The painting Reflections, celebrates the awesome process of changing into who we are and whose we are, God’s children, made in his image. God finds such delight in this process, especially when we reflect and acknowledge his grace within the journey.
I have been thinking a lot lately about Methodism. What made Methodism so attractive? Why did so many people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries join the Methodist movement? What did Methodists say that people found compelling? What, if anything, constituted the heart of the Methodist message? I believe these questions can be answered in one word: transformation.
I have always been intrigued by how much easier it is to destroy things than it is to build them. It takes years and months to build buildings, and when buildings are demolished, only days and seconds to destroy them. This is what a critical tongue does: it takes aim at a person, a church or organization, a project, an effort, a habit, an incident, a conversation, and it sets the charges to blow it up. What is amazing is how powerful our words can be, how easily they can offend and how deeply they can wound.
We Christians are to “sit down on the bottom rung of the ladder of sanctity and yell for Jesus Christ.” When we do, he will come. He will come to nurture and change us.
Bishop Wallace-Padgett serves in the Birmingham Area of the United Methodist Church. This sermon was adapted from one delivered shortly after her appointment there. From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a
