Sermon

Hello! This past weekend I went home to Lincoln, Nebraska for a quick meeting with my Committee on Preparation for Ministry, who are responsible for making sure that I'm working towards becoming a well-rounded pastor. While I was at home I also gave a sermon at my home church, First Presbyterian Lincoln. I've preached before for Youth Sundays and even one Women's Sunday, but this was the first time I was granted a wireless mike and carte blanche (which was terrifying). Here's the text of the sermon.



A New Kind of Family

Matthew 10:40-42
‘Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.’

Luke 8:19-21
Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd. And he was told, ‘Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you.’ But he said to them, ‘My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.’

First off, hello! It’s wonderful to be back home in Lincoln and here at First Pres, and both wonderful and a bit intimidating to be up here in the pulpit. Keep in mind that I haven’t taken any preaching classes yet – or any seminary classes at all – and I’ve been teaching middle school students all year, so this audience is a big change for me. I promise not to start the sermon off with a game of tag, though, so this should work out just fine.

This past year I’ve been leading a youth group at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago. The placement is part of my service as a Young Adult Volunteer, a program sponsored by the Presbyterian Church. I take the youth group on mission trips and movie nights, but also lead Sunday School each week, in a curriculum focused on the New Testament. While I teach the youth about Christ, they teach me to be extremely careful with my words. Each new lesson is an opportunity for them to dissect statements and test the boundaries of logic in a way better suited to copyright lawyers than preteens.

We talked about being children of God a few months back, and as soon as I finished reading the passage from Luke hands shot up.

“If we’re all related to Jesus and each other, wouldn’t we have the same DNA? Is it incest to marry other Christians? I’m an only child, and I’m definitely not related to him. My parents don’t take care of any of these other people!”

Metaphor is lost on the smart-alecks of the class, I’ve discovered. But to be fair, this story can be a scary one to take seriously. Jesus, the man we are supposed to emulate, ignores his family and refuses to see them. The idea that a person could just overlook their own family is a shocking one, especially for youth still living with their parents.

Jesus’ family has probably walked for hours or even days in order to see him. They have fought their way through crowds and waited patiently while Jesus speaks to the multitudes of people gathered to see him. Finally, at the end of his talk, they want to be able to reconnect with Jesus, to share their lives with him and hear about his journeys. Jesus had been traveling all over the country, and seen plenty of places none of them had ever been to. Of course his family must have also had their own news to share with him, marriages and new children, all the gossip from a person’s hometown. But instead of recognizing how important these people must be to him and spending time with them, Jesus ignores them to spend more time with people he’s just met. I dare any of you to try that with your own family some time and see how far it gets you.

In widening his definition of family so much, Jesus seems to insult the people he grew up with. He proclaims that any person who follows God is his family, not just the mother who raised him and brothers (and probably sisters) he grew up with. The idea that any person in the wider community of God’s followers could be just as valuable as Jesus’s family seems like an slight to Mary and his siblings.

However, thankfully, this standard goes both ways. Jesus treats his family as if they are only as important as strangers he has just met, but he also treats strangers as his family. He took the time to get to know people from all walks of life, to talk and eat with them. He spent years away from his birth family, busy teaching and caring for other children of God. And we are called to treat other people as our family, just as Christ treated strangers like family. We are encouraged to form a Christian community that acts as a larger family, where each member is loved and cared for.

Being kind to strangers is a nice theory, one which encourages smiling at people you pass in the grocery store and being more conscious of those around you. Treating them as if they were your family is a far more complicated matter, one which requires a certain amount of vulnerability from each of us. Living with strangers as if they were your family is difficult, but that initial vulnerability can turn into a wonderful support network.

This past year I have been living in intentional Christian community with five of my fellow Chicago Young Adult Volunteers. The concept of intentional community is a little strange – instead of simply rooming with people like you would in college housing or an apartment, we have all agreed to take care of each other and make household decisions together. We cook, eat, and clean together, we have a garden together and take turns taking out the recycling and choosing which movie to watch. We have, in short, become a family for our year of service.

At orientation week for all Young Adult Volunteers, alumns of the program try and explain what living in intentional community is like. “You’re going to become really close to these people,” they say. “You’re going to know every little thing about each other, go through bad times with each other as support. If you somebody gets homesick, or stressed, or has problems, you and your housemates will be responsible for each other.” And then they would laugh knowingly. “It’ll be . . . great.” It didn’t sound great. Intentional community sounded awkward and intense, the sort of thing people endorsed in theory but avoided in practice.

Everybody at orientation searched each other’s nametags, trying to find who would be their housemates and study them. We eyed each other over lunch and after worship, trying to figure out if we were really going to be as close as the alumns suggested. There were six of us assigned to Chicago, and we seemed to have only our age and our faith in common. That’s not much to build “a supportive intentional community on”, but we flew from orientation to the house we were going to share, and began acting as if we were familiar enough with these new people to be comfortable living with them.

I’m pretty sure nobody at orientation mentioned how weird those first few weeks would feel. We started out being polite, trying some of everything people cook for you, but never taking the last slice of pizza. Nobody talked about politics or played music in public spaces. People were a little bit stilted, but definitely nice. After a while, though, we started to relax and act like real people. We discovered each other’s interests and pet peeves, often by accident. There have been moments when everybody got on each other’s nerves and nobody remembered to buy milk and somebody told the same joke one too many times and it drives you crazy. We started feeling like a family, but the kind of family that’s been stuck in the backseat of a car for too long. And then, so slowly I almost didn’t notice it, we get used to each other, and started accepting each person’s quirks.

I learned what my housemates look like with terrible bedhead, when they’re sunburnt, when they’re sick, when they cry. We started becoming protective of each other. The community got less polite and more honest. It got easier to speak up when somebody needs to wash dishes; after all, you’re a community. If you can’t say something simple like that to them, how can you share what you really care about? We tease each other constantly– when you’re all around the same age, a family environment is one of all siblings, and that gets sarcastic really quickly. And we finally could share what we cared about without worrying about what others would say. We debated theology and went to each other’s churches and always, always prayed together. We agreed at the beginning of the year to say dinner grace while holding hands, and I’ll find myself at home here or having dinner out with friends and will instinctively reach across the table for people before eating. We’ve shaped each other’s understanding of God, living and working in places where our love of God is taken for granted and God’s love for us all shows up in our lives every day.

After a while our community check-in talks that started out feeling like forced confessionals got easier. We each realized that everybody had slightly different political opinions and religious beliefs than anybody else in the house, and that it was okay to talk about these differences, that we can still accept each other. We stopped being people who just treat each other kindly and became people who depend on each other. Bad things happened in other people’s lives, and it hurt the entire community; somebody gets robbed, somebody’s grandmother dies, somebody has problems at work and everybody comes together. We mourn together, celebrate birthdays together, and even congratulate each other when somebody else’s sports team wins a big game. Eventually I started to care for my housemates more about them than I really thought was possible for people I just met a couple months ago. I love them, something I can say here in Lincoln, but couldn’t tell them without being teased mercilessly. It’s been both wonderful and terrifying, to be that open.

Eventually this community, which seemed like a minor detail in my volunteer year when I signed up, has become a huge part of my life. We’ve become a family much like the kind of family you grow up with; the sort where people don’t have to get along or agree on everything in order to care about each other. We’re all from different places and have different interests, but we still take care of each other. It’s really started to feel like we’re getting a handle on treating each other like family, like we’re getting closer to really accepting other Christians as our brothers and sisters.

And that’s about when things get really tricky, because it’s taken me a year to treat five strangers like family, and Christ has called us to be this close to every other Christian on Earth. And that’s not just the Presbyterian ones, either – everybody. So let’s see, if it takes me one year to learn to love and support five people, and I should learn to love millions of people, that’s going to take . . . a really, really long time to be living as Christ wants. I don’t know if anybody out there’s a little faster at forming community, but we’re probably all going to have problems taking enough time to care about everybody.

Well, okay, so no person can be there and care about every single other person as individuals. But there are ways that the church becomes one unified family, one that cares for us and one that we need to care for in turn. Our church helps others through programs like Jacob’s Well (http://jacobswell-lincoln.com/) and Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, ways to help each person have what they need to thrive. We treat each other as family when we share meals together and pray together, when we celebrate important times in the life of the church. We live as a community when we respect each other enough to talk through differences and have difficult theological discussions. We can come together and share our lives and support each other, even if those first few steps can be awkward.

We are called to treat each Christian as family; not to just be polite to others, but to love and serve them. And although it can be difficult to accept the call to love everybody, especially if that makes us vulnerable, the gift of being part of a wider Christian community is part of God’s grace for us. We not only are loved by Christ as family, not only know that God loves and knows each of us, but have the opportunity to be part of the family of Christians. We can support each other, reach out and act as Christ on Earth and take care of each other. I know that together our church is a family, both in this congregation and beyond.

Being a Young Adult Volunteer has made it intensely obvious how much my life is supported through a wider community of Christians, both those I know and those I’ll never meet. I live in a house owned by a church, where maintenance work is done by their choir director and “tech support” is my boss’s husband. The house depends on donated kitchenware and furniture, and food brought home from our work placements. I go to sleep at night wrapped in a quilt made by Iowan Mennonites, with the prayer shawl knitted by our own knitting ministry next to me. In devoting myself to the church this year, I’ve been supported in turn by so many others, and that grace is a beautiful thing to be surrounded by.

I’ve been able to watch a stronger sense of family develop in the youth at Fourth Presbyterian Church over this past year. The same youth in Chicago that will heckle me during Sunday School are also the ones who will work hard every day of their mission trip, and the same ones that will hug me goodbye at the end of the year. The same youth that can never quite remember to stay silent during our individual prayer time will always remember to pray for each other when we share our joys and concerns. And in this one youth group, just like in my community house, I can see one small instance of how we’re called to live as family together. We are blessed to have so many different types of families, bound together by blood or by our love of Christ. Jesus loves his followers then and now as if they were family, and now it is our responsibility to love each other in the same way. It may not always be easy, but I know that this different kind of family is completely worth it.

Neighborhoods: Rogers Park

Rogers Park is Chicago's northern-most neighborhood. Since I first lived in Chicago on the south side, the area feels roughly analogous to Saskatchewan -- probably nice, very far away, maybe not worth the trip. Thankfully, there are enough things happening in Rogers Park that I've been there a few times and gotten more used to the long trek on the red line. Rogers Park is one of Chicago's most racially diverse neighborhoods -- although Chicago has plenty of diversity, it is intensely segregated.* Rogers Park is one of the few places where there is no obvious racial majority. It's also a family-oriented neighborhood in some places, with plenty of places that are kid-friendly. There are little parks dotted around, as well as lots of cafes and restaurants, many of which cater to the vegan/vegetarian/organic crowd. Loyola University has its undergraduate campus there, so there's a fairly large nexus of college students where Chicago meets its northern suburbs.

Rogers Park has lots of tiny theaters inside it, including Lifeline Theater. Lifeline only does shows which are adaptations of other works, usually of books. The first time I went to Rogers Park was to see their production of Zorro. The theater is this absolutely tiny space where you have to politely wedge yourself into a seat and try not to breathe on the actors, and yet the company managed to put an entire swashbuckling epic onstage, complete with chase scenes and (fake) horse-riding. It was fantastic, and a good reason to head back up to Rogers Park again.

*No, seriously, extremely segregated. Check out http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer and search for Chicago; the map explains what any person riding the CTA from North to South can already tell you, but it's a good infographic.

Greektown, West Loop, and an Announcement!

First off, some personal news: I have been accepted to Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and will start this fall! I'm going to get a Masters of Divinity, with the hope that I'll eventually be ordained within the Presbyterian Church. It seems like hubris to think that far ahead, since I have three years of grad school and plenty of exams to pass before ordination is even an option. However, I'm overjoyed to be certain about heading to seminary in the fall. This year has really helped me cement a sense of my own calling, and seminary will help prepare me for my future work within the church. Also, it'll be nice to be back in school; working without spring or summer breaks and being relatively free during the evenings has been somewhat confusing.

Now here's something from my backlog of neighborhoods I visited during seminary application time: Greektown. As I'm sure you can tell from the name, Greektown is a neighborhood filled with Greek restaurants, shops, and residents. The neighborhood is absolutely tiny, and marked off by pillars on either side of the stretch of restaurants that make up its main street. It's the best place to go for baklava or gyros, and has plenty of late-night diners and cafes to hang out in. The headquarters for ~H20+, a company that sells bath gel, is in Greektown. Their offices are concrete, rectangular, and soulless, except for the tiny mosaics of people in togas that dot the building -- apparently not even corporations are exempt from reflecting Greektown's shared heritage.

Greektown is a tiny dot in the middle of West Loop, a neighborhood with a much more boring name but equally fun things to do. Last time I was there was the weekend after Chicago's huge blizzard -- there were drifts to my shins on sidewalks, and I clambered around an absolutely beautiful park with a dog run and playground and mostly more snow drifts. There were sculptures in the park which looked like they were supposed to be fountains to play in, so I'll be sure to go back in a month or so and take pictures. The neighborhood is full of college students and the recently graduated; lots of tiny apartments and 24-hour taco stands and shiny new condos. It looks like a nice place to live, if a little new architecturally new to have much personality.

Back of the Yards/New City

I've been putting these blog posts off for a while first because of a need to do seminary applications and now a need to do scholarship applications. However, right now I'm feeling good enough about my deadlines to start catching up on neighborhood posts.

Back of the Yards is a large neighborhood in the South Side of Chicago (which is also called New City). It was once made up of meatpacking plants and housing for the European immigrants that worked there. However, the meatpacking plants have closed down to be replaced by warehouses, huge stores like Home Depot, and occasionally just empty lots and roads. The gate in this photo commemorates the neighborhood's history; it's listed as a historical point of interest on Chicago's tourism site, but is mostly surrounded by empty lots - probably more appealing than closed slaughterhouses, but still less than riveting.

We went to Back of the Yards in early January, and place was probably at its bleakest with black

ice edging the streets. Eventually after some walking the warehouses began to be interspersed

with houses, and finally we ended up in the more residential part of the neighborhood. It was mostly Hispanic, with cowboy boot shops and an absolutely delicious bakery near murals and plenty of older homes. The place started to feel more like a bustling New City, instead of the remains of Chicago's past. As we kept walking, we found a bustling flea market where people sold everything from tires to puppies to DVDs to cactus leaves (which, as it turns out, are pretty tasty). There was no room to walk and everything to buy and it was fantastic.

Claymation Videos!

This isn't so much of a post as it is a link. Elevation youth at Fourth Church did a make-your-own-movie night last week, and their movies are now posted on Facebook. Click on through and check them out!

www.facebook.com/fourthchurchyouth

Apology and Big Changes at Fourth Church

Sorry I haven't blogged in a while -- I'm applying for various seminaries, schools of social work, and a divinity school right now. This means that I feel guilty spending time writing anything that isn't an admissions essay, so the blog posts will be thin for a while. So far I've only submitted one application and have plenty more due within a month, which means that I will continue to update sporadically.

Rest assured, however, that my life in Chicago has not become any less (or more) interesting than before. Things are Fourth Church are getting a little hectic right now, but for the best of reasons.

Fourth Church is beginning a huge construction project they've dubbed Project Second Century. The church is tearing down one of their buildings and replacing it with a new structure that will have more modern worship space and plenty of huge rooms for youth gatherings. Since we've been cramming 20 youth into a tiny basement room for Sunday School, the new building will be an absolute blessing when it's finished.

However, right now the construction is more of a hilarious series of confusing changes than anything else. The space where I used to eat lunch is going to become a day school, the church's main entrance has been barricaded, and walls are being constructed so often that I have to stop myself from walking into new ones on a regular basis. The construction lends a somewhat surreal feeling to my time at church during the week, since I can never tell what changes will be made on a particular day. It's a very exciting time to be in the church, because the construction is forcing people to be more open to change and experimenting with new things. The congregation believes very strongly in the new building, to the point where the old Presbyterian complaint of "but we've never done it this way before!" is practically unheard. Since we are in a space which is being adapted to fit the church's long-term needs, changes in programming seem more possible than before.

The youth programs at Fourth are by necessity changing quite a bit, since we've been moved from our usual classroom space. Most of the old Sunday School rooms are being demolished, so all Sunday youth activities have been moved to temporary office space a few blocks away. This means that our new classroom space is on the 19th floor of an office building on the corner of Michigan and Chicago. It's huge, and the view is beautiful, and it feels absolutely nothing like Fourth Church's Gothic interior. Quite frankly, it feels nothing like a church, since there are cubicles right next to our classrooms and the paint is so fresh that the place seems sterile. I was worried about how the youth would react to learning about Christ in such a different environment. However, our first lesson in the new space came and went with plenty of enthusiasm from the youth. We talked about how churches were gatherings of believers, not buildings. The youth were happy to be together, and were excited about making a new space their own.