I began our gathering this morning by welcoming each of us, welcoming all of us, and welcoming all of each of us. May this gathering centered around the living God of boundless love and mercy and creative power and possibility be a space and a time when we can show up with our whole selves, honestly as we are, to whatever degree we feel comfortable, and know that we will be embraced as we are. 

May we feel free to bring all of ourselves to our God when we gather to worship and pray and commune: 

In our beauty, in our brokenness, in our brilliance, in our messiness, in our glory, in our grief, in our fabulousness, in our befuddlement – what have you.

When we allow our whole selves to be welcomed as we are (to the degree we can); when we allow ourselves to welcome the whole selves of others as they are (to the degree we can), and when we welcome God into the mix in this sacred space, something extraordinary begins to happen. 

We will not be left unchanged. 

Something deep begins to stir within us and among us and beyond us. What is dead in us begins to fall away. And we begin to grow, even just a little, and sometimes by leaps. We begin to grow beyond the bounds of what we thought possible, of who we thought we were – our souls can grow simply into more of who God has created us to be, who Jesus has taught us to be, open channels for divine love. 

“When you know yourselves,” Jesus taught his disciples, as recounted in the Gospel of Thomas, “When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living God. But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty and you will be the poverty.” (Gospel of Thomas, Logion 3)

Nicholas of Cusa, the medieval Christian luminary, said, 

“When I rest in the silence of contemplation, you, Lord, speak within my heart, saying: ‘Be you your own and I will be yours’ … You, Lord, cannot be mine if I am not my own.” 

The early church leader Irenaeus said, 

“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

Psalm 139 is an astonishingly beautiful expression of how the nature of God leads us to bring our full selves and become more fully alive, through a living relationship with the living God who knows us fully and embraces us fully so we may blossom into who our holy creator has created us to be. 

What this Psalm makes especially clear is that this is especially important for the parts of ourselves and the parts of our world that we would like to deny and pretend aren’t there. God is all knowing and all present and all loving. That means we can run but we can’t hide.  

If I ascend into heaven, You are there!

If I make my bed in Sheol – the realm of death –

You are there!

If I soar on the wings of the morning

Or dwell in the deepest parts

Of the sea,

Even there your hand will lead me, 

And your Love will embrace me. 

If I say, “Let only darkness cover me, 

And the light about me be night,”

  • If we deny all or part of ourselves, if we depress all or part of ourselves –

Even the darkness is not dark to You, 

The night dazzles as with the sun;

The darkness is as light with You.

…

Search me, O my Beloved, and know

My heart!

Try me and discern my thoughts!

Help me to face the darkness within me;

Enlighten me, that I might

Radiate your love and light!

We can run but we can’t hide – but also we need not be afraid.

Because God is all loving and all merciful, the fuller our honesty with ourselves before God and the deeper our knowledge about ourselves, especially the stuff we’d rather not talk about, all this become ways of blooming into the glory of God. 

 I praise you, God, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are all your works.

“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” 

We can ask ourselves, with mercy:

How are we fully alive right now? 

How are we not fully alive right now? 

What parts of ourselves do we allow into the light of God’s love? What parts of ourselves are we trying to hide away? 

How about the people whom we love and care for?

How about the people we don’t love and don’t care for? How is it with their souls?

One of Jesus’ core teachings is about how our ability to welcome the fullness of another person is connected in a deep way wiht our ability to allow the fullness of ourselves to be welcomed. “The measure by which you judge others is the measure by which you are judged.” When we allow more of ourselves to be embraced by God’s mercy, we become more merciful towards others. If we deny that mercy for ourselves, it’s so often tied to us denying it of others, or others denying it as ourselves.

So, Jesus steps in to flood the whole system with love. “As I have loved you,” Jesus told his disciples, “so love each other.” “Love God with all your heart, mind, body and soul; and love your neighbor as yourselves.” 

So much of Jesus’ healing power is woven with his ability to see fully into the beloved and broken humanity of the people he was with. And the spirit of this fullness of encounter characterizes the spirit that animated his disciples after Jesus’ death and resurrection. It is this Spirit that can animate our discipleship together here and now.

This is all about relationship. The blossoming of our true selves, the selves beyond our selves, happens through relationship, in love, with God, with ourselves, and with each other. Those kinds of life-giving relationships are fostered through sacred spaces, like worship and prayer, and through the sacred communion that is possible here. 

A healthy enough religious life and a healthy enough religious community can help us in the journey of bringing more and more of ourselves out into the light of God’s love. I say, “healthy enough,” because part of the whole point here is that we don’t have to be perfect, we just have to make enough room for God’s grace in ourselves and in our relationships. As we live and grow in faith we become more aware of the ways we deny grace, and that awareness becomes opportunities for further growth. It’s part of the process. 

The key value here is welcome – to feel welcomed into community and communion as we are – in our magnificence and in our humility. 

         Such a welcome – an Extravagant Welcome as we like to say – is one of the values we name and lift up here at UCC Valley Forge, and in the United Church of Christ as a whole, especially as an Open and Affirming church. 

This Extravagant Welcome in a community of faith is such a gift – as I’m sure many of you can testify to. 

And it is urgently needed in our society. Too many religious communities are not truly welcoming, when it comes down to it. This can then lead people to believe that there are parts of ourselves that we probably need to hide from God and be ashamed of. People can then sometimes become embittered against the God and Jesus that some can evoke to justify rejection. 

Even if we here do indeed do better than that, we all as Christians need to account for the living legacies of how our religion has been twisted to reject people and deny everyone’s inherit dignity– either because of sexuality or gender or race or mental illness or physical illness or economic status or on and on. That legacy has shaped our thoughts and behaviors, perhaps in ways that we may prefer to deny and keep in the shadows.  

Then there are all kinds of little subtle ways that church communities can be unwelcoming toward just natural parts of ourselves such as our grief or our humor or our doubts or our messiness, or if you’re an infant the fact that you communicate by crying. I’ve had people tell me, “Pastor I’m sorry I haven’t been to church in a while, but my life has been such a mess that I’m afraid that if I show up I’ll just start crying.” It breaks my heart to hear this. Because that’s exactly what church should be about. What has led you to believe that your heartbreak is not welcome?  

But then, on the other hand, what great joy when someone shares that at your church they have finally found a home, a spiritual community where they can be themselves, and feel nearer to God for it, and receive the healing and move toward the greater flourishing that they deserve. I know there are many testimonies about how this church as served as such a place.

Let’s lift up and celebrate the value of extravagant welcome that is alive in this beloved community of faith here at a UCC Valley Forge. I want to honor it, and give thanks for it. And I want to urge us all to keep living into it, to keep being challenged by it, to keep being called by it to share this outrageously welcoming love of God that is so urgently needed in our times. For this shared calling, in this beloved community, I give thanks to God.

Thanks be to God

(Delivered Sunday, May 22, 2022, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge)

A Prayer:

As a community of faith centered around the radical welcome of God through Christ, one of the most important things we do together, is to pray with each other and for each other, in a way that welcomes all of each of us into the full light of God’s love. 

O Living God

         Help us to settle into your presence here and now

         Help us to ease into our breath

         Help us to feel at home in our bodies

         Help us to be as we need to be in this holy stillness

         To be embraced and changed by your Love

Holy One we come here with so much on our hearts, concerns we may have, loved ones we care for, wounds we bear, as well as feelings of gratitude and joy, visions, inspirations, excitements … We lift up to you, these prayers of our hearts

This morning I wish to lift up in particular the groans too deep for words due to violence that we humans can inflict on each other out of hate or fear. I pray for those in our Black American communities who are subjected to the grief and fear unleashed by white supremacist violence. I pray for those in our Asian American communities, Indigenous, Immigrant, and all those who face hate do sexuality, gender or any aspect of who you, God, have created us to be. I pray for those living through war or other forms of terror, in Ukraine, in Ethiopia, in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Israel & Palestine, Myanmar. 

Give us the courage, O God, to turn from ways of death and embrace the ways of life, to free ourselves and our society of forms of supremacy and chauvinism and domination, so we may all live as fully you have created us to live.

Thank you for embracing us as we are, Holy one. Comfort us in affliction, discomfort us in complacency, guide us in waywardness, amplify us in joy, multiply our gratitude, manifest our inspiration. Pour out your blessings upon this dear church community, as we deepen our roots and widen our embrace, and live ever more deeply into the love, and justice, healing, hope, and hospitality to which you have called us.

Amen

Image: “The Spirit of the Lord…” by Sharon Tate Soberon. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/2.0/jp/?