It was only a little over a week
ago that we were finishing up our week-long Hunger Ride bicycle pilgrimage across northwestern Minnesota, but in that short
time since I have had a good deal of time to reflect. Actually, the great thing
about riding a bike for a good chunk of the day is that there is a lot of time
to reflect even in the middle of it, and, time and again, the thing I took away
from this ride was how much I needed
to open my eyes to the world around me—to look beyond the surface of my narrow
life and see the people who I mostly try to avoid. Open your eyes, I thought again and again.
The
same principle of opening our eyes applies to many different facets of life—how we read the Bible, for one. I had absolutely no idea what I was going
to do with Philippians 1 today, because, you know, it’s Paul rambling on in
introductory fashion and I didn’t expect to find anything earth-shattering in
the introduction to a book. This scripture didn’t jive with what I felt called
to talk about, and, honestly, my eyes glazed over every time I read it. I was
failing at keeping my eyes open even as that was the message I wanted to share
with you.
Finally,
as the week wore on I turned to a commentary on this Phillipians passage and I
realized how naïve I was being. Paul was in prison when he wrote
Philippians—it’s right there in verses 12-14, let me read it again because I
missed it at first: “I want you to know,
beloved, that what has happened to me has actually helped to spread the gospel,
so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to everyone
else that my imprisonment is for Christ; and most of the brothers and sisters,
having been made confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, dare to speak the
word with greater boldness and without fear.” In the back of my mind I knew
that Paul wrote some of his letters from prison cells all over Asia Minor, but again
this was just background noise; it didn’t hit home until I read a bit about
what those prisons looked like. Ancient prisons were essentially holes in the
ground meant for short-term stays, which meant the guards did not bring food or
water, and so, the prisoners were completely at the mercy of the local people
to bring them something to eat and drink to keep them alive. Suddenly, my mind
jumped to Jesus in Matthew 25, saying, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I
was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you
welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care
of me, I was in prison and you visited me” (Mt 25:35-36). And then I realized that I was set to preach on this passage from Philippians less than a week after an eye-opening experience about the pervasiveness of hunger and even still I did not see that this was written by a man thankful for meager rations in a time of need; a man completely dependent on the charity of neighbors, who were, by the way, helping out an unapologetic criminal. This goes beyond hunger; it condemns all of us who live in bubbles, unaware of the world around us. It condemned me when I self-righteously assumed I understood what Paul was saying without imagining where he sat writing these words.
Then, this past
weekend this went even deeper, as a few of us who were at Synod Assembly had
the opportunity to hear from Jim Ladoux of Vibrant Faith Ministries, who led
one of the breakout sessions on coaching for church leaders. At this session he
talked about the four letter word that is the bane of the Christian church in
the 21st century—this terrible, horrible, awful word: “busy.” He talked about the lack of
vibrancy in our faith lives when what we do as church feels only like another
thing that contributes to our busy-ness, and for me, in that moment, it
clicked. I had just experienced a vibrant faith experience, riding my bike
across the state, talking with people one on one, and listening to stories.
Yes, I suppose if I stopped to think about it this was a very busy week, and if
I stopped to think further it meant all sorts of busy-ness for Kate and others
back home, and if I really stopped to worry about everything on my desk when I
came back then, yes, I could say that I had plenty of busy-ness ahead, but
something about the pilgrimage experience refused to allow me to dwell on my
busy-ness. In fact, I’m not exaggerating when I say that the first day I didn’t get
on my bike and ride to a new town felt kind of empty. Even as my days on the
ride were full it
never crossed my mind that I was busy.
Too many times we give the impression of being too busy to have a faith life, which is a big problem because if your faith is not the ground for the things that you do then those things that make you busy will become your god. To
be fair, part of the blame rests squarely on the church. We who make up the
church often assign menial tasks rather than eye-opening experiences; we like
to focus on the nuts and bolts: ushers and readers, baking and cleaning, and
all sorts of things that you may enjoy but they also probably feel like just
another obligation. The church often forgets to be the place where our eyes are
opened, which is especially ironic when we read Paul, because who better to
show us that reality than the man who was blinded on the road to Damascus and whose eyes
were opened to an utterly different world? He was changed, and if we’re not
changing people then something is wrong. If the church feels like another thing
to make you busier, then it's not doing a very good job of being the church.
One of the churchiest experiences I’ve had in a long while was riding a bike for a week, and now I think I know why.
One of the churchiest experiences I’ve had in a long while was riding a bike for a week, and now I think I know why.
Our
week-long Hunger Ride was intentionally crafted as a pilgrimage: an opportunity
to reflect as we went, not focusing so much on the destinations as much as the
journey itself. The things that normally would have been frustrations—flat
tires, rainy and windy days, churches who forgot to find us places to stay, and
all sorts of things that looked like inconveniences—were as integral to the
experience as the events that went entirely to plan. So many times we become
preoccupied with the plans themselves, missing the experience as concerned as we are that things stay to plan. Sure, it’s not fun to bike in sub-40 degree temps
with a stiff headwind and sleet, but when it comes down to it you can either carry on or not. When we turned on to Highway 10 for a half mile before Perham—one of
our only stretches on a major highway—the skies opened, a 30+ mile per hour
headwind smacked us in the face, and what I can only describe as ice needles
started pelting down on us. Every time I looked up more needles would hit me in the cheeks, and I remember looking back at everybody else and thinking, “We can’t
seriously keep riding, can we?” But then I thought again, “Why not?” Just keep pedaling
forward and see what happens. Giving up and jumping in the support pickup was
always an option, but none of us did. I put my head down and pedaled with the
ice needles pounding away at my helmet. When we finally got to the Perham exit
the weather had cleared, and I realized how the trials heightened the
experience: the destination now meant much more.
Which got me
thinking… What would it be like if our churches actually worked like that? If
microphone break-ups, and crying babies, and Sunday School messes, and
scheduling conflicts, and kids saying things in the children’s sermon that make
us blush, and people who don't understand how we do things around here, and all the things that
make us uneasy about church were actually the things we claimed as our
identity? What if we put aside our stuffiness and claimed our messiness?
What
if, like Paul, we had the freedom to mess up immaculately and be a better
church for it?
Paul
killed people. Then, he made a 180 degree turn and railed against the Roman authorities.
Now, as he writes to the church in Philippi,
he is forced to rely on the kindness of strangers who knew who he was and why
he was sitting in that hole in the ground. So, who fed him? Was it the
Christians whose families he had a hand in murdering? Was it the Roman citizens
who knew the politics of feeding a Christian prisoner? Who was it? It could
only have been people whose eyes were opened to something more important, who
didn’t make excuses for their convictions.
If
we are too busy to be Christians then we aren’t much of anything. I went on
this intentional week-long pilgrimage to have my eyes opened, but the reality
is that the beginning and ending of all pilgrimages is arbitrary—it’s the
difference between a pilgrimage and a trip. Today is not about what I experienced a week ago, but it is very much about how our eyes will be opened now and in the future. If we are too preoccupied to see
the world around us and the need for us to be Christ to the world, then we are
nothing. Absolutely nothing. Our greatest handicap as Christians in the
middle-class of America
in the 21st century is that everything comes so fast, so easy, and
so thoughtlessly that we forget to actually open our eyes. We fill our lives with
so much stuff, and nobody may be better at filling your lives with junk than
the church, that we can no longer see Christ through all the clutter. But if
that’s the case then the church must change. It has to. But it starts with each
of us—opening our eyes, finding our passions, and making this pilgrimage we are
on more meaningful.
We
laugh sometimes when we hear about other churches in other places that have
people lining up to serve. Ha! If only I
weren’t that busy! we think, as if we are the only people who have lives
filled with family, work, and responsibilities. But we need to stop and
consider that what sets “those people” apart from us is not the amount of free
time they have but the amount of passion and joy they take in what they do. You
have to look no further than the ministries here that happen out of joy:
quilting, for one. Is quilting a chore? Sure, but it's also a joy. Then, we have the Cornerstone, as another example. There was a real need for a food pantry in Hallock, but Cornerstone
didn’t happen only because there was a problem to be fixed. It happened because some people, as altruistic as they may be, were
excited about it. This isn’t an either/or. You can be joyful and serve. In
fact, if Paul is any indication, you can be incredibly joyful in a hole in a
ground. Sometimes I think that’s what it would take for us to actually let go,
finally forced to confront the fact that the things we use to fill up our lives
and the lives of our families do not matter if the faith that once gave us meaning
is now just another chore.
I’ll
close with what Paul actually said in today’s reading, because, honestly, I
didn’t hear it—not the first time I read it or even the second or the third. So,
if you get there this time you definitely beat me. This is a prayer for all of
us—something to reorder our lives, and a hope for tomorrow. Paul writes, “This
is my prayer, that your love may
overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of
Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of
righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God”
(Phil 1:9-11).
Amen.
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