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.
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