At camp, God shows up!

 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.

You see, what makes this passage about sheep and goats in today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew so challenging for preachers is that it can be easily reduced to echo chamber preaching. Everybody hears what they want to hear! Whatever I say, it sounds like, “You’re in; they’re out. Congrats on being the holy few!” The echo chamber is real in this one. But my experience is that those who need to hear that they are acting like goats, don’t hear it, and those who need to hear that they are God’s sheep, don’t hear it, because, again, we’ve decided which side of the fence we are standing on. Because, like it or not, we live most of our lives in ruts. We go home and turn on the news, and we think the same things we thought yesterday, find ourselves frustrated or angry about thing x, y, or z; the same thing that upset us yesterday.

            I have been there—frequently am there lately actually given the state of the world, actually—but I was never more in that head space than when I first started working at camp. The year was 2006 when I first got a job as a counselor at Camp Lutherhaven on the shores of Mica Bay on Lake Coeur d’Alene in northern Idaho. This flat-land Midwest boy ended up out west surrounded by mountains after doing a service project through Idaho Servant Adventures the year prior, and I was really looking forward to getting away from the rut I found myself in in college. Now, I wasn’t a bad college kid. I did my work; I wasn’t much of a partyer (chess player, remember); but I was in a kind of spiritual rut. I was studying Religion with the goal of becoming a pastor, but I rarely attended church. I really, truly wanted to make a difference in the world, but my day-to-day life felt so boring and mundane. In short, I was like a lot of young adults.

            So, I headed out to Idaho to Camp Lutherhaven, which I didn’t even know was a joint ELCA/LCMS camp until I got there. Now, that might not mean much to many of you, but this is the kind of division that is not normally crossed in everyday life in the church. It’s the kind of division that leads to a lot of goat-language—a lot of thinking less of one another on the other side. And it is a real division. So, I honestly wasn’t sure how this was going to work. Then, I actually got out there and I saw a staff of counselors and program staff and year-round staff that was part-ELCA, part-LCMS, part-non-denominational Christian, part-Catholic, and even a few counselors who were pretty sure they were atheists but were trying this Bible camp thing out for a spin. After getting to know a few people, I became absolutely certain this was not going to work.

            Then summer happened and the unbelievable followed: God showed up. Again and again, God showed up. I made wonderful friends who believed pretty much the opposite things about God and about politics, who were part of churches that I would otherwise have thumbed my nose at all day long. God showed up because it was camp, and at its best what camp does is obliterate all those stinking divisions that are so engrained in us. And I know they are still there under the surface, and I know that there are terrible practical challenges to working together, but my experience was one of God made manifest in people I would otherwise never have gotten to know—people I would have thought to be goats all day long.

            Then, there were the kids! If camp staff came from a hundred different backgrounds, let me tell you about those kids—foster kids and kids whose parents were going through divorce, kids who get sent to a different camp every single week of the summer, kids whose parents really want them playing hockey but they can try Bible camp out for a week because their friends are going; Protestant kids and Catholic kids, and about a third of kids who haven’t been to church since they were baptized or never have been at all. Tons of kids with no religious affiliation. We know the kids need to learn about Jesus, but what’s really, truly amazing is that camp brings them together with counselors at a time in their life when the counselors don’t really know much either, and against all logic, God shows up. Again and again.

            It’s remarkable.

            So, in part it is camp that leads me to take a different approach to the sheep and goats in the Gospel of Matthew. I find myself flabbergasted by who God uses, whether it is at camp or back home if we are open to it. God sends us loads of people who we think are probably goats, and yet, when we allow them into our world, we discover how God moves against our expectations. My approach to leading camp is to leave the door open for all the goats, because they probably aren’t as goat-y as I imagine. And there are plenty of ways where we on the inside need to see we aren’t so great at being sheep.

            If you know camp at all, you may know that sheep are part of so many camp stories and songs. There’s another story from the Bible that you are perhaps more familiar with about these sheep. It’s the one with the 100 sheep where one of them gets lost. Of course, the best business plan in that circumstance would be for the shepherd to slough the dead weight and make that sheep a tax write-off. It’s not worth the time to return and look for one, measly sheep, let alone risk abandoning the ninety-nine in the process. Yet, the shepherd does. God does. And that feels nice and all, but it only achieves a kind of gravity for us when we realize that that sheep—that lost sheep—is you and me. We are lost sheep. All of us fall short; all of us need God to lift us up out of our ruts. We need holy places where God shows up against our expectations.

            I’m guessing most of you aren’t going to be campers at Red Willow next summer. Now, we always need counselors, but again, I’m thinking that a summer of half-deflated mattresses and screaming children might be in the past for most of you. Nevertheless, you are an integral part of camp. A mentor of mine, Bob Baker, loves to use the image of widening the tent from Isaiah 54:2. Camp is about widening the tent to include not just your kids or grandkids but also folks like you who maybe have never had a relationship with a camp or who do not see that as part of your past. Now, we would love to have you out—not only to serve Red Willow but so that Red Willow can be a place for you to break free from the ruts you find yourself in, especially entering year two of a pandemic. But even if you don’t have any capacity or interest in coming to camp—visiting or volunteering or donating—even if you are sure that camp really isn’t your thing, I hope that today I can offer a gentle reminder to find your place to break free from the echo chamber, because that is something we all need!

            See, the list of orders Jesus gives us in Matthew 25—feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, visit the prisoners—these are all much more available to us than we tend to think. If you are like me, you may read these and say, “Yes, I would do that, but there’s nobody hungry around me, there’s a few strangers (but, let’s face it, most of these North Dakota strangers certainly don’t want me to welcome them even in normal times, let alone during a pandemic) and yes, I will care for the sick when I can, but usually the people around me aren’t sick. So, we sit back and wait for these situations to present themselves. Yet, one thing that camp has taught me is that these are not just theoretical things out there but imminent realities for us right now.

            You may not have anybody starving for food around you, but you certainly know somebody starving for love. You may not know somebody desperate for water, but you surely know somebody thirsty for meaning or longing for justice. You may not know many prisoners, but you certainly know people imprisoned to particular ways of thinking—to addiction, to hate, to fear. You know these people, because one of them is you. You are an outsider who God welcomes in, the lost sheep.

For me, this calls to mind one of my favorite summer camp themes, which was the theme from my first summer in Idaho: OutsideIn. This theme was taken from Ephesians 2:13, which says, “Now because of Christ—dying that death, shedding that blood—you who were once out of it altogether are in on everything.” God takes the outsiders and brings them in, because we get it all backwards. God lowers the proud and lifts the humble. Jesus dines with sinners and rejects the law-heavy approach of the upright Pharisees. God doesn’t turn the black-and-white to gray; God reminds us that only God sees in color, the rest of us live looking in mirrors dimly.

            I’ve seen camp brings outsiders in again and again, and I’m hoping I bring a little of that to you this morning. And it might feel odd in the cold days of November, as we look toward the long winter ahead, to be thinking of a place that we associate with summer, but camp isn’t for a certain time of year or a certain age of individual. Camp is a reminder that God meets us against our expectations in places we least expect with a message of hope that casts out fear. So, if you worry you might be a goat, know that God meets people especially like you—God saves people especially like you. On the other hand, if you are certain you are a sheep, open yourself up to those you suspect are probably goats. God will show up and surprise you.

            I want to close my time with you today by saying this: Red Willow is a special place, but camp is an attitude. It’s about widening the tent; it’s about meeting God in the world against our expectations; and I think that wisdom transcends the place and the people. I want to acknowledge how all of this is weird right now—we don’t know what camp will look like into the future just as you don’t know what church will look like. But as brothers and sisters in Christ, we will continue to do the good work of feeding and clothing and visiting together. We will continue to proclaim a God who cares for all the sheep. And we will preach that in our singing and in our playing and in our community and out into the world. I hope you can join us in that ministry in whatever way you are able.

            Thanks be to God!