Now What?

I realize it's been almost exactly a year since I posted anything here (you know...grad school, teaching, life, etc.,) but I figured I would go ahead and share this. This is the text of a sermon I gave at Covenant Presbyterian Church last Sunday, June 15. You can listen to an mp3 of the sermon here. The scripture texts are Isaiah 58:1-12 (true and false fasting,) Acts 2: 22-47 (Peter preaching after Pentecost and the formation of the Church,) and Matthew 25: 31-46 (the sheep and the goats and the least of these.)

A few weeks ago, a friend and I approached a stressed out, slightly over-worked Paul [the pastor] and said something along the lines of, “You need a break. Pick a Sunday. One of us will preach.” So Paul asked for today, for Father’s Day, so he might spend it with his kids. Knowing that said friend would be knee deep in General Assembly, I said, “No problem. I’ll preach.” I haven’t given the message in over a year anyway.

So, in preparation, I did what any good Presbyterian would do who wants to do things decently, in order, and in community with the rest of the church; I looked at the lectionary, and was presented with passages involving the Trinity. Lovely mystery, that. One I do not begin to understand, but one of the good things about being a guest preacher is that you can change it up! It also means that you can use the scripture that God has put on your heart to use. I will still be speaking about the Trinity on this Trinity Sunday, but in no way will I attempt to explain it.

That said, this sermon comes with a few disclaimers:

1. I chose these very familiar scripture passages for a very specific reason, and I hope we can look at them in slightly new ways.
2. I just spent two weeks at the Montreat Youth Conference listening and learning and conversing and discerning with some of the most intelligent and honest and loving young people our denomination has to offer. I have pages of notes from keynote, worship, and small group and I want to touch on it all, so y’all just sit still because we might be here for a while.
3. You may experience some discomfort. A lot of what I learned and what I feel I need to share is challenging. But if I read the Gospels right, Christ never promised us a cushy, comfy life of discipleship. What Christ calls us to is challenging and sometimes—oftentimes—makes us, and possibly those around us, uncomfortable. That said, though, I know we’re up for it. To quote Barney Stinson from the popular television show How I Met Your Mother, “Challenge accepted!” So here we go.

As many of you may know, I received my undergraduate degree in Recreation Management. A BS in b.s., some said, but actually it was more akin to a business degree. However, instead of writing grant proposals for research and development projects, we wrote grant proposals for high ropes courses; and instead of learning about risk management in terms of money, we learned about risk management in terms of “how not to die.” We also played a lot of team building games, and overall I learned more about how to run a classroom and organize youth ministry from my rec degree than from anything else.

One of the many exercises you do when leading a group of people through certain activities is debrief the activities when you are finished. You get people to talk about what they experienced, what they learned, how they may have changed in your brief time together, and what new knowledge they gained that they can take back to the infamous “real world.” An effective method for leading these kinds of discussions is to follow the simple what/so what/now what pattern. Ask people, “What happened? What did you just do?” And then move to the slightly deeper, “So what do you think you just accomplished? So what new information do you have either about yourself or your situation?” And then you finish with the often hard-to-answer, “Now what are you going to do? How are you going to take this new information and apply it to your life?”

This simple debriefing tool has come in very handy for me in a variety of situations, and I can attest as well that it crosses international boundaries and translates well to other cultures, which is why I’d like to take this approach today. We need some debriefing. Our lives as Christians and our experience at Pentecost needs to be thought about and discussed; it needs to be debriefed so that we may take our new information and apply it. For that’s what debriefing is: learning what new information you have and how you can apply it.

Let’s start with “what.” What happened? What happened? The Holy Spirit happened! Last week was Pentecost, the birthday of the church. We celebrated the Holy Spirit come to earth just as Jesus promised. It blew through the house and lit people on fire and let them speak in languages they didn’t know to proclaim to a people they’d never met the good news of Christ’s resurrection. It emboldened Peter to begin what would become one of the most successful—and danger-ridden—ministries of all time. It confused some, scared others, inspired more, and generally turned the whole place upside down.

What happened? Jesus happened! This Nazarene shows up claiming to be God and preaches weird stories about sheep and goats and helping people and speaks in metaphors that drive even English teachers crazy and presents abstract concepts as characters in stories and much to the chagrin of the world he rarely explains what he means but instead leaves it all up for interpretation which has caused two thousand years of “problems."

What happened? A thousand years of prophecy fulfillment happened! Some dude named Isaiah talked endlessly about how to be right with God and how to do what God needs you to do and how to properly fast and then—SHAZZAM!—this Nazarene shows up and actually embodies what this Isaiah dude has been trying to communicate for the last thousand years and then even after his resurrection, Jesus promises the Holy Spirit to help us embody what he embodied which is what Isaiah told everybody to embody in the first place.

What happened? We were given instructions on how to be God’s hands and God’s feet and God’s mouthpiece. Isaiah talks about true and false fasting. He tells us that the fasts God chooses to bless are not necessarily fasts of the body, but rather fasts of the spirit; when those of us who have too much go without something we don’t need anyway so that we may help provide for those who have too little. When those of us in positions of power use our power not to oppress but to liberate.

Jesus showed us how to be God’s hands and God’s feet and God’s mouthpiece. Jesus hung out with prostitutes, ate dinner with corrupt tax officials, chose a group of obtuse blue-collar workers to be his friends and students, touched the untouchable, cleansed the unclean, and had some very harsh words for those who thought they were doing God’s will.

The Church was born. And I don’t mean Covenant Church, or the Presbyterian Church, or even the Christian church, but the big-C Church, the Church Universal, the body of Christ who, despite all evidence to the contrary, has at its core a deep and abiding belief in the power of love.

All this has happened. God told us through Isaiah what we need to do. God showed us through Christ what we need to do. And God empowered us through the Holy Spirit to go do what he showed and told us to do.

So what? So what new information do we have? So what new information do we wish we didn’t have? This is where it starts to get tricky.

A large amount of time at a Montreat Youth Conference is spent receiving and processing information. Three hours a day are spent in keynote and worship and another three hours are spent in small groups. (All this is divided up into hour-an-a-half blocks so it’s easier to digest.) Most of the time in small groups—and by “small groups” I mean 25-30 people, all from different churches and different parts of the country—is spent debriefing what you learned in keynote and worship. And as an educator and youth minister that’s the most telling time. The youth of the church are some of the wisest people I’ve ever met and there is a refreshing honesty in their discernment. I know this is why Jesus tells us to be more like children.

One of the daily themes at this year’s conference centered on the idea of family. Webster has one definition of family—persons related to one another by blood—but the church has a very different definition of family. To the church, “family” is everyone. If we believe that Christ came and lived and died for all of humanity, then that means that we are all brothers and sisters. And this, of course, applies to our enemies as well as to our friends.

The illustration for this idea that the keynoter used was to speak about a specific case involving Florida’s infamous stand-your-ground law. This law states that you are allowed, by law, to use deadly force against another human being if you perceive that you are in mortal danger. The sticking point is often that little word “perceive,” if you perceive that you are in mortal danger. The spirit of this law is to allow people to defend themselves in real life-or-death situations, but the letter of this law is disproportionately used to acquit middle class white men of crimes against minorities, when the perceived threat is not to their lives but to their social positions of power. This is not right. The world says “fight” but Christ says “love.” The world says “use the class system” but Christ says “In me there is no class system.”

The keynoter’s point in talking about this case and the stand-your-ground law was that if we are, in fact, family in the body Christ then, yes, we need to stand our ground. We need to stand our ground against the social injustice that says it is okay to kill a person based on our own judgments of his actions. We need to stand our ground against the idea that any one human being’s life is worth less than our own. Because if we are all family in the body of Christ then Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis and Matthew Shepard and 250 nameless Nigerian schoolgirls and countless others are all our brothers and sisters and children. But there is a flip side. If we really are all family in the body of Christ then George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn and Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson and Boko Haram and countless others are our brothers and sisters and children, too. Because no one life is worth less than another.

So what? When Isaiah speaks of truly fasting, and when Jesus speaks of sheep and goats, and when the Holy Spirit blows us into action, who is it for? It is easy to say that we must stand our ground against racism, sexism, gender inequality, bullying, and violence, which of course we must do. But we must also stand our ground against the lie that says that anyone is outside God’s grace. As it says in our passage from Acts, the Holy Spirit came for us all. We must stand our ground for those who believe they are unlovable and unloved. And friends, this is very easy for me to say but it is very difficult to do. Trust me, there are several people who have wronged me in deep and profound ways, and it is a bitter pill to swallow to think that a beloved friend and the men who murdered him are both equal recipients of the redemption of Christ. But fortunately Christ didn’t ask me, he just guides me.

So what? So God and Christ and the Holy Spirit work together to give us the information and the tools we need to go out into the world and be family. We are called to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and heal the sick and visit the lonely just as Christ did, but Christ also befriended corrupt tax officials and demoniacs. We are called to befriend bullies and love murderers and reach out to those who would actively seek to harm us. God has a habit of using not the piously qualified to advance the Kingdom, but the deeply disturbed. Most of our heroes of the faith by any other name would be criminals.

•  Moses was a murderer and a run-away
• Jonah was a sniveling, whining, self-absorbed bore
• Rahab was an opportunistic prostitute
• David was a liar, a murderer, and an adulterer (a trifecta of awful who still goes down in history as one of the greatest spiritual poets of all time and a “man after God’s own heart”)
• Solomon was a misogynistic polygamist (and how is it that the “wisest man ever” thought it was a good idea to keep 300 wives and 700 concubines?! Any man who’s ever tried to date two women at one time can tell you that this is a terrible idea!)
• Most of the apostles had a second-grade education at best
• Zaccheus and Matthew were corrupt accountants
• Mary Magdalene had a seriously questionable past
• Peter was wishy-washy and non-committal until he was literally possessed by the Holy Spirit
• Paul, who wrote most of our sacred New Testament, was a terrorist

These—and others—are the people whom God called to bring his Kingdom down to earth. We are comfortable with them now because we know the end of their stories, we know that they work out well, but what if we didn’t? How many of us would judge Rahab for her profession and shun her from our midst? David would certainly not be allowed to be out in polite society and would probably be on trial for a host of various crimes. Zaccheus and Matthew would be seen as better suited to work at Enron than at church, and we would be so scared of Paul that we wouldn’t even speak of him, for it is easier not to speak of the Taliban. And yet somehow, someway, against our wishes, God has stuck us together and called us family.

Now what? This is where we might get really uncomfortable because this is where the rubber meets the road. Now that we know what has happened and now that we know what information we have, now what are we going to do with it? How do we live it? How do we stand our ground for both the oppressed and the oppressors? How do we stand our ground for our enemies as well as for our friends? How do we act out a belief that all are redeemed through the sacrifice of Christ? How do we live in the world even while we’re not of the world?

While we were debriefing the keynoter’s stand-your-ground illustration in my small group during the first week, it came up repeatedly that the kids were shocked and upset that she would talk about politics from the pulpit. I learned later that this was the response of many other groups. I heard comments from youth and adults alike such as: “We shouldn’t talk about politics from the pulpit;” “There’s a time and a place for this kind of discussion but it’s not here;” “Church isn’t the right place to address political agendas;” and “She could have made her point equally as well without bringing up such a controversial issue.” However, I also heard comments like: “We have to talk about politics from the pulpit;” “If here isn’t the time or the place to discuss these things, then where is?” “Church is the perfect place to address politics and inform our decision making;” and “Her point itself was controversial so it wouldn’t matter what illustration she used.” It was an interesting discussion. And to all of it I say, “Now what?”

Now we get to put Jesus’s words into action. Yes, people are physically hungry and need physical food, but people are also starving for love. People live locked inside prisons of cinder block and rebar, but they also live locked inside prisons of their own minds and locked inside the prison of believing that violence is the only answer.

Now what? Now, I say, we get to be political. Here in America we have the privilege of being able to be political, and the separation of church and state only means that the government can’t tell us what to believe, but our beliefs had better influence our government. As people of faith we are called to have our faith form and mold every aspect of our lives and that includes our political actions. This applies to personal politics right up through international politics, and if you think the PC(USA) isn’t involved in politics, then I invite you to look at the docket for General Assembly. There are:

• 12 resolutions regarding Israel-Palestine 
• 7 resolutions regarding marriage equality
• 6 resolutions regarding violence (sexual, gun, sectarian)
• 2 resolutions regarding the use of drones and unmanned aircraft
• others include immigration, human trafficking, use of fossil fuels, for-profit prisons, taxes, divestment of stocks, abortion, the death penalty, drugs, public education, US-Cuba relations, and how the church interacts with churches in other countries

We are a very political church because we get to be. And we need to be. Our world operates on politics, whether we like it or not, and one of the ways that we practice being in the world while not being of the world is to be involved politically. To stand our ground in the public forum. It was because of the faith and love of people like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. that we got legislation like the Civil Rights Act. Our faith needs to inform what we do and how we vote. But we must also understand that my beliefs may cause me to vote in the completely opposite direction of your beliefs and that is okay. Because our faith also tells us that all things work out for good for those who love God and that we are all family.

Along with being political we must also continue to be missional and more than that, we must be missionally political. Our congregation is actually pretty good at the mission thing, we do a lot. We faithfully bring in our rice and peanut butter for Good Samaritan; we faithfully cook meals for the Melting Pot; we faithfully help host families for Family Promise. We do all these things faithfully and well, but I believe we are ready for more. We are a congregation of well-educated, largely well-funded people and we faithfully support programs such as Family Promise, the River, Good Samaritan, and Melting Pot and we should continue in this support, but we should also begin to ask, “Now what?” What more can we be doing for these and for others? Where else is God calling us to act as family for the world? How are we called to fast? Are we sheep or goats? Will we let the Holy Spirit blow us to new and uncomfortable places?

And lest you think that these are nice rhetorical questions for you to ponder over lunch (when I finally let you get there) think again. At the inside end of every pew you will find a stack of paper. Please take a piece of paper and write down two items: 1) What are you doing now? What are you doing in the world right now that is because of what you believe? What are you doing because of what Jesus tells us to do? 2) What would you like to be doing? Maybe this is something that you used to do that you’re no longer able to do, or maybe it’s something that’s little more than an idea and you haven’t quite figured out how to act on it, but you know you’re called to some kind of action.

I’ll give you an example. 1) What am I doing: I teach. I teach because I love it, and because I know it’s what I’m called to do. Frederick Buechner said that your calling is where your greatest desire and the world’s greatest need meet and for me that’s in the classroom. To those who say I should go to seminary and be a pastor, I say, “Who says I haven’t?” My faith calls me to write off no student and to respect all faculty, and to understand that inside every bully and apathetic and mean student there’s a small child who just wants to be loved. 

And 2) What would I like to do: Like it or not, I have to speak up against violence. I have to write my Congressional representatives and email the President (and, yes, you can email the President via whitehouse.gov) and work with local law enforcement programs that help children to respond to their world in ways that do not involve opening fire in the cafeteria or stabbing classmates. I have to do this so that what happened in Hawkins County and in Santa Barbara, California, and in Seattle, Oregon, and Newtown, Connecticut, and sadly a list that goes on and on does not keep growing. I must work with and through the political systems that are in place to address both sides of issues like gun control because I do not want my classroom on the six-o-clock news. I must do these things not only for myself but because I owe it to the kids that I teach. For some of them, the classroom might be the most stable and secure place that they encounter and everyone deserves a safe place to learn how to be themselves.

So tell me: What are you doing now and what more would you like to be doing? Take a few minutes, talk to your neighbor, write down what you think. Make sure to put your name on it because we want to know what’s being done here and now, and where our passions lie. When you’re done, hang on to it and we’ll take them up with the offering.

What? So what? Now what?

What happened? God happened. Jesus happened. The Holy Spirit happened. Because of God’s love for the world—the whole world—he sent us himself in the form of Jesus who lived and breathed and taught us what it looks like to live an Isaiah kind of fast. Then they sent the Holy Spirit to continue to prod us and lead us and convict us when we need it.

So what? So we were left with instructions. Sometimes they are vague, sometimes they are awkward, sometimes they make no sense and seem completely counterproductive. They require work to understand and even more work to execute, but this is why we discern together and study together. And laugh and cry together.

Now what? Now what is where we are, it’s where we live. We live this side of the prophets and this side of the resurrection and this side of the birth of the church. We have everything we need; now we have to use it.

Poet William Blake once wrote of human existence that “We are here to learn to endure the beams of love.” Which seems kind of silly. How hard can it be to learn to endure love? We all want to be loved, it’s the deepest yearning we have as humans, why would we need to learn to endure it? That should be easy. But God and Jesus and the Spirit, the three are one and they all embody love in its most perfect form, and they are anything but easy. It is not the beams of love that God has for us, but rather the beams of love that God has for our enemies that we must learn to endure. And we must learn to endure the beams of love we have for one another. There are people it would be easier to hate, and there are people that we can’t understand why anyone would have compassion for them, but we are not called to that. We are called to something this world can’t understand, but still finds beautiful. 

Now what? Now we are called to love the Christ that lives in everyone, especially when they can’t love it in themselves.

Amen.