#BeUMC Week 1: The People of God Who Do No Harm

PLANNING NOTES

Our series begins simply: Do no harm. Easy enough, right? Well, maybe not. This isn’t a passive avoidance of intentionally doing harm to another person. This is asking us to be aware of how harm is caused in our multicultural and interwoven world and to understand how devastating even unintentional harm is for those who are already living on the margins of society and the world. That is why we chose the words Diverse and Justice-seeking for this first week. We begin our worship together by declaring that we are in solidarity with people from all walks of life, even those who are ignored or overlooked – the poor, the homeless, the abused, the forgotten.

The messaging theme of inclusion seems obvious in this context. How can we move to a more inclusive stance in our worship and our mission? We begin by paying attention to the words we use for worship. How are we subtly excluding some people from our worship? What are the images that dominate our liturgy and our hymnody? What are the descriptions of who the beloved of God are as we gather together? Do they all look like us, or is there diversity in our images of community, even if not in our gathered congregation?

At the same time, we chose the word Resilient to align with this first theme of our series. Being resilient is about keeping our focus even through changes and difficulties. Doing no harm sometimes requires changes in behaviors and patterns of living. While change is always difficult, resilient people of God can incorporate change without complaint, while maintaining the mission of doing no harm and making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Worship can issue a challenge to, as Discipleship Ministries likes to say, “#SeeAllthePeople.”

Here we incorporate the theme of influence, connection, and impact by understanding that the changes we embrace—inclusion of and hospitality to the other—will need to radiate out from our local congregation into the wider community around us. We are the yeast that leavens the whole lump of dough; we are the salt that gives flavor to the whole world. Worship issues a call that continues beyond the benediction into how we live in the world around us, doing no harm.

The best way to do this is by telling our own stories. We have been welcomed into this family; we have experienced God through the love and support of the body of Christ. So, tell that story. Let there be a witness within the worship experience of someone who was endured harm and has been released by the grace of community and inclusion. The theme, “Experience of God through the UMC,” is a testimony to how transformative doing no harm really is in the lives of individuals and communities. How is the world around us more whole because we have chosen to avoid harm and undo the harm inflicted on people and the environment? What stories of healing what has been broken can we tell? steps What steps are being taken to avoid causing damage to the ecosystem that we can share as we gather for worship this week? How have we cleaned up what has been harmed in our neighborhood?

Doing no harm is not passive avoidance of behaviors, but an active awareness and response to systems and attitudes that inflict harm on a regular basis, without thought or regret. A part of our invitation to the world, to our neighbors, is to come to this understanding and experience of doing no harm as we are made into followers of Jesus Christ. The fourth messaging theme of the people of God campaign is Disciple-Making, and that is what we are always about. That is what worship does for us as we gather week by week; we are being shaped into examples of Christ at work in the world. The influence of that shaping is not simply an internal change; we are not made into disciples for our own sake, but for the world’s sake.

PREACHING NOTES

(NOTE: Please start your sermon preparation by reading the planning notes first. The design outline and intent of the series are found there and are essential for the sermon as well. The campaign words and messaging themes are outlined there and are useful for sermon preparation.)

As mentioned in the planning notes ,there is a surprising simplicity in this first week of the #BeUMC worship series. Surprising and deceitful, to be honest. On the surface, it is easy to proclaim, “Do No Harm” to the gathered and online congregation. Just avoid hurting anyone. Just . . . well, you know, don’t be a jerk. You’re like a parent in the carpool line at school leaning out the open window shouting at the child running into the open doors— “Make good choices!” Appropriate, perhaps, but not terribly transformative.

So where do we start? You could start with the rule. Spend some time unpacking what “Doing No Harm” means in both an active and a passive sense. Start simple and get more complex as you examine what it means to first be aware of the harm that is happening all around us all the time and to which we have become blind to or accepting of. Then consider how to avoid adding to the harm by how we have come to live our lives. What abuse are we contributing to by how we shop and how we eat and how we move about in our world? Who is being harmed so that we can enjoy the pleasures of our abundant society? It is sobering to consider, troubling, to say the least. There is certainly a need to make folks aware of the implications and the impact of our lifestyles on the wider world. People need to be aware of communities that are marginalized and harmed by a majority that manages not to see its privilege. The reality is, however, that many have tuned out this message, this approach, as being too uncomfortable to hear. Some efforts to raise awareness of the effects of racism, for example, have been met with a determination to avoid the conversation altogether.

So, where should you start, preacher? You could start with the text. Proverbs is an interesting book. It is difficult to preach without sounding like you are moralizing. And it lends itself to simplicity, just like the general rule itself. But what if you give the advice in Proverbs 3:29-30 a little context? Jump back to the beginning of the chapter and read the “why.” Why are we told to avoid harm? That’s what the first couple of verses of the chapter tell us.