Almost like falling in love: On service and comfort

Scripture: 1 John 1:1-4

            I’m going to say something radical that you might not believe, but it’s my goal by the end of this sermon that you may not only say “OK, that’s kind of true.” I want more than that. I want this to change you, because it is that important.
            What I want to say is this: “Comfort is the enemy of the meaningful life.”

            OK, that might not be completely radical. You can probably see that there’s at least some truth in that. If you grew up playing sports (or if you play sports still) you know that your success in athletics has a lot to do with how well you the push the boundaries of your comfort in training. If you’ve ever been self-employed or started a business you know how vulnerable, and yet immensely purposeful and gratifying, that can be. If you’ve ever fallen in love you know how scary and uncomfortable that is.

            So, if comfort is our goal, it makes sense to avoid sports, challenging work, and relationships. 

            But for reasons of our own we choose the pain of training, the risk of investment, the possibility of unrequited love, and the messiness of failed relationships. The things that we value the most—the things we talk about around the dinner table—are the very things that are most difficult. Every great story we read—every heartwarming example we have—testifies that life is better when we are impassioned for what is good and true in the world. That is why we serve—it’s a reflection of God’s coming into the world—to serve, not to be served. “The Word became flesh and dwelled among us.” We spend a good deal of energy telling you about the good news that is the incarnation, but we are often confusing when it comes to what that good news actually looks like today. We are freed not to comfort but to servitude. Nothing shows this better than falling in love, and nothing  shows it better in the church than serving in uncomfortable places. The two actually go hand in hand. When we serve, we love.

I don't know about you, but most of my life is spent in a rhythm; often it’s a good rhythm, occasionally it’s not. Only when that rhythm is disrupted—in the worst of times and in the best—am I reminded that God is found far more often in my discomfort than my comfort. I need to hear this more than I do, and I need to live it more than I have. I need to internalize this word from 1 John, “That which we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of Life… we proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you may have fellowship with us… we write this to make our joy complete.”
And I know I’m not alone.

I wish I got to share with each and every one of you the experiences I shared with our youth and adults this past week. I wish this every year and that probably means it’s time to offer something more for the rest of you. It’s one thing to tell you about what we have seen and heard and touched; it’s quite another to immerse yourself in it. I don’t think most of us know how badly we need to be immersed in it.

We have to push our boundaries if we want to be worth anything.

When we got to Earth Tipi on the Pine Ridge Reservation last Monday we stood under a leaky open-faced wooden structure, lightning nearly zapping us all, and we heard immediately about the toilet situation, which is to say we heard about the “lack-of-a-toilet situation.” It was awkward and uncomfortable, but then again, so many of our examples of strong faith are just that. Why is it that we think that these heroes of our faith are so great, but the prospect of facing anything like them seems subhuman? It’s like we assume sixteen year olds can’t deal with hardship, and yet we venerate fourteen-year-old Mary, pregnant with Jesus. Sometimes it takes facing immense challenges to understand that God is found when we are at the mercy of things outside of our control.

There are countless examples of stretching our comfort zones from this past week, but I’m not going to go into all that many specifics. I’d prefer to use this experience as a nudge to push all of us forward rather than a memory to look back upon with nostalgia. Life on the reservation is extremely rough in part because they are always looking back on a history of despair and loss. The brokenness of their history disallows creating a future with hope. We have exactly the same problem here for exactly the opposite reason: we are forever looking back on a history that we paint with golden hues and wherever the present does not live up to that past we look upon our situation with despair.

The funny thing about this is that we associate this kind of nostalgia only with the old when the truth is that our young people do it too. They compare one year with the past, one trip with another, always trying to live up to the experiences they had before. When we testify to what we have heard, seen, and touched (as 1 John tells us) we testify not to re-create but to inspire. And “inspire” is exactly the right word since it means “in the spirit.” To be in the spirit is to let go of our concerns and to see God in the world, in people, and in places that are utterly uncomfortable.

To do that you have to leave behind what is comfortable. This is about every one of us—regardless of age. We need a church in the world, because that’s the only kind of church that is worth its Christian name. An insular church is impotent, blind, and deaf. So, yes, we need to offer more opportunities to the rest of the church body—that’s a part of this—but on an individual and communal level we also need to be willing to push ourselves more. Our lives should be uncomfortable—more than toilets that are just buckets with sawdust we should be pushing our boundaries to include people we don’t understand and who make us uneasy, and situations that are foreign and weird.

That’s what I’ve seen, heard, and touched this week. I’ve seen God in faces of Lakota people working to better their homes, I’ve heard Jesus’ voice in the words of our youth to each other and to me, and I’ve felt the touch of the Holy Spirit in hugs, in holding hands, and all the simplest of things. But the problem when I share this with you is that I am forever having people come up to me and saying “That sounds like quite the trip. I’m glad that the youth got to do that,” which is fine in itself, but I often feel like those of you who tell me that need it just as much as they do! More to the point, these are not things that happen only out there; these are things that happen here if only we took the opportunity to connect them with the something deeper we crave when we come to worship.
Mission happens out there to remind us what mission looks like here.

God is here as much as God is at Pine Ridge. So why do our young people go back into their normal lives the moment they unpack? Because comfort is attractive—that’s why—and comfort is easy, but it is also temporary and, most importantly, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Love is never comfortable. To say “I love you” is one of the most frightening, most uncomfortable, things a person can do, and the moment it becomes a mundane thing is the moment when relationships have trouble. When it comes down to it, that’s what all this business of being in the world is: It is saying “I love you” to people who desperately need to hear it. What happens when we overcome our discomfort to say “I love you” to the world is that we discover, to our great surprise, that this world which we perceived as frightening turns around and says to us, loud and clear, “I love you, too.” We think we are going off to change the world but really we go out for the world to change us.

That might be the real source of our fear. Maybe we don’t want to be changed. Maybe we’re happy just the way we are. Isn’t that what we say anyway—God loves you just as you are? This gets to the real difficulty of what I’m saying. God loves you one way or another. God created you and called you “good” from the beginning of time. That’s true and great, but it works both ways. That world out there? It was created “good” too, and the only way you’re ever going to know how good it can be is to go see, hear, and touch it. The only way it will know it is loved is if you tell it, and the only way you will know you are loved is if you make yourself vulnerable enough that the world can let you down.

Out there you’ll hear about sorrow and loss; you may even experience it yourself. Make no mistake: that world out there might kill you. But if you never push your boundaries and never take a chance for the sake of your neighbor it already has. We are dead without the love of others. We are dead when we don’t receive that assurance again and again. “I love you.” Now go out and show it—go out and share it—tell the world what you have seen, heard, and touched. Be God’s hands. We were. We are. And, God willing, we will be tomorrow.