My Final Sermon at The Belfry

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.

A bittersweet moment in time, dear ones, to sit down and write my last sermon for this community. We have been through a lot, collectively, over these years, and there is much to say. And, of course, The Belfry continues apace, after me, just as it has for the last several decades. It will be different, next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. New students will arrive in the fall, and some of you will be here to welcome them. And as the new pastor settles in, you’ll work together, with the help of God, to create community inside this little yellow house and out.

So what can I offer you, each of you, this particular iteration of the Body of Christ at The Belfry, as you gather here in this place at this time—the first time we’ve gathered, and the last? I can tell you what I know to be capital-t True: you are a beloved child of God, as you are and as you are becoming. I can remind you of the promises made to you by the God who creates you, the Christ who liberates you, the spirit who accompanies you. That’s what I’m tasked with, as a called and ordained minister of the Church.

The scripture assigned for this week starts at the beginning, in the book of Genesis. Not the beginning beginning, where it says “in the beginning” but still in the beginning-ish.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, my favorite rabbi that I only know from the internet, says that the stories of Genesis are the stories of differentiation. “That is, it’s the story of moving from oneness—the unformed void, wind over waters—to a world of created things. Of birds and beasts, humans and trees. Of differentiating ourselves from our family, becoming our own people. Of leavetaking into the unknown in order to become who we need to be.”

These myths—and by myths, I mean stories we tell about truths we know—have helped us and our ancestors before us to know who we are and how we came to be. The people of God, for as long as there have been people of God, have been telling stories to each other about how they have experienced God at work. They have told stories about births and deaths, unity and strife, war and peace, scarcity and abundance. All the while, God is present. God is present within and among God’s people, shaping us for a good and just and merciful and joyful common life.

We have, throughout time, used and abused these stories. We have used these stories and our interpretations of these stories to include people and exclude people. To welcome and to banish. We have built, across the globe and across the centuries, a whole cultural narrative that hinges on our place in these stories.

I hope that as you have spent time at The Belfry—whether this is your umpteenth liturgy at this little yellow house, or you joined us online for the first time earlier this year, or something in the middle—you have heard enough stories to know that your story is part of God’s story.

That you know that you can dig into the stories of scripture and ask questions, offer critique, wonder out loud. That, within these stories, you can find the words for whatever it is that you’re experiencing, and be comforted by the idea that someone—in fact, many someones—spoke up to our God about that, too. And perhaps you can celebrate, alongside all of God’s creation, all the good that God has done for us. And that, when you encounter words of scripture that make you question some deep assumption or tradition of our society, you can be challenged to grow and change and build the Beloved Community here and now.

I am also struck this week by our situation in Pride Month, the time when we celebrate queerness in our communities and tell stories that are alternative to the dominant way of being in the world.

I wonder if, as you heard these stories from scripture today, you wondered about belonging, or relationship, or family. In the Gospel reading, specifically, when Jesus’ mother and brothers are cited as a reason for him to change his ways, he redefines what it means to be family.

Our queer siblings have been doing this for centuries, defining for themselves what it is to be loved and to belong. For Jesus, it is not simply relationships of blood or proximity that make family, but shared devotion to the will of God. As he asks, simply, “who is my parent or sibling?” in this story, he is really asking us a broader question of whose siblings and neighbors we are in the kindom of God.

We, who are siblings in Christ, are called to build up the family of God based on our shared values, stories, truths, and experiences. It may be that some people with whom we share genetic material or a childhood household are also people with whom we share values, stories, truths, and experiences.

But it may be that you have found, during your time in Davis, that your family of origin is perhaps not the fullness of family in your life. You may have chosen additional—or alternative!—people to call your family. It may be challenging or uncomfortable to engage with your family of origin or explain to them who you are, now that you have been away from them for some time. They may want you to remain the person you were.

But I hope that you have heard from this pulpit, and from our prayers, and from our songs, and from our discussions, that we are always being made new, always being re-formed, co-created. You are a beloved child of God, as you are, and as you are becoming.

As I leave here, I hope that I have done my part, that you have received and ingested these truths of God’s promises, as the Apostle Paul wrote in tonight’s reading from Corinthians, “that the one who raised Jesus to life will in turn raise us with Jesus, and place you with us in God’s presence...that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow!”

I hope you know these truths, and that these truths have made you free. That God has liberated you and me and all of us from the power of sin and death! Yes, we are mortal, yes, Paul writes, “this physical self of ours may be falling into decay”—such a way with words, that guy—but we do not lose heart! We are renewed day by day.

Because I have now gotten into the habit of homilizing and then hearing from you, I can’t just close with something tidy and finite. Even in the before times, our life together at The Belfry has never just been a one way street, where the pastor dispenses wisdom to you, the empty vessel.

I received so much from each of you as I have had the privilege and blessing to be in ministry with you. You have challenged me to wonder about big questions with messy answers. You have shown me what faithfulness and compassion and community look like in practice. You have ensured that I get “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” stuck in my head all the time.

You have formed me as a pastor and as a person, and every community I serve in the future will benefit from what you have taught me. I appreciate you so deeply, and am astonished that I have had the opportunity to accompany you and your fellow students these last six years.

And so if you have questions, please ask them. If you have reflections, please share them. Let’s wonder together, once more.

Trinity & Pride

Since 2018, campus ministry at The Belfry has been formally known as Reconciling in Christ, which is a program in the ELCA where congregations and communities go through a series of conversations about welcome, and self-identify as a place where historically marginalized and minoritized people are invited to participate fully and authentically. It began specifically as a way to designate a community as open and affirming of LGBT folks, because for decades in our tradition, the national policy was that queer people could not be full members of the Body of Christ. That policy, that stance, is a sin.

Our present policy in the ELCA is that queer people can be full members of the Body of Christ—how kind of us to allow you—but that communities who do not agree or are not fully on board are free to remain LGBT-free. The term we use to describe such people and communities is an exercise of “bound conscience” meaning that they believe it is a sin to be queer, and cannot support their queer siblings. We’ve decided to “agree to disagree” as a denomination, leaving our queer siblings between a rock and hard place.

Why have we done this? Well, mostly because we lost thousands of members and millions of dollars even allowing for this arrangement, and we can’t comprehend losing even more people if we took a firm theological stand. So we don’t. Queer folks are expected to suss out their own safety in every interaction they have with new congregations, communities, colleagues, neighbors. We apologize for the ways in which we include people and we carry on.

This is bad and wrong. This is not how God calls us to be in relationship. This past Sunday, the scripture for which we transfer to today, was the church’s observance of Trinity Sunday, a day dedicated to our favorite confusing Christian paradox. God the three in one, one in three. We name God the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. We name God the Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. God the Parent, the Liberator, the Sanctifier. We acknowledge that God is these many things and that God is one thing.

Trinitarian monotheism is a critical component of our Lutheran and Episcopal Christian theological heritage. Councils have been called, creeds have been written, heretics have been burned, and wars have been fought over this and other doctrines of our church. You may be a person who is very concerned with orthodoxy—and you are not alone—and so you are committed to understanding the sticking point of the Son being “begotten, not made, of one being with the father” in the words of our Nicene Creed. Or perhaps you are drawn to the Gospel According to John, in which it is written than “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the word was God” (John 1:1).

The gospel reading for today is a pretty famous exchange from John’s gospel between Jesus and a pharisee named Nicodemus. He comes to see Jesus under cover of night, asking his burning questions. I love Nicodemus for this.

I can just imagine that he has been lying awake at night for days. He has heard that this man, Jesus, is called the Son of God; he has heard him declare forgiveness of sins; he has heard him proclaim freedom from the systems that oppress. Nicodemus has probably tossed and turned, wondering how this could be.

As a Pharisee, it’s his job to know everything there is to know about God and about God’s relationship to the Jewish people, and how they are to be in relationship with one another. Everything that Jesus says throws him for a loop, because it challenges his knowledge and his assumptions. Jesus speaks of new ways of being children of God.

As usual, Jesus does not simply say yes or no, but says, instead, that the truth of the matter is that in order to truly experience the beloved community of God, one has to go through spiritual transformation. Nicodemus doesn’t know what to do with this, either, because he takes Jesus literally, assuming he needs to be re-born, which even in the first century, they understood could not be done. Three times, Nicodemus speaks to Jesus in this encounter, and all three times, he focuses on the logical possibility of explaining what God is doing, and all three times, he gets more confused. And he’s not alone.

You may have hoped that I was going to give you a hard and fast way to fully understand the trinity. I am not. Several years ago, a pastor of mine reminded me that the Holy Trinity is not merely a complex theological concept to be comprehended, but a relational reality to be lived. God-for-us, God-with-us, God-in-us.

It is awesome—and by that I mean the slang of our dear California and the literal inspiring of awe—that God relates to us in these varied ways. God created this universe and everything in it. God came among us, their beloved creation, as one of us. God continues to move through us and inspire us.

We need not be able to explain why or how this is so in order to respond to it.

There’s a famous old diagram of the Trinity that attempts to express how it is possible that God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but also that the Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father. They are all of one being, but they are not the same.

Shield of the Trinity

This first one is Latin, which does not make it easier for any of us to understand. But I just wanted to show you the old school creepy three-faced Jesus that somebody thought was a good idea. Here it is in English.

That’s helpful, kind of. But theologian Kee Boem So says that “the Trinity is not an abstract doctrine but a practical reality with implications for Christian life.” Nicodemus came to Jesus hoping to understand who Jesus was, in order to assess those implications. Coming to believe that Jesus was the Son of God would mean radically transforming his life, his community, and his religious practice. The same is true for us! Recognizing the community built into the God who loves us—God the Creator, God the Redeemer, God the Sustainer—should lead us to build a community, too. If God is multi-faceted, and co-creative, we ought to be, too.

All of our church friends observed this on the last Sunday in May, but we are lucky enough to be here on the first Thursday in June, which is, of course, Pride Month. So we have the distinct privilege to call upon our queer ancestors, saints, siblings, and selves to show us the multiplicity of our God. It is queer—as in odd—to be the Body of Christ in the world. If we are truly living into the radical creativity of our triune God, we cannot be complete without the full spectrum of human relationship, connection, and love.

As Christians, our observance of Pride Month and our commitment to being a Reconciling in Christ community is not just a token “tolerance” or “we are all equal” or the backhanded “we are all sinners” and “hate the sin, love the sinner”. That’s not authentic relationship. We have to not only welcome but invite difference, affirm and celebrate queerness, and not demand assimilation but expect our own hearts and minds to be transformed. In whichever ways we find ourselves among the dominant demographic group, the majority, the “normative”, we must be willing to surrender that superiority and be changed by the liberating love of those who have been marginalized and minoritized.

We cannot say “come on in, your difference is cool, change it, though, to be more like us, but also your difference adds flavor to our sameness!” We must say first to ourselves, “I am prepared to change, I am prepared to struggle, I am prepared to learn, I am prepared to be transformed.” And then we can thank our siblings in Christ who trust us with their truth, their struggle, their authentic expression of their identity, and ask them to show us more of who God is.

That’s what authentic diversity provides us. That’s what radical hospitality cultivates. More ways of being human, more ways of meeting God. The trinity shows us that there is more than one way to express divinity, and that we must embrace complexity in order to live abundantly.

Long story long, you are a beloved child of God, as you are and as you are becoming. God has called you to this time and this place, and to whatever is next for you, in order that you might share the goodness of God’s specific creation as it lives in you. And that you might receive something similar from those with whom you are in community—not the same, but similar. Who you are, how you live, what you do, who you love, all of that is a gift from the God who loves you. We are blessed beyond measure when we are among more ways of being and more ways of meeting God.

This is the Sound of One Voice

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.

Once a year, every year, those of us who follow the Revised Common Lectionary are given a week in the Easter season where the scripture is somehow about sheep. Psalm 23, which we did not read, begins with “The Lord is my shepherd…” which may ring a bell for you. Our reading from the Revelation of John features the Lamb, who will be their shepherd. In our reading from the Gospel According to John, Jesus calls his followers “sheep” who hear his voice. But our reading from the Acts of the Apostles makes no mention of shepherds, or sheep, or lambs. Instead, it is about our sister Tabitha, a disciple, who was devoted to good works and to acts of charity. She made tunics and other clothing with and for the widows in her community. This is one sentence in the story but it is a meaningful sentence.

Do you know that, in the first century (and in many other centuries), widows were among the poorest members of society? This was because they had no husband to financially support them—theirs was not a society in which women were economically independent. Tabitha was devoted to good works and to acts of charity, making clothing for the poorest women in her community.

I wonder who she was. I wonder if she was a wealthy woman, with plenty to spare, and so she devoted herself to good works. We might call the 2019 version of Tabitha a philanthropist, which, by the way, is from the greek for “human lover” which is awesome. We can only speculate about who Tabitha was, because we only have these few sentences. But, if we recall that this story comes to us from a time in which women were particularly disenfranchised, it is notable that we have this story at all. That we have even these few sentences about this woman of valor.

Remember which book of the Bible this is in? The Acts of the Apostles. We have this story primarily because it is a story about the apostle Peter. You know Peter from his greatest hits such as misunderstanding the Transfiguration of Jesus, denying Jesus three times after his death, and falling out of the boat into the sea more than once. He’s also Saint Peter, who is responsible for the beginnings of the Church as we know it today. A multi-faceted guy.

So, in this story, Peter is summoned to the home of a woman who has died. We do not know why those apostles believed that there was something Peter could do about this, since we have no other stories of Peter raising someone from the dead. But the apostles understand, to whatever degree, the power of God. They understand that there is life, and death, and life again. So Peter arrives at her home, prays, and says, “Tabitha, get up.” And she does!

I think we have Tabitha’s story in with the sheep stories because of that detail. Peter speaks and Tabitha hears him. In the Gospel story, Jesus talks about speaking and listening. In that instance, he’s being questioned by the religious authorities about whether or not he is the Messiah. They’ve been wanting to know for a long time, as he’s been gaining notoriety and raising a ruckus.

“Tell us plainly,” they say. Jesus rarely tells anyone anything plainly; he replies, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works I do in my Father’s name testify to me.” He insists that they should be able to tell who he is by hearing what he is saying and watching what he is doing. By healing people, and freeing people, and feeding people, he is showing everyone who he is and who the God who sent him is. “My sheep hear my voice,” he says, “I know them, and they follow me.” He doesn’t mean a literal flock of sheep here, of course, but he means those who follow him and believe that he is who he says he is. Those who are so hungry for liberation that they are listening to unbelievable stories and witnessing unbelievable miracles and believing.

If it helps to parse the sheep metaphor, you might be interested to know that sheep have weird eyesight—they have excellent peripheral vision, great for sensing danger, but have such poor depth perception that they cannot see what is right in front of their noses. This is why they have the instinct to “follow the leader” in front of them. They rely on shared sight, and on each other’s voices and the voices of the shepherd to know what’s going on. In a huge flock, packed tightly in for safety, sheep listen for the familiar sound of their shepherd’s voice, which calms and collects them. They can tell the difference between their shepherd’s voice and other sounds that might mean danger. [1]

So, then, if the Lord is my shepherd, it is imperative that I listen for the voice of God. If I cannot see what is right in front of my nose, it will help if I listen up. There are a lot of stories in the Bible about listening to the voice of God. In the first one, Adam and Eve are hiding in the garden of Eden because they recently listened to someone other than God who told them that they were naked and that their naked bodies should be hidden.

Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber wrote about this in her recent book, Shameless. “For some reason,” Nadia writes, “God allows us to live in a world where alternatives to God’s voice exist, and those alternatives are where shame originates. Maybe you, too, are hiding, having listened to a voice other than God’s.” [2]

There are so many voices we can listen to out in the world. So many individuals and institutions and cultural ideas that are all yelling over each other to get our attention—our families, our peers, professors, employers, politicians, business leaders, celebrities, instagram influencers. It can be hard sometimes to tell the difference between the voice of God and other sounds that might mean danger.

In a reflection on this week’s scripture, Jesuit Father James Martin wrote that “It’s important to know what is and is not God’s voice.” [3] A simple sentence, but basically the thesis of the thing.

The voice that tells you you are not enough is not God’s voice.

The voice that tells you that you are too much is not God’s voice, either.

The voice that tells you that your body is wrong, that your feelings are wrong, that your way of being in the world is wrong, that is not God’s voice.

The voice that tells you that your gender, or race, or class, or citizenship, or ability, or education make you worth more than another person—that’s not God’s voice, either.

It’s not always easy.

God’s voice is the one that tells you that you are loved unconditionally.

God’s voice is the one that tells you that your sin is forgiven.

God’s voice is the one that tells you that you are created good, as you are and as you are becoming.

God’s voice is the one that tells you that you are doing your best and your best is enough.

God’s voice is the one that tells you that you are the only one who has control over your body.

God’s voice is the one that tells you to get up and live.

Amen.

_____

[1] This is vaguely approximated from all sorts of cultural representations of sheep as well as the aptly titled sheepinfo.com

[2] Nadia Bolz-Weber, Shameless: A Sexual Reformation, 2019.

[3] From a tweet thread by @JamesMartinSJ from 12 May 2019.