During the Kansas City convention this past week, I was invited to preach a sermon at the contemplative service on Saturday evening. After a long week, full of many different emotions, I felt called to reflect on the consequences of our actions, and the pain in the midst of our church community. Here is basically the text of my sermon.
Sermon for convention
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| http://mennoniteusa.org/news/delegates-grapple-with-israel-palestine-resolution/ this is a picture of my delegate table. You can see a bit of the back of my head. |
Good evening friends, it is good to gather in this service of
contemplation and worship this evening.
We have come to the last night of convention. Tomorrow, we return
home. Back to the usual rhythms of life, whatever those might look
like for you. Janeen did a wonderful job expressing some of the
emotions that you may have brought to this space this evening-joy and
exhaustion and grief and hope and all the rest.
For me, I'd like to start with a confession. I have wept more this
week than I have in any week since my father died 6 years ago. I
have felt the pain because of the choices of the church and how we
treat one another. So I have a simple prayer for my sermon this
evening. I pray that I might not cause any more pain in this service.
So with that, lets turn to the scripture text. We've been working
through the story of Luke 24, the Emmaus Road. We've reflected about
being on the way together. And Janeen, as she planned this service
months ago, thought, since it's the last night of convention, it
might be good to reflect on the end of our passage, and to talk about
what happened after Cleopas and his friend dashed back to the city of
Jerusalem, where Jesus, equally fleet of foot, came to the disciples
gathered together in the upper room.
There is much to chew on here-the
disciples with their disbelieving joy, the traditional “Shalom
Alchem”, “Peace Be With You” greeting, Jesus eating the fish so
resonate of the feeding of the 5000, and the nets left by the sea,
the scriptures opened a second time to explain the journey that the
Messiah had to take. But what caught me when I read this text
months ago, and where I want to draw you as well is to the hands and
feet that Jesus showed to his disciples. It's an ancient tradition to
contemplate the wounds of Christ. To reflect on the pain of our
savior.
But something else struck me as I though of this familiar story
again, and I'd like to see if it resonates with you. I was struck
that Christ still had wounds in his hands and his feet. Now you might
say that makes sense-why not? It's only been three days since they
were wounded, it stands to reason that there would still be holes in
them. At the same, though the surprise has been dulled by 20
centuries of repetition, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect that
the resurrected Lord, the king of glory, with his new body, the first
fruits of the new creation, the one which would sit at the right hand
of the father would be healed of the marks of the cross that he
carried just a few days before? Yet it is the lamb who had been slain
who sits on the throne.
And I'd like to honor that the Christ risen on Easter Sunday carried
the wounds of his past. Actually, I'll say that more strongly. I'd
like to claim that the risen Christ can be recognized by his wounds.
The resurrection stories are all about recognizing Jesus- you
discover Christ when he says “Peace Be With You” You know it's
Jesus when he calls your name: Mary! The savior of the world is made
known in the breaking of the bread.
And here, the disciples recognize Jesus because he bears the marks of
the cross. His wounds were the testimony to his reality and his
resurrection.
And we are wounded people too. We have been hurt. And we are a
wounded church, with pain that abounds in our midst, and we do harm
to one another as well as offer healing.
We claim that we are the body of Christ. Should we not look to the
wounds in the church and of the church to discover Jesus? But this is
not what we do.
I noticed an
editorial by Paul Schrag in the Mennonite World Review a few weeks
ago. He wrote “Rumor
has it the church is a place for people who’ve got their act
together. People who will tell you how well everything is going.
People who think pretty highly of themselves. We can see where this
rumor started. We like to make a good impression on a Sunday
morning...we
cover our flaws and try to look perfect. A denomination can do this
just as well as an individual Christian. Why reveal our disputes and
problems? That’s not very “missional.” We do so much that is
good. This is what the world needs to know. The messy parts can stay
behind closed doors. We have a reputation to protect.”
(http://mennoworld.org/2015/06/08/editorial/honest-imperfection/)
That good reputation is a sin. It belies the evidence of the Gospel.
The Bible is a book full of wounded
people. The writers of scripture were not afraid to tell the story of
David murdering Uriah, the story of Noah getting drunk and exposing
himself to his sons, the story of Abraham trying to pass Sarah off as
his sister, the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree for not having
figs when it wasn't the season for figs, and many many others. You
can't open the good book without running into broken people doing
foolish things.
And so it is with us-every
congregation I've been a part of had it's stories of woundedness, and
when we listen well, we may learn to love better.
A mostly harmless story-I was a youth pastor at Faith Mennonite
Church in Newton. After the Christmas program, they handed out
Christmas bags, with peanuts, chocolate, and candy canes. I expressed
some surprise at the absence of the traditional oranges, which were
essential to the Christmas bags of my youth. And the high school
youth sheepishly told me the story of how years earlier, they had
been playing catch (or throwing oranges at each other) after the
Christmas program, and had broken one of the large basement windows
in the church, and ever since there hadn't been oranges in the bags.
Just as the broken relationships between Jacob and Esau and Isaac and
Ishmael reverberated down through the centuries in ancient
hostilities, so to do the wounds that we bear reverberate in our
lives.
So I celebrate when we as a church tell true stories, because just as
Cyneatha said this morning, it is in those stories, shared over
broken bread that we come to love one another. The stories of our
wounds come together to reveal the deeper brokenness in the church
and the world, and Christ who is found at the margins reveals himself
in the pain of his children who gather.
In social science circles, we call it intersectionality-the ways that
different structures of oppression come together to build up a
community based on power and control. So lets reflect on those ways
that people are working to reveal the wounds in the church.
We have mourned the violence of John Howard Yoder this week, and have
acknowledged the violence that continues in our congregations and our
communities, and I think of the work that Rachel Halder at Our
Stories Untold and Carolyn Holderread Heggen have done to reveal the
deep ways we continue to put the fears of institutions and concern
for perpetrators above the needs of survivors.
I think of when Erica Littlewolf acknowledged that we're meeting in
Kansas City, on the edge of the Kansas Prairies, and reminds us of
the Kiowa, and the Kansas and the Wichita and the Osage and many
others, who lived on this land, I remember how I intersect this
story. This is the land of my birth, and the land of my father and
grandfather and great-grandfather before me. Here that Mennonites
came for good land, bringing the winter wheat that made this part of
the country the breadbasket to the world, but we came to land that
was not our own, stolen only a few short years before from those who
possessed it. Iris DeLeon Harshorn and other leaders have begun to
teach us more about the history of the land that we pretend to own
through the Doctrine of Discovery, and is warning us of the danger in
celebrating our own exodus journeys without remembering those who
were swept away for our journey.
Today, I come from the city of St. Louis, and our community has
experienced a great deal of brokenness in the last year. Or, more
accurately, the brokenness that has been part of our community for
hundreds of years has been highlighted, because of the tireless work
of activists in the #Black Lives Matter movement.
And I have found myself struggling with how to speak faithfully,
pastoring a church that is almost entirely white in a segregated
city, preaching a style that is almost quintessentially middle class
Mennonite, and coming from a religious tradition that encourages me
not to speak to government, not to challenge political systems of
oppression and evil, but instead to simply acknowledge that the world
is fallen and get back to the work trying to transform the church and
to leave the public realm to its own devices.
I have been strengthened by the challenges of Ewuare Osayande and
Cyneatha Millsaps and Christian Parks and Nekeisha Alexis and Regina
Shands Stoltzfus and Jesse Dunnigans and James Long and Michael Blair
and Tierra McCoy many others who have taught me that anti-oppression
work is core the gospel, that Jesus spoke up against that fox Herod
and called the Pharisees white washed tombs and turned over the
tables of the money changers and that I cannot love my neighbor
without being willing to confront all the injustice that she faces in
solidarity.
So I will acknowledge that it's the 4th of July today, and
America is celebrating it's independence. We will shoot off rockets
to celebrate our victory in warfare, we will sing the national anthem
to remember the land of the free and the home of the brave,
politicians from across the spectrum will praise this country as the
greatest nation the world has ever seen, and they will pray that God
might bless America.
And I am so much more aware today than I was about the ways in which
this is not true. That we have stacked the deck against black and
brown people, that urban ghettos and the persistent wealth gaps in
our cities, and jails filled with black bodies are not accidents of
history, but are deliberate policy choices by a government founded in
white supremacy.
And I hope well tell the stories of this week. We have caused pain
this week. With each resolution we passed, or didn't pass, people
have grieved. So let us remember the stories well.
I will remember the woman who wept that we could not stand with the
oppressed Palestinian people.
I will remember the man who challenged us to rewrite the resolution
on sexual abuse, to make it stronger and better, and we would not.
I will remember so many people who stood at microphones and bared
their souls and experienced their church decide against them, grumble
against them, even silence their voices.
And most of all, I will remember the pain in the eyes of my LGBTQ brothers and
sisters, grieving the wounds we offer once again, when we deny their
agency and do not trust their love.
Friends, you who have gathered this evening, lets resist the
temptation to paper over the holes in the body of Christ, lets not
try to rush forgiveness and lets not accept cheap grace. Instead,
lets remember these stories, and add them to the story of what makes
Mennonite Church USA.
Those are my stories. I know you have your own, and I don't presume
to speak for you. Which is where we will turn next in our service.
May you remember the wounds that you have experienced, and that you
have caused. And may you find Christ there.
Amen
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