A Great History, A Greater Future
Sermon preached by Rev. Patricia Farris
October 22, 2006

As you entered the sanctuary this morning for worship, did you notice all the red up here? The Christian church uses the color “red” for the season of Pentecost AND for celebrations, festal days. And today is surely one. We’re celebrating the 49th anniversary of our partner congregation, Bethany UMC in New Orleans and our own 131st anniversary as the First United Methodist Church of Santa Monica. And how wondrous, the scope of God’s purpose and plan, such that this morning, our 3rd Gulf Coast Work Team has completed their week of hard, hard work and is worshipping today with our brothers and sisters of the Bethany congregation.

The team had a great week. (One member, our usher Jon Ward, is back and with us this morning.) They got all of the sod down for this weekend’s events and almost finished the final house. They were very hot and wet for most of the week until the weather broke on Friday, a beautiful sunny and cool day that reinvigorated everyone in the group. Yesterday they were at a "Taste of New Orleans" dinner. They send their love to us and all are looking forward to getting home.

Pastor Edwards and I did a little joint planning on today’s services, so that as we celebrate this morning both churches are clothed in celebration red and all our services this day will conclude with the singing of the great old hymn, “Victory in Jesus.” I’m sure the sound will ring the rafters of heaven and God will be smiling.

As anniversaries go, 49 sounds young compared to 131, doesn’t it? Those folks at Bethany have a ways to go to catch up with us. We’ve worshipped in four different places in our time here in Santa Monica. The earliest of them is now a private home, designated a historic landmark since 1977. You may have seen the story on it in a recent “West Magazine” in the Sunday LA Times. Now owned by an architect, it is Santa Monica’s oldest remaining wood structure, built in 1875. It began its life as the Methodist Episcopal Church at 6th and Arizona streets and eight years later was moved two blocks west to 4th Street to be closer to town. In the early 1900s it was moved to 2nd Street. It was deconsecrated in 1923 and served for years as a community center for widows of Civil War veterans before being transformed into a single family home. (continued...)

"A Great History, A Greater Future" by Rev. Patricia Farris, October 22, 2006

That transformational journey of our church home is a great image for the transformational journey of our congregation, isn’t it? We have not remained static for these last 131 years. Times change. The town we live in changes. The make-up of our community changes. The norms and complexion of the culture change. Churches go through life cycles just like all people and all institutions. And like all individuals, like companies and hospitals and educational institutions, churches must remain flexible and forward-looking. While rooted in our great past and our great traditions, we must always be reading the signs of the times and straining towards the future, adjusting and adapting, refocusing and reforming. Churches are alive, living beings, not museum pieces to be carefully guarded and protected. Yes, we witness to the past, but at our heart is “the clay of Christian experience, material that successive generations of believers must craft with faithful care.”

Just last week, one of our members was reflecting on the times in which we live. He expressed concern that the growing religious bodies and trends seem to be fundamentalist and he wondered what that will mean for a church like us in the long run. This from a business person who is trained to look at trends and projections. Don’t we all look at our world and ask this same question?

One of the realities of the life cycle of our congregation is that we were privileged to boom through the 1950s and ‘60s and into the 70s along with the mainline Protestant churches. In those great post-war days of a burgeoning middle class, everything about our economy and our civic culture and the make-up of our community favored the mainline churches.

But the world has changed in more ways than I can explore here this morning. Suffice it to say that other forms of the faith are booming now. This is all part of a great ebb and flow of life in religious institutions and practices. Oh, it’s more fun to be on the boom side, to be sure, and much more challenging to become part of the religious minority. But, what I said to our member last week, and believe with all my heart, is that especially in this time of a fundamentalist resurgence, the passionate voice of open, tolerant, learned, committed Christian faith is needed more than ever. The tradition we preserve is what religious scholar Huston Smith—who spoke recently at Santa Monica College—has called The Great Tradition, “the voice of peace, justice and beauty that emanates from the Christian soul.” We have a vital heritage to preserve and a witness to make that is more important now than ever before. God still has a job for us, an important role for us to play. All we have to do is trust what we know, claim what we have experienced to be true and offer it all to God. We stand, as always, on the firm ground of God’s holy word. Did you hear what Jesus said to Zebedee’s sons, his disciples James and John, in response to their pronouncement that sounded just like something we might say to Jesus: “We want you to do for us whatever we (continued...)