February 9th, 2025 - "2x2: The Miracle of Multiplication" - 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 at Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris: I

am convinced we have the most talented band,

in all of Christendom.

I'll say that.

And maybe all of pop and rock, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maybe it's the most willing band.

Welcome to First United Methodist Church here in downtown Bentonville.

My name is Michelle Morris.

I'm the lead pastor here, and I want to echo Pastor Ray's welcome.

It is a joy to have you here in worship.

We are starting our stewardship campaign today.

And it's called 2x2, the miracle of multiplication, which is also

what I'll be preaching about today.

And surprise, surprise, we're going to hear a little bit of Noah and the ark.

So here now, the word of the Lord.

I'm now bringing the floodwaters over the earth to destroy everything

under the sky that breathes.

Everything on earth is about to take its last breath.

But I will set up my covenant with you.

You will go into the ark together with your sons, your

wife, and your son's wives.

From all living things, from all creatures, you are to bring a

pair, male and female, into the ark with you to keep them alive.

From each kind of bird, from each kind of livestock, and from each

kind of everything that crawls on the ground, a pair from each

will go in with you to stay alive.

Take some of every kind of food and stow it as food for you and the animals.

Noah did everything exactly as God commanded him.

In the second month, on the twenty seventh day, the earth was dry.

God spoke to Noah, Go out of the ark, you and your wife, your sons,

and your sons wives with you.

Bring out with you all the animals of every kind, birds, livestock,

everything crawling on the ground, so that they may populate the earth, be

fertile, and multiply on the earth.

So Noah went out of the ark with his sons, his wife, and his son's wives.

All the animals, all the livestock, all the birds, and everything

crawling on the ground came out of the ark by their families.

Noah built an altar to the Lord.

He took some of the clean large animals and some of the clean birds and placed

entirely burned offerings on the altar.

The Lord smelled the pleasing scent and the Lord thought to himself, I will not

curse the fertile land anymore because of human beings since the ideas of the

human mind are evil from their youth.

I will never again destroy every living thing as I have done.

As long as the earth exists, seed time and harvest, cold and hot, summer and

autumn day and night will not cease.

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.

I'm in So, in the years following World War II, the only thing

that was feared more than polio was the threat of nuclear war.

What's interesting about that is that polio was not actually the most prevalent

disease that they had to deal with.

It was not even the largest reason that sometimes children were struck

in childhood and passed away.

But what was terrifying about polio was that it did strike without

warning and doctors were baffled to know how it was actually spread.

And it could hit anybody.

I mean, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was struck with it when he

was a rising political star.

So there were many people who were working on the possibility of a vaccine.

And one of those was Jonas Salk.

What was different about Jonas Salk is that he bucked the prevailing approach.

Vaccines at the time always used live virus.

And Salk thought that there was a possibility that you could

use a killed virus vaccine.

And it would be as effective as a live virus.

So, he developed his killed virus vaccine, and the first people that he inoculated

with it, besides a child that was in the hospital, were himself and his family.

He took a big, big risk that it would actually work.

From that came the largest public health experiment ever in the nation's history.

So that by 1955, Salk's vaccine was deemed safe, effective, and potent.

But what was interesting also about this is that Jonas Salk refused

to patent the polio vaccine.

He believed that the polio vaccine belonged to the people.

People thought he threw away millions of dollars that he could have earned,

but he said, How can you patent the sun?

That is a crazy story.

It is almost as crazy as the story I just read you from the Bible.

Now, let's get this out right away, there are problems with Noah's Ark.

We have to reconcile the fact that it appears that God

participates in mass genocide.

But I want us to remember to put this in context, and that all across the ancient

world, flood myths are an important part of how people understand their world.

And how they frame their understanding of God and the

way the world works around them.

And that is what is going on here.

They're reckoning with the fact that floods happen and they are catastrophic

and they take out whole communities.

They are and feel very much like the end of the world.

Also, I don't know about you, but I sort of get right now

why God would want a do over.

I mean, I'm all for, let's just start again, right?

So with that in mind, let's think about the parts of Noah

that we are very familiar with.

And it is the two by two animals getting on the boat, right?

I know a bunch of childhood nurseries that were decorated with two animal pairs

with the Noah's Ark theme through it.

We are familiar with that and we are familiar with the story of the rainbow.

But we sort of skip over this moment where they exit the boat and go on dry land.

We know they come out again two by two, right?

And we know that God makes a covenant with them, right?

But before God makes that covenant, Noah sacrifices some of the animals!

Hang on!

Hang on!

These are the animals that are supposed to repopulate the earth.

And the first thing Noah does is sacrifice them.

Now there is a piece that I did not read that you're missing, which is

that he did bring extra animals of the sacrificial animals, but not

so many as to feel assured that those animals would continue on.

It is A crazy thing to do.

I mean, part of me wants to say, Hey, Noah, I bet God would be like, You know,

it's cool if you let some herds come to be first, you know, and then sacrifice.

But no, Noah knows that everything is due to God.

And as such, he will do the right thing and return some of it to God.

And that smell reminds God of the beauty of the earth.

and the willingness of humanity to participate in God's activity.

And it prompts the covenant from there.

Noah kept his eyes beyond that immediate moment and trusted God enough to

be assured that there was a future.

As I mentioned, this series is called Two by Two, The Miracle of Multiplication,

and we will be looking at the power of multiplication when God is in the mix

over the course of the next few weeks.

But I have to admit, as I was spending the week getting ready to preach

this sermon, I really didn't want to go into stewardship right now.

It feels like really bad timing.

There's a lot of anxiety in our society today.

There's a lot of uncertainty.

The stock market has gone bananas.

Several people have either lost their jobs or are facing loss of jobs.

There is still a struggle with inflation.

And just to share a little bit of the impact of that in our community, our

food pantry is feeding more people each week than it gives out on Christmas.

So.

Why talk about stewardship now?

Well, part of it is because we have to get ready for our budget year,

and our budget year starts July 1st.

So, we have to have these conversations now, and we will

ask you to make commitments.

There's cards around, um, I thought I brought one up here, I'll look

for it in just a minute here.

There's cards around that we invite you to fill out, and the value

of filling out those cards is that it helps us make real plans.

Make careful plans about what we will do with the funds and how we will

structure it in a way that can do the best good for the most people.

We need that information.

We need it.

But I'll admit it feels a little tone deaf right now to be talking about it.

It feels tone deaf until I remember what I'm actually asking you to give to.

So This past Friday and Saturday were our confirmation retreat and as part of that,

we went over to First United Methodist Church in Rogers where the lead pastor

there, lead pastor there, if you don't know, is James Sherlock and he and I are

best friends and so we talked to the kids about what connection means and we were

able to talk about that in broad terms for the whole United Methodist Church all

the way down to our friendship and how our friendship sustains us in ministry.

But while we were there, James was talking a little bit about their

church, and he mentioned that their building has been around since 1908.

Which prompted one of our kids, who's been paying a lot of attention,

Johnny Haney, to our history.

And, who said, well wait, our building is younger than theirs, so did that

church then start their church and then come over here and start our church

and James and I looked at each other and started laughing and I said, oh no,

our building is younger But our church has been on this corner since the 1850s

In fact, I tried to do some research to see how old We are in comparison to

other churches in the area And I can tell you that we have a cornerstone

on our church that says Methodist Church 1830 And that is the arrival of

Methodism in Benton County All right?

The Cumberland Presbyterians got here at the same time.

So, Methodists and Cumberland Presbyterians.

The oldest church building in Benton County seems to be Twelve Corners Baptist

Church, which is out in Pea Ridge.

That seems to be the oldest church building, and it's from the 1840s.

It's been bricked over, but it's, it's from the 1840s.

But when it comes to Bentonville, I think, and some churches don't have

their history out there, but I think.

We have the longest run in Bentonville in the same location as any church.

Yeah.

Y'all, that's a long history.

I want us to think about what history this church has been through.

We've been through the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Teapot Dome

Scandal, World War I, the Spanish Flu Epidemic, the Stock Market Crash,

the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, Korea, the Civil Rights

Movement, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Y2K.

9 11, the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 recession, a pandemic, and not

to mention contentious elections and political divisions since the year 2000.

We have also been through our own history within the Methodist church.

We've seen the church divide into North and South.

We've seen the church come back together.

We've seen the church add on the EUB church, and we've seen disaffiliation.

All of that has happened, and we've been right here.

And I will tell you, when I am feeling unrest, it gives me such comfort to

come in this space and know we have been through all of that and are thriving.

But it also gives me a commission.

A commission to honor the work of the people that came before me

that assured that we were here.

Because we're not here because it was easy.

We are here because all through that history, people saw beyond the

moment and made the sacrifice anyway.

They looked past the immediate pressure and saw the eternal.

And let's also recognize that their sacrifice was not

made just to keep us here.

Their sacrifice was made to keep Christ here.

Their sacrifice was made to keep love here.

And to be the hands and feet.

that cared for our neighbors around us.

We've done a lot of things as a church, but just off the top of my

head, besides Second Street Pantry, you know, this church founded Helping

Hands 50 years ago, 50 years ago.

And I know that Methodists are always proponents of healthy practices of care

for the vulnerable and of public schools.

So without knowing anything about our history, I can be assured that Methodists.

Have done that work like Sal, like Noah, they sacrificed in

the moment to save people to see beyond themselves to the eternal.

It's the faith of arks.

Noah built an ark that saved the world in Hebrew.

The name for the basket that Moses has put in is an arc. God saved his

people through that arc, through Moses.

Arks result in covenants, the covenant that Noah gets, that, that

God promises we will always be here.

We will always be here.

Believe it.

And then the Ark of the Covenant, that ordered us and

structured us around our faith.

And then that most beautiful of arks, that saving body in which the whole

world is redeemed, the Ark that is Jesus.

This is a God who saves the world through something small.

You may feel small right now.

You may feel like things are overwhelming.

You may feel like things are too big.

But remember what you do here.

You help save the world through something small.

Through staying on this corner and insisting on love, you save the world.

You bring them God.

So, my friends, don't stand on a moment.

Stand on the eternal, and climb aboard Bentonville's ark.

We're gonna ride out the storm, and we're gonna continue to

be part of God's saving work.

Thanks be to God.

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 community 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 9 and 11 a. m. both

in person and on Facebook Live.

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

Grace and peace.