Smoky Hill Umc Weekly Sermon

Anne was a dancer. A part of a youth group I led in a church I previously served, she had a sweet, gentle, humble spirit, and she was honest in her ability to see herself and her gifts clearly. Anne was a good dancer. But I'll never forget the day she said to a group of us, "I'm a dancer, but I've got no rhythm." My mind did a double-take as it tried to square those seemingly incongruous statements. "A dancer with no rhythm," I thought to myself. Is that even possible? I wonder if we might be in a time and a place where dancing may be our only way out – or better yet, our only way through. As a society, as the United Methodist Church, as individuals and families, many of us may be feeling stuck – almost paralyzed – by the trauma we are experiencing. COVID-19, long-overdue racial and economic reckonings, cultural divisiveness fueled by a spirit of winner-take-all politics, ever-intensifying extreme weather causing record-breaking destruction of habitat and lives...all these (especially together) are raising s