the text that went out and said, Haven Wood needs help.

Within about two hours, we had it figured out.

And then all over town people lost their food because electricity was out.

People who could not afford to lose their food, lost their food,

but we didn't lose power here.

And we have freezers full of food that we give out to anyone who needs it,

and that's why I turned the Holy Spirit and said, now you're just showing off.

Because the Holy Spirit was doing what the Holy Spirit does, which was

removing obstacles so that we had the opportunity to truly show love

to each other, and that's who we are.

We're the people of a good Samaritan faith.

And we saw that not just from our church, but all over the city.

So many of you all talked about, the Mormon church showed up and helped us.

The Baptist Church showed up and helped us.

This non-denominational church showed up and helped us.

The Muslims showed up and helped us.

It didn't matter.

Those divisions that we put between each other, those Samaritan or Jew

realities that we tend to put on each other, those didn't matter anymore.

What mattered was, you're my neighbor and you're in trouble and I'm gonna help you.

And that's what we did.

We responded as that people.

The Good Samaritan people, and it was so striking.

It was so striking that Barry Moring, you'll see him sometimes in the video,

he's the county judge and he was helping coordinate all the response of the city.

And he was so taken aback by the faith communities of this town and how fast

they moved that he called me at one point and he said, look, we have people

showing up who want to volunteer and we don't know how to coordinate them,

and we've noticed that the faith communities are really good at that.

So can you just take that over and start coordinating?

And I said.

I mean, I can try, but uh, honestly, I'm making this up as I go along.

There's no real organization here.

I mean, I'm just hearing about a need and sending people to that need.

That's all I'm doing.

That's living into who we are, people who is moved by compassion,

and that's who we are at our best.

I mean, the county and city officials did a phenomenal work of restoring

our infrastructure and doing the long haul work that that needed to happen.

But the difference between them and us was that they have procedures

they have to follow, and those procedures can be a very good thing.

But while they were waiting for being declared a federal emergency.

Disaster area.

We were already on the ground because the only regulation that we had was

an imperative to love our neighbor.

It reminded me of this time when I was working for the conference offices.

I was hired to help build an online learning system, and they

sent me to a conference about how to build online learning systems,

and I found myself the only.

Person representing a church agency at that conference, and I went to a session

that specifically was dealing with how to build an online learning system that's

accessible to as many people as possible.

And as we went around introducing ourselves and talking about why we

had chosen that particular session, I realized that I'm in there with people

who are representing the military, who are representing education, who

are representing the government.

And everyone that was in there said, I am in this session because I have to be.

If I do not build something that's accessible, I'm gonna lose funding.

I'm gonna be brought up on charges.

There's laws that are breaking, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

They get to me and I said, well, I'm here because.

It's the right thing.

Making education accessible to people who have different styles

of learning or who are blind or who are deaf, making that possibility

accessible to them is the right thing.

It's how we love our neighbor.

It's how we include all in God's family.

That's why I'm here.

'cause that's who we are now.

Let's be honest.

That's who we are at our best, but we can also be at our worst.

And at our worst, we do the exact opposite thing in the

parable that I just read for you.

It was a priest and a Levites, the representatives of the communities

of faith who crossed over and walked by, and there's been all kinds of

conjecture as to why they did not help.

One that is frequently pointed out is that to touch a man who would've had blood on

him or who might have been dead would've meant making yourself unclean, and if

they were on their way to temple service.

That would've disrupted their service.

They could not have served, they couldn't have gone into the temple.

They would've had to do rights of cleansing and perhaps even taken some

time, separated out for that cleansing.

And so they followed the rules.

And kept themselves clean and didn't help.

And let's be honest, rules and laws do serve an important purpose.

A lot of times they keep us safe, they set up important boundaries, but

there are times when those rules and those laws get in the way of loving

and saving our neighbor, of responding to the most vulnerable among us,

of allowing love to be activated.

Tornadoes happen all the time to all kinds of people in all kinds of ways.

It's not just the actual reality of a tornado, but people have tornadoes

in their lives and they need someone to step out and respond in love, and

they need someone to do it right away.

And that's, that's who we are.

That right away people actually, that's who we are.

Note when I told those stories, I. About the Holy Spirit showing off.

Look, y'all we're Methodists.

We have methods, very nicely defined methods, and no decision

gets made in this church without a committee having a say on it, right?

But there's processes and procedures of how we decide

to do things, accept, accept.

Note that in those moments right after the tornado, I did not get that a hundred

dollars and then say I need to call a few people and ask them if it's okay if I use

this a hundred dollars to buy gas cards.

No, I took that a hundred dollars and went and bought gas cards because somebody

was about to run out of oxygen if they didn't have gas in that generator.

This is not a committee decision.

This is a love decision.

This is a decision we make because that's who we are.

Someone's in the ditch, we're gonna get 'em out of it, right?

So we have these hard and fast rules, except when the Holy Spirit sends

us in a new direction, when the Holy Spirit shakes us and says, somebody's

hurting and you've got to respond.

When the Holy Spirit moves us to compassion, God is not

interested in keeping the rules.

God is interested in.

His people being saved.

So we have these hard and fast rules, except when the most

vulnerable among us need rescue.

When someone's in the ditch, when someone's hurting, when someone's scared,

when someone's lost, then we respond.

As the people of the Good Samaritan faith, we have these hard and fast

rules, except when something is keeping us from loving our neighbor, because

that is also keeping us from loving God.

And I will tell you this, friends, that's all it's really about

loving God and loving our neighbor is the heart of who we are.

That's the heart of our faith.

And so it's always worth bending the rules.

It's always worth being accused of heresy.

It's always worth getting into some holy trouble because at the heart of it.

Love is always worth it.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

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

Methodist Church in downtown Bentonville.

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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 movement in our community.

Please join us for worship on Sunday mornings at nine and 11:00 AM, both

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All are welcome and we'd love to have you with us.

Grace and peace.