For daily scripture, see Matthew 25:31-46
First, a few things about me: I have a wife, Kate, and two kids, Natalie and Elias, who are both excited to be living at camp and extremely isolated at the moment. I wear sandals when I can wear sandals; I would be preaching in sandals if this were July, but I can’t, so when I don’t wear sandals, I wear trail runners. And I’m a chess master, which I don’t normally tell people, but now that Queen’s Gambit on Netflix has made chess insanely popular, it is finally cool to tell people that. So, I just did.
Anyway, I am
thrilled to be with you today in these strange and challenging times. And I
think that’s a thing that can unite all of us up-front; we are all living through
strange and challenging times. Up until October, I was a pastor in northwestern
Minnesota where I saw the difficulty of leading a church in this time when we
are being torn apart trying to figure out how to care for our neighbors with
our church’s policies and with our politics—and all of it is exacerbated by the
fact that we don’t really have a playbook for what we are going through as a
society, as a church, and as neighbors to one another.
We
certainly haven’t been immune to this at camp. We’re facing some of the same
struggles that churches are—financial uncertainty and the viability of programs
and when will things ever return to something like what they were before? But I
am inspired by camping ministry in part because it brings us out of our normal
ruts, and somehow that makes significant challenges more approachable. At camp,
God breaks through boundaries. At camp, God shows up. It is the place where
kids meet God perhaps for the first time, but I think more often God simply
becomes real to them in way they’ve never experienced before, surrounded by a
community of kids and young adults who come together to have fun, to praise and
chant and sing and play games and swim, and to experience it all under these
big, beautiful North Dakota skies. Camp is one of those rare places that breaks
us out of the echo chamber of the ordinary.
This pandemic has reminded me how we need to venture into these extraordinary places more often. All of us need to figure out how to leave our echo chambers behind.
