I had dinner and went to a baseball game with my best friend Kelsey and our moms last night. It was awesome. One of the awesome things that happened was that they told me that my number one fan happens to be Kelsey's dad! So this post serves exclusively as a shout out to Rick for thinking I'm awesome enough to read my posts religiously. What a guy. :)
Salt, light, refuge, and space -- Confirmation Camp 2013
Each night at
Confirmation Camp, the kids in charge of worship choose the Congregational
Leader (youth director, pastor, intern, whoever's parent came with them) to
speak about that day's Bible Study and the theme the kids have picked for the
day. Because they are crazy, the kids who had Friday chose me. That meant that
I had to talk about the culmination of the "Blessed to be a Blessing"
study they'd been in all week, and somehow also talk about the outer space
theme they'd chosen. Kids these days.
---
Good and gracious
God, We give you thanks for this time we have spent together, recognizing
the blessings you are constantly giving us, growing in our love for one
another, diving into your Word, hiking your mountains, rafting your river,
singing your praises. Quiet our hearts and minds for a moment, that we might
hear your voice.
Amen
So I have a unique
opportunity to speak to you tonight. I'm in a funny sort of place right now
because I've been serving as a pastoral intern at Holy Trinity in Littleton
since last August. Three weeks from right now, I'll be back in California,
where I'm from; internship will be over.
And so when I'm
thinking about how to tell you my story and how it's part of God's story and
how it's part of your story, I'm thinking about how incredible it is, for this
short time, to be related to all of you.
Here we are, on a
mountain in Colorado, around a campfire, after a week of play and worship and
food and so much fun. A week ago, most of us didn't know each other. But this
week, we ate at the same tables and we slept in the same cabins and we read the
bible together and we sang in worship and we did skits at round-up and we had a
dance off and we learned to play the guitar and we worked together on the ropes
courses and we painted Sawyer's toenails -- how many memories have we made, all
together?
These friendships that
we've made happened so fast, without us even noticing, probably. But a lot of
us are going to leave tomorrow morning. And even the staff is going to do
a little shuffling, with trips and day camps and all the amazing things they
do. We're going to come down from this city on a hill, go our separate ways
back to our separate churches, back to our houses and our families and our
friends.
What are going do with
the newfound understanding of who we are as children of God that we got this
week at camp?
We are salt for the
earth and we are reflections of the light of Christ and we are living stones,
that together build a city on a hill! We have been blessed with so many incredible
gifts - each and every one of you offers so much to the world.
Hear these words from
the gospel according to Matthew:
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. ‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. ‘You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. ‘You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. (5:3-16)
Everything that makes
you who you are is a gift from God to the world around you. Every time you
smile at someone, you are shining the light. Every time you participate in an
activity you love -- play soccer, act in the school musical, laugh till you cry
with your friends, bake cookies -- every time you do those simple things, you
are seasoning everyone around you, enhancing the flavor of your
community.
And it's not just at
camp that you are these things. It's not just when you give it up to the
kitchen and support staff for their hard work, or paint Sawyer's toenails, or
high five your congregational leader for being so cool -- it's not just when
you are salt for people who know that you are salt. It's when your attributes
and your actions are a blessing to those who do not know that you are salt or
light or a city -- those are the ways that we take camp home with us. Those are
the ways that we keep these newly formed relationships alive, even when we
aren't in these same villages anymore.
Since the theme for
today is space, I was thinking this morning as we sang Little Room, about how
even on the darkest night, God fills the sky with little sparks of light. It is
you who are those little sparks of light. (Look up at the sky right now. Can
you see any stars? It's cloudy. When the world is cloudy, it is us who have to
light the night around us. Do you have a flashlight? Take it out. Light it up.
Wow, right? That's pretty legit. Okay turn those off, now. I'm blinded by your
light, haha)
And so for me, you
guys, going back down the mountain tomorrow will be particularly poignant. It
has been such an incredible blessing to be among you this week, and on a larger
scale, being in Colorado this year. So many of you have been salt for my earth.
So many of you have blinded me with the light of the Christ we know and love.
So many of you have been that refuge, that city on the hill
And I hope you know it
because I said it to you or thanked you in some way. But even if I didn't, the
simple truth that we're all here together, piling our blessings on one another,
you give me great hope for the future of the church and the world.
There's a lot of
darkness around us. Space is a pretty big place. But when we, as the body of
Christ, take full advantage of the blessings we have received and use them to
bring out the flavor and the light that seems to be missing, and bring safety
and comfort and refuge to a deeply weary world -- there are no limits to what
we are capable of. The power of God to move over the waters and to create the
farthest reaches of our solar system does not ever stop. Because God is
powerful, you as a child of God are powerful.
You have the power to
go above and beyond -- to infinity and beyond, we might even say -- to reach
the whole universe with your saltiness and your spark of light.
You are blessed to be
a blessing not just to Rainbow Trail this week, not just to your home church
this Sunday, not just to your family and friends next week until you kind of
forget about it.
In your baptism, God
blessed you to be a blessing to the entire body of Christ -- the entire
humongous universe -- and when you get confirmed, you will be saying that you
agree to go out and be that blessing. You will stand up there and say to your
pastor and to your family and to God and to yourself -- challenge accepted. So
as you make your way through your church's confirmation classes and camp and
all the stuff that you'll do, remember what you learned this week. Remember who
you are and what you're made of and why.
I know that I will
never forget you. Thank you and thanks be to God. Let's pray.
Infinite God, we
are in such awe of how huge you are and how much you love us and how much you
give to us. Continue to remind us of just how blessed we are, in good times and
in hard times, and never let us forget our identity in you. By the many names
you are known, we pray. Amen.
Healing -- Luke 8:26-39
I Kings 19:1-15
Psalm 22
Galatians 3:23-29
Luke 8:26-39
Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer, Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.
But you
may be feeling a little heavy right now, after hearing the texts for today. We
talked about that as we were reading through these texts at Bible exploration
on Tuesday. We noted that Elijah is the definition of desperate. And, though we
didn’t read it this morning, know that the psalmist repeatedly begs God to come
to her aid. This man of the Gerasenes is tormented by demons and abandoned by
his community.
And
this is a little confusing, because recently,
it was Easter, and more recently Pentecost, and so we’re all joyously resurrected
and we’re empowered by the fire of the Holy Spirit! Right!? But sometimes it
can feel like that sort of…wears off after a while. And so in these stories, we
get a look at what life looks like when we’re in need of resurrection and in
need of the Holy Spirit’s cleansing fire. When we just get stuck in the stuff
of life. When we feel so low, or so broken, or so outcast. When there’s just a
rut we can’t quite get out of. When the responsibilities of everyday life just
feel like chaos. When we feel we’ve exhausted all the possibilities and there’s
just no energy to continue.
In our story from I Kings, Elijah
has just run out into the desert, fleeing for his life, and feels like all is lost
and that he just could not possibly go any further. But God has a different
idea about that. God nourishes Elijah and sends him out to a new city to do a
new thing. And we’re hip to that this year! It’s the ELCA’s year of Always
Being Made New. In everything that we’re doing this year (and every year) God
is making all things new. God is taking the exhaustion of our lives and
restoring us to the whole, full people that God created us to be.
But it’s not so simple. For
this man among the Gerasenes, whose demons have caused him to be chained and
shackled and left in the darkest corner of his community, “always being made
new” seems far from reality. He is constantly tormented by the legion of demons
in his mind, and by the rejection he’s received from the people around him.
They fear him. And he probably
fears himself. His anguish is so overpowering that he breaks the chains that
the people have bound him in. He lives in the tombs, among the dead, the
furthest from his society it is possible to be. They have, essentially, left
him for dead. So it is not just him, but also them, who need to be healed and
restored to wholeness. Most human communities are guilty of relegating some
group to the outskirts.
This is not specific to the
Gerasenes, nor is it specific to the Galatians. This portion of Paul’s letter
includes some of his more famous words. It is written that we are no longer Jew
nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. We are one in the body of Christ.
Paul would not have written this if the community at Galatia was a model of
inclusivity. Clearly, they’re struggling with the desire to use the law to
exclude people from the Christian community. In this new community, the only
law is radical love—everyone is welcome to the table.
Theologian and author Jim
Rice has put the words right in my mouth. He writes, “Christ has rendered obsolete
the practice of separating and judging on the basis of race, ethnicity,
religious lineage, gender, economic status, or class. The human tendency to
divide and denigrate is deeply ingrained, but God's way of equality and unity
is the new order of things. The consequences of that profound revelation are
still unfolding.”
And
that could not be more true. There are ills that plague us as individuals and
as communities. And we have a problem not only with the original divisions but
with the solutions to the divisions! We have found ever-deeper ways to alienate
one another, with divisions that are not from God but are of human creation and
human misunderstanding.
And
so like this man, we need not only to be healed of our demons and restored to
the community of care that surrounds us, but also like the Gerasenes as a
whole, our communities need to be made aware of the profound ways in which we
separate ourselves from one another, and we need to be reconciled and restored.
Proclaiming
that the radically equalizing love of God in Jesus the Christ has the power to
heal us, first implies that we are in desperate need of healing. We need to be healed of our own, deep, personal
maladies. Our
feelings of inadequacy. Our
fears of isolation and abandonment. Our
addictions. Our traumas
of abuse or of neglect. Our
scars of betrayal and distrust.
We
need to be healed of our destructive compulsions. We need to be healed of our
shameful silence. We need to be healed of the ways we try to stifle our pain
and heal ourselves through different, damaging behaviors. We need to be healed
of the shame we feel from that which has excluded us and relegated us to the
fringes of our communities -- whether it is mental illness, physical
disability, gender identity, citizenship status -- or a perceived social ill
like our history of abuse or our divorce or our criminal record. Or our sin so
painful, we have never been able even to speak it aloud.
Of
all these things, we need to be healed. And we will not be healed by the wave
of a wand or the snap of fingers. We will not be healed by our will alone. We
will not, either, be healed solely by the power of someone other than us. We
will be healed by the radical love and grace of God in Jesus Christ, of that
much we can be certain – and we must claim that we are broken in order to be
made whole. We can begin to be healed by acknowledging that we are in deep
need.
This
will take time. And this will take tears. But through the depths of our despair
-- through the wind, the fire, the earthquake, the sound and the fury of the
chaos that surrounds us! Through it all, God will be alongside us in the sound
of sheer silence. God will speak to us in that still, small voice.
That
still small voice that, when we could not get out of bed to face the troubles
of our own souls, said, "get up!"
That
still small voice that, when were debilitated by our anxiety and our fear into
the paralysis of isolation, said, "do not be afraid, I am with you."
That
still small voice that, when we thought all hope was lost, when all options had
been exhausted, when there was nowhere left to go, said, "follow me."
It
will be that still small voice that offers us encouragement when no one else
will. It will be that still, small voice that calms the storms that rage around
us. It will be that still, small voice.
And
once we have heard that still small voice, we will be able to use our own. We
will be able to speak from the depths of our hearts about the need for healing
in our world. Because we have seen that we need healing not just on individual
levels but on the corporate level. We need to be healed from our predisposition
toward hating one another and fearing one another. We need to be healed from
our insatiable thirst for violence.
We
need to be healed from the infectious diseases of systemic and
institutionalized racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, xenophobia. We need
to be healed of the military-industrial complex and of the prison-industrial
complex. We need to be healed of the scourge of the failure of the war on drugs
and with it of the mass incarceration of people of color. We need to be healed
of the epidemic of gun violence in our classrooms and in our suburban shopping
malls, yes, but also on the forgotten streets of our ghettos.
We
need to be healed from our destructive desire to consume whatever is in our
path, no matter the economic or environmental consequence. We need to be healed
of the consequences of authoritarian dictators who have ravaged their countries
and torn their people apart.
It
all starts with a still, small voice. A still, small voice that reminds us
that, under the new law of Christ, we are no longer Jew or Greek, slave or
free, woman or man, black or white, citizen or immigrant, republican or
democrat -- we are all one in the body of Christ.
And
while our differences should be celebrated as we work together to be that body
of Christ in this world, it is imperative that we recognize that our invaluable
contributions are just that -- no more valuable than the contributions of any
other, and certainly no less. We as a people bring so many gifts to this table,
all of which are welcome. And we also bring all of our hurt to this table, all
of which is welcome. This is what we mean when we say all are welcome. This is
what we mean when we say come as you are.
Come
to this table of grace, to be celebrated and to be healed and to be restored
and to be loved. And leave this table to celebrate and to heal and to restore
and to love. Return to your home and tell everyone what God has done for you.
Amen.