Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Sermon for Kansas City Mennonite Convention

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
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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