Belong—A Sermon of Promises

Grace and peace from God our Creator, Hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you always.

The lectionary is weird. We’re in the seventh week of Easter, but the Gospel lesson today is from the night before Jesus died. At first glance, it’s backward and disorienting. But the people who put the readings together are professionals, so I’ve decided to trust them.

Scholars, like the people who assembled the lectionary, call these chapters of John’s Gospel the “Farewell Discourses.” Jesus is saying a lengthy goodbye to his friends and disciples. In it, he sums up a lot of the things he has said before; he reiterates the most important details; he makes new promises. This week’s text is a prayer he says in the Garden of Gethsemane—just after the Last Supper, just before he’s arrested. That’s quite a moment in the life of his community. He prays “on behalf of these”—the disciples—“but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one.” That's us! 

The fun thing about being Christians so many generations removed from Jesus is that there is no way that the Church looks like what Jesus thought his followers would look like. Millions of people, across the globe, organized together because of the love of God through Jesus. Except, more often than thought, we’re not very good at being “together.” We have this nasty habit of dividing ourselves on all sorts of lines—denominations, languages, races, classes, nations. 

Even when there were just the dozen or so disciples, it seems Jesus had a hunch that they’d struggle to stay together. I think the lectionary assemblers new that, just like Jesus' friends needed to be reminded of all the ways in which God would remain with them after Jesus' departure, we too need that reminder after we've celebrated Easter. We need to be reminded of the promises that were made, that are still being kept.

Karoline Lewis is a preacher I want to be like when I grow up. She wrote this about this week’s Gospel story: “...God counts on us to embody God’s promise in a world of broken ones. God needs us to give witness to the ultimate promise kept when our experience….knows only empty promises. God invites us to live in the promise that is truly ours forever—that is the resurrection difference.”

Since we are living in the world after the resurrection, there is a whole new range of possibilities open to us. But I think I speak for a lot of us when I confess that the logistics of the resurrection are distracting, and I never really get past that. Karoline continues:

“Resurrection is often relegated to a belief of the church to which we simply comply and that which we by rote confess. We go through the motions each Easter, each time the creed is said, but how often do we stop and say that resurrection makes a difference for how I live my day today? What might it feel like to know that the promise of the resurrection is mine now?”

What might it feel like to be open to the newness of resurrection? What might it feel like to try being church a completely different way? How might it change what we do and what we believe?

Let’s step back a second. What does it even mean to believe? What are some synonyms you can think of? Audience participation! 

When you google the word believe, as you might do, casually and hypothetically, the primary definition is “feel sure of the truth of.” You know those words of the creed we say before the Eucharist? “I believe in God, the father almighty…”

What if we said “I feel sure of the truth of God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I feel sure of the truth of Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord...” and then “I feel sure of the truth of the Holy Spirit…”

I think that, like the resurrection, we get stuck on the word “believe” a lot, because we worry about whether our beliefs are “right” or not. And often, especially on a college campus, it can be challenging to respond when people push you on your beliefs, right? And when you’re still sort of working them out, that can be a big roadblock.

There’s an Episcopal author named Diana Butler Bass who has written several books about church. She wrote one called Christianity After Religion that looks at what we’re going to be in this age of “spiritual but not religious”-ness. It’s an interesting book, and it has one part that I’ve carried with me since I read it. She says that in the old way of being church, there were three B’s: Believe, behave, belong.

You went to a church because you believed the things they believed (or wanted to) and then learned from them how to behave according to those beliefs, and then once you’d gotten all of that squared away, you could “join” the church officially. You could really belong there. That probably sounds familiar, and maybe doesn’t sound entirely problematic to you.

But what if we flipped it? She asks. What if instead, we belong and then behave and then believe? What if we are invited and welcomed into a community, no questions asked? What if, then, we see how others act and we learn new ways to love ourselves and our neighbors? What if, then, we come to believe the truths they teach?

Here at the Belfry, I hope you feel like you are part of something. I hope you feel like you are invited and welcome to be all of who you are, whether you’re even sure who you are. I hope you feel like the other people here are learning alongside you, and that you--as individuals and as a community--are growing. I hope you feel like, as we talk and learn and read and sing and laugh, that these promises that God makes are promises to you.

And I promise you that, while you’re here and after you leave here—whether you graduate or study abroad or finish your service with LEVN—that you will always belong here.

If you discern that you’re Lutheran or that you aren’t; if you discern that you’re Episcopalian or that you aren’t; if you discern that you’re queer or that you aren’t; if you discern that you’re called to be a pastor or that you aren’t; if you discern that you’re going to graduate or that you aren’t.

Whoever you are, you belong here.

You don’t have to sit in this chapel every Wednesday to belong here. You don’t have to show up for Bible study every week, or for Tapping Into Theology every month, or for book club, or for Prov, or for anything. I like you, and so I hope you want to show up to all those things and create other spaces for other folks to feel like they belong here, too! That’s the behave part. That can come next.

You are part of the Belfry and you are part of God’s family at all times and in all places. I promise.

Fill in the Blank

I listen to a lot of great podcasts. A while ago, I wanted to like, "get into" podcasts, and thought that there was like, some sort of...way that one did that. Turns out, you just click on some and listen to them and then subscribe if you want new episodes to appear on your phone. And like, I didn't want to listen to Serial or to This American Life or to Radiolab or any of the NPR and NPR-esque podcasts that everyone says "but you HAVE to listen to it!" Sometimes I am a horrific contrarian. I love NPR for life, but INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH there is more to life than NPR.

[Tangent! Once, at a Secular Student Alliance meeting at CLU, we joked for a while about what the podcast would be called that each of us would host. Grant and Evan's podcast (related to their atheism) would be called The Lack Thereof--mostly because they were always punctuating other people's descriptions of things with a jabbing "or the lack thereof!" to underscore how inauthentic everything is in American society or whatever. Hashtag undergrads. Mine, it was determined, would be called Interestingly Enough (essentially an audio version of this blog, it turns out--I just get to tell the world about things I find interesting) because I throw that phrase into a lot of sentences, usually exposing some sort of irony or bullsh or whatever, usually about church. Thanks for playing!]

If you were with me a few months ago, you know that I added some rad podcasts to my life during my white media fast during Lent. [Read all about that here.] One of those excellent podcasts, Call Your Girlfriend, recently spoke right to me.  Not literally--they didn't answer my listener question or something, but Aminatou and Ann were talking about "making it" as a writer (in an answer to a listener question, actually) and I am grateful for the care they took in answering. They noticed that the question came from a place of fear and scarcity--the woman writing in expressed the concern that there were so many great writers around her that she could never be as good as. Ann, a journalist and freelance writer extraordinaire, explained a common phase among writers that involves feeling like nothing you write is ever as good as anything you read. And then she said,

"If you're stopped in your tracks by other people's great writing instead of inspired by it, there's no future in that for you" (Episode 29).

I said, "huh" out loud. I paused the podcast for a second. I "rewound" a bit to hear her again, because I wanted to copy down the sentence so I could eventually write this about it. I do not consider myself "a writer", per se, and as such am rarely intimidated out of writing something based on reading the excellent writing of others--I so do not equate myself with them, and therefore find no problem rambling madly here with you. :)

But the reason this spoke right to me is because I often feel this way about other pastors. I sometimes allow the incredible preaching, teaching, and caring of others to stop me in my tracks and intimidate me away from being my best pastoral self. What Ann has so simply and deeply reminded me is that all those other superb pastors are part of how I am the pastor that I am. We, together, are the church. We, together, are the ELCA. We, together, are the body of Christ. Because a colleague of mine can succinctly/beautifully/boldly/radically/poetically express the Gospel does not mean that I should discontinue expressing the Gospel. So so much the opposite. I need the excellence of my peers to foster the excellence in me.

What about you? If we changed "writing" to a _______, what would it be for you? What do you do, and whose doing of that thing falsely intimidates you out of doing it the way you know to be true? Fill in that blank. And then really fill it.

The one where a Lutheran agrees with the Pope

Recently, I've been in conversation with a local organizer from NextGen Climate who is rallying support from faith leaders in Yolo County for SB 350. I wrote this letter to the editor in response to Pope Francis' recent encyclical. 

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As a Lutheran, I don’t often agree with the pope. After reading Laudato Si, Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on climate change, however, I must. 

For too long in the United States, religious rhetoric surrounding the environment has been denial of climate science and ignorant arrogance with regard to its catastrophic effects on the poor and vulnerable. This must change.

For people of faith like Pope Francis and myself, there is a moral imperative to reduce and reverse the effects of climate change. Since we understand ourselves to be connected to all of creation, we are called to protect and preserve it. Pope Francis reminds us that our Scriptures, “bear witness to a conviction which we today share, that everything is interconnected, and that genuine care for our own lives and our relationships with nature is inseparable from fraternity, justice, and faithfulness to others” [2.II.70]. 

The saying goes that as goes California, so goes the nation. It is my hope that California will pass legislation including SB 350, which will reinforce our role as a leader in the fight against climate change. SB 350 calls for a 50% reduction in emissions, a 50% increase in energy efficiency in buildings, and that 50% of California’s power come from renewable sources, all by 2030. 

We have the power to make substantive changes—we must. Join me in prayer for our planet and its leaders, and in telling California’s leaders to vote yes on SB 350 and other protections for our world and its inhabitants.

Casey Kloehn, M.Div

Program Director, Lutheran Episcopal Volunteer Network