Sermon for Sunday, July 7, 2013: You are not Alone

Sermon Sunday July 7^th, 2013

Gospel: You are not alone.

Pr. Paul Cannon

Good Morning Bethany Lutheran!

As many of you know, I grew up out in the wild west known as Utah.  And if Utah is famous for any one thing, it’s famous for being the central hub of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints – known as the LDS church aka, the Mormon church.

And I have to tell ya, that being a Lutheran in Utah gets kind of lonely.  There was like 3 or 4 kids in my confirmation class and two of them were me and my brother. So my parents, being the wise, and gentle people that they are (and I’m not just saying that because they are here this morning…wink wink) sent me off to college in MN to learn my Lutheran roots, or as my mother secretly wished, to marry a Lutheran girl!  Mission accomplished.

It was a good move on my parent’s part, not just because I married a Pastor’s daughter, but because up in Minnesota Lutherans are like ants – they were everywhere.  You couldn’t look under a rock without finding a Lutheran eating a hot-dish (dontcha know).

The opposite is true in Utah.  The state is well over 50% Mormon, so though I’m not an expert on Mormonism, I have learned a lot about them just by living there. About half the kids in my school were Mormon, we had Mormon neighbors and Mormon teachers.  Most of our politicians and even the newscasters were all Mormon. 

A lot people in this part of the world don’t know much about the LDS church.  Maybe you have a neighbor who is Mormon, or maybe your doorbell has been rung once or twice by a couple of goofy-looking teenagers on bikes.  You know the ones I’m talking about.  They wear white button-downs, black ties, black pants and they have those name tags that have the ironic title “elder” printed on them.

Well, one thing I can say from my experience is that the LDS community in Utah is that on the one hand they really take care and look after one another.  But on the other hand, they can also be very closed off.  Often the Mormon kids would only hang out with each other, so living there sometimes felt very isolated and lonely as a Christian.  Our family wasn’t ever invited to a Mormon neighbor’s house and I never really hung out with LDS kids because they were only supposed to hang out with each other.

I bring all this up because today we are talking about community & mission.  And those are two things that the LDS church simultaneously really good at, and really bad at.

And it starts today with our Gospel. Mormons take the Bible passage we read today about as seriously – and if I’m being blantantly honest, more seriously – than most Christians take it.

The story comes from the Gospel of Luke.  Jesus had been traveling across the countryside, visiting towns and acquiring more and more disciples. In our story today, he gathers a group of seventy of his followers and then sends them out in pairs ahead of him to proclaim the good news to all the villages they come across.

And this is the model the Mormon church has picked up on. They send their young 19-20 year old male missionaries out in pairs.  And that’s why whenever you see LDS Missionaries there are two of them – because Jesus sent out the seventy in pairs.

There’s a lot of good reasons to go out in pairs and perhaps most significantly, going out in pairs sends the message, “You’re not alone.” You’re not alone. Those missionaries always know that they don’t have to go knocking on doors by themselves.  They have a partner – somebody who has their back. 

Time and time again, our scripture tells us the same thing: that we were never meant to do it all by ourselves.  In the Garden of Eden, God looked at Adam and said, “It is not good that man should be alone.”  Then what did he do? God made Adam a partner. 

In the first chapter of Matthew, an Angel appears to Joseph and tells him “’Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ And what does Emmanuel mean? … ‘God with us.’”

It’s interesting because on the one hand, the LDS church models this really well. They send all their missionaries in pairs so they aren’t alone. Their tight-knit communities look after one another.  And those are great traits to have in a church.  But our family’s experience (and I know the experience of many Utah Christians is similar) was that they often did it to the exclusion of outsiders – to the exclusion of their neighbors.

That’s not a reflection of God’s Kingdom.  God reaches out to the lonely.  He speaks through the outcasts.  Jesus didn’t exclude people he deemed unworthy.  He built his church on them.

It’s not just the LDS church that does this.  Lutherans can be guilty of it as well.  Too often we reflect the world we live in, rather than God’s Kingdom. Our world is one that asks “Why should I care?” “It’s not my problem if my neighbor can’t afford health insurance.” “It’s not my problem if people are dying of Malaria in Africa.” “It’s not my problem if the new kid at school doesn’t have somebody to talk to.”  It’s just not my problem.

As a church, we need to be counter-cultural to this.  We are called to go out in pairs supporting one another in God’s mission.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, breathe easy, I have no plans to send you out door to door with cheesy pamphlets explaining how to be Lutheran. I’m not even sure what would be on a pamphlet like that. How to be a Lutheran: Step one: Receive God’s grace.  Step Two: Receive God’s grace.  Step three (optional): Eat hotdish.  No.  Not all of us are called to be evangelical missionaries.

(Hotdish is the Midwest term for a casserole that contains basically everything you can find in your pantry/freezer.  mmmm...hotdish).

However everybody has a calling.  Let me say that again.  Everybody has a calling.  Sometimes we have this faulty assumption that it’s only the Pastors who are quote “called” to things.  But that’s not how Martin Luther saw it.  He believed that all people are called into their stations in life. So whether your calling is as an accountant, a teacher, a stay-at-home parent, a student, a retired grandparent or a customer service rep, God has called you to be where you are.

And all of us are called in whatever we do to stand with others against injustice.  We are all called to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. We are all called to be God’s hands and feet in the world. And that can be a daunting task!  There are a lot of hungry people!  There is a lot of injustice in the world!

But the grace in all of this is that God doesn’t leave you alone to do these things by yourself. Isn’t that what we heard Paul write to the community in Galatia this morning?  He begs them to “bear one another’s burdens.”  Bear one another’s burdens. It’s both a calling and a blessing.  

We are called to bear our neighbor’s struggles.  So it is our problem if our neighbor’s can’t afford to send their sick kid to the doctor.  It is our problem every time a person dies of a preventable disease in Africa.  It is our problem when the new kid in school doesn’t have anybody to talk to.

The blessing is that you are not alone. You have a community here at Bethany that wants to support you. You have a God that has promised in Baptism to be Emmanuel – God with you. So when your burdens get heavy – when you lose your job or are fighting depression or trying to kick an addiction – you have a community that will help you bear those heavy loads.

This community exists to support one another and God’s entire creation. It’s what God calls us to do.  God’s mission for this church is not only that we can support you in your struggles, but that we look outside of ourselves as well. 

So, people of God, I say to you,

“Go in peace, and know that you do not go alone.”

Amen

3rd Sunday after Pentecost: June 17, 2012

3^rd Sunday after Pentecost: June 17, 2012

Mark 4:26-34

PREACHER: Pastor Carrie B. Smith

On this Father’s Day, it seems appropriate to tell a story that at least begins with my father. Therefore I’ll tell you how, in the summers after my freshman and sophomore years in college, my dear Dad kindly arranged a summer job for me, so I wouldn’t be bored sitting around the house. Wasn’t that nice of him? Happy Father’s Day, Dad! I had taught a few piano lessons and had held a job as  Sunday morning pianist at the Freewill Baptist Church in town, but this was my first non-music job—and it was a job working for one of my dad’s friends. No pressure!

But before you feel too sorry for me (I did plenty of that for myself), you should know this summer job was far from the burger-slinging or toddler-chasing I could have been doing. I had no reason to whine, in fact, because what my dad had arranged was a job working in the university botany lab.

Thanks to my dad, I had the privilege of working for eight hours a day in an air-conditioned, sterile, nearly soundless room, carefully placing Arabidopsis thaliana into Petri dishes. In plain language, my job was planting mustard seeds.

If I had known I would one day be a pastor, I might have appreciated the irony of spending the summer planting mustard seeds. As it was, I did appreciate the air-conditioning. But I was a music major, and I therefore understood exactly nothing of what I was going on in that lab.

Pick up seed with tweezers, wash seed in Clorox, set timer for 90 seconds, wait, rinse seed in water, plant seed in Petri dish. Repeat. Seed, after seed, after seed. Mark 4 verse 31 says the mustard seed is “the smallest seed on earth.” I’m sure this isn’t technically true, but let’s just say that mustard seeds are small. Very, very small.

And it was all very strange to me. What was the point? I’m sure I did ask that question, but even the answer was incomprehensible. And so I continued on: picking up seeds, washing them, and planting them. I simply had to trust that somehow, something was happening with those seeds.

On weekends, I was sometimes on watering duty, and it was then I could see the results of my endless hours of tweezing and bleaching and planting. Unlike my sterile planting chamber, this room was packed with mustard plants, and they were growing—like weeds!

Here were the results the professors and students were hoping for. Here were hundreds of flowering plants, growing to maturity from those microscopic seeds. Here was the harvest, mysteriously growing even though I had no idea what I was doing.  Later, I would learn that Arabadopsis thaliana became the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced. 

Jesus says the kingdom is like that: “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” 

We plant seed, after seed, after seed. We teach Sunday school. We’re kind to our neighbors and are active in the community. We smile at the check-out girl and invite her to church. We give our offering checks. We pray: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done”. And some days we wonder if it’s making any difference at all!

It’s especially hard to see the kingdom coming when giving is down, when it’s summer and the pews aren’t filled, and when our young people don’t come to church. It’s hard to see the kingdom at hand when our neighbors are losing their homes, when the cost of insurance means our loved ones can’t see the doctor, or when children are dying of malaria. And yet we trust. We keep planting, and praying, and trusting that the kingdom will indeed come, on earth as it is in heaven. 

And—thanks be to God—it does! While we sleep and rise, the seed sprouts and grows, though we do not know how. The kingdom “is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

This weekend I had the privilege of attending the Northern Illinois Synod Assembly with your fellow church members Joel Thoreson, Ron and Pat Henning, Shirley Anderson, Karla Malpica, Bethany Gola, Michael Fortin, and Mel Meier. We heard reports from committees, passed the budget, honored retirees and clergy anniversaries, watched promotional videos and celebrated the 25^th year of the ELCA and the Northern Illinois Synod. (we also ate dessert at every meal!)

As fascinating as parliamentary procedures can be, the best moment of the weekend was yesterday when we welcomed Lord of Love Lutheran Church in Galena as a congregation of the ELCA and the Northern Illinois Synod. 

Bishop Wollersheim invited members of the congregation on the stage, and suddenly from behind us we heard the sound of a trumpet, a tambourine, and singing: “Amen, amen, amen, amen, amen!” And here they came: black and white and brown, young and old, singing down the aisle and onto the stage. Lord of Love’s pastor, Dennis Hill, had been ordained the night before, and they were clearly still glowing from that joyous event. 

That sight alone might have been enough to lift our spirits after a lengthy session of historical speeches and Robert’s Rules of Order! And then we heard the story of Lord of Love.

Lord of Love began as an informal group of just thirteen people. Some of had been members of congregations that left the ELCA. Some had been without a church home for years before, or had never felt welcome in one. But in 2009, those 13 believers came to the Synod office and asked if they could become an ELCA congregation. They had a vision of becoming a church for all believers in Christ, where all are welcome regardless of age, disability, gender, nationality, race, religious background, sexual identity or socioeconomic status. In their own words: “At Lord of Love, when we say “All Are Welcome,” we mean it.”

There were some problems to overcome: for one thing, their pastor wasn’t Lutheran, but Baptist! They had no idea what they were doing. As their congregational president said, starting a new church isn’t on anyone’s bucket list! And on that first day, when they opened their doors, they weren’t sure anyone would come to the kind of church they had envisioned and described. For the first few minutes, it was just the thirteen of them, alone. 

But then they started to arrive. Cars drove into the parking lot. Families walked in. Community members they had never seen darken the doors of their old churches were coming to this one.

That was in 2009. This year, at their official organizational meeting, there were more than 125 signers! Lord of Love, which at one time looked like nothing more than a handful of tiny stray seeds, has now grown and put forth large branches, so that the birds of the air—all the birds of the air—can make nests in its shade. 

The thing is, we often expect the kingdom to look like one thing, and it ends up being completely different. We too easily dismiss tiny seeds. We assume nothing is growing if we can’t see it happening.

And yet Jesus tells us to trust. Trust that in spite of our worries or statistics that seemed stacked against us, the kingdom is coming. Trust that in spite of dire predictions that the mainline churches are dying, Christianity has become irrelevant, or the world is going to hell in a handbasket, we have reason to hope. 

Our hope is in the One who said, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” and “the kingdom of God has come near”. Our hope is in the One who sees in a handful of discarded church members and lonely souls the seeds of a new church. Our hope is in the One who heals girls everyone else thought was dead and who gives blind men sight. Our hope is in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, friend of the friendless, voice of the voiceless, our master gardener, the water of life, our rock and our redeemer. Amen!

January 22, 2012: Five More Minutes

Third Sunday after Epiphany: January 22, 2012
Mark 1:14-20
“Five More Minutes”
Preacher: Pastor Carrie B. Smith

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Five. More. Minutes.

These are perhaps the three most frustrating words in the English language.
When I was first married, these were the words that greeted me many mornings, when I would casually mention to my new husband that now might be the time to wake up and go to College Algebra. “Five more minutes,” he would groan, to which I would frequently respond, in five of his favorite words: “I. Am. Not. Your. Mother.”

But then, one day, I was someone’s mother! And soon I heard those three words almost nightly when it was time for bed. “Five more minutes! I’m almost done with this level! I just need to save my game! Just five more minutes, PLEASE?!”

There was one—and only one—time when I truly enjoyed hearing those three little words. It was a school day morning, and my younger son was sitting on the floor of the living room, jacket on, backpack already strapped to his back, trying to finish a particularly good book (The Hunger Games, I think). When I told him it was time to hurry on to the bus stop, he looked up at me with teary eyes and pleaded, “Five more minutes! Please?”

How could I refuse? Five pages and five minutes later, I happily drove him to school.

Five more minutes—it’s a seemingly simple request, but it’s also a very convenient (and much-loved) avoidance technique.

All of which makes me consider the immediate response of the fishermen in today’s Gospel reading from St. Mark, the first chapter. Jesus walked along the Sea of Galilee, calling out to Simon and Andrew, James and John, and the scriptures tell us they “immediately” left their nets and boats and followed him. Not in five minutes, but now.

And this is how we know they weren’t Lutherans.

Lutherans would have held some meetings first. Lutherans would have tabled the discussion for awhile and formed a task force. If a decision couldn’t be reached, they would have split into a few synods, each claiming to be more faithful than the other. If those first disciples had been Lutherans, I’ll bet they would have found a way to bring their boats with them—or at least their favorite seats in the boat!

Meanwhile, Jesus remains on the shore, calling out with his simple invitation: “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Softly and tenderly, Jesus is still calling us to new life, new opportunities, and new ways of being in the world—and we put it off until later, determined to attend to our own agenda first. Rather than responding immediately like those first eager disciples, our answer is often something like “Five more minutes, Lord.”

“Just five more minutes! We’re happy here in our boats, with our nets, catching fish. It’s comfortable here! After all, this is the way we’ve always done it. Fishing for people sounds interesting—but not today.Following you sounds like a good opportunity—for someone else. But I tell you what: give us your cell number, Jesus, and we’ll call you later.”

To be fair, we have lots of practice at putting things off for later, because time is always an issue. With iPhones and iPads,professional organizing services and automatic bill payments, we should have more time than ever. But when are you going to actually read that story to your kids? When will you have dinner with those friends you haven’t seen in ages? When are you taking that vacation, or taking your spouse on a date? When are you going back to school for that degree? When are you finally going to say you’re sorry?

“Five more minutes. Just five more minutes is all I need.”

To which Martin Luther once replied, “How soon NOT NOW becomes NEVER.”

And his namesake, Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we celebrated this week, famously wrote, “The time is always ripe to do what is right.”

Dr. King wrote these words in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, and you might be surprised to learn they weren’t directed at the racists and bigots who were opposing the fight for civil rights. Instead, these strong words were intended for well-meaning Christians (some of them
pastors) who thought King was moving too fast. He wrote:

“I received a letter this morning from a white brother in Texas which said: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but is it possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry? It has taken Christianity almost 2,000 years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth."
Dr. King’s letter continues:

“I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the
people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”

When we respond to the call of Jesus with “Five more minutes, Lord”; when we stay on the boat;
when we put off for later what God wants done now—then we contribute to the appalling silence of the good people. We remain fence-sitters and pew-warmers rather than co-workers with God.

And so today, when we hear this familiar Gospel lesson about Jesus calling the first disciples, it both inspires and convicts us. When we hear about those fishermen who immediately got off the boat, it’s easy to recognize the ways in which we, time after time, have missed the boat because we stayed on the boat!

And perhaps I could end the sermon here, while we pass around sign-up sheets for the various ministry and service opportunities at Bethany Lutheran Church. We could be overrun right now—immediately!—with volunteers for PADs and Sunday School and the Green Team! Let’s get out of the boat and fish for people! Amen?

But wait: there’s more!

To be sure, this Gospel lesson is focused chiefly on how—and when—we respond to the call of Jesus. It’s a story about time, and how we use it. But this story also teaches us about how God uses time.
Scripture tells us that Jesus came walking along the Sea of Galilee at a certain moment in time:
his friend and mentor, John the Baptist, had just been arrested. This was a difficult time to be a prophet, and laying low might have been the wiser choice for Jesus. But Jesus instead went to Galilee, boldly proclaiming the Good News and calling out to anyone who would listen (even fishermen on their boats).

And the Good News of God that Jesus was proclaiming, the message that he would not let be
censored or suppressed, went something like this:
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.”

Other Bible translations put it this way: “The time has come!” or sometimes “The right time has come.”
But my favorite, from the Message Version of the Gospels, goes like this:

“Time’s up! God’s kingdom is here!”

Time’s up! No more waiting for the Messiah! No more living in darkness! No more struggling to
gain God’s approval! No more reaching toward the unattainable goal of perfection! For, as it is
written in Galatians chapter 4:
“When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.”

In the fullness of time—at just the right time--we received the gift of Jesus Christ, our Savior, our Redeemer, our healer, and our brother. The God who loves us saw fit to end our waiting and make us adopted children of God. This happened at just the right time—and this is the Good News! This is the message Jesus calls us to join in sharing with the world.

Not in five minutes. Not when we’re comfortable or when we’re sure everyone will agree with us—but NOW.

When we get out of the boat, Bethany Lutheran, when we leave our nets behind, we are free to join Jesus in proclaiming to the world: “Time’s up!”

For racism and bigotry, wherever we find it: Time’s up!
For poverty in our backyard and around the world: Time’s up!
For hatred of those who are different: Time’s up!
For apathy, greed, and indifference: Time’s up!

Time’s up, sisters and brothers, because the kingdom of God has come near. Jesus calls us
to follow him, and the time is now. Amen.