Well, hey everybody, I'm Adam Schell, the pastor of Albert Heitzen. Welcome to our sermon podcast. And I just want to start out by thanking you for spending part of your day with us. And if you're blessed during our time together today, let me invite you to come and worship with us live on Sunday mornings at 10.30am Eastern time.
You can worship with us live on our church website at mhbcleuoval.com slash live. Or if you're in the Louisville, Kentucky area, we would love to have you come and join us in person. With that, let's get right into this episode, sermon. I want to start our time together by playing a little game with you today.
And here's how it's going to work. I'm going to give you a series of choices to make and all you have to do is decide which option you prefer. All right, nothing too difficult with it. So we'll dive right in.
So here's the first choice that you have to make. Do you prefer waking up early or do you prefer staying up late? All right, by show of hands, how many of you are early birds? Look around, see your fellow early birds in place.
All right, you put your hand down. How many of your night house? Look around, see your fellow night house. Very good.
I think you got to hang out. Let's keep going. Next question for you. Do you prefer having a home cooked meal or would you rather eat out?
How many of you prefer eating at home? How many of you want to go to a restaurant? Very good. Next question.
Do you prefer cats or dogs? How many of you are cat people? How many of you are dog people? I see double hands going up for dogs.
All right, very good. Next question. Fair enough. Next question.
Would you rather read a book or watch TV? How many of you are readers? How many of you would rather watch TV? All right.
Now, this may be a silly question to ask since we live in the state of Kentucky, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Do you prefer football or basketball? And can I already know you don't care? So it's OK.
All right. How many of you prefer football? How many of you are basketball fans? All right.
Continuing on the sports, they might have to ask again because living in Kentucky, how many of you prefer the Kentucky Wildcats and how many of you prefer the Louisville Cardinals? How many of you are cats fans? How many of you are card fans? Very good.
David's holding up his Tennessee Cup to let us know where his allegiance plays. Very nice. One last question for you. Do you prefer dressing up or do you prefer going casual?
How many of you prefer suits and dresses? How many of you would rather wear t-shirt and jeans? Very good. Thank you very much for playing along with my little game as we get started today.
And as we were playing that game, it probably seemed like all of those were pretty simple, easy questions for you to answer. It didn't seem like they were much more than an opportunity for you to express your individual opinion on a few different subjects. But there's a little bit more that's happening there than they meet the ivory. And that's because every time that you answer the question, the same way that somebody else sitting inside of the congregation with you right now answered that question, you were able to build a little bit of camaraderie.
You were able to find a point that you can connect on and build your relationship with. Like if two early birds get together, you guys can go out and you can have breakfast. Or if you're a dog person, somebody else is a dog person, you can go hang out in a dog park together. If you both like cheering on the Kentucky Wildcats, you can get together to watch a basketball game.
But the opposite is also true. Every time that you disagreed with somebody else's answer to one of those questions, you created a little bit of friction. Because if you're the kind of person who likes to watch TV, you know, you can't talk with somebody who'd rather read a book about what you think is going to happen in the next season of that lesson whenever it eventually comes out. Or if you are the kind of person who likes football, you know, you can't talk with somebody who likes basketball about their thoughts on what the Bengals are going to do.
Now the Joe Burro got hurt last week. Or if you're the kind of person who likes dressing up, you're never going to be able to understand why other people want to wear their sneakers when they come to church. So every one of those choices that I gave you gave you the opportunity to build on your relationship with other people inside of the congregation, or they also had the chance to divide you just a little bit. And I know it seems a little bit ridiculous to think that we could actually be divided over things like our preferences and entertainment or the kind of pets that we like.
But if we're being honest here, we as human beings have a long history of finding different things that divide us. And it was this premise that actually became the basis for one of the most famous sociological experiments that happened in the last century. This particular experiment started on April 5th, 1968, which was today after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.
And on that morning, a nine year old boy named Stephen Armstrong stepped into Jane Elliott's third grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa. And it's even walked into Miss Elliott's class that day. He asked her. He said, Miss Elliott, why do they have to kill Martin Luther King?
Well, after all, 28 of her students were seated that day. She told them that she had something they wanted, she wanted the class to do to help them understand what had happened to Dr. King. So she started by asking her students, she said, what do you think it would be like to be a black boy or a black girl in America right now?
Well, her entire classroom was made up of nothing but white students. So they had no idea. So Miss Elliott continued on and she said, I don't think we can imagine what that would be like unless we've experienced some discrimination for ourselves. So she finished by asking your students, would you like to find out what it's like after hearing a chorus of gas go up from her kids because they're third graders and they don't know any better.
Miss Elliott stepped up to the classroom to the chalkboard in her classroom and she started explaining something to her kids. She said, things like your eye color, your hair color, your skin color, all determined by a chemical call, Melton. And scientists have discovered that Melton is directly correlated with your intelligence. So the more Melton that you have, especially in your eyes, the smarter you are.
And since students with brown eyes have more of this chemical, that means that they are smarter and superior to the students who have blue eyes. So Miss Elliott divided up her class that day based on the students eye colors. And she could quickly see a chasm forming between these two different groups of students in her class. So she decided that she was going to push things just a little bit further.
So she went over to class for the day. She said, the students with brown eyes, they're going to get five extra minutes of recess and they're also going to be able to get second helping to lunch, which would have been a punishment when I was going to school. But I guess it was a reward back then. I'm going to get second helping to lunch.
Meanwhile, the blue-eyed students, if you want to drink from the water fountain today, you're going to have to use a paper cup. One of the blue-eyed students in class just couldn't figure that out. And she said, Elle, why do we need to use a paper cup? But before Miss Elliott could respond to another student, one of the brown eye kids in the class quickly chimed up because we don't want to catch anything from you.
Well, it's kind of treatment continued all morning long in the class. The brown eye students just continue to berate the blue-eyed students. Well, one blue-eyed student struggled to answer a math question. A brown-eyed student chimed in and said, well, what did you expect from him?
Is Elliott, he's just a blue-eyed student, and then as the students lined up to go to lunch that day, they had a shocking revelation about their own teacher. They realized that Miss Elliott herself had blue eyes. So one of the students asked her, Miss Elliott, why are you allowed to be a teacher if you have blue eyes? And before Miss Elliott could answer that question, another student jumped in and said, well, if she had brown eyes, she'd be that principal or superintendent.
But even that insult wasn't enough to distract Miss Elliott from one of the unintended consequences of this little social experiment that went on. Because Miss Elliott noticed something about the brown-eyed students in her class that day, she noticed that her lowest performing brown-eyed students were able to answer questions and solve problems that they had never been able to answer in class before. She also saw that all the brown-eyed students were walking around with a whole lot more confidence. And she says that she saw some of the biggest smiles she had ever seen in her entire teaching career on those brown-eyed kids' faces throughout that day of school.
But the opposite was happening to the blue-eyed students. Some of the best and brightest blue-eyed students in the class weren't able to answer the kind of problems and questions that they had been answering all school year long because they were struggling under the weight of the discrimination that they were feeling. Well, the end of the day, Miss Elliott decided that she wanted to push things a little bit further. So the kids came back to class the following Monday.
She stood up at the classrooms blackboard again and she explained that she had been mistaken the last time they were in class on that Friday. She explained that it's actually the blue-eyed students who were the smarter students and the blue-eyed students are really the superior students. Well, with the blue-eyed students started braiding and mistreating their brown-eyed classmates. But Miss Elliott did say that she noticed that the blue-eyed kids weren't quite as nasty as the brown-eyed kids had been previous Friday because they knew what it was like to be on the other side of the equation.
Well, at the end of the school day, Miss Elliott knew it was finally time to come clean to her class and she told them she had made the whole thing up. Kids weren't smarter because some of them had brown eyes or some of them had blue eyes. Your eye color has nothing to do with your intelligence. And as soon as the students heard this revelation, some of the brown-eyed kids and blue-eyed kids who had been best friends before this whole social experiment started quickly ran over and hugged each other because this chasm between them had ended.
Other kids just simply sat and cried. But Miss Elliott knew that every one of her students had learned a valuable lesson that day. Now as adults, we know how kind of ridiculous it sounds to try to say that someone is more intelligent than another person simply because of the color of their eyes. So we think about this story.
We think there's nothing in the world that could ever divide us as adults the same way that this eye color experiment divided this class of third graders. But if you think that you're wrong, because the reality is there are tons of things that we as adults allow to divide us. I can prove it with you to you with just two words, pumpkin spice. That's right.
Unless you've been living under a rock for the last 20 years, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Back in the fall of 2003 Starbucks introduced the world to the pumpkin spice latte. And every year since then, this pumpkin spice craze and phenomenon has only continued to grow. So it has been a long time since pumpkin spice was just a flavoring that we added into our copies around these parts.
Today, you go to the grocery store and you buy pumpkin spice flavor, Oreos and Twinkies. I've actually even seen pumpkin spice cheese for sale in Kroger this year. Not brave enough to try it, but I have seen that it's for sale. And it's not just pumpkin spice, it's not just limited to food items either.
You can buy pumpkin spice deodorant. You can buy pumpkin spice toilet paper. You can even buy pumpkin spice kitty litter. So obviously there's some people in this world who absolutely love pumpkin spice.
So they count down the days of the start of PSL season, that pumpkin spice latte season in case you haven't been indoctrinated into this cult yet. They count down the days to it because they can't wait to taste their favorite flavor and see what new mashups are going to come out with products having pumpkin spice infused into them this year. But other people absolutely loathe pumpkin spice. You don't want to smell it.
You don't want to taste it. You don't want to see pictures of it popping up all over your social media feeds when Starbucks releases the pumpkin spice latte another year. And the last thing that you want to see is some brand out there who decides that they want to force pumpkin spice into an existing product where it just doesn't make sense. And if we can get this divided over something as trivial as a flavor that you add into coffee, then you better believe that we can get every bit is angry and more upset about things that matter.
Things like the ongoing conflict in Ukraine or in Palestine. Things like illegal immigration and border security. Things like the cost of health care in our country or funding for education. And I'll be honest with you.
There is nothing that I can say in a 25 minute sermon that's going to resolve any of the conflicts that we have over any of those things. So to say what I want you to think about is another question. The question that I really want you to think about is how do we as followers of Jesus deal with all of this divisiveness? How do we deal with all of this divisiveness?
Do we just bury our heads and sand as a church and pretend like none of these things, none of these controversial issues are happening in the world around us? Because I got to tell you, that's the easy thing to do. It's easy to just keep your mouth shut over all these controversial issues that happen in the world around us because nobody's going to get that upset with you if you just stay silent. But part of the problem with that is it's not just people outside the walls of the church that are wrestling with these kinds of issues.
It's people inside the walls of the church that are wrestling with the same issues too. And if our faith can't help us face these difficult questions, then what good is our faith? If our faith can't help us as we face these difficult questions, then what good is our faith? So I'll ask you again, how do we as people of faith as followers of Jesus deal with all of this divisiveness?
Maybe to answer that question, we need to take a look at how people in biblical times dealt with the divisiveness that they faced. And when I think about people that were facing divisions in biblical times, I can't help but think about the church in Corinth. And that's because the church in Corinth, they were not just facing some divisions. They're entire churches on the verge of falling apart because there were different factions inside of the church in Corinth who all played a different leader for their particular faction.
And all of these factions thought that they were the ones who were right. They thought that they were the ones who were truly representing their faith. So the church in Corinth was dealing with same kinds of divisiveness that we see in our world, in our country, in our culture today. There were people in the church in Corinth who were allowing themselves to be divided based on the factions that they were following.
They thought that they were completely right and that everybody else was entirely wrong. And they were more concerned with proving that they were correct than they were with loving their neighbor. So in a letter that he writes to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul has something to say about all of this. Paul wants to encourage the church in Corinth to not just overcome their divisions, but to be united as one body.
So let's take a look at what Paul says to them. If you've got a Bible, close by your Bible app on your phone, you can open it to 1 Corinthians, chapter 10. 1 Corinthians, chapter 10, I'm going to start reading in verse 16. This is what Paul writes.
Paul says, isn't the cup of blessing that we bless the sharing in the blood of Christ, and isn't the loaf of bread that we break a sharing in the body of Christ? Since there is one loaf of bread, we who are many are one body because we all share that one loaf of bread. So when Paul is writing to this church that is so divided, they are on the verge of following a falling apart. Paul points them to this table, the communion table, which what we've been talking about over the last few weeks here at Melbourne Heights.
We've been working our way through the series called at the table where we've been talking about what happens at the communion table because the communion table is more than just an ordinary piece of furniture. It's more than four legs with the top. Communion table is a place that challenges us to become more like Jesus. So Paul points Corinthians to the communion table and he explains to them, he tells them that because we drink from the same cup and because we eat from the same bread, we are part of the same body because we drink from the same cup, because we eat from the same bread, we are part of the same body and that's the body of Christ.
And because we are all part of the body of Christ, we should probably act like Jesus. Right? So as we think about how we're supposed to deal with all the divisiveness that we see in our world today, maybe we need to think about how Jesus faced divisiveness, division during his time on this earth. So how did Jesus deal with the divisions that he faced?
And again, the answer to that question is going to bring us back to the communion table again, because the communion table teaches us so much about who Jesus is and what our faith is over the last few weeks we've been learning about what this table teaches us. We've seen that this table teaches us what it means to follow Jesus. And it actually costs us something to be one of his disciples. Last week, we saw that everyone has a seat at this table that we all belong at this table, not because we've earned a spot here, but because Jesus wants us here.
But today is we think about how we can deal with the divisiveness and we experience the world around us. What we're going to learn from this communion table is the way that this table transforms us. And this table does transform us when we step back and we realize what Jesus did when he faced the greatest divide of them all. And that's the divide between God and humanity.
So what did Jesus do when he faced the divide between God and humanity? Would you just face the division between God and us? What did he do? Well, when Jesus faced the divide between God and us, he didn't bury his head in the sand and pretend like there wasn't a problem at all.
When Jesus faced the divide between God and us, Jesus didn't pick one side of the cosmic debate and say that the other side was completely irrelevant and wrong and should be done away with. No, when Jesus faced the divide between God and us, he became one of us. He became human. But why?
Why did Jesus become human? Well, one of the early leaders of the church, a man by the name of Gregory of Nazianza explains it this way when he says, what is not what is not assumed is not redeemed. What is not assumed is not redeemed, which is a fancy way of saying that until Jesus understood us, Jesus could not help us. So Jesus had to walk a mile in our shoes, experience what it means to be one of us in order to truly help us and save us.
So this one does, when Jesus becomes one of us, he not only walks a mile in our shoes, he's been 33 years on this earth experiencing everything that it means to be human. He experienced all of the ups and all of the downs. He experienced times of acceptance and times of rejection. He experienced our joys and our sorrows, he experienced our losses and our gains.
He experienced everything that it means to be one of us. So for the first time in the history of the world, we as human beings know that God actually gets us. God understands us. God knows what it's like to be us.
So God empathizes with us. And without empathy, there can be no unity. There is no unity without empathy to go hand in hand. There is no unity without empathy.
So unless we are able to walk a mile in someone else's shoes, unless we're able to see the world through someone else's eyes, unless we're able to hear the cries of other human beings and understand their suffering and their struggles, we can never overcome all of these things, the divide us. So that's what God did. That's what God did. He became one of us to empathize with us so that we can be united with him.
And every time we come to this table, the communion table, every time that we eat the bread, every time that we drink from the cup, we are reminded of the links that God went to to understand us. Because when we look at this table, we're reminded that God actually became one of us. We drink from the cup as a symbol of Jesus's blood, actual blood that was flowing through human veins. We eat the bread to remind us, as a symbol of Jesus's body, an actual body that walked this earth.
God really did become one of us to end the division between God and man so that we can be united with him. So as we think about everything in the world around us that divides us, that threatens the terrace apart, we need to be willing to do what Jesus did. So that's what I want to challenge you to do today is we get ready to come to the communion table again in the service. I want you to think about what this table actually represents.
And I want you to spend the moment looking around the sanctuary with people that are in this place, worshiping with you right now. I want you to see them. I want you to see the person that is sitting in the sanctuary with you right now who voted for a different political candidate than you did during the last election cycle. I want you to look around this room and I want you to really see that person in the church whose theology makes you a little bit uncomfortable.
I want you to look around the sanctuary. I want you to see that person who actually bought pumpkin, spiced, and kitty litter. And as you look at all of these people, I want you to realize that Jesus gave his body for them. I want you to realize that Jesus shed his blood for them.
I want you to realize that Jesus came into this world because of how much he loves them and you. So as we think about everything in the world that threatens to divide us, let's do what Jesus did. Let's give of ourselves. Let's be willing to walk that mile and somebody else's shoes.
Let's listen to their cries and try to understand their suffering and their struggles. Let's empathize with each other because that's what Jesus did for us. Jesus became one of us to empathize with us. And at this table, we should be transformed into people who empathize with each other too.
That's pretty good. God, as we come to you in this word of prayer before we gather at this table again today, God, you know that there are so many things in this world that drive us apart. There's so many things in this world that want to tear us apart from each other, from our choice in pets that we love, our choice in entertainment, our choice in the clothes that we want to wear, our choice in the teens that we want to root for, our choice in whether or not we like pumpkin spice, but God, there's other far more serious things that tear us apart. So we think about conflicts that are continuing to happen in Ukraine and in Palestine as we think about what's going on with illegal immigration and border security in our country.
So we think about what's happening when it comes to the cost of health care and education funding and God, that list can go on and on and on. There's so many things that want to tear us apart. But God, as your people, we are always pulled together at this table, because at this table, we eat the bread, we drink of the Catholic, remind us of your body, of your blood that came into this world in the form of Jesus Christ and that you came for all of us. So God, my prayer is that you use this table today to pull us as people of faith together to remind us that there's always much more that we have in common than there is that wants to tear us apart.
And ultimately the greatest thing that will always unite us is the love that you have for us. So let us feel that love, let us celebrate that love, let us embrace that love as we come together and let us carry that love with us, what our time at the table ends. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
I just want to thank you for tuning into this episode of our Star B podcast and I hope that you've been blessed during our time together. If that's happened once again, I want to invite you to come and worship with us live on Sunday mornings at 10 30 a.m. Eastern time. You can do that by joining us on our website at mhpcluable.com slash live.
Or if you're in the Louisville, Kentucky area, you can also worship with us in person. And that's going to do it for this episode of our sermon podcast. But I want to invite you to come back and join us again when our next episode drops next week. But until then, I'll be praying for you.
I hope that you have a great week and we'll see you back here soon for another sermon podcast.