Generational lines, "All Star" clergy, and reaching the aliens

Scripture: Jeremiah 1:4-10, 7:1-11
The following is a transcript

I'm going to start with a little poll. How many of you are subscribers or regular readers of The Lutheran magazine? Anybody here? Alright, we have some people who read The Lutheran. For those of you who do not (or for those that do but did not read this month's issue) they had a big issue on the clergy retirement wave, and the age demographics of clergy (and implicitly also congregations) in the ELCA. This became something of a controversial issue, because never did they say anything negative about the next generation--my generation--of clergy, but they did kind of imply things--like we're in the process retiring the "All Star team" of clergy. That's a message that many of us heard loud and clear, saying "Oh, so we're the minor league team, I guess." What ended up happening was a lot of good discussion already--and I expect more in the future. But what came up more than anything else is a sense of frustration at how easily we fracture along those lines of demographics and age.

So this call of Jeremiah that we read about today is a call to somebody who is extremely young. I think we fool ourselves if we think that God only calls people that are extremely young, but we also fool ourselves if we think that the only people who ever receive worthy calls from God are in their 50s and 60s and 70s. I think that God calls people of all sorts. There's no such thing in God's mind as too young or too old. In fact, in the Jeremiah reading God says that he set him apart before he was even born.

As a church we tend to separate. We tend to make youth groups and Sunday Schools, MOPS for young mothers, Bible studies for women--Faith Journey and our Wednesday morning group--and we have our quilting groups, and a lot of these are groups that are separate by age. They aren't all officially that way, but they just kind of end up happening. A by-product of this is that we actually have very few ways that our stories are told across generations. This is something we talked a lot about when we had our Vibrant Faith morning, did our inter-generational Sunday School, and all that. One of our problems that we have as a churchwide organization is that demographically we are getting, shall we say, long in the tooth. There are a lot of churches that are riding that clergy retirement wave that The Lutheran is talking about. It is true that there are many more pastors that are in their 60s than pastors that are in their 20s.

This is really only a problem, however, when our churches are not representative of our communities. Are we representative of the people of this county? In some ways yes, and in some ways no. That's where our churches can slide into a very comfortable place. If our churches only serve the people who look like us, act like us, and talk like us then we are always going to be missing out on what our mission should be.

Jeremiah talks about the alien in this reading from Jeremiah 7. Now this is not extraterrestrial alien, nor necessarily only the kind of alien we hear about on the news with immigration and those kinds of things. He says, “If you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place." I want to suggest that the alien is sometimes the person who just isn't here. The alien is the person who doesn't think or act like us, and so doesn't feel welcome here. That maybe the person we need to be welcoming is the person who doesn't agree with us, because, by definition, outsiders think and act differently from us which is the reason they aren't here in the first place. Those are the kinds of people we need to be welcoming here.

Now, this isn't only an age thing, but it is an age thing in part. I do a lot of premarital counseling with young couples, and one of the interesting things about young couples when they do this inventory I assign them is how the respond in the category of "Spiritual Beliefs." By and large these are couples who are not actively involved in the church--some are but most aren't--so you would think that couples who do not regularly attend church and have no formalized, communal faith backing at the moment would score pretty low when it came to the spiritual beliefs scale. In fact, it's often the opposite. Much of the time the couples who have no church home at the moment are exactly the couples who end up answering positively to the question, "Do you consider God to be the center of your relationship?" A lot of them say, "Yes."

Which is really interesting because it means that it's not that they don't have a desire for faith, but instead that, for whatever reason, the homes we have created for faith just aren't connecting with their desires. We may know this already but it is very interesting. Part of the reason for this, I want to suggest, is because we have a generational disconnect. We don't actually connect much with one another except for those people who are like us--who are similar in age, or are part of our families, or in some way have similar experiences to our own. That's one area where we need to work on welcoming the outsider.

And, importantly, we're not only doing it for their sake. I think we think this a lot--that they need to be part of our church for their sake. That might be true on some level, but what's much more important for us is that we need them--and we need them not because we need to make them more like us (actually quite the opposite), we need them because they expand the body of Christ. The body of Christ is all of us, and not just the people here but also the people at the margins; the people who challenge our faith and make us better people.

So when Jeremiah brings this temple sermon it's not a very positive sermon. This is typical of Jeremiah; in fact most of the book of Jeremiah is the prophet convicting Israel and Judah of their many sins; but what Jeremiah does that we sometimes miss is that he does not condemn individuals. We read this through our individual lens and think, "Oh, Jeremiah's condemning me if I individually do not welcome the outsider," etc. That's not how the prophets generally work. They typically bring judgments against communities and nations. They say, "You as a community have failed." And the repercussions of this are, in Jeremiah's case, the kingdom was conquered by an enemy. Now, I'm not too worried about Canada coming down and taking us over--it could happen I suppose--but I'm thinking that's probably not our worry. But I am worried that sometimes we have gotten complacent, and in our complacency we have let people slip through the cracks. And in that way the people who are slipping through the cracks are the very people who we need to keep ourselves vibrant, that those are the very people we need to be a better church. If we're doing that then it's of our own doing that we are losing our vitality.

Prophets bring a mentality of mission. Mission is one of those words that we use in the church and it kind of goes over our heads, like what on earth does that mean? Mission means that we have a purpose for what it is that we are doing. That we're not just doing things willy-nilly, or because it's how we've always done it that way, or because the pastor decided, or the council voted, but because the council actually prayed over, thought upon, dwelt in these ideas; that the pastor dwelt in these ideas; that the congregation dwelt in these ideas, and they said, "Yes, that's who we are." And if we can claim that that is who we are, then that's where the prophets are calling us. It's scary and it's messy. Welcoming the margins means change and all sorts of things we don't like because, by definition, people at the margins are different from us (that's why they aren't here right now).

We do have hints of this already. Cornerstone Food Pantry is in its third year serving the margins of our community, and if you don't think that the people who come to Cornerstone are a part of this church then I think you need to widen your view of what church is. They are a part of this church. They might not be members--I don't know that any of them are--but they are a part of this church because they are served by us and many of them want to give back and serve when they have the opportunity themselves. We have this with MOPS, which is a new thing around here and is serving a demographic that is in need of new opportunities for fellowship. We have it with council meetings where we've embedded faith practices in new ways; we have it with our women's Bible studies and our quilting, and all the ministries of our church that continue on with a sense of purpose, making us who we are. Now what I hope we can imagine is how we can be even more by pushing those margins and meeting people who are not like us, who look a little less like us.

That's kind of scary and we have a lot way to go, but we do have this promise. This is what the prophets bring: a word of condemnation but also a promise. And the promise in this case is that God will not forget us and will not let us go. That in our very act of falling apart God is there to bring resurrection to us. It just might hurt. And we might not like it. But that's OK. A lot of the time the things that hurt are the best for us in the long run. That's the promise God's bringing: that he's making all things new, and it's a rough promise for us, it's a tough promise for us; it's the kind of promise we don't always want to hear, but it's happening. It's happening here already. The question is how much we jump into it, or how much we rely on the prophets to drag us along kicking and screaming.