First United Methodist Church - Fort Collins, CO

Monday’s thoughts

For some time I have wanted to look at the importance of music in worship. What kind of music works for us and what kind does not. We have struggled here at this church with the contemporary service. That has been something some people have really enjoyed, and yet other people haven’t appreciated it so much.

Several years ago our contemporary service was growing, but the numbers fell to the point we couldn’t continue with it. The praise band did a good job. They were talented and dedicated, but it just became more work for them and for our staff than we could justify.

I am wanting to look at the music of Bach. Some people can relate to classical music and Bach is noted as a church musician.

1. What are your thoughts about music in worship?
2. What seems to be meaningful for you and what is not?

If you have thoughts to share publically, please leave a comment with this post. For personal thoughts write me at charlesschuster@fcfumc.net

I look forward to your ideas.
Charles

I’ve been thinking about the fact that we seem to have a large number of baptisms this Sunday, and that we had designated this as “Children’s Sabbath”. Also, we have seen the ongoing horror of the death of the Amish children in Pennsylvania. We have learned that the children begged their murderer to take their lives and save the others. Those children were so selfless and sacrificing of thier own safety. How precious are the children!

In the usual baptismal ritual there is a lot about how children are born in sin because they are part of the human family and implicated in the sin of Adam and Eve. Baptism for many people is salvation from the sin of Adam and Eve. Baptism is a cleansing of the evil that we were born into.

I cannot agree with this concept. Baptism for us, here at First Church, is something entirely different. It is a community’s recongition of its responsibility and it is the parent’s owning up to the importance of what it means to raise a child in a world like this.

There is something else I beleive about baptism. We baptize children into the Christian faith and not into the United Methodist Church. Baptism is an entre into the church, but not necessarily our church. It could be a church of another denomination. We accept baptisms from other denominations and we do not require people who join our church to be baptized in our church if they have been baptized somewhere else.

Sunday will be a huge day for us. We will have five baptisms. Four of them will be at the 9:15 service and one of those is an adult. One baptism will happen at the 10:45 worship hour.

It is children’s Sabbath. Appropriately, we will have many baptisms. We will affirm the goodness of the human spirit and God is with us.

1. Do you think we are born in sin?
2. Do you believe in “original sin” or “original good”?
3. If you believe in “original good” what is the purpose of Jesus’ life and teaching?

If you have thoughts to share publically, please leave a comment with this post. For personal thoughts write me at charlesschuster@fcfumc.net

I look forward to your ideas.
Charles 

Natalie Sleeth is a hymn writer whose work we are featuring this Sunday. She wrote many anthems for children and one of her finest pieces of work is entitled, “One Bright Candle”. This is what she had to say about that song:

“This piece came about because of the sad and premature death of a very special young girl from Manchester, Maine –Samantha Smith. I didn’t of course know her personally but she had caught my attention because she wrote to the Russian premiere (who answered her letter) about world peace. A few years after that event she was co-starring with Robert Wagner in a new TV series and after four episodes had been filmed in London she and her father were returning home to Maine when their plane crashed. I once heard Samantha interviewed on the Today Show, and she was such a sparkling, enthusiastic and sincere person (with no obvious egotism about what she had done), that she captured my heart as well as the hearts of all who watched her. When she died so suddenly, I somehow wanted to write a piece that ‘highlighted’ the idea that one person can make a difference – now and then, here and there – so that was the thesis behind ‘One Bright Candle’.”

One child can make a difference in the world. Apparently, when Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat were meeting with President Carter at Camp David the tensions ran high until Golda brought out her pictures of her grandchildren and Sadat brought out the pictures of his. Then the two world leaders were able to look at each other as people. Children do make a difference.

Do you know any examples of a time when children turned lives around like that?
——————————————————————————–

If you have thoughts, please leave a comment with this post. For personal thoughts write me at charlesschuster@fcfumc.net. I look forward to your ideas.

- Charles

“The Faith of a Child”

Sunday is “Children’s Sabbath” and the sermon will wrap around what it is our church is doing for and with children. Appropriate to the occasion we are participating in 4 baptisms. We will look at what baptism means and why we do it and we will think some about the development of our faith and what was going on in the text when Jesus said, “Suffer the little children and forbid them not for to such belongs the Kingdom of God.”

Jerome Berryman has become one of the experts on “interactive learning” and Christian Education for children. He tells us, “When a person has an experience of God there is a desire both to re-experience it and to tell it to others. But how do we communicate the experience with the invisible? We compose a story, and through that story we relive the experience as well as communicate it to others. Some people have concluded that children do not experience existential questions. This is more than an error in fact. Undervaluing this existential experience of children can be very destructive for their spiritual growth. The faith of a child must be respected.”

There is the story of Sunday school teacher who asked the children before she dismissed them to go to church, “And why is it necessary to be quiet in church?” Annie replied, “Because people are sleeping.”

In our church, when it comes to Christian Education for children, we are not sleeping. We have built an environment for learning the faith and for sharing the faith in exciting ways.

Do you remember something that you learned in
Church School that has stayed with you? How has your faith evolved?

If you have thoughts, please leave a comment with this post. For personal thoughts write me at charlesschuster@fcfumc.net. I look forward to your ideas.

- Charles

The second in the series of sermons on the life and teaching of Jesus moves us from what was in his name to what was behind what he did. Sometimes we have come to see some things in our faith when we put them in the perspective of the context in which they were put. I have wanted to deal with the whole matter of miracle and how we learn from it for some time. Jesus was said to have performed miracles. He made a blind man be able to see. He healed people who had leprosy. He healed a man who was unable to walk by the pool at
Bethesda, and he turned water into wine. Each of us will be able to identify our favorite miracle story, and some of the stories we point to are ones that are a problem for us.

Would we be better off, in our day, if we didn’t have to try to explain some of the miracles of Jesus? Wasn’t there enough in the wisdom of what he said and in the courageous sacrifice he was willing to make to inspire us to be his disciples? Are we really looking for miracles to happen today?

Did Jesus really believe in miracles? How important were the miracle stories to him? It’s a legitimate question. If we examine the Gospels we will discover that Jesus never performed the same miracle in the same manner. Many of the miraculous actions of Jesus were followed by his warning not to disclose what he had done. It would be reasonable to conclude that there were things much more important to Jesus than the acts that violated natural law.

Frankly, I am a Christian in spite of the miracles of Jesus and not because of them. They are episodes in his life I have to rationalize and not parts of his life story that draws me closer to his truth.  What do you think about the miracle stories? How do you explain them?

If you have thoughts, please leave a comment with this post. For personal thoughts write me at charlesschuster@fcfumc.net. I look forward to hearing from you.

- Charles

There is some uncertainty how many of the August sermons I’m preaching. I think I get to preach three of the four Sundays, but that could change is Joel and the youth want to take a Sunday to report on their important mission trip to Mississippi. On August 20th The Reverend Rod Wilmoth will be preaching. He is one of the truly great preachers in our denomination and we are fortunate of have him with us the third Sunday of the month.

The sermons I preach in August will concentrate on the meaning of Jesus life and mission. I begin with the question he raised of himself as he was visiting with his disciples. He asked, “Who do men and women say that I am?” and then he asked Simon, “Who do you say that I am?”

The result of that exchange with Simon led to a change in Simon’s name. Jesus told Simon from then on his name would be “Peter”, and “upon this rock I will build my church”.

Jesus was named “Christ”, “Son of God”, “Son of Man”, and he had many other names. How he is named determines who he is permitted to be. I intend to explore this issue of the names of Jesus.

In that context I want to ask about our names. What are we called? How are we named? What difference does it make how we are addressed?

My mother and father named me Charles. The first church I served in Colorado I was an Associate Minister. The Senior Minister determined that, since the organists name was Charles, and, since Charles came to the staff before I was appointed, my name would be changed to “Chuck”. I have wondered what difference that made in my ministry.

Do you have a name that is different from the one you were given at birth? Does it matter?

What’s in your name?

- Charles

The sermon will have two points; two ways of dealing with the tedium of tomorrow and the terror of tomorrow. We remember the words of Jesus who said, “Don’t worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has problems of its own.”

Some of what tomorrow brings is small. It’s boring. It’s boredom; Monday morning monotony. When we face the tedium of tomorrow then we will want to do something different. We will want to change what has become our pattern or our way of doing things.

Some of what tomorrow brings is big. It’s frightening. It’s threatening and scary. Tomorrow can bring death or illness. It can bring uncertainty and failure. Monday morning can loom awaiting us like a menacing presence. When Monday morning brings something big we will want to imagine something new. It’s time to rethink; to re-imagine.

• What do you do about Monday morning; about tomorrow when it’s small or when it’s big?

If you have thoughts, please leave a comment with this post. For personal thoughts write me at charlesschuster@fcfumc.net. I look forward to hearing from you.

- Charles

I have begun to realize that this “Monday” this is large and applies in different ways to different people. Monday is my day off and is a day I look forward to spending with Kathy, but there are other ways in which there is a Monday issue.

“Monday is a Monster”

Some of us it is the ongoing routine we cannot escape. It’s a day to do nothing followed by another day in which there is nothing to do. For some of us Monday the day we’re dreading. It’s the coming of the new school year, or the arena in which we will be challenged to do something we may or may not be able to do. For some of us it is the arrival of the moment when we are going to have surgery or when we are going to face the death of a loved one. For some of us it is the arrival of our own death. Monday is the tomorrow we’re afraid to face. How do we face it?

For Jeremiah it was the coming of the Babylonians and the captivity and he responded by buying land as a token of his confidence that the people would return to the land. It was an affirmation of the future they we not able to see. 

• How do we face Monday/tomorrow?
• How do we face whatever tomorrow brings?

Jesus said, “Do not worry about tomorrow. Today has enough problems of its own.

 If you have thoughts, please leave a comment with this post. For personal thoughts write me at charlesschuster@fcfumc.net. I look forward to hearing from you.

- Charles

This summer we have tried to look at some of the many moods of summer, and this coming Sunday I want to have us reflect upon the depression of going back to work when, at times, we feel our work is futile. Many members of the church tell me how exciting their work is and how much they enjoy it, but that doesn’t deny that there are times it is difficult to get back to it. In fact, we can become addicted to our work.

In the Biblical texts we find support from some surprising sources as we reflect upon our Monday Morning Blues. The Creator of Creation had moments when there was regret for the fact of creation. We are told there was a time God wished God had not created humankind. Moses, in leading the people out of Egypt, had to face the indignity of questioning from people who would rather have remained in captivity. Did Isaac ever get depressed? The name, Isaac, means “laughing”. Were there times in his life when he wasn’t laughing? I suspect there were.

What do we do with our depression? It can come to us because we do not believe the work we do is meaningful, but it can also hit us when we are overstressed by work we values but which takes too much out of us. It can come to us because we feel inadequate and it can come to us when we are feeling extremely competent. It can come to us at any stage of our career, and it can come to us when we are completely retired. It happens to people in the Universities, in the corporate world, and in the Retirement Home. It happens in the church, in the operating theater, in show business, and in the school classroom.

What do we do with our depression when it is related to the work we do, or the work we wish we did, or the work we are no longer able to do?

 If you have thoughts, please leave a comment with this post. For personal thoughts write me at charlesschuster@fcfumc.net. I look forward to hearing from you.

- Charles

The preacher for Sunday July 16th is Dr. David Dalke. Here are his thoughts on the sermon he is writing.

The theme for Sunday will be centered around the scriptures in Matthew and John, where Jesus calls us to pay attention to “the least of these”.  We need to notice the “stranger” in our midst…the “scared”…the “wanderer”.  I will tie some of these scriptures into a significant time in the church of Belle Plaine, KS., as this congregation experienced “ministry” when least expected, just as we do here at First United Methodist Church in Fort Collins.

It is time to notice how powerful Jesus’ message is as he addresses the “religious” people who have brought a woman to him, caught in adultery.  He raises their concerns to a higher level…”what right do you really have to condemn this woman?”  Another expression of “the least of these”.  As Erich Fromm says, “the greatest threat to our happiness is the feeling of separation”.  The subtle message is: we must not “judge” or “ostracize”, but rather reach out and CONNECT.

I will close with an illustration about a 78 year old retired carpenter building a cross for Easter Sunday morning service, and what that message of the cross can mean to “the least of these”….

If you have thoughts please contact David at Ddalke37@cs.com. He’d love to hear from you.