“Wesleyan Rooted: Embrace Widely”
Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 30, 2025
Burnt Hills United Methodist Church
[Note: I am, once again, thankful for the scholarship of Jessica Price and Amy Jill Levine. The exegetical work done for this sermon comes from their work on re-contextualizing the parables of Jesus in light of Jesus' Jewish context and 2,000 some odd years of antisemitic interpretations of New Testament texts.]
This son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!
Today we continue our Lenten series exploring our roots as Christians in the United Methodist and Wesleyan tradition. Thus far, we’ve looked at how our Wesleyan heritage drives us to grow deeply in faith and in love of God and of neighbor. We’ve explored how that deep faith must bear fruits of active and tangible love for our communities. We’ve looked at how we must bring that same deep faith to our approach of scripture rather than accepting shallow, easy readings. And today, we’re looking at how that same love calls us to draw an ever-widening circle.
Because every time we draw a line between us and someone else, we’re going to find that God is on the other side of that line.
As Wesleyans, we are called to be a people of wide embrace. Our love of the “other” is rooted in God’s love for us. We seek to love others as we have been loved in Christ. We acknowledge that not all people think alike but believe all can love alike.
These are basic tenets of our heritage, not just as Wesleyans, but as Christians in general. You’ve heard me say it many times at this point that we are interdependent. We are creaturely creatures with endless needs. That we need one another and, thanks be to God, we’ve been given the greatest gift of all—through Christ, we have been given the gift of each other.
That we are more perfect together than we will ever be apart.
All of this is true, and, if you take nothing else from our worship today, that’s a good a message as any to take away.
And yet, I can’t help but wonder what the engine that drives this impulse is. What is the logic that fuels it? What are the assumptions that undergird it? What are the metrics that define its success?
One of the most important lessons I learned as a result of the pandemic was that we, collectively, value what we measure and we measure what we value.
I grow increasingly frustrated by the American Church’s propensity to be governed by the logic of the free market. We have this unfortunate tendency to reflect the culture and norms of our broader social order rather than that of Christ.
Growth is seen and understood as inherently good.
The churches that are presented as the most vibrant and vital are the ones that have the most members. The ones that have the most resources. The ones that are growing the fastest.
Those are the churches that are the exemplars. They are the models upon which all other churches should craft themselves.
And in my time in ministry, I’ve seen that yield some unintentionally and unfortunately hilarious results.
I was at a church once that sent some of its leaders to a conference at the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City. The church wanted to grow its youth program, and since Adam Hamilton’s Church of the Resurrection is the largest United Methodist congregation in the whole connection—13,800 members on their roles and 3,800 in in-person worship each week—that seemed like as good a place as any to learn.
Now, my own complicated feelings about Adam Hamilton and Church of the Resurrection aside—you can ask me at coffee hour—I do have to admit that I can understand that church’s thinking. Clearly, Church of the Resurrection is doing something right, let’s go see what they’re doing and what we can learn for our own church’s youth program. I’m sure that there were some things worth learning from that context.
Unfortunately, the only thing they did learn that had any lasting impact at that church was the name of the company Church of the Resurrection used for the furniture in their youth spaces. I bet that furniture is still in my old church’s youth room.
We want our churches to be the biggest churches so badly. Embrace widely because more people means more numbers and more numbers means we are more successful. We are more good. We are more righteous.
We turn Christ into a product and the Church into a factory, churning out units of salvation. If the machine keeps running smoothly, we can distribute enough Jesus widgets to save the world. We build programs and track metrics, assuming that if we just get more people in the pews, we’ll be doing God’s work.
But Christ is not a widget.
The Church is not a factory churning out units of salvation. It’s a community of grace—where prayer, Scripture, sacraments, and service draw us deeper into the love of God.
The Church is a body—living, breathing, wounded, and healing. The Church is a community formed not to produce but to receive. Formed not to consume but to embrace and to be transformed through that embrace.
Embracing widely, from a Wesleyan perspective, is not a strategy for institutional growth. Growth, in this manner of speaking, cannot be the Church’s goal. Not the goal of the Church universal, not the goal of the United Methodist Church, and not our goal here at Burnt Hills United Methodist Church.
Because it turns out that we already have a goal here at Burnt Hills UMC. Our goal is to love God, love neighbor, and serve the world. That’s our mission as a church community.
Because once upon a time, there was a man with two sons.
I imagine that it’s a story that many of us in here know quite well. A parable of a man with two sons. The younger son demands his inheritance early, leaves home, squanders it all, comes back in desperation, and is greeted with a feast. The older son stays home, works hard, and resents the celebration when his brother returns.
We know this story. We’ve heard it a thousand times before. And yet, so often we turn our attention in this story to the actions of the two brothers. And sure, there’s a lot we can learn from their actions and their behavior. But that’s been the subject of many other sermons.
What if today, we instead focused our attention on the father?
See, Christian interpretation of Jesus’ parables tend to allegorize certain characters in parables as a stand-in for “God”. Does the parable have a king in it? Well, obviously the king is supposed to be God. Does the parable have a judge? Ok, well obviously the judge is supposed to be God. A father? Yup, the father is clearly supposed to be God.
And I’m not saying that these interpretations of these characters are wrong, per se. I’m just saying that they’re not the only way we can interpret or understand the character of the father in this parable.
If we look at the text a certain way and in a certain light, the father also messes up in this story. The father loses both of his children in this story.
Because we have to remember that this parable is the finale of three parables about loss. A shepherd loses one sheep out of ninety-nine. A woman loses one coin out of ten.
And then a father loses both of his sons.
But unlike the shepherd and the woman, this father doesn’t move heaven and earth to find that which he has lost—even when it’s his own flesh and blood.
How often does that happen in the Church?
How often does a person just quietly stop coming for one reason or another? How often is it that the first time that they hear from the church is when they don’t turn in a pledge card? How often do we let a beloved child of the church grow up and go away to college or start their own life and just hope that they’ll come back? How often do we, through our action or inaction, harm someone and they leave without us noticing that they’re gone?
The man in this story lost his son. He gave his son his inheritance and let him go off to a distant country where he would be separated. Separated from his community. Separated from the ones who loved him. Separated from the ones with whom he could be mutually accountable to.
The man just sat there. Not realizing what it was that he had lost.
But, by some miracle, the son who he had lost came home.
He happens to look up one day and there, just above the horizon, he sees his son making his way back to the household and something in him clicks.
He leaps up, runs to his son, and embraces him. He doesn’t know what his son went through when he was away. That doesn’t matter.
In one scene, we see this man finally realize that he had lost his son and he can’t wait one minute longer to be with his son again.
I think that’s as faithful an interpretation of this parable as any. Because, yes, there is much that we have lost. But the hope of the gospel and the promise of our faith is that what is lost can and will be found.
Not by us sitting and waiting for it to happen. But by actively going out and reaching beyond ourselves. By drawing the circle wider and wider, incorporating the lost and the least into our common fellowship. Not because we have something special or unique to give them that they can’t get from anywhere else. But because they have something special and unique to offer us.
It is only through the other—it is only through our neighbor—that we can encounter Christ.
And if we happen to grow in numbers—if our average worship attendance or membership increases; if the size of our ministry plan increases and we get more pledging units—that’s great!
But growth can’t be the be all and end all of our collective lives as a community of faith. In biology, there’s a word for something that grows and grows and grows without limit or purpose: cancer.
Jesus did not call us to grow at all costs. Jesus called us to love the other and let that love transform us.
Transformation comes from our encounter with the other—when we meet our neighbor, the stranger, the “other”, we find that Christ is already there.
The Church is not called to measure success by how many people walk through its doors. The Church is called to open its doors so wide that no one is outside them. Not because we have something to sell—but because Christ is already out there, waiting for us to meet him in all of our neighbors. Black and white. Gay and straight. Native and Newcomer. Rich and poor. Incarcerated and free. Over- and under- and unemployed. Trans and cis and everyone beyond and in between the binary. There’s no line that God hasn’t already crossed. There’s no door that God hasn’t already opened.
And when we embrace widely—when we risk relationship, when we step across lines—we discover that we are the ones who are being saved.
Will our attempts be perfect every time? No. We will still mess up. But we can’t let that stop us.
After all, the father our parable did make another mistake that we rarely talk about in church. It’s good that he throws a feast for his son who was lost. It’s an occasion that’s worth celebrating.
But someone’s missing.
Someone wasn’t invited to the feast.
The other son.
This is, after all, a story about a man who loses both of his sons.
But this time, the man realizes a lot quicker that the other son is missing. It’s not weeks or months or seasons that pass, but moments—at most hours.
The man leaves the party, finds his lost son, and strives to make amends. Whether or not his attempt was successful, the text doesn’t say. Like many of Jesus’ parables, he leaves the ending frustratingly open-ended.
But I do think one thing is clear.
The feast is the vision. The feast is the goal.
The feast is the joy of restored relationships. Not a prize for good behavior but grace extended to us freely and without condition. Grace that we, in turn, are called to live into and extend.
If we, as a Church, are serious about being rooted in Christ, then we must embrace widely.
Because the embrace is where Christ meets us and we meet Christ.
And the table is already set.
This son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!
May the one who began a good work be faithful to complete it in us.
The work continues.
Amen.
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