Posted by rrindfuss    2 Comment(s)    Add a Comment 
Nov 30 2017

Between kindergarten and eighth grade Christmas stars started appearing in my neighborhood. Farmers fashioned stars out of lumber and lights and mounted them on the tops of silos and other tall structures on their property. One year my uncle fashioned one such star for the silo at my grandfather's farm, and a few years later it came to our house where my dad mounted it at the top of a 5-story tower that held our TV antenna. High in the air and out in the country without city lights, our star and the others in the neighborhood shown large among a night sky filled with stars, and they proclaimed the coming of Christ. So, a couple years ago when our staff was encouraged to decorate our offices for Christmas, my mind went back to my childhood.

I went to the shed behind our house where I collect scrap lumber and have a few tools for cutting it. I cut and re-cut. I drilled and inserted tiny hooks. I hung lights. When I finished I had a Christmas star, sort of.

You may be able to tell from the photo that my Christmas star had wood that looked fresh in some places and severely weathered in others. It had pieces with multiple cuts that didn't align perfectly. It had some smooth edges and some rough edges. Every light seemed to hang at a different angle, and the angles where different pieces of wood met weren't very accurate. In short this star was ugly… and perfect for a Christmas star.

The prophet Isaiah wrote of the coming messiah:

"He had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him." (Isaiah 53:2)

The author of the book of Hebrews wrote:

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. (Hebrews 4:15)

The original Christmas star lit the way for Magi to find a messiah that was physically average or even unattractive and who had the same human frailties and weaknesses as the rest of us. The Christmas message is not that God one day fixed us but that one day God joined us in our brokenness.

When it comes to Christmas decorations, I encourage you to embrace a bit of ugliness and imperfection this year. Those characteristics perfectly point to the Christ that came at Christmas.

I also encourage you to join us at Access this Sunday as we continue our sermon series on Christmas contradictions and further explore the topic of "Lights and Stars."

See you soon!
Rich

Rich Rindfuss
Access Pastor
First United Methodist Church Richardson 

Posted by jklossner    1 Comment(s)    Add a Comment 
Nov 24 2017

We hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! The spirit of gratitude shows us just how closely connected gratitude is to hope, love and grace. This year we each wanted to share with you what we are grateful for. 

I'm grateful for all the strangers that have become friends this year. I see God's grace in their willingness to reach out, welcome, and embrace someone new in their lives. At church I'm continually reminded of the blessing of our congregation. You give your time, money, energy, and creativity in places and ways you wouldn't have to and make a true difference in our community. I'm grateful to live out our mission alongside you, Welcoming people for Christ, Growing people in Christ, and Serving people with Christ!
-Pastor Rich Rindfuss

I’m grateful for my Access family here. For someone who has their immediate family in other, far away, states, I can’t express how thankful and grateful I am to have found a family to share my life with here in Texas. You guys mean the world to me!
-Shandon Klein

I’m grateful for FUMCR, a place that Val and I are excited to call our church home! We’re honored to partner with other church members, guests, acquaintances, and everyone else we meet along the way in spreading the Gospel and furthering God’s Kingdom. I’m also grateful for the example our church sets in the community and the Methodist denomination on how to be a church that welcomes, worships, and serves as one body of Christ, regardless of political or social beliefs or backgrounds. What a blessing it is to have that kind of culture in church!
-Eric Czechowski
 

I’m grateful to be part of community that welcomes everyone with open hearts and minds. In a time when it’s so easy to be divided and find reasons to pull away from each other, I’m grateful the our Access community looks for ways to draw closer, to love one another more fully and serve by loving those around us.
-Pastor Julie Richter 

Join us as we start our new series this Sunday Reindeer and Donkeys! Christmas is full of contradictions- it can be messy and magical, sacred and secular. As we head into this Christmas season, join us as we talk about how to find the goodness and light of Jesus in the midst of it all.

See you Sunday! 

Posted by jklossner    0 Comment(s)    Add a Comment 
Nov 17 2017

Last year for Thanksgiving, my family came in from five different states to Wimberley, TX where we gathered to celebrate my grandparent’s 60th wedding anniversary. The property we rented was beautiful, and had a lot of space to spread out. Some of the cousins, also known as the ‘third generation’ (‘gen three’ for short), stayed in renovated old barn that we named the bunkhouse. It was there that we laid down the expectations of our time together that came to be known as the ‘bunkhouse rules.’ 

Important things on the list included: not being dumb, using your words, knocking before entering a room (with a shared bathroom situation this was important), never EVER skip the Avett Brothers on Pandora, and humble bragging would be allowed as we caught up and celebrated life together. It had been many years since we all had gotten together like this, and while done in a joking manner, those rules oddly brought us closer together. It seems as though rules might get a little bit of bad reputation. They're seen sometimes as a way to ruin fun times or a precursor that must exist before anything else can take place. Yet, rules can have this great ability to bring people together and tightly knit a community into the kind of relationships they desire to have with one another. 

This is what we see with Moses and the Ten Commandments. Just after the Israelites make it out of Egypt and are free, they realize that they now get to define who and how they want to be as a community. Moses goes up Mount Sinai God gives him rules on how to be in right relationship with one another and with God. These rules are far from whimsical or extravagant, but they bound the Israelites together for generations, and they bind us together even today. 

The same is true in Micah in a passage of scripture talking about what God requires of us. In Micah 6:8 it says “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” What if instead of looking at rules as a hindrance or burden, we saw them as a way to bind us closer together with one another and with God? 

For the third generation of our family, we found the bunkhouse rules to bring our thanksgiving a space to be connected, be grateful and love each other well. Isn’t that what we hope at all times, not just the holidays? 

This Thanksgiving week, what are you and your families’ rules for how you will be with one another? How do these rules knit you closer together? 

This weekend in Access we will be talking about a set of three rules called the General Rules that bind us as United Methodists closely together in mission and relationship with one another. Plus, they’re just three great faith rules to live by and they make me proud to a Methodist (remember, humble bragging is allowed). 

See you Sunday! 
-Julie 
Cousin #3 of the Third Generation