Gospel of Inclusion

Boundary-crossing God, we pray for your insight today as we seek to understand your Word and how it calls us to live in faithful service to you. Amen.

There’s been a social media campaign online over the past week or two. People are creating memes – pictures with witty captions – that complete the thought, you might be a Lutheran if…

You might be a Lutheran if fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and mac and cheese are traditional funeral foods.

You might be a Lutheran if your Vacation Bible School snack is tostadas.

You might be a Lutheran if you have elephants roaming in your backyard.

You might be a Lutheran if you serve roast goat for dessert.

This social media campaign was started because many of us are sick and tired of the assumption that all Lutherans are of Scandinavian or German heritage.

Folks who posted these memes online were trying to break a stereotype that had no meaning for them, except to make them feel excluded.

Many Lutheran churches in this country were begun by German and Scandinavian immigrants, but that was a hundred and fifty years ago. We cannot continue to expect Lutherans to resonate with the northern European culture that was brought to this continent by immigrants in the 1800s.

Lutheranism is so much bigger than that.

Our church is about grace and faith, Word and Sacrament.

It is not about jello, casseroles, Ole and Lena jokes or lefse. If we limit our faith to a cultural stereotype, we are doing it a great disservice.

Someone created the hashtag “decolonize Lutheranism” so that people could follow all of the alternative views of Lutheranism that were being shared online. She was making the point that Lutheranism isn’t just about the culture that immigrants and missionaries brought with them to new places, but is about the theology and how it is actually lived out in each culture that has embraced that theology.

After his vision today in the book of Acts, Peter could have created a hashtag called “decolonizing Christianity.” Or, since the name “Christian” wasn’t really used yet in Bible times, his hashtag could have been “decolonizing The Way.” That was one of the first names for the followers of Jesus.

Early followers of The Way were predominantly Jewish. They had been raised to follow the Jewish faith, and all of the men had been circumcised as infants. You had to be circumcised in order to be Jewish, you see. And you had to be Jewish in order to be a follower of The Way, according to everything that the apostles knew and believed.

And here was Peter, sharing sacred Christian community with uncircumcised Gentiles – outsiders, according to all the critical measures.

What were you thinking, Peter?

Sure, Jesus tells us to love one another – but surely he was talking about the insiders! Jesus meant for us to love people who look like us and talk like us, who were raised like us and who have a similar experience of the world to ours.

Peter’s friends and colleagues just can’t believe that the promise of Jesus is intended for those dirty Gentiles.

As with most protests against inclusion, the followers of The Way who criticized Peter were scared. They were afraid of persecution, which was a real threat to their community. They were afraid that they would lose control of their churches, and that their children wouldn’t understand the sacrifices they had gone through to get to where they were.

If Gentiles – members of the dominant culture, the occupying enemy forces – were allowed to become followers of The Way, wouldn’t the face of the faith change? Would it still mean as much as it had when Jesus was physically with his disciples and sharing meals with them?

Peter’s critics were afraid of Gentiles becoming Christian without first becoming Jewish.

It was like those people who expect that folks must first become Scandinavian before becoming Lutheran.

It’s unnecessary, and upon reflection, maybe a little bit absurd. But it isn’t anything new.

In Peter’s time, followers of The Way were concerned about losing their identity and letting the outsiders take over. They were afraid that the definition of what it meant to be a follower of Jesus would change.

It is the conflict that has plagued Christianity for two thousand years.

Every time that a church community is established, it draws borders around itself.

We’re the Lutheran church, not Episcopalian, not Presbyterian.

OK, maybe we can play nice with those other denominations, but don’t ask us to work with those Missouri Synod Lutheran folks.

This one is particularly hard for me, as my ordination and call to ministry wouldn’t be recognized in the Missouri Synod church.

But OK – maybe we can try to play nice with other Lutherans, and with other Christian denominations. But surely God doesn’t want us to work with folks from other faith communities?

You get the picture. And I know that, for the most part, I’m preaching to the choir here.

This congregation is full of members who have come from other Christian denominations, who are married to people from various religious traditions, who appreciate a wide range of cultures and traditions.

But you’ve heard these arguments before. It’s hard not to hear these arguments, if you ever listen to the news and to the politicians and the talking heads who try to instill fear in their listeners by preaching a gospel of exclusion.

But a gospel of exclusion is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

From the very beginnings of Christianity, Jesus has encouraged his followers to love everybody, to include anyone who wants to join, to reserve judgment on others, and to be respectful of all cultures.

What God has called clean, we must not call profane!

Who are we to hinder God?

Don’t put limits on God’s love. We have no authority to do that, and when we do, we end up alienating the very people God sent to us.

When we experience conflict like the church did in Peter’s time, the proper response is to show love to others – to shift our understanding of God’s love to include the new evidence of community around us.

As one of my pastor colleagues says, “shift happens.”

A shift in our perspective is evidence of the action of the Holy Spirit.

And the Holy Spirit is all over today’s reading from Acts.

The Spirit gave Peter the vision of the animals, and told him that all of them were ok to eat – even the ones that were un-kosher.

The Spirit told Peter not to make a distinction between himself and the Gentile believers.

The Spirit led Cornelius to summon Peter to his house.

And as Peter was a guest in that house, the Holy Spirit fell upon everyone gathered, just as the Spirit had done with the disciples on Pentecost. 

The Gospel that God would have us proclaim – the one that has been sent from God, embodied by Jesus, and proclaimed by faithful Christians for the past two thousand years – is a Gospel of inclusion, love, and welcome.

         Jesus is the important thing that unites us with other.

How we follow Jesus – the kind of music we love, whether we commune with wine or grape juice, the style of our prayers, what we serve at our church potlucks – these things hardly matter in the grand scheme of things.

Our job is to be inclusive.

Now, this is difficult sometimes – many times, actually.

First we have to overcome our stereotypes and assumptions.

But we do work really hard at this – we already know not to categorize people, and to respect everyone as a child of God.

The hardest part comes when the people we are trying to welcome don’t actually respond to our invitations.

         Imagine that today’s Bible story had happened a little bit differently.

What would it have been like if Peter had had this vision, and the Holy Spirit had sent him to Cornelius’ house, but Cornelius hadn’t received a message from the Spirit about welcoming Peter in?

How could Peter have shared his message if he had been rejected by the people he was trying to serve?

This is the question that plagues many progressive churches like ours.

We want to include people of all sexual orientations and identities, but most people who come through our doors are heterosexual folks who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

We want to work on racial reconciliation, but our congregation remains largely white.

We want to work on interfaith dialogue and we want to welcome immigrants to our community, but we don’t know where to begin.

And sometimes, when we do begin, it seems like our efforts bear no fruit.

Cornelius may not trust Peter. But that doesn’t mean that he should be left out.

Recovering Catholics, transgender folks, immigrants, those who have been hurt by the church in the past… these people may choose to stay away from us, no matter how welcoming we try to make our ministry.

But we leave the door open to them.

Jesus tells us to love everyone.

Peter’s dream tells us not to draw distinctions between people, but to have an open and inclusive community.

And so we do our best.

And it’s because people have been doing their best at making a welcoming community here at this church for years that many of us came to be members here.

We fail sometimes. There are people who leave this place feeling like they were not heard or respected or loved for who they are.

But when we hear about that happening, I know that we do our best to fix the situation, and to make sure that it never happens again.

That’s the lesson from Peter today.

Welcoming people from all walks of life isn’t easy. Sometimes God needs to tell us many times over before we get the message.

But we continue to work on shifting our understanding of the Gospel, of what it means and who it’s for. We continue to expand our understanding of insider and outsider. And we continue to show the love of Jesus to other people in the ways that will be most meaningful to them.

Praise God for the inclusion that we have come to discover as followers of Jesus.

And may God give us the grace to show that level of welcome to others.
Amen.

Easter 5C, 4/24/16
Acts 11:1-18; John 13:31-35

Unlikely and Improbable

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God. You are our rock, our strength, our life, and our redeemer. Amen.

The Gospel of Luke begins and ends with angels.

A few months ago, we heard about how an angel came first to a childless elderly priest and then to an unmarried young woman, and announced to them both the birth of their respective sons. Nine months after the first announcement, John was born to Elizabeth and Zechariah.

And then, on Christmas, the angels came to the shepherds in the fields to announce the birth of Jesus, the Messiah.

         That’s how the story – the Gospel – begins.

Today, at the end of the story, two angels came to a group of women to announce the resurrection of Jesus, the Messiah.

These women had watched Jesus die on Friday, and seen the place where he was buried. They rested on the Sabbath, as was required by law.

But first thing Sunday morning, Mary, Joanna, and a group of other women had come to Jesus’ tomb to pay their respects.

Instead of finding a tomb at which to grieve, these women were greeted by messengers from God to tell them that Jesus wasn’t there! He was no longer dead, but alive!

The women went straight to tell Jesus’ other disciples the good news that Jesus was risen! He had conquered death!

But these words seemed to them an idle tale.

God sends messengers to the world – angels, bearing good news – and they show up in the most unlikely of places, to the most improbable people.

         An elderly priest and a poor teenage girl.

Who would believe either of them, when they told people that they were going to have a son? The priest’s wife was too old, and Mary herself was too young.

But these unlikely people believed the messengers of God, and because they believed, they became    the carriers of God’s Word    to the people.

So it was with the shepherds.

Shepherds were peasants, at the bottom rung of the social ladder. And more than that, they were dirty and probably smelled bad – after all, they lived in the fields with the sheep most of the time. Who would want to get close enough for conversation with people like that?

And yet, the angels came    to the shepherds    to announce the birth of Jesus.

And the shepherds became the first evangelists, the first people to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, and then to go tell others about him.

In Luke’s Gospel, angels have a record of showing up to people who may not be taken seriously by society. So today’s story follows right in line.

The women come to the tomb in grief, expecting to complete some of the rituals of burial that had been missed two days before.

But they were surprised.

Jesus’ body wasn’t there, but two angels were.

And the message from God that the angels brought to the women was – why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here! He is risen!

That must have been a confusing and unbelievable message to Mary and Joanna and the others. When we have lost a loved one and are in the throes of grief, often we want nothing more than for the person we loved to return. But deep down, we know it can’t happen.

Except – for these women, and for Jesus, on the very first Easter, it did happen. He came back from the dead. How were the women supposed to make sense of that?

The angels took a few minutes to explain their message to the women. Eventually the women realized the depth of the good news they had just received.  Jesus is risen! Just like he said! Death has been conquered!

Once they understood God’s messengers, the women just had to share the good news. They became the next evangelists, sharing the story of Jesus’ life with others.

But in the patriarchal society of ancient Israel, the male disciples of Jesus just couldn’t believe what the women had to say.

Even Peter, who saw the empty tomb for himself – Peter was amazed, but he didn’t understand. He didn’t tell other people about what he had seen.

The male disciples couldn’t believe in the Resurrection until they heard it from someone they believed to be credible, and the female disciples just didn’t fit the bill.

Too bad for the men. They had to live with their grief and confusion for a lot longer until they understood the good news of the Resurrection, simply because they didn’t listen to the messengers God sent to them.

This happens whenever we let stereotypes dictate our perception of the people we meet. Stereotypes based on gender, race, language, or any other measure, will prevent us from understanding the work that God is doing in the world.

God rarely sends messengers to people in positions of power. Instead, angels bring the good news to people who are outcast, oppressed, marginalized, and dehumanized by the society around them.

And then those people become the evangelists – they become God’s human messengers who can share the good news with the rest of us.

But because God’s messengers come to the people we least expect, our stereotypes can make it hard for us to believe that God’s messengers have come at all, or that the good news that is carried by these marginalized people could possibly be true.

This is what happened with Jesus’ male disciples.

The male disciples still hadn’t learned how God works.

God sends messengers to the most unlikely of places, to the most improbable people.

Angels came to the shepherds, and to a group of women.

         But to the men, it was just an idle tale.

It was the greatest news the world has ever known – Jesus is risen! And they couldn’t hear it.

God continues to send messengers into our world.

And those messengers continue to show up in unlikely places, to improbable people.

Today, we have the opportunity to respond to God’s messengers like the women did, or like the men. And the more open we are to hearing God’s word from unexpected places, the sooner our grief and sorrow can be healed by the words of the angels.

If we want to hear the message of God for our lives today, we need to listen to our Muslim sisters and brothers. As Pope Francis reminded us this past week, we are all children of the same God.

If we want to hear the message of God for our lives today, we need to listen to our transgender neighbors. God can speak to us through them.

We need to listen to our immigrant neighbors, regardless of their legal status, because they just might be carrying a message from the angels.

At some point, the idle tale of the women became the foundation of our faith, a faith that has endured for the past two thousand years.

Eventually, the male disciples came to believe the good news that the women had known right from the start, and they also started sharing the good news with others.

And even when the evangelist was a man, the listeners still probably received the news of the Resurrection as an idle tale sometimes.

The life of Jesus is something so new, so unprecedented, so unbelievable, that it can be hard to find the right words to describe it.

But, thank goodness, the evangelists wrote it down for us. They gave us language and stories to understand, and they kept telling the good news over and over again until that idle tale could become the Word of God.

God’s good news is waiting for us, ready to bless us and give us new life. And if there’s one thing we can learn from Luke’s Gospel, it’s that the good news of God will come through messengers sent to unlikely, improbable, marginalized people and places.

And so, let us rejoice with the outcasts, that today, God’s good news has come, even to us!

And let us continue to find ways to hear God’s messengers, and to tell others the good news.

Christ is risen!

Christ is risen indeed!

Please pray with me.

God, help us to hear your words as good news, and not as an idle tale.

As you have shown us through the example of the women disciples, help us to be faithful in following you, and fearless in proclaiming your message of hope and love to the world.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.

March 27, 2016
Easter C
Luke 24:1-12

A Week

Lord, help us listen to your voice, to follow through with actions, to grow closer to you, and find ways to serve others. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

A lot can happen in a week.

When I worked at church camp, the staff would be scrambling on Sunday morning to make sure the cabins were clean, the registration table set up, and everything all ready for a new week with campers. The counselors would dig through their piles of laundry to find a staff shirt to put on before the kids arrived after lunch.

There was a lot of excitement on Sundays, and some nervous energy.

That nervous energy went through the roof when campers started showing up.

You had kids who had never spent a night away from home before, and kids who had been coming to camp every summer their whole lives. There were shy kids and outgoing kids, those who loved being at camp in the woods and those who really missed their screens.

And then there were the parents – ready to have a week away from their children, or worried about missing them. Some families had relied entirely on scholarship support to send their kids to camp, and the registration question about leaving money for their kids to spend in the camp store was a stressful one. Some families had parents or older siblings who had served on staff, so being there was like a reunion.

The first day of church camp was hectic, energetic, confusing, exciting, and overall just full of emotions!

Campers and counselors met each other, as the people who would be their roommates for the week.

Bedtime Sunday would be full of late-night talks and teary homesickness and exhausted campers and counselors alike.

Monday was different. On Monday, people started building the relationships that would carry them through the week. Everyone started getting used to the daily schedule of meals, worship, activities, and campfire before bed.

By Tuesday, people were getting good at teambuilding activities – trust falls, low-ropes activities – and they became involved in worship planning.  

By Wednesday, folks had figured out each others’ talents and areas for growth, and could encourage each other to challenge those growing edges. The carefully cleaned cabins by now were a mess, but a happy mess from all the games and craft projects and bonding that folks had been doing all week.

Thursday was the last full day. People would go all out to create memories with their new friends, to last them for months to come. The most elaborate camp games were played, and the most meaningful worship happened.

Friday was a crazy mix of emotions. Excitement of campers to see family, to share the experiences of the week, to go home to parents and friends and pets.

Excitement by the counselors to have a day off, spend a little time online, check in on that job application or school housing option for life after church camp.

Friday was filled with sadness and grief for the amazing memories that had been made but would never be repeated. People would promise to come back and meet up at camp next year. Campers would exchange contact info in hopes of maintaining these new friendships. Parents would come to camp by lunchtime, excited to see everything that their children had learned and all the ways they had grown over the past week.

And really, a lot had been accomplished in that week.

Children learned to overcome fear and shyness.

Staff learned their own capabilities and independence.

And everyone learned about the surprising ways that God can break into our lives to show us something new and amazing, even when we’re not expecting it.

A lot can happen in a week.

Today, on this Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem to the sound of cheers, being welcomed as royalty. The disciples who traveled with him must have been confused and excited and frightened about what it all could mean.

Even on the first day of the week, there were some who didn’t want to celebrate Jesus. Whatever their motivation – fear, jealousy, anger – the Pharisees warned Jesus and his followers that this day of celebration couldn’t continue forever.

And indeed, the mood changes quickly. Immediately after his triumphal entry, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem. He laments for what he sees as the imminent destruction of the city and its inhabitants, due to their unfaithfulness.

And then he gets mad. Jesus enters the Temple and drives out the people who are selling things there. He claims that these people are exploiting the faithful, and perverting religious teaching.

All of that happens on day one. It’s a hectic day of energy, excitement, confusion, learning, and overall just full of emotions!

Throughout the rest of the week, Jesus teaches in the Temple… his authority is questioned, and he tricks the religious leaders. He describes things in parables, comes out on top in battles of wit against religious leaders, and denounces legal experts. Jesus describes a poor widow as blessed, while at the same time condemning the society that has sentenced her to poverty.

As his week in Jerusalem goes on, Jesus foretells the destruction of the Temple, and Jerusalem. He tells more parables. And he and his disciples prepare to celebrate the Passover meal together.

On Thursday evening, Jesus and the disciples share the Passover meal, which we remember every time we gather for worship and celebrate Communion.

On Thursday evening, one of those disciples who shared in that celebration chose to betray Jesus to the authorities, thereby ensuring his execution.

Overnight Thursday to Friday, Jesus endured a strange trial in which everyone wanted him to disappear from their lives, but no one wanted to claim responsibility for executing him.

And on Friday, Jesus is executed in public, as a convicted criminal. He dies and is laid in a tomb. And his disciples don’t know what to do.

A lot can happen in a week.

As worship began today, we remembered Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem as a celebrated leader! During the rest of worship, we are going to hear some of those stories from the rest of the week, as Jesus shares his last meal with the disciples, is betrayed and arrested.

It’s a complicated story, encompassing the range of human emotion, with lots of opportunity for finding ourselves in the story. Are we more like Mary or Judas? The disciples, or the crowds shouting for Jesus’ execution? Do we relate to Barabbas, or to the person who owns the donkey?

We can find ourselves in the midst of the action or on the sidelines, but the rich story of Jesus’ passion can and does speak to each one of us, even now, 2000 years after the fact.

And so, this week, I invite you to find yourself in this story.

Listen as it’s read here in worship today. Return for more of the story on Thursday, share in Communion and have your feet washed as the disciples of Jesus did.

Join us on Friday for a time of prayer and song, and reflection on the meaning of Jesus’ death for our sake.

Find where you connect deeply with the story, which pieces bring meaning to you, and where you find God even if you weren’t expecting God to be there.

And in all of that, don’t forget today’s celebration.

Because next Sunday, we’ll be celebrating again! Jesus will be arrested and executed, and placed in a tomb.

But next Sunday, the tomb will be found empty! And the celebration will return.

A lot can happen in a week.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

March 20, 2016

Palm & Passion Sunday C

Luke 19:28-40