"Who Believes in You" - Tansfiguartion C

Saint John 17:20-26

Late May and early June are the seasons for graduations and commencements.

I have always loved the colors if not the excitement of a good college commencement.  The robes which often matched the school colors, the academic hoods to signify the degree, and the hats.  Of course the hats where  mortarboards, berets, and the occasional biretta on the clergy make for a spectacle worthy of opening day at Ascot or the Kentucky derby.

I have saved a card from my last commencement because it summed up the occasion perfectly.  “Graduation.”  it said.  “A time when really smart people dress up in really stupid outfits.”

Every commencement worthy of the name has to have a speaker.  A man or woman is required to get up and say something.  The something they say is usually some “out the door” advice to students who would rather be “out the door” than listening to advice. 

If you are at a really famous university chances are you will have a really famous speaker.  If you are at a smaller school you’ll probably hear from a major donor or a crony of one of the trustees.  In the latter case you probably won’t even know who it is.

I wonder how many students in the 2014 graduating class of the University of Texas at Austin knew who Admiral William H.  McCraven was.

He was profiled recently on CBS News Sunday Morning and even though the piece was about his retirement from the Navy after leading missions to Iran and Afghanistan and commanding the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound when I saw him I said to Lowell, “He’s the ‘make your bed’ guy!”

It still amazes the Admiral that a little commencement speech he made five years ago is what he is most remembered for.

Here is the part of the presentation that went viral.

Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Viet Nam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they would inspect was your bed.

If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers pulled tight, the pillow centered just under the headboard and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack-rack—that’s Navy talk for bed.

It was a simple task—mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that were aspiring to be real warriors, tough battle hardened SEALs—but the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over.

If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another.

By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.

And if by chance your have had a miserable day you will come home to a bed that’s made - made by you - and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.1

 In today’s gospel we are listening to Jesus’ last minute instructions.  This may seem strange because we are seven Sundays into the Easter season and almost to the day of Pentecost but the instructions from Jesus that we read today come before the crucifixion.  The crowds of thousands are long gone and he is alone with his disciples in a private quarter of Jerusalem.  Immediately afterward in John’s gospel he heads to the garden site where he is arrested. \

He concludes his instructions with a prayer.  It is a powerful prayer for them and for us.  Listen carefully to the words again from another translation:  “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message...”2

That’s us.  That is you and me.  Jesus is praying for us.  Jesus is praying for this church.

What if we really believed that?  What if we really lived into the promise that Jesus is not only hoping the best but praying the best for us?  What if we remembered that, in his darkest hour, Jesus fell to his knees and prayed for us?

It makes a difference when a person prays for you and believes in you.

Here is how that might work from a Rick Reilly column on espn.com when he wrote about the “the oddest game in high school football history ...down in Grapevine, Texas. It was Grapevine Faith vs. Gainesville State School and everything about it was upside down.”

This all started when Faith's head coach, Kris Hogan, wanted to do something kind for the Gainesville team. Faith had never played Gainesville, but he already knew the score. After all, Faith was 7-2 going into the game, Gainesville 0-8 with 2 TDs all year. Faith has 70 kids, 11 coaches, the latest equipment and involved parents. Gainesville has a lot of kids with convictions for drugs, assault and robbery—many of whose families had disowned them—wearing seven-year-old shoulder pads and ancient helmets.

So Hogan had this idea. What if half of our fans—for one night only—cheered for the other team? He sent out an email asking the Faithful to do just that. "Here's the message I want you to send:" Hogan wrote. "You are just as valuable as any other person on planet Earth."

Some people were naturally confused. One Faith player walked into Hogan's office and asked, "Coach, why are we doing this?"

And Hogan said, "Imagine if you didn't have a home life. Imagine if everybody had pretty much given up on you. Now imagine what it would mean for hundreds of people to suddenly believe in you."

[So] when Gainesville came out to take the field, the Faith fans made a 40-yard spirit line for them to run through.  They even made a banner for players to crash through at the end. It said, "Go Tornadoes!" Which is also weird, because Faith is the Lions.

More than 200 Faith fans sat on the Gainesville side and kept cheering the Gainesville players on—by name. [T]he Gainesville Tornadoes were turning around on their bench to see something they never had before. Hundreds of fans. And actual cheerleaders!

"I thought maybe they were confused," said Alex, a Gainesville lineman (only first names are released by the prison). "They started yelling 'DEE-fense!' when their team had the ball. I said, 'What? Why they cheerin' for us?'"

As one might expect Grapevine Faith beat the Gainesville State Tornados by a whopping 33-14.

After the game, both teams gathered in the middle of the field to pray and that's when Isaiah surprised everybody by asking to lead. "We had no idea what the kid was going to say," remembers Coach Hogan. But Isaiah said this: "Lord, I don't know how this happened, so I don't know how to say thank You, but I never would've known there was so many people in the world that cared about us."3

People of God the good news for you this morning is that somebody cares about you.  Somebody is even praying for you. 

As you go about the everyday tasks of the day be they great or small someone cares about you.  When you face the greatest struggles of life somebody believes in you and is praying for you.

And that somebody is no less than Jesus Christ our Lord.

Thanks for listening.

________________

1.  William H. McRaven, "Find Courage to Change the World" (speech), June 17, 2014, accessed May 31, 2019, https://news.utexas.edu/2014/05/16/mcraven-urges-graduates-to-find-courage-to-change-the-world/.

2.  St. John 17:20.  (NIV) [NIV=The New International Version]

3.  Rick Reilly, "Life of Reilly," ESPN, May 12, 2014, , accessed June 01, 2019, http://www.espn.com/espn/rickreilly/news/story?id=3789373.
 

"Wierdos Welcome" - Easter 5C

Saint Peter Contemplates Who Gets In

Acts 11:1-18

“Weirdos Welcomed”

One of the Lutheran Church’s best pastors and thinkers is Nadia Boltz-Weber. 

If you were to meet her you might be taken aback by the fact that she sports tattoos clearly visible on her arms and has an over-all smokie, gothic look.  Like the rest of us she has more than a few faults that she readily admits. 

I have heard her speak a couple of times and on each occasion she wowed the audience with her wisdom and wit.  I even had the pleasure of acting as her host for a synod conference that I used to chair and found her delightful.

Pastor Bolz-Weber’s claim to fame is her founding of a Lutheran church in Denver called House for All Saints and Sinners which she described as “a little indie boutique of a church” that attracts people who might never feel comfortable in a traditional congregation.  A congregations like Our Saviour.

I’ve been to off-shoots of churches like this and while I have found them interesting to sample I also knew that over time they would not be my cup of tea.  The constant Sunday after Sunday trendiness would leave the traditionalist in me longing for something more constant.

After House for all Saints and Sinners had been featured in the Denver Post Pastor Bolz-Weber felt conflicted as more and more people came to visit the church.  Experiencing what would make most churches ecstatic the congregation and the pastor became troubled. Their problem was that the visitors weren’t at all like them.

Here is how the visitors were described by Pastor Bolz-Weber:

[They] were a bunch of people, baby boomers who wore Dockers and ate at Applebee’s, who had driven in from the suburbs to consume our worship service because it was neat and so much cooler and more authentic than anything they could create themselves. It felt horrible and I became angry.1

Do you see the irony here?  The people that Pastor Bolz-Weber and her congregation were trying to exclude were people like us - you and me - because we weren’t like them.  In their world view we would be the outsiders and they would be the insiders.  Hard as it may be to believe for those of us gathered at Our Savior’s we would be a threat to their way of doing things.  They would be afraid that our traditionalism would eventually triumph over their free-spirit creativity.

In one way or another this is a problem that has been around for the church since the time of Saint Peter’s first missionary journey.  He would understand the conflict perfectly.

The great saint has been is a roll.  By the eleventh chapter of Acts he is walking around preaching the gospel, spreading love, healing the paralyzed simply by walking near-by, even raising the dead.  He’s so popular that even outsiders - people who had no connection to Judaism or Jesus - were inviting him into their homes for a little coffee and conversation.  Peter accepts the invitation of one of them named Cornelius who is a Gentile, for a little gab and grub.

For this act and because the church has always been the church Peter gets hauled before the council of First Church Jerusalem. 

He is greeted not with a parade to celebrate his faithful discipleship and his amazing acts of healing and hope.  He is greeted with consternation and condemnation for defying the fundamentals of his Jewish tradition by eating with Cornelius and his household. 

[His accusers] express deep concern that Peter has lost perspective and ignored the divine imperative not to associate with, much less to engage in table fellowship, with those who were unclean.2

The key to understanding this passage is that we are the outsiders.

Just as the good people of the Church of All Sinners and Saints saw the Docker wearing and Appleby’s eating visitors as threats the church council of Jerusalem saw gentiles as dangers.  To the Jewish mind we are still and will always be gentiles.  So both groups would look askance at us. 

Just as to a faithful Jew we are gentiles and to the faithful at Pastor Bolz-Weber’s church we are just too normal.  In either case we - Yes!  You  and I - would be the interlopers that both groups might be tempted to exclude.  We might have remained on the outside were it not for Peter’s vision.

When he gets called back to Jerusalem to face the music his first response is that this was not idea.  This was God’s idea, he explains.  

I fell into a trance and saw a vision: Something like a huge blanket, lowered by ropes at its four corners, came down out of heaven and settled on the ground in front of me. Milling around on the blanket were farm animals, wild animals, reptiles, birds—you name it, it was there. Fascinated, I took it all in.

“Then I heard a voice: ‘Go to it, Peter—kill and eat.’ I said, ‘Oh, no, Master. I’ve never so much as tasted food that wasn’t kosher.’ The voice spoke again: ‘If God says it’s okay, it's okay.'3

 Then he asks the key question to that first century church, House for All Saints and Sinners, Our Saviour, and every church in Christendom.  “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?”4

 If God is speaking and an eclectic group of people are gathering in a coffee house and singing songs that would never make it into any mainstream church’s hymnal, who are we to argue.

If God is speaking to a middle class group of people like us who wear nice clothes to church - dockers, sports jackets, suits, wing-tips, Topsiders - and whose restaurant of choice may be TGIF rather than Applebee’s, who is anybody to object?

If God is speaking to charismatics waving their hands and speaking in tongues or Quakers sitting in silence waiting for that same Spirit to move, how can anybody stand in God’s way?

If God is leading anyone, by any means, to a repentance that leads to life, who is anybody to argue?

This is a message that needs to be heard by everyone who thinks they have it all together and that there are others that don’t.  This message of exclusion is one that reaches from the wealthiest of the wealthy to the poorest of the poor and it is one that divides rather than unites people who have been called to proclaim the Gospel.

Not long ago I was asked to serve on the board of a Lutheran Campus Ministry at the prestigious University on the North Shore where the seminary I attended was located.

Because their congregation was made up exclusively of college and graduate students who were incurring enormous debt to get an education the ministry was always scrounging for money.

There was a Lutheran church on the south side of town and another on the north side with no place to worship anyplace near what was called the “ministry center.”

As with most board meetings the conversation was more about money than ministry and I got to thinking about people I knew.  

I thought about the young couple who had twins under the age of three who weren’t particularly faithful not because they didn’t want to come to church be but because even if they started getting ready for church at 8 A.M. by the time they got their children dressed, ready, strapped into their car seats, removed from the car seats because one of them had to go to the bathroom, and stopped them from fussing the only worship they could attend was the 5 P.M. “last chance mass” at Saint Monica’s.  
What if we told them there was a “ministry center” with preaching and a full Eucharist every Sunday that they could walk to and would welcome them?  

I thought about the older person with the broken hip who might have lived three doors away and who couldn’t drive yet but who could hobble over?  Wouldn’t it be great to reach out to them?

I thought about how good it would be for the students to worship and fellowship with people who were not like them. 

When I spoke my thoughts aloud it was like I was facing same people who Peter faced at the First Council of Jerusalem.  

The pastor’s response was (And how I wish I was making this up!):  “As long as they are not weirdos.”it’s okay.’

I thought she was kidding and said, “Hey!  Hey!  I’m a weirdo and I resent that remark.” The lack of laughter told me that she was not joking in the least.

In some places people who might need the Gospel that leads to life  must live up to some arbitrary standard that we are creating on the fly - before they can join the fellowship.  They are welcome so long as they are not “weird.”  A stipulation that would exclude not only me but almost everybody I know or would choose to be associated with.

It’s a hard lesson to learn but every time we exclude anybody we hinder God.

I think my pastor, The Rev’d Shannon Kershner, who serves Fourth Presbyterian in downtown Chicago is closer to catching the spirit of Peter’s vision. 

From the outside, with its location on the Magnificent Mile, Fourth looks like it would only serve the best and the brightest, and it does.  However, on any given Sunday there are also the least, the lost, and the lonely sitting in the sanctuary.  At coffee hour there is not only the well quaffed who you would expect to be there but also people who have everything they own in their backpacks.

Here is what Pastor Kershner said when she preached on this text.

God takes our boundaries; God takes our stereotypes; God takes our rules; God takes our expectations; God takes all of that and often God looks at ... it and says, No. I don’t have favorites. Your limits, your litmus tests, your fears—none of that limits me. I embrace whom I embrace and guess what, God says, I have got really long arms.5

 For me, my fellow weirdos, and weirdo wanna-bes the idea that God has long enough arms to reach across any artificial barriers that might be created is good news.
 
For all of you who have ever felt excluded in any way the idea that we have all been embraced by God’s love is good news too.  It is nothing less than the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ - the Gospel that leads to life.

Don’t you think?

____________

1.  Nadia Bolz Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint. (New York, NY: Jerico Books, 2014), p.  178-187.

2.   Gary W. Charles, "Acts 11:1-18. Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture," in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year C. ed., vol. 2 (Louisvill, KY: Westminister-John Knox Press, 2018), p.  249-250.

3.   Acts 11:5-9 (MSG) [MSG=The Message]

4,  Acts 11:17.  (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]

Shannon J. Kershner, "Hindering" (Sermon, Sunday Morning Worship, The Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, April 24, 2016).  http://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2016/042416.html

5.