Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons

About Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons

Foundry is an historic, progressive United Methodist Church that welcomes all, worships passionately, challenges the status quo, & seeks to transform the world.

Publisher

Foundry UMC DC

Category

religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

28 Mar 2022

Latest episode

15 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

232 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   15 Oct 2026

   More Than We Can Explain

   When I was in seminary, I participated in a Liberation Theology seminar tour in South India. During those two weeks, we soaked up the beautiful, radical otherness of the culture. We learned from profound teachers who opened our minds and our hearts to new ways of thinking about theology and about Christian witness in a place where only 2% of the population is Christian. We stayed primarily in Dalit communities, communities made up of those who were previously called “untouchables” in the Indian caste system. One night we stayed in a village of Dalit Christians. After a service filled with music and singing, the community poured out of the small church at the center of the village and began gathering. Imagine any given Sunday here at Foundry after worship, with groups gathered here and there outside the sanctuary. It was kind of like that. At a certain moment, we noticed that some kind of ritual seemed to be happening. People were gathered together, and members of the community were going around distributing something. We didn’t know what was happening. Then someone came up to us and put some pea pods in our hands. They reminded me of what you might think of as edamame. We tried to ask what this was, but it was tricky since none of us spoke Tamil. One young man simply said, as best he could, “Peas for the people.” Or maybe he was saying “peace for the people.” We weren’t sure. But we wondered whether this was the way that this poor village celebrated communion. Everyone received the same simple food, and it was for all the people. Food and peace for all. To this day, I don’t know exactly what was happening, and maybe that’s one reason I still remember it so clearly. There are experiences in life that resist being neatly explained. Something happens, and we know there is more going on than we can name. We feel ourselves caught up in something larger than ourselves. Throughout this series, we are exploring those experiences that interrupt our ordinary ways of seeing and remind us that the world is larger, stranger, more beautiful, and more interconnected than we usually remember. Dr. Keltner writes about the way experiences of awe often lie at the heart of spiritual life. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Across cultures and traditions, people encounter what he calls a kind of fundamental “it,” something larger than ourselves that we may experience as God or mystery, spirit, sacred presence, or connection. We don’t always know how to explain it, but intellectual explanation is not the only way human beings know that something is true. And I think there are few places where that becomes clearer than at the table we gather around today. Paul asks the church in Corinth, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?” The word translated “sharing” is koinonia: communion, participation, fellowship. Paul is saying that this is more than just remembering Jesus. Somehow, in this meal, we participate in Christ. And because we participate in Christ, Paul says, “we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” In what United Methodists call this holy mystery, we take a little piece of bread and we receive from the cup, and somehow this ordinary meal reveals something extraordinary about who we are. We belong to Christ, and therefore we belong to one another. Jesus speaks of the same mystery in his prayer in John’s Gospel. He prays not only for the disciples who are with him, but also on behalf of “those who will believe in me through their word.” And that means us: all of those who came before us and all of those who will come after. Jesus prays, “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” I in you, you in me, they in us, we in them. Is there a Venn diagram for this? We can try to wrap our minds around this language of eternal, dynamic, life-giving, interdependent, indwelling love, but it’s

2. 

   6 Oct 2026

   The Sound of Hope

   This is a little different view from the one that I'm used to when I'm here. So welcome and thank you for the opportunity. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. I love those words from Mary Oliver, and I love being here to talk about the music of our movement. Making music is an act of creation. What draws us to its sound? On this reconciling Sunday, we celebrate what we have learned from our music. You've heard some of it already this morning, and it really preaches. It was really easy to write the sermon because the songs kind of do it for you. I will always be grateful to people like Julie and Rush and Mark Millar and the many others, who have lent their gifts to this movement. We associate music we like with where we were when we first heard the songs. Linda and I frequently talk about snack bar songs. And what we mean is those songs from the 1970s that played on the jukebox in the Wesleyan College snack bar. Every time we hear one, it brings back this image of this small college snack bar with a jukebox over in the corner that served the best bagels in cream cheese you will ever have. And where we made and met some lifelong friends. More recently, my siblings and I have been going through my mom's belongings. We came across some records a few weeks ago that have to have been her mother's, because they weren't people my parents ever listened to. We laughed at Lawrence Welk and Charley Pride and other memories of things that we heard at my grandparents house. The image it brings is of 15 plus relatives in my grandparents five room house, most of us pre-teens, and lots of noise and laughter. We pulled out the Kate Smith Christmas album to play this Christmas. Music accompanies us throughout life. No matter the occasion, it gathers us in and holds us. It feeds our memories, offers solace, and provides great joy. It reminds us that we are not alone in a way that words cannot. It takes us out of ourselves and places us inside something larger, larger, a congregation, a movement, a denomination. A people, and a promise. That feeling of being part of something larger than ourselves is what we call all. And this movement is no stranger to that. Or I don't know what Charles Wesley would have had to say about today's LGBTQ justice movement, but we Methodists should not be surprised that movements have a soundtrack. We inherited a theology that was sung. Charles Wesley didn't simply write songs for people who already knew what God was doing. He gave people language to imagine the freedom that God was calling them toward as Methodists. Justice movement might just be a part of our DNA. So in Ginger sent me the theme and the scriptures for the day. I was kind of excited, but I also wondered how I could fit it all into one sermon. I'm still a little worried about that. There's material for a sermon series in this scripture, so I took a step back. The first thing I did was write down everything that the music of movements, plural, meant to me. And the one thing that stood out from all of that, from all of the words I wrote down, is the word connection. Because the music of a movement helps people, individuals, become a people, a people with a common vision and a common goal. The music of the movement is part of the connection that I was just referencing. It teaches us to hear a future that is not here yet. For the reconciling movement. It was imagining a church where queer folks called the ministry could authentically respond to that call, and where same gender couples could be married in church sanctuaries by their pastors. At foundry, we can celebrate that our own Reverend T.C. Morris or Morrow. Excuse me. Tse is serving her first appointment today. Her path from seminary to appointment was long, and I remember the year that she and Joey Heath Mason were told no. Linda and I were fortunate to be married here ten years ago, as gender just mentioned ten years ago this November. Not everyone in all United Methodist churc

3. 

   29 Sept 2026

   Learning to Notice

   A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC September 20, 2026, the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. “Be Astonished” series. Texts:  Psalm 19:1-4, Matthew 6:25-33 “The heavens are telling the glory of God.” I love that phrase. It’s so poetic and so deeply true. The heavens are telling. Day pours forth speech to day. Night declares knowledge to night. The whole creation, the Psalmist imagines, is engaged in this unceasikng testimony to the glory of God. And then comes this: “There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard.” Creation is telling us something without saying a word. The sky is telling. The trees are telling. The oceans and rivers, birds and flowers, creatures we can see and creatures buried in the soil beneath our feet are telling. The question is whether we notice. Perhaps that is why, centuries later, Jesus says: Look at the birds. Consider the lilies. Pay attention. In fact, the words Jesus uses are stronger than our English translations sometimes make them sound. When Jesus says “look at the birds,” it’s an invitation to really look, to direct your attention toward them. And the word translated “consider” the lilies means something like observe carefully or learn thoroughly. This makes me feel better about becoming one of “those people” who have a collection of bird books and are constantly recording birdsong in the Merlin app to identify what birds are around. Jesus says not just “look” or notice, but study the birds. There is something here for you to learn. And notice who he says this to. Anxious people. People worried about what they will eat and what they will drink and what they will wear. People preoccupied with all the things that might go wrong. Jesus doesn’t respond to anxiety with an argument or a philosophy. He instead gently redirects attention. Look at the birds. Consider the lilies. For Jesus, the birds and lilies aren’t simply beautiful distractions from anxiety. They are witnesses to a creation—including anxious humans!—held in the care of God. Pay attention, Jesus seems to say, and you may begin to notice not only the wonder of the world, but the faithfulness of the God who’s got the whole world in God’s hands. Jesus teaches this way throughout the gospels. Pay attention to seeds and soil. Watch how yeast works its way through dough. Notice vineyards and fig trees and sheep and weather. Jesus moves through the world as though everything is shimmering with the possibility of revelation. Which suggests that paying attention to creation isn’t a side hustle to the spiritual life. Paying attention to creation is part of how we learn to see. It’s a way we come to learn the wisdom, the love, and the care of God. Annie Dillard, who died this past week, once described coming to a place where you say to the woods, the sea, the mountains: “Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive.” What if awe begins there? Not with some extraordinary experience, but with stopping. With noticing. With allowing something other than our own thoughts, fears, schedules, screens, and preoccupations to claim our attention. The psychologist Dacher Keltner identifies nature as one of the great sources of human awe. He calls it “wild awe.” And wild awe can certainly happen in spectacular places. Standing on the rim of a canyon. Looking across an ocean. Walking among trees that were ancient before any of us were born. Looking up on a clear night and suddenly comprehending—or failing to comprehend—how enormous the universe actually is. But one of the things I appreciate about Keltner’s work is his insistence that awe doesn’t require a plane ticket. We can learn to notice astonishing things happening all around us. We live on a planet where bees use dance to give other bees directions to the next flower. Where crows remember human faces and teach their young which humans to avoid. Where ants beneath our feet build whole communities,

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2 ratings

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