Sermon: June 3, 2012
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Our scripture passages today are a pretty good description of the people whom the church is supposed to especially care about, and be in relationship with: the poor and needy, strangers and outsiders, the sick and imprisoned, neighbors everywhere. I’m going to talk about those people and relationships today; but I’m going to do it from a little different perspective.
I’m going to talk about how it has mattered to me – to be relating to people who are so different from me.
Now I know there is a danger here. When Diana Shaw was the Associate Minister of this church, and we were talking about sermons one day, Diana said that her preaching professor in seminary had given all the students one particular piece of advice.
He said to them: If, at the end of your ministry, people reading all your sermons would be reading your autobiography, then you’ve talked about yourself too much.
Sermons, in other words, are not supposed to be particularly about the preacher, they are supposed to connect with the worshippers’ lives.
Personal examples from one’s own life are occasionally O.K.; but making a regular practice of it is questionable, and doing it too much in any one sermon is clearly frowned upon.
But that is exactly what I am going to do, today. Perhaps I can be forgiven for this transgression. For someone nearing the end of a calling such as the ministry, I hope it is acceptable to reflect on what some particular part of it has personally meant.
In 2005 and 2006, I spent a lot of time working against the proposed constitutional amendment on marriage. In that regard, I met a lot of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.
Now, obviously, there are many LGBT folks right here in this church. But together we are a mixed group, and we often don’t even think of each other as different. And that, in itself, is a phenomenal thing to say. It’s a tremendous gift to each other and to the world.
But occasionally, the groups I was part of in the amendment fight were not like that. There were a few times when the straight, white, old guy was in the clear minority; and when people heard I was a minister, trust might be a real question, a significant issue.
It reminded me of a time in Iowa about 35 years ago. We were at a church camp in central Iowa, and 4 of us decided to go to a bar in the nearby town of Tama after the evening program was complete.
There was a Native American Reservation right next to Tama. The bar we went to was one frequented almost exclusively by Native American people.
When four white boys walked in and sat at a table, all conversation ceased; and all eyes were on us. I felt just a little bit like that in a couple of the groups I was in, in the fight against the amendment. A few people, usually with perfectly good reasons from their past, felt it was impossible to trust a straight, older Christian minister.
A year or two later, I went to a Wisconsin prison, and was in a gathering of inmates for the first time in my life. It was a graduation ceremony for our Prison Ministry’s first Restorative Justice program.
There were perhaps ten or so people from the outside there, and about 25 inmates. At the end of the ceremony, there was cake and coffee; and we were all expected to talk together. I remember very clearly the anxiety and trepidation I felt about that.
How could I talk to prisoners? How could I relate to robbers, rapists, murderers, and who knows who else? I grew up in a 1950’s family that was struggling to appear to be, and be accepted in, the middle class. The last thing a family like that did was to associate with someone perceived to be lower, or outcast, or poor, or different.
My parents were upset that I, for a short time, dated an Asian girl. And this wasn’t just me, it was the time. Two hundred miles away, Joan’s parents were called by her high school because she was seen regularly with an African-American male classmate.
The whole idea of difference was a struggle, and that was particularly true for me. But the experience in the amendment fight, two or three experiences in prison, and simply eating with people who came to Community Meals at St. Paul’s Catholic Church, convinced me I had to get to know people who were significantly, radically different from me.
I believed – as I still do – that is what Jesus wants us to do. And I came to believe Jesus was specifically calling me to do that.
So among other things, about four years ago, I started relating differently to the people who called or came to the church for help. Rather than simply saying yes or no – and often just passing the information through the church secretary – I started meeting and getting to know every person who called or came in asking for more than bus tickets or McDonald’s coupons.
Obviously, this took a lot of time. It probably affected the other work I was supposed to do. But it enriched my life incredibly, and I believe it affected positively the people I came into contact with.
I have gotten to know a woman we are supporting in a Methadone Treatment program. I have learned something about the horrors of drug addiction. I’ve learned – from her husband who went through all this with her– what it really means to be committed for better or for worse.
It puts my pride in my own marriage in its proper place.
Occasionally, other ministers have recommended that I let some social-service organization in town distribute our money. It would be much more efficient, they say. And I’m sure they’re right.
But I think that would not honor the needs, the being, of the people who come in; nor does it honor you who gave the money – recently, about 600 extra dollars – to be used in that way.
These kinds of experiences in the last several years have changed me … and they have helped me make some decisions about what I am going to do in retirement.
I’ve shared with some of you that I have a writing project. I will try to do that and complete it; and I recruited a retired seminary professor to make sure my standards are set high enough. But I’m also, through our Prison Ministry contacts, going to visit inmates in Wisconsin prisons.
Through Jerry’s work and our relationship, I have learned that the vast majority of inmates have no contact with people outside the walls once they enter prison. If I can bring a little light and hope to a few men’s lives in the next few years – and enrich my own life with the variety of people I will meet and get to know – I will be very pleased.
Also, sometime later, 6 months or so, and depending on time, I am going to find a school in a disadvantaged area of Madison or Milwaukee that would like an adult to come in one or two half-days a week: to read to children and, under the direction of a teacher in the school, help them learn how to read.
Our five grandchildren, who are here today – Evie and Wyatt, John, Sam and Andrew – are lovingly cared for by their immediate and extended families; and they are in good schools, where they are taught well, and where they learn well.
Not all children have those blessings. I would like to share a little of our extended families’ good fortune with some other children.
Finally, as if all this isn’t enough, I have one more goal or project in retirement. It has little to do with people who are different from me – although French people are different; but it will be much more difficult than those earlier ones I described.
It takes some courage for me to tell you this – our sons are here today, and they’re liable to laugh out loud when I say it. I am going to learn French better than I have ever known it, even better than when we came back from sabbatical in France in 2006.
I have struggled with French all my life. Through 6 years of Junior High and High School, a year in college, and sporadic attempts after: it simply never “took.” I am going to give it one, last, committed attempt.
The writing project is a personal obsession. Learning French is, evidently, the desire to do something really difficult.
Visiting inmates, and helping with reading in a disadvantaged school, come pretty directly from my interactions with the last, the lost and “the least of these, my brothers and sisters,” in the previous six years of my ministry at this church.
As I think about those years past, and the years ahead, I am reminded of the last four lines of a Robert Frost poem, which read as follows:
Only when love and need are one,
and the work is play for mortal stakes,
is the deed ever truly done
for heaven and the future’s sake.
I think Frost meant those lines to be understood rather simply: Love is what we really like and have a passion for; Need is work simply to keep body and soul together. My twelve years here have been a wonderful combination of love and need.
But what if there is a second way to understand these words, also? Need may be what we have to do – what we each need to do – to follow Jesus faithfully in our personal lives. Love may be what comes to us when we do follow Jesus into the unknown future.
Only when love and need are one,
and the work is play for mortal stakes,
is the deed ever truly done
for Heaven and the future’s sake.
May the grace of God guide you, so that you need to do that which will make Christ’s love clear and present in your life. Amen.
