The youth are not the future. Jesus is.

Luke 11:2-4

             I’m going to begin today by apologizing to your Midwestern sensibilities, because this week I’ve listened to sermons from couple African-American preachers, including the black Lutheran tradition, and so if I have a little more fire in my belly than normal, well, you know where it came from, and this is—I think—a good thing. Feel free to “Amen” as needed.

Today we bring together a few different things. A youth mission trip to Idaho; the Lord’s Prayer, especially that first line: Thy kingdom come; and lastly, though not insignificantly, the work of our wider church in New Orleans this past week.

            When I started to think about all three of these things at once, first of all, I got a headache, because there’s just a lot to be said; then, I realized that the three events create a bridge from past to present to future. And so I’m going to start there.

            Sharing about mission trips is always a bit funny. Probably most of you have had this experience. You go and do something awesome—a concert, a big vacation, a convention of some kind, or a mission trip, or something else—and then you come back and you try to share it with people who weren’t there. You tell stories, share pictures, they nod politely, and then you start to think, “Man, they just don’t get it!” I guess, you had to be there, you say.

            The trouble with sharing the past if our goal is to bring people into the experiences is that if we just can't manage it. You can’t re-live it, can’t re-create it. That was in the past. So, it’s good and right to share it with you—many of you supported this particular trip with your time and money and prayers, but the truth is it’s done. Finished.

            We’re never going to have that experience again. Some will try. I remember going back to work at camp for the second time in 2008 and the summer program coordinator, in my interview, warned me, saying, “You know, it won’t be the same.” And I said I knew, but I didn’t. I didn’t know all the ways—big ways, small ways—that that second experience would differ from the first. Trying to re-create the past always disappoints.

            The church too often tries. But the church that takes the past and uses it to forge ahead into this moment… that is the church that is Spirit-led. It’s the church that can pray “Thy kingdom come” because it is looking forward to Jesus; the only future we have.

Last Monday, our presiding bishop, Elizabeth Eaton, preached a sermon in which she asked the body at Churchwide Assembly a not-so rhetorical question, so I’m going to ask it to you. The question is: “What are young people to the church?”

Its future?

No, that’s the wrong answer. Tempting answer but wrong. The youth are not the future of the church: Jesus is.

The youth are not the future of the church; Jesus is.

That’s what we mean when we pray “Thy kingdom come.” Not “thy young people come.” Not “thy children learn to fill the pews so our church has a future.” No! “Thy kingdom come.”

The future of the church is Jesus’ kingdom.

So, if the youth are not its future, then we must come to struggle with the fact that they are its present.

The mission trip is over. The kingdom of God is coming. But what about right now? What are we doing as people of God to make a difference in the world right now?

One of the joys of being in a different place in the world, surrounded by different people from a whole variety of backgrounds is listening to their stories. I talked with a lady on the bus to the airport in New Orleans who had just spent the week at the Baptist National Conference; she made sure to tell me it was the “Progressive Baptists,” which I kind of gathered when she mentioned hearing speeches from both Tim Kaine and Jesse Jackson, Jr. at the conference. (Hence, not the Southern Baptists). This lady was from New Jersey, in her mid-80s, African-American, and was filled with lament for the state of the country, but not in the way that I so often hear around here. It wasn’t “Gee, the world is getting worse out there, isn’t it? Glad we live where we live!” It wasn’t “Did you just see this on the news?” Instead, it was “Let me tell you about my experience. Our people are hurting.” It wasn’t out there; it was personal.

            And I was convicted, because I knew I’m part of the problem. I didn’t create it; I didn’t do anything, and that’s exactly the point—I haven’t done anything. This is about right now—what are we doing right now?

            Thy kingdom come, yes, but what about right now? What are we doing right now?

            Whether it’s changing our view toward those differently-abled than us, as we saw in Idaho, or healing racial injustice, or just simply finding and naming the persons in need in our community, the question is about right now. A little Greek lesson is appropriate here—I know how much you all like Greek lessons. This phrase, “Thy kingdom come!” is in imperative tense. Now you’re all scanning the deep, dark recesses of your middle school English classes or high school Spanish or French classes to remember what that means. Imperative. It’s a command. “Thy kingdom come!” When I first learned this it opened my eyes to the Lord's Prayer in a completely different way. The prayer is filled with imperatives. It’s not praying, “God, your kingdom is coming and I know this,” as if it were a confession of faith. It’s not praying, “God, I really hope maybe your kingdom will come soon,” as if it is a request. Instead, it’s an order. It’s you, ordering God, every time you pray to bring God’s kingdom now, because that’s God’s job.

Ours is to do our part in the meantime.

            And that starts with relationship. This week I befriended an African-American octogenarian from Jersey, a mother from Wisconsin—my age—with two children who had never taken the train before and had a load of questions, and I chatted with and visited a chess hustler in New Orleans, the head bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, as well as too many Lutherans to count. I had meaningful conversations with a person in every decade of life; I learned a ton about people who were very different from me and also people not so different from at all. I had meaningful conversations with a person in every decade of life. In Idaho our youth and adults walked alongside children and adults with special needs, and they experienced the same kind of enlightenment. None of this is radical. None of what happened this week in New Orleans or last month in Idaho is that out of the box. All we were doing was entering into relationships, and, probably not surprisingly, that’s all that really mattered.

But here’s where it really matters. The last part of this story comes yesterday as I attended a funeral for my friend, Zach, who died two weeks ago following a car accident at the age of 24. If ever there was occasion to remember that young people are the present and not the future it is moments like these where we are smacked in the face with the reality that nothing is guaranteed. All week I had Martin Luther's death bed quote reverberating in my head, where he says, "We are beggars. This is true." The promise of the future is Jesus; not anything else--not a long life, not a life without grief--which is why relationships are of the utmost importance, because relationship is the only thing that can begin to chip away at despair in the face of death. Friends, “thy kingdom come!” is something every person in this world is praying in one way or another. We are all crying out, all hurting, all pained, all missing something. So, when I sat on the stage of the social hall at that church following that service with Alex, Zach's dad, a very good friend and mentor of mine, I felt the depths to which that relationship mattered, and it was proved in grief and loss. I couldn’t fix a thing but I could sit there with him because we had tested that relationship through experiences and built the trust needed to stare death in the face when nobody wanted to be there. We could say "I love you" and mean it because the groundwork was laid.

That’s our challenge as the church. Pray “thy kingdom come!” Then get to work. Because we aren’t bringing about the kingdom on our own—that’s God’s job—but we are invested in one another. The youth aren’t our future. Jesus is. The youth, and the young adults, and the older adults, and the children, and everybody in-between is our right now. Which means right now we have work to do.

Mission away / Mission at home

I’ve been on two trips in the last few weeks: Two separate “mission” trips—one to the Twin Cities, serving alongside an inter-generational crew for a couple days in St. Paul and Eagan, and one to northern Idaho serving alongside sixteen youth and 6 adults at a camp for kids (and adults) with special needs. These trips are inevitably the highlight of my year every year. I don’t have to go on these trips; I get to go on them. And they just so happen to be the A#1 time I get to see progress in the life of faith among people whom I pastor. They are incredibly rewarding: spiritually, emotionally, and also professionally. I have few metrics by which to reliably measure my performance as pastor, but these trips allow me to feel like I’m doing something right, which I need more often than I admit.

            There are also tremendous needs for service at home. This is very true. And I hear somewhat frequently about how we should be doing more for people in our own backyards (sometimes with the implication that these trips to other places are unnecessary). We absolutely do need to be helping people here in Kittson County more than we do, but the more I go on these trips the more I realize there is absolutely no substitute locally for what we experience outside of this place. Part of spiritual and emotional growth requires leaving our bubble of safety and comfort behind.

            This is also where we discover the big secret about serving other people: When we serve others we often make less difference in their lives than they make in ours. Jesus came to serve, not to be served, because the path to a good and meaningful life is being the server not the one being served. This is why so many people who receive something—food from the food pantry, rehabilitation from addiction, meals when a loved one dies—spend their time trying to pay that gift forward when things are settled again. When we receive some unmerited gift we feel compelled to give back, and the biggest unmerited gift was Jesus dying on the cross for us so that we might have salvation, and so our entire lives are spent living in response to that grace. Service is part of who we are. You might say it is all that we are.

A life of service

2 Samuel 6:1-5

This scripture about king David dancing in the streets seems like kind of a strange story for Confirmation Sunday except for one thing: David was king because that is the role God called him to. He lived to serve God. Serving God is basically what Confirmation day is all about. Now, you’re probably not chosen to be a king (honestly, we don’t have much use for any more of those). The truth is that most of you are going to end up doing work that the outside world undervalues. Most people in our church have fairly normal lives, by which I mean nobody is going to write a book about you. Having a family? Normal. Working a job for somebody else? Normal. Sitting down for coffee with friends? Normal.

            None of us are Iron Man. That would be exciting. Probably you are just going to shop at the Farmer’s Store, or another similar place somewhere else in the world, and you’ll go home to supper and your favorite TV shows. If you compare yourselves to king David we’re going to come up looking seriously under-productive.

            But, here’s the thing: God doesn’t really care about that. God calls us to serve in different ways, but he calls all of us. More than that, the person serving in a perfectly normal role—who is actually living this life that looks so un-exceptional to the outside world—often finds exceptional joy and fulfillment in it. As much as we remember David, most of the good things we recall happen before he was king—when he was a normal shepherd boy. That’s when he defeated Goliath with a sling and a lion with a staff. When David does well it is because he is a servant, and when he does poorly it’s because he fails to be a servant. This is all God is ever calling us to be—to enter into servitude for the sake of a world that needs it.

            So your perfectly normal life to somebody on the outside might be exactly the kind of life that God would look at and say, “Well done. Well done.”

Becoming servants (and other surprisingly good things)

Mark 10:35-45

This sermon was offered as guest preacher at Pembina Lutheran Church for their Confirmation service.
 

Last year it was a privilege to have several of your youth in our Confirmation classes, including the three who will be confirmed today. And though Confirmation classes can sometimes feel like herding cats I can assure you that none of them were quite as brazen as James and John. None of them came out and said, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” I mean, that’s pretty presumptuous, and not just Midwestern-Scandinavian-Lutheran presumptuous either. It takes a whole other level of gumption to order Jesus around like that. We all pretty much know that if somebody comes up to us and says, “I want you to promise to do something” before explaining what that something is, then that something is probably not something we’re going to want to do.

            Jesus, being the pretty smart guy (not to mention Son of God) that he is, realizes this and redirects them to what they actually want, and what they actually want is a promise that they will one day sit on his right and left hand in the kingdom of God. In other words, if Jesus is king, then they will be the next in line, the highest among the rest.

            OK, let’s pause there, because even though we might bristle at the way James and John go about asking, we nevertheless tend to think about Confirmation as something like the process of earning our seats at the right and left hand of Jesus. Maybe that’s not exactly the image we have of it, but in one way or another we understand Confirmation to be the moment where we bask in the reflected glory of Jesus, having done our homework, checked a few boxes, and earned the right to become members of the church. So we parade you up here before the congregation (all robed in white, no less!) as if we are graduating you from the church (which for too many of you is exactly what you think it is), and we give the impression that this is what the life of faith is all about. We give the impression that the important things are A) that you’ve done your homework, and B) that from now on you’ll be able to say that you are members of Pembina Lutheran Church, no matter how often, or how rarely, you come back.

Loving strangers: even when it's every tent for one's self

Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7

This is the perfect Biblical story for a day in which we are imagining what intergenerational relationships look like because you don’t get much more inter-generational than one-hundred-year-old-ish first-time parents.

I mean, if you get past the miracle of giving birth at 90 years old, which admittedly is a huge stumbling block, it’s natural to wonder what it would be like for a couple of people in their 100s to raise a child. I’m pushing 30 and some days it feels difficult.

More than that, this is a story of radical hospitality. Welcoming three strangers—three foreigners—lays the groundwork for Abraham to receive the promise of an heir. These men who stand as God before him, and whom Abraham serves without any indication of reward, become agents of grace who offer Abraham an impossible gift. Does Abraham receive the promise of Isaac because of he treated the Lord in the right way? We don’t know. But we do know that he quite literally lives out the reality of Hebrews 13:2, which )warns not to “neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”

The morals for us are many. Obviously we are called to be hospitable to strangers and to take care of the needy, and this is ever starker given the context. Abraham and Sarah are on their own. There is no nation. Israel, you might remember, is the name given to the grandson of Abraham and Sarah. There are no Hebrews; no ethnic brothers and sisters. This is the beginning of all that. Before Abraham and Sarah it was every tent to themselves.

And yet, here they are practicing a radical kind of hospitality.

Sheep are silly

Scripture: Matthew 25:31-46

This morning I’m going to serenade you with two classic ballads of the Christian faith. Each is as deeply serious as it is theologically rich. The first is entitled “Sheep Are Silly” and it goes something like this:

Sheep are silly! (Silly?) Silly, my friend.

Sheep are silly! (Silly?) Silly, my friend.

They need a shepherd. (A shepherd?) To keep them alive.

They need a shepherd (A shepherd?) To help them survive.

Sheep are silly! Silly, my friend.

And the verse ends with an invitation that all of you associate with deep religious motivation: “Get silly!”

            The second song is perhaps even more familiar, and potentially life-changing (I hope I’m not overselling this). And it goes something like this:

            I just wanna be a sheep. Bah! Bah! Bah! Bah!

            I just wanna be a sheep. Bah! Bah! Bah! Bah!

            And I pray the Lord my soul to keep

            I just wanna be a sheep. Bah! Bah! Bah! Bah!

Now there’s once verse in particular of this classic that applies to today and it goes like this:

            I don’t want to be a goat. Nope.

            I don’t want to be a goat. Nope.

            Because goats ain’t got no hope.

            I don’t want to be a goat. Nope.

            I just wanna be a sheep. Bah! Bah! Bah! Bah!

Etc, etc, etc.

I’m tempted to preach no further, instead allowing you to reflect on the depth of the lyrics of Sheep are Silly! and I just Wanna Be a Sheep, but you’re not paying me only to make a mockery of myself up here, so let me expound on the sheepy song silliness for a second,

            There are two things I actually like quite a lot about these songs anyway when it comes to their interplay with the parable of the sheep and the goats from Matthew’s Gospel. This is a hard, hard, hard parable, and these songs are immeasurably silly. That’s a point in their favor, because to the question, “Is everything a joke to you?” the only correct answer is ever, in the immortal words of Stephen Fry, “Only the things that matter.”

Why this youth trip meant more to me

For all I write I'm usually not very personal. This is mostly by design. I mean, I never much cared for pastors who preached all about their own lives, and I'm not much into self-promotion on the blog. There is a danger in not talking about myself--at a certain point I lose my humanity and become a thinking-head, a writing-automaton. It's posts like this that will hopefully keep me from becoming that. This is going to be more personal than most, and for that I do not apologize in the slightest.

This year marked my third mission trip/service trip/cultural immersion/whatever you want to call what we do with our high school youth each summer (personally I prefer service trip, generally, though this year was more of a cultural immersion). And this year was different than every other year--as it tends to be. Some parts were rough; some parts were great. We persevered and had what I would consider a great trip.

But the reason this trip meant more to me than years' past had little to do with what we actually did. It had far more to do with the relationships built over the course of three years, and (maybe more importantly) it had everything to do with the roller coaster ride I've been on professionally since Natalie was born. Things have been fine at home, but my time and energy has been sapped, and we have had a string of rather serious events in the life of our parish since I returned to the job in April. A change of secretary was tough, especially given the circumstances, then a spate of deaths, including a suicide of a man with a young family and a murder involving family of our congregation were tougher. Finally, in the last month we've lost a couple members who lived good long lives, but, frankly, they always made me happy to visit and, selfishly, I was very sad to see them go.

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.

Bike tour, church, and the collision of passion

            And we’re off! Well, almost. On May 8^th I’ll be heading to Turtle River, Minnesota and the start of a week-long bicycle ride across the NW Minnesota Synod of the ELCA to bring attention and raise money for hunger-related causes. It’s been quite the undertaking already. There was route planning and lodging and meals. Then there were the events along the way. We’ll be having concerts, a film screening in a local theater, a hunger simulation, programs on Indian Reservations and local schools, roundtables with local governmental and church leaders, a mini bike tour of Bemidji, visits to food shelves, and worship services all along the way.

            In short, this has been a lot of work even before turning over the first pedal. But it’s also been the best kind of work because it’s been people who are passionate, finding the intersection of things they believe in. In all, we’ve had around 100 people in on planning local events, and many more on the various moving parts of putting the whole picture together.

            For me, it is an important reminder that when we find things that we are passionate about the work doesn’t feel like work. I’ve seen that in the Cornerstone Food Pantry closer to home. The amount of hours that have gone into making that a success and the continuous resources that go into it are difficult to fathom, but it’s where peoples’ passions lie. Nobody complains because there is nothing they’d rather be doing.

            I wish we could be this passionate about everything else we do. It’s tough. I mean, nobody gets as excited for a church council meeting as we do for a bike tour meeting or a food pantry shift and I don’t expect that to be the case. But I wonder if what we do as church shouldn’t be feeding the same kinds of passions. This is no knock on people (least of all those who are already serving!); it’s a knock on the church’s ability to address the serious needs and desires of human beings.

Service is a joy and those who think differently haven't tried it

Scripture: John 13:1-17

            I was given orders this week to make this as short a sermon as possible [since we're showing off a baby at church and that's going to take some time]. But part of my job is to not always give you exactly what you want but what you need to hear, so consider this your Lenten discipline for the day—that can wait. Although, come to think of it, this whole baby thing does kind of color everything I read here—like I can no longer read Jesus saying “Not all of you are clean” without resisting the urge to point at Natalie, because I know different.