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.