Category: FPC Rolla

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Mark 9:38-50. The YouTube link (click on the image) should take you directly to the sermon.

Why do we make the choices we make? Seems like a simple enough question, right? Since the Enlightenment, we have thought of ourselves as rational creatures who mentally tally up the pros and cons of a given set of options, then choose the one that’s best. The reality is, most of the time, we don’t really know why we make a given choice. We may tell ourselves that we do, but the truth is, we often make a choice and THEN compose the rational justification.

A couple weeks ago, I told you the story about when I moved from Baldor to the University of Illinois. As I tell it, we analyzed our situation in Arkansas, evaluated our options, calculated the possibilities for advancement, and made a rational choice. It’s more accurate, though, to say that we had an emotional and spiritual yearning to be closer to family, and that when I was on campus for the interview, it just felt right. I essentially decided to take the job before it was offered, and then analyzed the offer in a way that would justify that choice.

In a recent column by David Brooks, he wrote, “One of the most unsettling findings of modern psychology is that we often don’t know why we do what we do.” There is on the one hand our conscious self, that part of us that talks and acts and interacts with other people, that we think of as our true self, that we think is in control. But I’ve read other authors describe our conscious self as a rider on an elephant. The rider can give nudges, but the elephant, which is our vast subconscious self, does most of the work and makes most of the choices. Brooks doesn’t like this conclusion. Like most of us, he feels like his conscious self is in control.

So he went looking for psychologists that could confirm this belief. That alone is a little problematic, but maybe a topic for another sermon on confirmation bias. Anyway, much of what he learned is that what we can actually control is our stories. Some stories are better than others, in the sense of being more accurate. Some stories are better than others, in the sense of being more useful for our future selves.

Here’s an example from the column. Suppose a man has a string of failed romantic relationships. One story he could tell himself is that he never got over someone who dumped him back in college. Another story he could tell himself is that he has a high level of neuroticism—a tendency to anxiety and self-doubt—that is disrupting his relationships. Both stories may have elements of truth to them, but they call for different solutions.

We are a story-telling species. What stories do we tell ourselves about this congregation? What story do you tell yourself about why you are here, and not somewhere else? Let me tell you a little bit of mine, and then we’ll see where it might take us in the future.

When we moved to Rolla, we decided it was time to make space in our lives for weekly worship. Sam was 7 and Jesse was 5. New town, new job, growing kids—time for a new approach to God. I had a few criteria, things I wouldn’t compromise on. My sister is a United Methodist pastor, and I grew up Methodist, so any church we attended would have to be accepting of women in the pulpit and be more-or-less in the same theological tradition as the Methodists. I had always attended a traditional worship service, so that’s what I was looking for—but not “high church.” I short-listed this church and First UMC. Our first visit was the Sunday after Christmas, figuring it wouldn’t be too crowded and overwhelming.

The greeter at the door was Rob Heberer. We had already met him—he lived three doors down from us and had come over to welcome us to the neighborhood. So that’s one plus. At some point, I think during the passing of the peace, Lowell Crow asked if I knew his daughter, Mariesa—well yeah, she was the chair of the search committee that hired me. So that’s two. At some point, perhaps during fellowship, we met Bob and Carlene May. We had just moved here from Mahomet, where we lived while I attended the University of Illinois, which is where Carlene grew up and Bob attended college. So that’s three.

There are lots of churches in Rolla. We differ dramatically in many ways: size, demographics, theology, worship style, schedule, programs. I think that’s great. Everyone needs to have a way to connect to God and to be a part of God’s family. Some people like pipe organs while other people like a rock band. Some people need certainty—to be told what to think and believe—while other people need freedom to question. Some people would never attend a church that allows a woman to preach, while others would never attend a church that excludes women from full participation in God’s ministry.

We all have our stumbling blocks, those things that stand between us and God. Often, the root of the obstacle lies deep within the elephant of our subconscious, and we build a story that satisfies us. For example, maybe you grew up with a rigid boundary between the secular and the sacred, and anything that makes that boundary a little squishy makes you feel a little squishy.

As you may recall, I was the chair of the Way Forward Committee for a while. We floated several different proposals, many of which related to restructuring the sanctuary. I’ll try not to get riled up here, but I have often called whoever designed this sanctuary a sadistic madman. Everything is crooked. There are no right angles, but instead things meet at 30 or 60 or 120 degrees. The pews are too long to really use completely, so everyone sits right on the aisle.

The other issue we have with the building is that the fellowship hall is the furthest point imaginable from the sanctuary. Getting to fellowship time after worship is a real chore, especially for the increasing number of congregants with mobility issues. Our fellowship time under the portico has been going OK, but I don’t know what we’ll do in November.

So we proposed to replace the pews with chairs and use the back half of the space for fellowship. Now, I expected there to be pushback over the pews vs. chairs. What I didn’t expect was the objection to the idea of fellowship in the sanctuary space. People would say, “What if someone takes coffee with them into the service?” And I thought, “Uh, then they’ll stay awake?” It took me a long time, and I still don’t completely understand, but it has to do with a certain understanding of proper decorum. It’s probably generational.

What I’m starting to grasp is that the people who objected weren’t making some rational evaluation, but instead had a deep reaction. To them, the only food that is appropriate in a sacred space is the communion elements. Anything else just feels wrong.

A few years ago, a group of us read through Christianity After Religion by Diana Butler Bass. At least I think that’s the book where I picked up this concept, which I also heard her give a talk about this past spring. She talks about the three B’s: belief, behavior, and belonging. Historically, that was the order: a person would come to a set of beliefs that were aligned with a particular church, start attending, start following its rules of behavior, and ultimately become a member. In her books, Bass writes that the order is reversed: first a person finds a church where they belong, then they adopt its written and unwritten rules of behavior, and then they gradually adopt its beliefs. More recently, Bass has said that it’s more of a triangle with multiple entry points and directions of development. Whatever. The point is, belief, behavior, and belonging are all important components of entering God’s realm through its expression in a particular congregation.

What I want to highlight is the importance of belonging. A podcast I listened to recently discussed the difference between belonging and fitting in. Fitting in is like wearing a mask. Not the kind of mask we’re all wearing to protect each other, but a mask like you would wear on Halloween. We all do that in different situations. I mean, I interact with Rhonda’s family much differently than with my own. When I go elk hunting, I’m careful to avoid politics, knowing that most of the guys would disagree with me on practically every topic. When I’m at the Mission, I’m a cook, not a professor, and actually I’ve been asked if I work as a cook somewhere.

Belonging, though, is bringing your whole self, and being accepted for who you are. When I’m here, I know that I’m valued as a beloved sibling in Christ. We may disagree about a lot of things, and there may be things that we just don’t discuss, but I know that you love me for who I am, for all of who I am. At the same time, I hope you all know that I love you, too, for all of who you are, including the parts I don’t know about. That is belonging. That is being a part of the body of Christ.

When we came that December Sunday so many years ago, we immediately felt that sense of belonging. But I think we all need to be aware that there are other people who would not feel that same sense. People who haven’t grown up in the church, and so they are unfamiliar with the music and the liturgy. People who don’t know what to wear, where to sit, or what to expect. People who have been hurt by other churches, for whatever reason, and need to heal in order to truly experience God’s love.

When Jesus told his disciples not to place stumbling blocks, he was talking about anything that creates an obstacle between us and God. Sin is ultimately about separation from God. The things we let come between us and God become idols. Anything that does not enable us to express our love for BOTH God AND neighbor blocks both relationships. What value does it have if it makes us comfortable while preventing us from fully embracing another beloved child of God?

Now, I’m not saying that we’re going to tear out the pews, put in chairs, and have fellowship in the back. I’ve set that aside in favor of other priorities, because that vision was becoming an obstacle between my congregational siblings and me. As long as I was thinking of people as pro-pew or pro-chair, I wasn’t thinking of them as pro-Christ. And that’s who we are, or at least who we need to be. Nothing should matter more than loving God and loving our neighbors. Everything we do should be an exhibition of God’s reign in our lives, and God’s love available to everyone. If anything—anything—is causing me to love someone else less, I need to set it aside. If anything—anything—is preventing people from encountering God through our congregation, we need to set it aside.

The question before us, individually and as a congregation, is this: What is blocking our ability to exhibit God’s reign to the people of Rolla and beyond? Or from another perspective, what is blocking our ability to see God in each person we meet? Those are two sides of the same coin. As members of Christ’s body, we need to enter fully into relationships with all other parts of Christ’s body. We must bring our full selves, and allow others to bring their full selves—even those parts we don’t like.

So, what are the stumbling blocks in your life? What parts of your life are you keeping God out of? What is preventing you from seeing the image of God in each person you meet? And how do you see those stumbling blocks reflected in the life of this congregation? Let us all seek to make our church more welcoming, and the path to God more clear, for all of God’s children in Rolla and beyond. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Preached on September 12, 2021, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Podcast linked below. Archived recording of live stream available:

---

Yesterday was the 20^th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Do you remember where you were? I sure do. At the time, I was working for Baldor and living in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The day before, Rhonda’s 6-year-old nephew, Zach, stopped breathing when he went in for a tonsillectomy. It turned out he had non-Hodgkins lymphoma. So the morning of 9/11, I took Rhonda and Sam, who was just over a year old, to the airport. Their plan was to fly to St. Louis via Dallas. On the way to Baldor from the airport, I heard the news about the attack. Rhonda didn’t hear until she went to the gate for her connecting flight and found everything shut down.

That was a turning point for my family. I wasn’t terribly happy with my work; we had few friends in Arkansas; and we were an 8-hour drive from the nearest family. I started looking for opportunities to move closer to family. What I found was a job at the University of Illinois as a research engineer. On paper, it made no sense to take the job. As I recall, it was about a 15% pay cut, with little hope of direct advancement. However, Champaign is much closer to where Rhonda’s family lives, and there were other opportunities for me. I went on to get my Ph.D. and wound up here. If I hadn’t taken that chance on the job at Illinois, who knows where life might have taken me?

Professors are generally pretty conservative. Not politically or socially, but in the sense that we don’t like change. I think the reason is that we are expected to take a lot of risks in our research, and so we “use up” all of our risk tolerance. We become reluctant to make any changes to the curriculum because there may be unforeseen side effects. We become hoarders, keeping old papers and journals and equipment that have long outlived their usefulness. We’re even reluctant to move to a better office or lab because it would mean changing our routines.

At some level, I think everyone is a bit like that. Everyone finds the things that make their life comfortable, and hold onto them long after they should. Eventually, though, life circumstances force a change. This pandemic has certainly caused a lot of people to consider changes that they wouldn’t consider otherwise.

Sometimes, our desire for change is brought on by an awareness of injustice, an awareness of the general brokenness of the world becoming particularly acute in a way that touches us personally. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a promising German academic and theologian. He studied in America at Union Theological Seminary under Reinhold Niebuhr, then returned to Germany in 1931 to become a lecturer at the University of Berlin. His career took a dramatic turn after Hitler was installed as Chancellor in 1933. He could not keep silent: he gave a radio address that warned against Germany become an idolatrous Nazi cult. Over the following decade, he worked with other leaders of the Confessing Church, which resisted Nazi efforts to impose their will on the Christian church in Germany. He traveled internationally and developed connections with the German resistance movement. He wrote The Cost of Discipleship, a meditation on the Sermon on the Mount that teaches the difference between “cheap grace” and “costly grace.” Eventually, he was arrested, sentenced to death, and hanged at a concentration camp.

Bonhoeffer’s life was changed because of his faith in God. He began his career as a theologian, an academic, someone like me who lived his faith in head space. After encountering the Social Gospel in his studies and starting ecumenical work to connect with other Christians, his faith moved to heart space. Rather than talking about God in the abstract, he was moved to live out Jesus’s calling to help the poor, the oppressed, the victims of our sinful world power structures.

In today’s passage, Jesus teaches his disciples that they must be willing to take risks for the sake of the gospel. What is the gospel, the good news that he taught? “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.” Jesus taught that it was time for the power structures of the world to be overturned so that everyone would live as part of God’s family. In God’s realm, nobody has power over anyone else. Only God’s authority matters.

Jesus knew that this was a dangerous path, though. Throughout the Gospel of Mark, a key theme is the “Messianic secret.” Jesus confirms that he is the Messiah, but then tells everyone to keep it a secret. He knows that openly challenging the secular and religious power structures of his day would lead to the “prophet’s reward”—that is, they will suffer as Jesus did, as Isaiah did, as so many of God’s messengers have throughout history. Like Bonhoeffer, challenging the authorities led most of the apostles to martyrdom.

History is filled with examples of people who took risks on behalf of the oppressed. Gandhi worked his whole life for the freedom of India, eventually succeeding at the age of 78. Martin Luther King, Jr., led the Black civil rights movement until he was assassinated at the age of 39. The 14^th Dalai Lama has been working for the independence of Tibet throughout seven decades of exile. Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela worked for years to end the apartheid regime in South Africa, succeeding in 1990.

But rarely are there single events that change the world. The reality is that India’s independence was followed by years of struggle, the partition into India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and strife between religious and ethnic groups that continues today. The civil rights movement of the 1960s ended legal segregation, but the struggle for equality continues today, as evidenced by the Black Lives Matter protests of the past few years.

As you know, my personal calling is to reconciliation with and ministry to the LGBTQ+ community. The major turning point in the fight for gay rights was the Stonewall Uprising, a response to police harassment at gay bars in New York City. On June 27, 1969, there was a police raid at the Stonewall Inn. After midnight, tensions boiled over and a riot began. This wasn’t the beginning of the gay rights movement, and certainly wasn’t the end, but it was a turning point: a time when LGBTQ+ individuals refused to submit to persecution. Over the next several nights, there were continuing skirmishes between gay activists and the police. A year later, the first Pride parade was held in New York. Gay activists had decided that the risks brought on by open demonstration were preferable to the risks of living in the shadows.

It was another 45 years, though, before gay marriage became legal, and there are still ongoing legal battles over gay and transgender rights. For example, did you know that it is still legal in Missouri to refuse employment or housing because of a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity? Every year, the Missouri legislature considers the Missouri Nondiscrimination Act, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to Missouri’s Human Rights Act. MONA, as it is known, was first introduced in 1998, and every year it inches a little closer to passing but has never broken through.

Some people that I deeply respect have commended me for the little that I do to support the LGBTQ+ community. As a middle-class, cisgender, heterosexual, white man, I have choices. Should I work for women’s rights, or do anti-racism work, or work for gay and transgender rights? Or help the poor or homeless? Or none of the above? America’s systems and power structures have been built by and for people like me, so I could just live my life and let someone else worry about all of the injustices in the world. But the Holy Spirit is nudging me to act.

My decision to help the LGBTQ+ community wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing, though. Susan started laying groundwork almost ten years ago. Then I educated myself. I went to Pride STL. I read books and articles. I met with gay individuals to learn about their experiences. I attended lobbying days with PROMO to work towards passage of MONA. Eventually, I took a leap and created LGBTQ+ Rolla as a nonprofit organization and attracted some others who had similar interests to get things going.

Now, I have a vision of what this organization could become, but I am trying to stay aware of two basic facts. One, it’s not for me, it’s for the queer community, and they probably don’t need what I think they need. Two, it will only succeed if we grow in the way God intends. The Holy Spirit blows where it will, and like sailboats on the sea, we reach our destination faster if we let the wind take us than if we fight against it to go our own way.

There are risks to creating and helping to lead an LGBTQ+ organization in a town like Rolla. Before our Pride event, I worried a lot about hecklers or protesters or worse. I would like to see us have an LGBTQ+ center, that is, a place where people can go for resources and a sense of community, but such a place could also become a target of hate. I don’t have any serious risk of losing my job, but there is a risk to my reputation. I suppose someday, you all could tell me to stop talking and preaching about it, which would be unfortunate but not the end of the world. One thing I do encounter is people assuming that I’m gay because I wear rainbow jewelry. Well, that just gives me the tiniest glimpse into the world of discrimination that gay and transgender individuals face.

Life is full of risks, though. Our choice, as individuals and as a congregation, is which risks we are willing to take for the sake of growth. John A. Shedd once said, “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” We can stay safe where we are—physically and spiritually—or live into God’s call.

You know what, though? A ship in harbor is not necessarily safe. One danger is that when the storms come, the wind and the surge will drive it into the docks and pilings. Boats are made to survive their encounters with water, not land. Another danger is slow decay. When I was sailing with my dad, each time we came into a harbor, we would see boats tied to moorings that had clearly been there a long time—too long, long enough that they probably couldn’t ever leave.

As individuals and as a church, we can stay safely where we are. We can choose to ignore the needs of the world. We can slowly rot away on our moorings, waiting for the next storm to destroy us. Or, we can invest time and energy into maintaining our spiritual lives, making sure we are ship shape. We can study God’s word, and then put it to work in the world. We can go where the wind of the Holy Spirit takes us. When the storms of life come along, we will find ourselves tested, but ready.

No reward comes without some risk. We may be uncomfortable with necessary changes. We may lose friends who aren’t willing to grow along with us. We may need to let go of ideas, attitudes, activities, and commitments that we thought were serving us well but that are blocking us from going where God is leading. But in exchange, we will experience deeper connections to each other and to all of God’s people. We will become fuller participants in God’s family. We will exchange contentment and comfort for a deep joy in doing God’s will.

Are you ready? The challenge before us is to embrace God’s call, to let go of our past and even our present in order to fully live into the future that God has in mind for us. May we all work together towards that future where this church is a place of renewal and refueling to go do God’s work, to go out into our community showing our love of God by our love of our neighbors, enabling each person to see that they are a beloved child of a God who cares about their whole being: mind, body, and spirit.

We turn now to the Table of our Lord. Work requires energy, and spiritual work requires spiritual energy. At our Lord’s Table, we are renewed and refueled. As we have been nourished by the reading and preaching of God’s Word, let’s now be nourished by a greater awareness of God’s presence, strengthened and energized to follow where the Holy Spirit is leading us, to put the Word to work in the world.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:47-58; Proverbs 9:1-6.

---

Dan Brown wrote a series of books about Robert Langdon, a fictional Harvard University professor of religious iconology and symbology. In The Lost Symbol, Langdon tells his class, “Don’t tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh.” Of course the students are horrified. He continues, “And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion.”

I imagine that Jesus’s audience responded something like those students. We can connect this passage to communion, where the bread symbolizes Jesus’s flesh and the wine or juice symbolizes Jesus’s blood—just symbols. But if we imagine ourselves as Jesus’s followers, we would probably be disgusted at the thought of eating our leader. It’s just a strange passage.

The Gospel of John is heavy on symbolism, though. So let’s go ahead and make that connection to communion. In John’s rendering of the Last Supper, there is no explicit Eucharistic verse, so this is it.

Communion is a time when we eat bread and drink wine or juice as a way of becoming more Christ-like. That is, it allows us to connect to God in a more tangible and tactile way. It allows us to get out of our heads and into our hearts and our bodies. It reminds us that our spiritual lives need nourishment just as our bodies need nourishment.

By consuming the elements, we get a little more Christ in us. We become a little more aligned with God’s purpose and will. It’s a little bit like the way my friend Wayne prepares for elk season. In these last few months before the hunt, he makes sure to eat some of the elk meat in his freezer, so he has more elk molecules in him. That way he’s more elk-like, so he can think like an elk. As we consume the communion elements, we become more Christ-like. And we are reminded that Jesus was not only God, but also human, flesh and blood just like us.

The Gospel of John, or at least parts of it, were popular with the Gnostics. Gnosticism asserted a dualism in which things of the spirit were superior to things of the flesh. They believed that human beings contain a divine spark within themselves, but that all physical matter is subject to decay, rotting, and death. The material world was created by an inferior being and is evil. Here, though, Jesus is elevating the status of his body, and by extension the material world. He is affirming the importance of the material world, our life in the present age, as a way of becoming more Christ-like and more aligned with God’s will for us.

Last week, we heard from Tonya Johnson about the ways Presbyterian Children’s Homes and Services is impacting broken families. As she said, research shows that children of abuse have the best lives when their past is acknowledged honestly, rather than pushed down and “forgotten.” Jesus’s body mattered. Our bodies matter. Each of us has a story that brought us to where we are today, and that affects our relationships with each other and with God. Jesus’s message of love and reconciliation was about healing the brokenness of our world, not abandoning the material world in favor of a purely spiritual existence.

There was a recent column in The Christian Century titled, “Where is my love to go?” It relates the author’s interaction with a Christian ed class in which he shared the “big reveal” about Christianity: When God settled on the single most significant thing of all, it turned out that thing was being with us as a human being just like us. Not to change us, but simply to be with us. This teaches us that relationship is not just the way God does or communicates something more important, but is what God is. This didn’t sit well with one group member. He became increasingly agitated as he described a life of broken relationships. He had lost his partner, his family, even his dog. “Where is my love to go?” The author took a chance and responded:

Imagine eternity from God’s point of view. Imagine God having all that love pent up like you have right now. But the difference is, God’s got that love all pent up potentially forever. God’s like you. God’s thinking, ‘Where’s my love to go?’ So God creates the universe. But God’s got still more love to give. So God creates life, and makes humanity, and calls a special people. But that’s still not enough. God’s got yet more love to give. So God comes among us as a tiny baby. God’s question ‘Where is my love to go?’ is perhaps the most important one of all time. Half the answer is the creation of the universe. The other half is the incarnation. On Christmas Day we find out why the universe was created. It was created for us to be the place where God’s love could go. So when you ask yourself, ‘Where’s my love to go?’ you’re getting an insight into the very heart of God.

Samuel Wells

Jesus came to dwell among us so that he could truly experience that loving relationship with humanity. God does not just dwell in the highest heavens, removed from the messiness of life. God is here, among us by the Holy Spirit. God came down as a human to love us in a personal way, so that we could all learn just what it is to love God and love one another.

Paul describes the church as the body of Christ. That is, Jesus was killed, then rose and ascended, leaving his disciples behind to continue his work. We are the inheritors of that legacy, charged with continuing to be Christ’s body in the world. Jesus circulated throughout Galilee, Judea, and adjacent regions, meeting people of varying backgrounds, preaching a message of reconciliation, forgiveness of sins, and social transformation. So also we are called to be like Jesus, going forth to share this same message. Two millennia have not achieved the social transformation set forth in the Gospels, because every step forward towards equality before God has been met with resistance by those who are perfectly happy with the status quo. So we must continue to learn from Jesus and work towards the peaceable kingdom he described. We must continue to spread the good news of God’s kin-dom and work towards uniting all of God’s people. I read a great quote from Kat Armas on Clergy Coaching Network:

Jesus didn’t ask to be let into people’s hearts; he told them to follow him—dedicating his life to the most vulnerable in society. Following Jesus wasn’t a call to a private piety disconnected from society. Following Jesus was relational, social, and it involved justice.

Kat Armas on Clergy Coaching Network

This is incarnational ministry. That’s kind of a buzzword these days. The goal of incarnational ministry is to live as Christ’s body. This is a part of the PC(USA) Vital Congregations initiative. The core of incarnational ministry is an outward focus: understanding that we live in a world where people are hurting, due to poverty, racism, discrimination, and isolation. The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t create disparities in society, but it exacerbated them. The world is hurting. The time we have together is an opportunity to be fed by Christ, so that we have the spiritual energy, wisdom, and love that are needed to go out and help in the work God is doing.

One danger in incarnational ministry is to rely too much on our own ideas. I think that’s a particular danger for me, personally, thinking back on some of the ministries I have tried that didn’t work out. Perhaps they were good ideas, but they weren’t God’s ideas. It is essential that Christ is in us, but also that we are in Christ. That means going where God is leading us, not where we imagine that God would probably want us to go. We are right now working through a process that may lead to new ministries or new ways to be the church. Many of us are reading a book that was recommended by Greg Emery called Neighborhood Church, which contains many examples of churches deciding to do something new as they adopted an outward, incarnational focus. But it’s not an instruction book. We cannot simply read about something another church is doing, then say, “Hey, we can do that. Let’s go!”

Truly incarnational ministry is relational. It involves getting out and meeting people where they are, learning about their challenges, and seeing where God is at work. I had an excellent conversation the other day with a colleague who is doing anti-racism work. Like me, he is a straight, white, middle-class, educated man. He commented that his perspective has really changed by spending time with people who are not like him. Part of his challenge, though, is to get people in his circle to also get out and spend time with people who are different. If your only knowledge of Black people, or Hispanics or Muslims or Chinese nationals, is what you see on the news or on the internet, it’s easy to put up walls and stay within your little bubble, imagining that everything would be better if “they” would be more like “us.”

Truly incarnational ministry involves spending time with those outsiders so that we can see the world through their eyes. We are all beloved children of God, members of one family, but that doesn’t mean we all need the same things or have the same challenges. Our goal should not be to convince people that they should dress and act like us and come spend an hour on Sunday morning singing our hymns and reading our liturgy. Our goal should be to walk with people on their unique paths towards God, so that they can enter God’s kin-dom as equals, members of Christ’s body who add new perspectives and new ways of being Christ-like. In doing so, we will see ourselves through their eyes as well. We will see where we need to grow and change and become more of the people that God wants us to be. We will see what obstacles we are putting in our own way, walls we are building between ourselves and God.

Let me return to the Gospel text: Jesus said, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.” How can we eat and drink Jesus? The Gospel of John opens with, “In the beginning was the Word.” Jesus embodied God’s wisdom, the bread of heaven revealed partially in the Hebrew scriptures. We “consume” Jesus by learning God’s wisdom. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, wisdom is personified as a woman calling to us, sometimes known by the Greek name of Sophia. In Proverbs, we read:

Wisdom has built her house,
she has hewn her seven pillars.
She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine,
she has also set her table.
She has sent out her servant-girls, she calls
from the highest places in the town,
“You that are simple, turn in here!”
To those without sense she says,
“Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Lay aside immaturity, and live,
and walk in the way of insight.”

Proverbs 9:1-6

To become more Christ-like, we need to ingest God’s wisdom. Jesus came to teach us God’s wisdom by example. He was supremely dedicated to obeying God’s will, but not always in the way that his peers understood it. He showed us that the Law and the Prophets, indeed the whole teaching of God to humanity, hangs on two principles: love of God and love of neighbor. Often, though, it is hard to see how those principles apply. It is especially hard to see how they apply in the abstract. That’s why Jesus did not simply expound on philosophical principles. No, he lived with God’s people and saw first-hand the challenges they confronted, so that he could viscerally feel and understand the ways in which they were not being loved and the ways in which he could show love to them.

Incarnational ministry is not just another program. It is a renewed way of being Christ’s body. Jesus taught those early disciples just as he teaches us today. Abide in Christ as Christ abides in us. Ingest God’s wisdom, the teachings of the whole Bible that reveals God’s relationship with humanity and the lessons the ancient Israelites and first-century Christians learned from their encounters with God. See the world through Christ’s eyes, filled with love. Go out and encounter God in the people we meet. Learn how we can enable each person to see God’s presence, to experience God’s love, and to experience our love for them. Go where God is at work and join in. And as we do, we too will know God’s love and will be transformed into citizens of God’s realm and members of God’s family. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Ephesians 1:3-14.

---

For as long as humans have owned material goods, we have been concerned about passing them on to our children. We see the next generation as a continuation of the work we have done in the world and hope that what we have accomplished, what we have built, and what we have gathered will continue on.

Laws about inheritance are complicated. Each culture has its own practices and rules. Under Roman law, the priority was given to family continuity as a foundation for stability. When a man died, his children would inherit both his property and his debts. Although women required a legal guardian to perform legal transactions, they could own and inherit property if there was a will designating them for inheritance. Slaves, too, could be heirs, but that was a little tricky. If the will also gave them their freedom, then the slaves could take possession. If not, then the actual possession of the inheritance would go to the slave’s master.

This was the legal environment in which Paul and his readers were living. They understood inheritance as an essential building block for a stable society. That stability also permeates the Old Testament laws, where land was designated for a particular family. That is, if someone was poor and sold their land, the purchaser was obligated to allow them to redeem it later. The rules around redemption are hard for us to understand from a modern perspective, but if you read the story of Ruth the Moabite and her mother-in-law Naomi, you will see that property redemption and inheritance was an essential part of the story that ultimately led to David’s birth.

The Bible can be read as a collection of individual perspectives, but also as a single unified story of humanity’s relationship with God. In Genesis, God promises to bless the world through Abraham. In Exodus, God enters a covenant with Israel that blesses them so that they might be a blessing to the world. As the story progresses, though, through the peak of David and Solomon to the nadir of the exile, we see that the Israelites forsake their inheritance. At the peak, they enjoyed the blessings of God, the divine favor that made David & Solomon’s Israel a wealthy and respected regional power. They inherited God’s special blessing specifically so that they can bless one another and the world, but they turn their backs on the covenant. Inheritance comes with both blessings and obligations, but Israel failed to meet those obligations. As a result, God rescinds their inheritance. Throughout the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, the message is clear: “Observe and search out all the commandments of the LORD your God; that you may possess this good land, and leave it for an inheritance to your children after you forever.” But in 2 Kings 21, which is near the end of Judah’s existence as an independent kingdom, God says, “I will cast off the remnant of my heritage, and give them into the hand of their enemies.”

Paul knew this story, knew all about the heritage that Israel had forsaken. This story of lost greatness was an essential part of Jewish identity. But as Paul encountered God through Christ, he realized that their spiritual exile was over. The inheritance was given to us all once again because we have been redeemed. But this inheritance was not about the land of ancient Canaan that was promised to Abraham. It was about the spiritual blessing that God promised to the whole world through Abraham and his children.

In the early days of the covenant, the inheritance was understood in material terms. Even today, the so-called prosperity Gospel promises that people who follow Jesus, who “accept Him into their heart,” will be blessed with health and wealth. If you are not healthy and wealthy, well, I guess you don’t believe strongly enough. This way of thinking also arose in the context of predestination. This particular passage is pretty strongly in support of Calvinist predestination: in the New International Version of the Bible, verse 5 is translated, “In love, he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.” The Puritans and other strong Calvinists of that era looked for outward signs of their predestination. If you were among those chosen for salvation, then obviously God would bless you with material abundance in this life.

But I don’t think that’s what Paul meant at all. In antiquity, people generally believed that wealth was finite. The only way for one person to be rich was for other people to be poor. Rather than teaching that God would transfer wealth from the powerful to the weak, Paul seems to be teaching instead that God would honor the lowly. Everyone would receive spiritual abundance.

Elsewhere, Paul writes that the fruit of the Spirit is “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” These are perhaps English translations of Greek words that circle around the meaning of hesed, a Hebrew word often translated as lovingkindness. Hesed is the special love that God has for humanity and the way in which we respond to that love. When we receive God’s grace, we respond with love, joy, and peace. As God works through us, we share that lovingkindness with our family, our friends, our community, and the world. These are riches that know no bounds. Love is not finite. Anyone who has truly loved one person—a parent, a spouse, a child, or a sibling—knows the joy that love can bring, and the way that one loving relationship fuels our ability to love others. I am able to serve my church and my community in part because the love Rhonda and I share renews me, refreshes me, and empowers me to keep on going. But the root, the source of that love is God. As we tap into God’s love, we may all be continually refreshed, renewed, and empowered to love our community.

The church is working through a process that includes reading Neighborhood Church, by Krin van Tatenhove and Rob Mueller. One of the first concepts is transforming your perspective from one of scarcity to one of abundance. We read this passage in Ephesians and hear of spiritual abundance, but what does that really mean? How does that translate into this congregation, this collection of individuals in this community?

In Lou Ellen’s farewell sermon, she described her time here as a time of healing, a concept echoed in Brett’s remarks during the reception afterwards. Our church has been through some stuff in the time I have been a member. Ten years ago, we were not healthy. Relationships were fraying or contentious, and worship was not always a time to encounter God. John Oerter came to us and helped us on the path to healing. He helped us to see the good in each other and to recognize the gifts we have within us, individually and as a group. He left before the work was complete, in truth because the work is never complete. The nature of sanctification is that we are always approaching God, always approaching wholeness and holiness, but we can never get there until we meet God face to face. Bob Morrison also helped us to see that we can do God’s work, individually and together. By the time Lou Ellen joined us, we were ready to share God’s love with her. We had learned the power of God’s grace to connect us with each other, to support one another, to become a part of God’s family.

We are once again in a time of transition, but stronger and healthier now. We have been abundantly blessed by God through Lou Ellen’s leadership over the past six years, but perhaps have become complacent about doing God’s work.

Paul writes of the “fullness of time.” The word we translate as “time” is kairos, which is more like “timely” or “opportune time.” It is the responsibility of each person who calls on Christ to recognize this kairos, this timeliness.

We have been blessed with spiritual abundance. We are devoted to God. We are generous with our time, talent, and treasure. We are loving towards each other and take care of each other when someone is suffering, whether due to illness, grief, or spiritual pain. We are accepting of differences and welcoming of all people. We are one of the few churches in town where someone who is gay, transgender, or of any other sexual orientation or gender identity can be welcomed into full membership. We have become a place of healing and wholeness, a place where those who have been hurt, those who feel far from God, can come to encounter God’s love and enter into full communion with Christ’s body.

It is time. Time to share our spiritual riches with our community. As we do so, we will be continually renewed by the infinite depth of God’s grace. You know, growing up in Pittsburgh, I always assumed that communities everywhere got their drinking water from rivers. Years later, I learned that most communities in this part of the country get their drinking water from municipal wells. The aquifer is recharged by the rain that falls. In the same way, God rains grace down upon us to recharge our spiritual reserves, which we can then draw upon to share with the community. But while the water on Earth is finite, God’s grace is infinite. In spending our spiritual riches, we are replenished.

There’s another place of healing in Rolla that I encounter weekly: The Mission. The patrons at The Mission are all hurting in some way and are striving to improve their lives, to become full participants in the community, and to achieve independence and wholeness. Why do I keep going back? Because in serving them, I am served. I encounter God through each person I meet. In the same way, I encounter God each Sunday, not only through our worship service, but also through the people in this congregation.

We are the family of God. In the Gospels, there are frequent references to the “Kingdom of God.” There are two problems with that metaphor. First, living in a democracy means that we no longer have direct experience with a monarchy in the way that the original New Testament audience did. Second, “kingdom” is a patriarchal term that has a lot of baggage from the centuries of oppression, destruction, and exploitation throughout the world. A few decades ago, Georgene Wilson, a Catholic nun, introduced a new term that her friend Ada Maria Isasí-Díaz popularized: the “kin-dom of God.” This is a new term that brings the original concept into the modern age. Ancient society was based on family, clan, and tribe. Kingdoms were built upon this kinship structure, basically putting the king’s family above all others and, in a sense, uniting all of the tribes into the king’s family. In the same way, we have been predestined for membership in God’s family, through Christ our king, or rather, our kin—our brother. With Christ as our brother, we become part of the Christian family, the Christian tribe. Paul says God is gathering all things into Christ’s family. Let us live into our inheritance, receiving the abundant spiritual gifts God rains down upon us, and sharing God’s grace so that all people, everyone in our community, can join us in the kin-dom of God. Amen.

---

Watch a video of the worship service:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on John 15:26-16:15, Acts 2:1-21.

---

When I was in grad school, I took a course one semester titled, “A Differential Geometric Approach to Nonlinear Control.” The course started with a discussion of manifolds, diffeomorphisms, Lie brackets and Lie derivatives, and so forth. For about six weeks, I sat in the class and listened as if it were a foreign language. One day, it suddenly all made sense. Unfortunately, that experience didn’t stick with me, and when I’ve looked in that textbook, I can only read about a page before my eyes roll back in my head.

Many people have that same experience if they study theology. Probably even most people here today. If we were in a Sunday School class and I told you that I use a hermeneutic of love, you would probably miss the word “love” and get hung up on “hermeneutic.” Calvin taught us about predestination, but theologians have been untangling that concept ever since. Salvation, justification, sanctification—what do we mean? What does it mean to “be saved”? Saved from what? Justification—isn’t that something to do with typing and margins?

Then there are some more common words you might hear around a congregation—like the word “congregation,” instead of “crowd” or “audience.” Only church people use “fellowship” as a verb. We use the word “mission” to mean something different than in the corporate world, and for that matter, many congregations use it to mean something more like “charity.” Before I was asked to serve on it, I had never heard of a “session” as being a committee.

I am in the business of using precise language. I know how important it is to distinguish between, say, energy and power. But I also know that jargon and insider language have a way of erecting barriers. Language becomes a way to signal that “we,” whoever that “we” might be, are distinct from “they,” or from “you.” It’s a way to send a subtle signal of tribal membership. Like, we’re church people and if you can’t understand us, then you don’t belong here.

But how do these words and concepts bring us closer to God? More importantly, how do they speak to the world at large? If you read or watch the news, you will see endless stories of the troubles in our community, state, nation, and world. Poverty, homelessness, and crime. A raging pandemic that has resulted in millions of hospitalizations and deaths, and has led to loneliness and isolation for millions more. Political conflict that even creates barriers between friends and within families. Oppression based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Uneven wealth, both within our nation and among the nations of the world, where 9% of the world’s population survives on less than $2 per day. If you are homeless, what does salvation mean? If you have been marginalized because of who you are, rather than what you have done, what does justification mean?

Ancient Judea was also such a world. The once-mighty nation of Israel was an occupied province of the Roman empire. The Jews were oppressed because of their religion. There was continuous political unrest, with divisions between the zealots and those who worked to appease the Roman occupiers. The Holy Spirit was poured out upon this turmoil to erase these divisions. The disciples were empowered to preach “God’s deeds of power,” a message the gathered crowd was ready to hear. They spoke of God’s ability to change the world and to heal their nation. To unite everyone and welcome everyone into God’s family.

On the day of Pentecost, the disciples were all together. This was the birth of the Christian church, a single body of Christ. Ever since then, we have been finding reasons to split up. The most recent divisions have emerged over issues of social justice, women’s roles, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Some people respond by saying, “Teach tolerance.” That is grossly insufficient. Tolerance is to say that a person is wrong, but you will overlook their wrongness. Can you imagine saying to a close family member—a spouse, parent, or child—that you “tolerate” them? I hope I never reach that point. The next level up is “acceptance.” Acceptance is an acknowledgement of difference with just a hint of judgment. Kind of like saying, “I love you anyway.” There is still division and distinction. How about “welcome”? It has become somewhat common for churches to say, “All are welcome.” First of all, saying it doesn’t make it true. Secondly, what does that mean? “Welcome” to what? Welcome to sit in the sanctuary? I’m glad churches are saying that their ushers aren’t acting as bouncers. Welcome—but looked at as guests and outsiders? And who is “all”? For centuries, “all” has had an asterisk: all people who fit a certain demographic, who look and act a certain way. In modern churches, the usual distinctions are related to sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as age and class.

The Holy Spirit led the disciples to be not only welcoming, but also inclusive. The gathered crowd was divided by language, so the Holy Spirit enabled the disciples to speak to each person in the language they could understand. Peter quotes the prophet Joel’s apocalyptic vision of inclusion. The spirit would be poured out upon everyone, regardless of age, gender, or social class. In the same way, the Holy Spirit calls us to spread the Gospel to everyone and include them—truly include them—in Christ’s body, which is the church.

What does it mean to be inclusive? I found a good definition on a site called “Humor That Works.”

An organization is inclusive when everyone has a sense of belonging; feels respected, valued and seen for who they are as individuals; and feels a level of supportive energy and commitment from leaders, colleagues, and others so that all people–individually and collectively–can do their best work.

Humor That Works

Although describing a business or non-profit, this definition works pretty well for a church, too. An inclusive church values each person for who they are as an individual. People are not pigeonholed according to their demographic category, but are valued for the particular ways they have been blessed by God and the particular ways they are blessings to others. This is not to imply that their gender, ethnicity, age, or sexual orientation is meaningless. It is to acknowledge that those characteristics have influenced the experiences that person has had, but do not define their gifts or the ways they can be a part of Christ’s body.

Every church struggles with inclusion in some way. The evangelical movement is still struggling with the roles that women may take. Beth Moore has, for decades, led large-scale Bible studies, speaking at stadium-style events. As a Southern Baptist, though, she could never be called a preacher. Over the past few years, she has been pushing back against the culture within her denomination that treats women with disrespect. Finally in March, she broke ties with both her publisher, Lifeway, and the Southern Baptist Convention. She could no longer participate in a denomination and organization that seemed to value misogyny, nationalism, and partisan politics over the Gospel.

It’s easy for us, though, to say we’re not like that. We have a female pastor, right? Not only that, but our denomination officially allows for the ordination of gay pastors, elders, and deacons and for blessing gay marriages. Problem solved, right? Well, no. Remember, there is a spectrum from tolerance to acceptance to welcome to inclusion. Rules in the Book of Order are ultimately only the beginning. Those rules indicate tolerance or perhaps acceptance. There are plenty of PC(USA) churches out there that would struggle with calling a female pastor, and even more that wouldn’t call a gay pastor, no matter what their other gifts. I think our congregation does better than most, but there’s plenty of work to be done. There are plenty of people in our community who need to feel the love of God, who need a connection to Christ’s body, who need to hear the good news that the kingdom of God is at hand, and is available to them right here, right now.

Let me return to that day of Pentecost. In the passage, the gathered crowd lists all the places they came from. The list includes modern-day Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Italy, and Turkey. Considering that most people traveled by foot, that’s a pretty broad swath of land. I think that answers in part the question, “Why was Jesus born 2000 years ago?” I mean, I understand why Jesus was born, but why then? Well, between the Pax Romana, the expanding shipping industry, and the vast network of Roman roads, moving around the Near East was easier than ever. It had become possible, for example, for Parthians to move from modern-day Iran to Jerusalem. By the same token, it had become possible for the first apostles to travel throughout Syria, Turkey, Greece, and North Africa.

We live in an even more connected world today. Thanks to the Internet, people can access the Gospel all around the world. I recently heard an American speaker talking about her 80-year-old Catholic mother listening to homilies from parishes around the nation and even from far-away places like India. Every week, I post both a podcast of the sermon and a video of the worship service. While we were shut down, the videos regularly received 40 or more views. Since re-opening, the number has dropped to the teens. Still, that’s a dozen people who would not otherwise be able to worship God.

Of course, that raises an obvious question: Are the people who watch the videos online truly worshipping God with us? What “counts”? I was talking recently with a dear friend of mine who lives in Ohio. She had a falling out with her local church a few years ago. Since then, her family has been essentially unchurched. But an amazing thing happened. Her brother and sister attend a church in Baltimore that started livestreaming worship last summer. She started “attending” worship because of that connection. She has since joined in a monthly faith formation group that her sister leads. Now, she wouldn’t have been connected with that particular church without the family connection, but still, the pandemic enabled a church in Baltimore to reach someone in Ohio. I assert that she is no longer unchurched, that she is just as much a part of that worshipping community as if she lived in Baltimore.

What defines a church? What defines OUR church? The Great Ends of the Church in our Book of Order are:

1. The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind.
2. The shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God.
3. The maintenance of divine worship.
4. The preservation of the truth.
5. The promotion of social righteousness.
6. The exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.

The closest this list comes to requiring us to gather in a sanctuary on a Sunday morning is “the maintenance of divine worship.” However, I have been in truly wonderful worship services in the chapel, in the fellowship hall, in a city park, and in the woods. This in-person gathering is helpful for “the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God,” but there are other ways for us to connect to one another. This gathering is certainly not essential to the promotion of social righteousness or the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world. Yes, we are, right here, right now, living in the Kingdom of Heaven, but I also experience God’s kingdom when I work at The Mission, or when I talk with a student about something in their personal life. I experienced it when I hosted a parents’ panel for LGBTQ+ Rolla, even though there was at least one atheist among us. I experience it when my family is gathered together. I experience it when I go elk hunting each year.

There are many ways to be Christ’s body, to pursue the six Great Ends of the Church. So long as we are proclaiming the gospel, preserving the truth, and promoting social righteousness, we are exhibiting God’s kingdom.

On that first Pentecost, Peter remembered the words of Joel: “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” Today as we once again celebrate that ancient outpouring of the Holy Spirit, let us all dream dreams. Together let’s pursue a vision where all people are included in Christ’s body, whether they are with us physically or online or in our hearts. Let’s pursue a vision where all people are included in Christ’s body, whether or not they look or dress or think or act like us. Let’s pursue a vision where all people are included in Christ’s body, knowing the good news of unity and reconciliation that we know by the power of the Holy Spirit. Come, Holy Spirit! Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

See also the post with the video. Based on John 12:20-33.

---

Every year when I go elk hunting, I disconnect from all email and voicemail for about a week. Last fall when I checked my messages, I discovered that I had missed a message from Mark, an engineer at Ameren’s Technology Applications Center in Champaign who was working with me on my electric vehicle charging project. His message said that he was leaving Ameren that Friday, with some vague reference to church; of course, I didn’t get the message until the weekend, which was too late to get in touch with him for more details.

Later, I had the opportunity to talk with his former supervisor, Rod, and asked what Mark was up to. Mark had decided to commit himself to a project in Africa. He is visiting a tribe with a language that does not exist in written form. What he is doing is recording people telling Bible stories in their language, which he can then distribute to other groups who speak the same language. In this way, even though written Bibles are not available, the African tribespeople can still hear the Gospel.

Rod and I talked about Mark’s commitment. We are both committed to our respective churches; I shared a bit about the Commissioned Ruling Elder program that I’m working through. But we both agreed that it would hard for us to do what Mark is doing. Kids in college, family to care for, and good jobs that are hard to walk away from. We both admire Mark, but are not yet ready to take that leap.

In today’s passage, we hear about a group of believers who, like the Africans that Mark is evangelizing, needed to hear the Gospel in their own language. At that time, there were Greeks who were referred to as “God-fearers.” I suppose a reasonable analogy in modern Christianity would be unbaptized worshippers. God-fearing Greeks could go to the Temple in the Court of the Gentiles and offer sacrifices, but they could not participate as fully as circumcised Jews. While Greeks were the dominant group in much of the Roman Empire, they were outsiders in Judea. They had come to worship God during the Passover festival. Apparently when they arrived, they heard about Jesus. This passage comes just after his triumphal entry on what we celebrate as Palm Sunday. Maybe they had also heard about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Jesus was the big news in town, so they sought to encounter Jesus.

So they did what most people do: they found someone who spoke their language and knew their customs who could make the introduction. Philip had a Greek name and was one of Jesus’s closest disciples, so he was the perfect choice. When he and his hometown friend Andrew approached Jesus, Jesus realized that the time had come. He was not only drawing Jews to himself, but Greeks as well, and would soon draw all things to himself and reconcile the world.

Yet Jesus knew that life would not be easy, not for himself and not for his followers. He knew his own death was approaching and faced it with courage. But he also needed to warn his followers that if they chose his path, they would need to cast aside all of their other attachments. They—and we—would need to even hate their lives, that is, all the comforts of ordinary life.

Throughout history, and even today in some parts of the world, suffering for the Gospel includes paying the ultimate price of martyrdom. Early Christians were martyred; many schisms in church history have included martyrs. I read a story recently about Assyrian Christians, an ethnic minority in northern Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. These are the same Assyrians we know from the Bible. They converted to Christianity in the first few centuries A.D. In the centuries since, they have been persecuted, even subjected to a genocide around World War I. Most recently, their population was decimated by ISIS. They remain a dwindling minority in the Middle East, with a small number living elsewhere around the world.

Meanwhile, in Myanmar, we hear mostly about the ruling Buddhists persecuting Rohingya Muslims, but the army has also imprisoned over 100,000 Christians in concentration camps. I met a pastor from Myanmar who was studying at Eden Seminary. He said that there were times when the army surrounded his church to prevent him from preaching something subversive, and he had to pivot to a sermon that supported the military dictatorship. He has since completed his studies and returned home, where he continues to lead his church despite the threats.

But we are not Assyrians, nor do we live in Myanmar. We live in a democracy where religious freedom is guaranteed. The so-called threats against our faith include such terrible things as not being allowed to lead communal prayer in public schools, or being forced to sell wedding cakes to gay couples.

Yet it is still true that Christians suffer in more subtle ways, or else compromise their faith. Many of us are fearful about sharing our faith in any public way, for fear of reprisal from our superiors at work or loss of friends. I know I need to be particularly careful on campus because of my position of authority. There can never be an implication that students are expected to profess what I believe in order to succeed in my class. I work with people of all different faiths—every sort of Christian, plus Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, and more—and our different beliefs can’t prevent us from working together.

For generations, we have been taught that it is impolite to discuss religion or politics. I understand that, to a certain point. The problem is that we have failed to learn how to politely discuss these sensitive issues. These are the things that really matter, that really touch who we are, and we never talk about them. Even among my friends at church, these last few years have been pretty hard on political conversations.

As a result, we end up discussing surface-level topics. We talk about the weather; we talk about sports. These days, we talk about COVID. I have a lot of conversations about my beard and about hunting. Such small talk smooths out our interpersonal interactions, but we never reach true understanding of each other. Just as the interstate highway system is a way to cross the country without seeing any of it, small talk is a way to talk at length with someone without knowing who they really are.

For the last few years, I have been active with the Campus Ministries Association. CMA includes Common Call, which is this church’s ministry, plus CCF, the Newman Center, Baptist Student Union, the First Methodist ministry called Ignite, and a few others. CMA’s flagship event is an Interfaith Dialogue every spring. Last year, of course it got canceled, and this year we have to pivot the format a bit, but here’s how it goes in a normal year. We try to get people to attend from a wide range of faith traditions: Christians of many types, from within our ministries and also from across campus, plus Muslims, Hindus, and whoever else we can think of. We mix them up at tables of six with a facilitator at each table. Then each group goes through questions like, “Have you ever been asked to do or say something that went against your faith or belief system? How did you respond?” Or, “How do you understand evil in persons and in our world? What do you think is the best way to deal with evil?” There are about twenty different questions, and none of them have a right answer. Most of them don’t even have an “approved” doctrinal answer. They are more about the practical realities of our spirituality. How does our religion or our spirituality impact our daily life? We are all trying to figure things out and live our faith as best we can.

The two keys to a successful interfaith dialogue are a willingness to share and a willingness to listen. The goal is to understand each other, not to win a debate. I have found that I have more in common with a Muslim than I ever imagined. We may all leave believing the same things as when we arrive, but we also leave with a memory of an experience of the Kingdom of God.

Because really, what is the kingdom of God? It is people living together in deep relationships. It is abundant life, not a life of abundance. It is seeing Jesus in each other. It is being guided by the Holy Spirit. It is setting aside our fears and anxieties and showing our true selves.

That is what Jesus is calling us to do. He asks us to set our lives aside—our false selves—and pursue Him and His Kingdom. That is not an easy road, but it leads us to a place of joy and peace.

Some people are called to literally set their lives aside, as Mark did to travel to Africa. Others find ways to live for Christ where they already are. Rev. Dr. Maria Evans is a pathologist in Kirksville who felt called to the priesthood a few years ago, and so is serving as the interim priest at Christ Episcopal here in Rolla. She continues in her practice as a pathologist while at the same time serving God through pastoral ministry. Rev. Steve Lawler, on the other hand, is a semi-retired Episcopal priest with an MBA who is the director of the Walker Leadership Institute at Eden Seminary. His goal is to help people who have had successful careers, who are perhaps at or near retirement, find ways to use their career skills to serve God through missional leadership, meaning leadership of organizations that are serving some specific mission towards establishing God’s kingdom. James Brown is a sportscaster, best known for being the host of the NFL Today on CBS, who is also ordained in a nondenominational church. He doesn’t preach much on TV, but he does radiate God’s love, and he’s not afraid to bring his faith into the discussion when it’s appropriate.

Maybe you’re not ready to become a preacher, ordained or otherwise. We are all differently gifted. Some are led to preach or teach, others to healing and compassion, others to a wide range of service to God’s Kingdom. But we all share one calling: to be witnesses of God’s grace at work in the world. We are all called to encounter God, to see God in all things, and to share with others how great is God’s love—for each one of us, and for everyone else, too. God’s love is greater than anything else any of us ever have or ever will experience. As followers of Christ, we should treasure that love above all else. It is a great gift, one that gets bigger the more we give it away.

Sharing God’s love means sharing our deepest joy, but sometimes means touching another person’s deepest pain. That pain can lead the person to lash out at us, as a proxy for the angry or spiteful or judgmental God they think they know. But if we’re willing to suffer through that pain, we have the promise of glory on the other side: the glory of entering God’s kingdom here and now, as God’s beloved children become our siblings in Christ.

Truly, that is the promise of the Gospel. Following Jesus isn’t easy. It is frequently a path to poverty, or to persecution, or to ostracism. But it is also a path to deeper, truer relationships. We go beyond the surface to those issues that touch our hearts. We connect to people we would otherwise never know. Let us each seek to set God’s priorities above our own, to open our true selves to our neighbors, and in so doing to experience the joy of God’s beloved community. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I haven’t blogged much recently. Among other things, I have been busy with the course on preaching that I’m taking this semester. If you would like to provide anonymous feedback on the sermon, please visit: https://forms.gle/eEUkkFJmwzGCAGq98

Preached for December 27, 2020, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Galatians 4:4-7 and Luke 2:22-40.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download