August 4th, 2013 The Eleventh Sunday After
Pentecost
First Baptist Church, West Jefferson
Matthew 22:1-10
Before we pray I would like to
comment that this sermon is not about our own Grace Miller playing in the
compost pile in DC. The youth would like me to clarify she may have been messy then but that's not exactly the grace we are talking about. Will you pray with me?
Will you pray with me?
God who
enlivens and sustains us,
May
the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing in your
sight oh God our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
Think back
to your oldest memory. That memory that you can’t think of anything before that
and beyond that you have to rely on the stories you’ve heard about your growing
up. For me, my oldest memory is one that I cherish because I think it sums up a
lot of things, my relationship to the person this memory involves, it sums up
what I enjoy most in life, and most importantly it points to the reality that
one overarching quality has encompassed my life, I am a nerd.
My oldest
and most vivid memory of my childhood is of me, sitting on my Dad’s lap and
watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I remember as we sat there he shared
just a little bit of his Bunny Sliced Bread, I couldn’t have been
old at the time but I remember the thrill of watching Captain Jean-Luc Picard
and his crew race across space to the furthest reaches of the galaxy. To this
day I still can tell you what the warp theory is that enabled them to do that,
I can tell you that first contact with an alien species happened on April 5th,
2063 and that when people were beamed aboard the starship Enterprise it was a
combination of glitter, water and special effects that made that happen. To be
a nerd might be an understatement.
Something
happened this week that I saw that might have changed my outlook on being a
nerd. It wasn’t the best idea to want to be Spock for Halloween growing up, it
wasn’t always popular to play with a model starship instead of a football, but
this week a fan was at a Star Trek convention (yes they have those) and asked
one of the stars of the Star Trek: The Next Generation stars to impart some
wisdom to her newborn baby. In a world of social media she recorded it and now
we see the wisdom in being a nerd.
Wil Wheatonwho played young Wesley Crusher in the 1980’s and 90’s said this: “Hi Violet,
my name is Wil Wheaton and it’s 2013 and you’ve just joined us on earth, so
welcome. I’m an actor, a writer and a dad… I don’t know what the world is going
to be like by the time you understand this, and I don’t know what it will be
like to be a nerd when you’re a young woman. For me when I was growing up,
being a nerd meant liking things that were weird and took a lot of effort to
understand… I really wanted to get to the bottom of what was going on instead
of riding this planet through space. When I was a little boy, people teased me
and made me feel like there was something wrong with being a nerd. The world
has changed a lot, because being a nerd or geek is not about what you love,
it’s about how you love. There will be something in your life that you love, it
might be sports or science, or building things, it doesn’t matter what it is,
the way you love it and surround yourself with other people who love it is what
matters and what defines you. The defining characteristic of being a nerd is
that we love things, whatever that is. Some of us love completely different
things but we all love… We come from all around the world and love with other
people. That’s what being a nerd is.”
I feel like
Jesus could have imparted those words to us a night long ago. I wonder if he
lovingly looked at his friends, and he probably said something along the lines
of ‘I don’t know what the world will be like when you finally understand what
is about to happen.’ That voice has echoed throughout time as we come to a
table and feast on the Blessed Sacrament.
Our youth
had experiences with communion a few weeks back in the very heart of our
nation. In a place often characterized as godless and soulless the youth of
First Baptist Church were in mystic sweet communion with the people on the
streets of Washington at a park not too far from the center of power in our
world. They sat together and in some holy humor they took sliced bread and
Dixie cups and celebrated a faith older than all of us combined. It was messy,
grape juice would sometimes splatter and the people we shared in communion with
weren’t the epitome of cleanliness but it didn’t matter because love was
involved. We were nerds for communion. It didn’t matter that we were out in a
park in 87-degree weather, it didn’t matter that they had spent their day
making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and it didn’t matter that they had to
walk back on feet that were sore because in those moments they were
experiencing the very kingdom of God.
My
great-grandmother Lee was a bulwark of what some would consider the old guard
of southern aristocracy. She was quick to tell people when they would first
walk into Broad Street United Methodist Church if they were sitting in
someone’s usual seat, much less her own. About 10 years after her death I was
talking with her pastor from the 1970’s who I still maintain a friendship with.
This particular pastor led the congregation as they began the “new” way of
celebrating the Lord’s Supper through intinction. He said the first time Broad
Street celebrated communion that way my great grandmother came down the aisle
to the front of the church with a napkin ready to be tucked in her collar to
make sure she had a clean break with this communion. The worst reality for her
was the possibility that grace might be messy. Her pastor told me that ever
since then he wondered if she ever ‘got it.’
My prayer
is that she did. My prayer is that one day she realized that grace is messy and
if the worst thing that happened to her that day was some grape juice
splattered on her hands then she was doing pretty well. You see when we were
out there on the streets with the homeless of DC this Eucharistic action was
more than a moment to walk down the aisle and look around nodding to the
congregation who watches us take communion. It was not an act of public faith
it was an act of survival. They took the bread and ate it as if it was their
last meal they might have for a while. They feasted because they had been
invited to the feast.
There
weren’t any stipulations placed on who was welcome. There were people there in
that park that had 401k packages with more money than your entire staff makes
in a year. There were people who had been in and out of jail, people who knew
what hell was like because they were living it. But in a holy way they came
together and hoped for a brighter tomorrow. Their feast was what mattered to
them and they joined with us in a magnificent moment of messy grace.
You know
this past week I had another moment of messy grace. Michael and I went to
Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem to visit Terry, Carl and Mary Simmons.
These members of our church are grappling with the realities of making moments count,
of facing the thoughts of death and endings, and sleepless nights in a hospital
room. As Michael and I visited we both got the sense that this was no ordinary
hospital visit. I feel as if we were both extended a grace that was messy but
nonetheless beautiful. You see Carl, Mary, and Terry didn’t act like people who
faced such realities. They talked as if a victory had already occurred, because
ultimately it has. The beauty in the life of this church is we have countless
church members from the youngest children to people like Carl and Mary who have
been married 59 years experiencing this messy grace in a way unique to them. Messy
grace can be painful, tiresome and depressing, but it reminds us that the life
of faith is full of God’s incarnate love.
You see
we’re all broken and in need of redemptive, messy grace. If you’ve ever broken
a plate you know that the pieces don’t always go back the way they used to.
When you are broken you don’t go back the way you used to be, and in an act of
love, messy grace comes in and fills the brokenness with new life and
redemption. When we share in an act of worship like communion we stare
everything that has ever broken us in the face and in an act of defiance we share
together in proclaiming victory.
The hope of
communion, the hope of our faith is that we love. They will know we are
Christians by our love. They won’t know we are Christians based on our favorite
form of the Lord’s Supper, they won’t know you are Christians by your political
party or particular opinion of a hot button issue such as sexual orientation,
the nation’s budget, the war, or teacher pay. They will know you are Christian
by the fact that you respond to all those issues informed by the love that
makes you whole.
And in the end those things don’t matter as
much as they used to when we are informed by love. It almost seems rather petty
when you think about our disagreements in the light of God’s glory and grace.
I’ve often wondered what would have happened if people shared in communion at
all the disagreements in the institutional church. What if the Crusaders
decided to eat with their enemies? What if Luther would have been willing to
share a meal with the Catholic Church for whom he ardently disagreed with? What
if the Moral Majority would have broken bread with the Progressive Mainliners?
What if the Southern Baptist Convention and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship
were willing to share a meal in the midst of all the pain they’ve both
encountered?
You see
what’s scary about all that is when you share a meal with someone; you have to
get to know them. That’s what Jesus wanted, and we experienced that in the park
that hot summer day in Washington DC. We were forced to abandon our safe harbor
and find the grace of talking to someone. We were as much recipients of
Christ’s grace as we were people sharing that gift. We encountered people there
like Matthew who taught us what it meant to be a follower of Jesus, of John
Spencer a kid from another church who embodied servant-hood even though it
looked a little funny, we found out about friendship from David a kid from
Texas, and if you’re brave enough, ask our youth about what they experienced
when they met a kid named Henry.
But it
didn’t stop there. Our own youth became for so many the incarnate presence of a
living and life-changing God. Church family if you want to see what it’s like
to experience communion you need only look as far as a conversation with Evan,
Parker, Adrian, Ethan, Caroline, Amanda or Grace. If you want to share in a
feast ask Ava Rector, Chelsie Bobbitt and Kennedy Reeves about the important
task of inviting Justin Bieber to church. When I went on these trips I went as
a cautious observer at first, I think most people think that because you are
young you are automatically qualified to do youth ministry, let’s be real with
one another I was terrified. But each of these youth and children in their own
unique way invited the chaperones, the homeless of Washington, and other
churches into a feast of fellowship, of messy grace, and of love that is bigger
than I could have possibly imagined.
Back to the story I first told you about my
Dad and that night years ago watching Star Trek. I’ve experienced a lot of
church services in my life, I’ve been to a bunch of communion services some
which I felt so close to God it was overpowering and some where I felt so far
away I couldn’t imagine sharing in the feast. But one thing I’m thankful for is
that my first memory with my dad watching Star Trek was one of profoundly
Eucharistic implications. Honestly we could have been watching anything at the
time, it didn’t matter. What matters for both of us that I had the opportunity to
have some bread and coke with my dad, the dad who knew me before I knew what it
was like to be known. The dad who taught me to drive and live and love through
his example, and he got to share that with me. We too are invited today, not
because we do anything particularly special or because we all agree on
everything, but because we love, we love a God who loved us before we knew how
to even acknowledge that love. God like my dad back years ago takes these
elements well-off people like us take for granted and makes them tools
necessary for our spiritual survival. Yes you might get messy, but you know
that old saying you are what you eat? What if you eat this bread and take this
cup and become what we hope to experience through it? You never know, you might
end up in a park in DC, or watching Star Trek with your son, either way you’ll
never be the same again. Thanks be to God.
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