At camp, we go!

2023 Summer Staff Commissioning -- Preached June 3-4, 2023 @ First Lutheran, Decorah

 Matthew 28:16-20

Fittingly, the scripture readings for today are about both the great outdoors and great work. Psalm 8 tells us that God’s majesty is a reflection of the majesty of creation, which is something that I feel deep in my soul whenever I am climbing a hill and anticipating the view of the world below. Hopefully, you can slow down enough to experience the wonder of the earth and the heavens as a window into God’s playground. I could preach only on this today and have plenty to say. But even better, we mark the Holy Trinity this weekend with Matthew’s Great Commission, which takes all that business about the outdoors and the world and tells us, “Get to work!” Which is great, because right now, at camp, let me tell you, there is a lot of work to do!

And since there is a lot to do, I am in the mindset to focus on the verbs—the specific actions Jesus expects of us. There are five of them—five verbs of the Great Commission—five directives for Christians to accomplish while passing through this big, beautiful world. Those five verbs are: Make disciples, baptize, teach, and remember… I never claimed I was good at counting. Make disciples, baptize, teach, and remember… what did I forget?

Oh, yes, GO! It is the one that Lutherans seem to skip over if we’re being honest. We are great at baptizing. We baptize babies and adults and everybody in-between; we baptize as a reflection of God’s grace poured out for us, and man, do I believe God is pleased with how we baptize! And what about teaching? Holy cow, do we teach well! We have one of these incredible institutions of Lutheran teaching here in Decorah in Luther College. And they might not like me telling you this, but Lutherans teach so well that there are many options for higher learning with a Lutheran heritage—places with names like Wartburg, Augustana, Augsburg, Concordia, St. Olaf, Gustavus, Grand View, Carthage, Midland—and those are just the ones you could drive to today! My wife, Kate, would be very disappointed with me if I didn’t mention Wittenberg—the point is that there are a lot of these places! We teach really well. We teach the faith. And, as I remember so well from my days at Augustana College (now University, go Augie!), we ask the question, “How then shall we live?” I have to believe Jesus is pleased with this.

We also remember well. Here’s how I know this: Some of you enjoy eating lutefisk. There is no godly reason in the year of our Lord 2023, when you all have refrigerators in your houses and in your garages, coolers in the pickup, and ice on demand at every gas station in every town, that you should be eating air-dried cod soaked in lye. But some of you do. In fact, you have convinced yourself you like it, and that is of course not because of the taste or the texture, but because you remember! And that memory is valuable. Your heritage matters. You have a whole weekend at the end of July dedicated to Norwegian heritage, and I’ve been told it’s kind of a big deal. Whether you are Norwegian or some other variety of Europeans, or like some of our staff you come from a place like Mexico or Guyana or somewhere else really unique, it is good to remember where you are from! Perhaps you also remember the liturgy of your grandparents, which flows like a river from the time of those first churches in Acts, using language from places exactly like Matthew 28. We recognize this commission because we remember, and I believe Jesus would be quite pleased with this act of memory.

We also make disciples. This is trickier. I hear enough about how we are not making enough disciples. We mourn the grown kids who no longer participate in the life of the church, wondering what else we could be doing to keep them in the fold, concerned we did something wrong. Yes, we make disciples, but perhaps we haven’t yet stumbled upon the best program or the right preacher, or… you fill in the blank.

Hmmm…

I want to pause there for a moment, because I believe our challenge in disciple-making is directly connected with our inability to hear the first verb in the Great Commission. We skip over to baptizing and teaching and remembering, and we struggle with disciple-making because we haven’t gone anywhere. We have waited for folks to come to us. We have sat in our pews faithfully on Sunday mornings, wondering why new folks don’t show up. And I get it—it’s hard to know what it means to GO! I suspect that knocking on doors and telling people about Jesus would get poor results in Decorah in 2023. I don’t know—perhaps we should ask the Jehovah’s Witnesses how it’s going—and maybe we’ll learn something. Regardless, we must go somewhere to see about this disciple-making business.

But I fear I’ve misled you now in the same way we have often failed to tell the bigger story of our faith, because the church is already going many places. What if I told you that that whole narrative about Lutherans struggling to go anywhere is completely bogus? What if I told you that you have been making many disciples in the last century? What if I told you that Lutherans have been on the cutting edge of evangelism and continue to make huge strides in going out into the world today? I know this is hard for some of you to stomach because Lutherans and cutting edge are not necessarily words you have been taught to associate, but that’s somebody’s fault who is stuck on the idea of church as the building.

Because do you know where your church is going out into the world? Well, I know one huge place where this is happening, and it is in camping ministry. And this is not just the work of some young adults… and it’s not just the work of some adults like me who never outgrow it, this is your work, because we are part of the very same body of Christ. (Can I get an Amen?)

Now, I am going to lob one big criticism at the ELCA here regarding how we talk about church. There is this common line in the ELCA said by churchwide and Synods and regurgitated in congregations by pastors who really hope that their people understand how they are part of a wider church. The line is that we are a church with three expressions—churchwide (the folks who exist to be grumbled at by everybody), Synods (the folks who exist to deal with congregations grumbling about churchwide), and congregations (God’s gift to the universe who never have problems /s). Now, I humbly ask, “Where does outdoor ministry fit into those three expressions?” Because we are none of those. We are not financially supported by churchwide or Synods; we are not a congregation that baptizes and confirms. Instead, we are lumped into a category of “affiliated ministries,” which makes it sound like we a small side venture loosely associated with the church.

 The effect has been that the ELCA has hidden in plain sight its strongest evangelism arm, and you all have been told in varying ways that Lutherans stink at going out and making disciples, because the method that has been incredibly successful at disciple-making is not even considered an expression of the church! So, let us all thank God that God is not limited by how we describe the function and reach of the church. God has been meeting people at Ewalu and countless other outdoor ministries, and disciples are being made every single day every single summer. Lutherans are not the first or only religious organization to do this through camping ministries, but we have done a magnificent job of crafting camping ministries that take kids and young adults out of their normal and instilling in them a fire for faith that comes alive under the open skies.

At camp, we GO! We go out into a world and meet young people who need to know that there is more to life than their cell phones and computer screens; that there is a story that they are a part of that makes whatever they are binging on Netflix look pretty meager by comparison. We make disciples by going out into the beauty of creation and allowing kids the space to engage in holy play. They are free to explore, to ask questions in a safe place where God is not used to enforce conformity but where God meets them and shapes them where they are. And then, something incredible happens. Those campers and counselors and volunteers get to work.

The great criticism of the Lutheran faith has often been that because we proclaim a salvation by grace that is so all-encompassing, we therefore do not demand much from our people. At some point, our prospective disciples have asked, “What do I need to do to be saved?” And we have responded, “Nothing.” And they’ve said, “OK, check.” And they’ve turned to their sports and video games to pass the time until they have a family, and then they turn to their family to give them joy and a purpose in life, since their salvation is taken care of.

At camp, we proclaim the very same God who died for our sake and rose so that we may be saved by grace through faith apart from the works of the law, and yet, we have 45 young adults who have come back to us this summer to work long hours for a pittance of a wage with a lot of responsibility on hot summer days. Why? Why do they do this?

For two main reasons: 1) The power of a devoted community in Christ, and 2) Because we were made for meaningful work. In a world that tells us that we are supposed to spend our youth putting ourselves in a position either to earn the most money possible or to find the fastest way possible out of work, camp teaches something different, which is this: God calls us to good work in community, and good work in good company is holy and meaningful and it will stick with you.

So, at camp we GO! We make disciples.

Now, let me be clear: I am not saying you should be changing yourselves to be more like camp. Rather, I am saying you are doing this work already! You are instrumental to this work! So, by all means, imagine how you can do more of the work of going out into your community and making disciples locally, but don’t for a second think you have failed in this work so far! When I sat around the campfire last summer and watched the good work of these summer staff, mentoring, shepherding, counseling these young kids, praying for them, showing them they care, I know that Jesus is smiling. I know we are doing the great work of the Great Commission. And I want you to know that work is happening through your efforts, even if you don’t see it. It is happening and it is great!

So, let me conclude with the best news: You are saved by grace through faith, so you are set free to do this work with abandon. You are not being judged on whether you do enough, but instead you are called to follow into giving more than you ever expected you can give. When you give more, you will discover that joy keeps on coming; it is inexhaustible like that living water that Jesus promised the woman at the well.

So, let’s all GO! Each in our own ways, doing great work together for the sake of a world that needs it. After all, God is doing it already! Join in! In whatever way you can. Then, at the end, take a moment to soak in this wonderful world that bears testimony to this God we worship together, sit around a campfire or out on the deck, breathe in the free air. You didn’t have to do a thing, but you chose to… because we are itching to go!