Marquee seen outside Northbrook Presbyterian Church in Beverly Hills, MI last week: “Just Remember: Moses Was a Basket Case.”

 

With that note of vulnerability in mind: Would you pray with me …?

 

*        *        *

 

One of my favorite seminary mentors was a pastoral care professor named Sandra Brown. Not only was she a native Southerner (one point in my plus column), she understood the occasional offense of the Good News of Jesus Christ for us all. Dr. Brown expressed that offense in this expressly Southern way: When an especially trenchant remark of a student cut her to the quick, she would exclaim, “Now you’ve stopped preachin’, and gone to meddlin’!”

 

Perhaps some of you will feel I’ve stopped preachin’ and gone to meddlin’ as I make a few choice observations this morning about the golden calf of University of Michigan football. No, I’m not about to pile on with all the other Sunday quarterbacks second guessing head coach Lloyd Carr after the team’s third loss yesterday. And I’m not going to mention the odd symbolism of calling the home stadium “The Big House”. And I’m not even going to mention the fact that for every home game, tens of thousands of fans gladly fork over $50 and up to fill the seats not occupied by the students – that, plus the double-digit parking costs. (And finally, I’m not going to mention the fact that the last-minute scheduling of another home game next Saturday has upset the timing of an important church event for us, causing us to change the date and hence delay its announcement till the last possible moment.)

 

I’m not going to mention these things. What I do wish to lift up today – in light of the Exodus story of the ever-present danger of idolatry, i.e, worshiping a false god, holds for us all – is the following:

 

·        The fact that thousands of these football fans, most of whom spent at least five hours of their day yesterday watching the game plus traveling to and from it, won’t spend an hour-plus of their time at their chosen house of worship this week.

 

·        The fact that just about every fan will relive the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat after each one of these games, and yet just about no one will look beyond the face masks and understand the lifelong impact of the injuries sustained by most – yes, most – of the players. Yes, helmets are meant to protect. And yet, not unlike SUVs, this protective gear is just as likely to harm.

 

·        And finally, there’s the fact that – as none other than conservative political commentator George Will puts it – football in general combines the two worst elements of American society: violence punctuated by committee meetings.¹ (I would qualify one of these two worst elements as corporate violence, myself.)

 

Have I gone to meddlin’ yet? I actually enjoy watching football, from time to time. And I know many of you do, too. And yet, what is it that makes football by far the number one watched sport in American society – our true national pastime, since the time of the Vietnam War – such a golden calf for many, too many, of its fans?

 

My guess is that it’s the violence – what theologian Walter Wink calls the true spirituality of our day, the ethos of our dominant culture.² Football – not a contact sport, as coaching great Vince Lombardi once so infamously put it, but a collision sport – violently and vicariously atones for us all. Deep down, many of us enjoy how football grants us the psychological phenomenon Germans call schadenfreude – seeing others suffer for our pleasure. The darkest shadow of this phenomenon: the three worst hours for domestic violence annually occur during the Super Bowl. Such is the nature of this idol – this false god.

 

 

Note that I said the joy in being vulnerable; not the joy of being vulnerable. Our faith doesn’t teach us that our loving and just God equates vulnerability with joy; this would cruelly romanticize the suffering of the football players, and – incalculably moreso – of the hundreds of thousands who lost their lives in the Pakistani earthquake yesterday. Our faith does not teach us of the joy of being vulnerable. Our faith does teach us that, when we inevitably do take off our face masks and look in the morning mirror, we can find joy in – in the midst of – our most vulnerable places.

 

The apostle Paul understands the joy in being vulnerable. His letter to the church in Philippi is written in the midst of one of his most vulnerable moments: as a prisoner in a Roman jail cell. And yet, listen again to his words to that church, and to us today:

 

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice … Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and … thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

 

That’s the joy of the gospel of Jesus Christ! Not the triumphalistic, blind belief-based joy which may have led a scripture reader I heard in church once to actually read this passage in this way: “And the peace of God, which surpresses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” The gospel of Jesus Christ, on the other hand, is a vulnerable, experience-based joy, with open hearts and open minds, which the spirit of Jesus can then be enabled to guard.

 

That’s the joy of the gospel. That’s a passionate spirituality, which is one of the eight essential ingredients to natural church development discerned out of a recent study involving 4.2 million Christians in 32 countries on six continents.³ A passionate spirituality, which the study also determined was one the weakest of those eight essentials ingredients among mainline Protestants. A passionate spirituality, where the Christian seeks not simply to be enlightened, but also and especially to be moved. A passionate spirituality, that makes us feel connected beyond the worship rituals, and is often conveyed in music such as ours at Northside that wraps around our tender souls and embraces us in God’s loving arms.

 

Can I hear an “Amen” to that? … Can I hear an “Alleluia?” … What’s the matter? Think you’d lose control? Think you’d be seen as a holy roller? Think you’d simply be noticed?

 

The joy in being vulnerable.

 

Jesus has his own message for us today about the joy in being vulnerable. His message is one of ours, which you will notice – if you have not already – is part of our Purpose Statement at Northside, found each week at the end of our bulletins: The Joy in Doing Justice.

On the cusp of his crucifixion, Jesus tells his Pharisee oppressors a parable: “(The king) sent his servants to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet (for his son), but they would not come.”

 

So, whom does the king invite? “(The king says to his servants,) ‘Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ Those servants went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.”

 

Weddings are for everyone! Thanks to our official marriage policy, which doesn’t discriminate as to the gender of the members of the couple being married, we at Northside live that out in one faithfully just way, at least!

 

Let me close with two brief stories. The first comes to us via my former colleague in Central American refugee ministry, the present Moderator of our national General Assembly, Elder Rick Ufford-Chase. Just this week, on his email blog, Rick – whose intentional focus as Moderator includes shining the spotlight on the passionate spirituality of our young people – shared the following words from the journal of one Laura Lee, a junior at Williams College in Massachusetts and a Presbyterian church member in Franklin, TN. Laura’s journal was kept during a seven-week mission trip this past summer in Mexico City. Here are a couple of her entries – testimonies to her own, and to the Mexican people’s, joy in the midst of being vulnerable:

 

“It was HARD to be surrounded by the smells and hardships day in and day out, it’s hard knowing that the Mexican and U.S. governments allow these situations to develop just to fuel an economy. And yet, over and over again, God gave me abundance. I don’t know what other word would describe the deep peace, happiness, and joy that I found in Mexico City. When an old, old woman came over just to sweep our floor, or the neighborhood kids came by to play – hours before our English class – I learned that service/mission is a great gift.”

 

Another entry: “That doesn’t mean that service always ‘feels good’ (breathing dust to the point of black snot does NOT), but in the hardest, toughest, darkest places on earth, we find that God’s strength is doing a whole lot. I expected to be devastated by Mexico City, and instead learned what it means to allow God to be powerful. It’s the most fun I’ve had in a while.”⁴

 

The second story comes to us from Fr. Roy Bourgeois, the tough-as-nails spiritual saint who founded the movement to close what until recently was called the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, GA – the terrorist school run by the Department of Defense that subtly and not-so-subtly prepares hundreds of Latin American military each year to commit massive human rights atrocities in their countries for the sake of perpetuating our North American lifestyle.

 

In a new biography of Bourgeois titled Disturbing the Peace, Fr. Roy recounts an eleven day fact-finding excursion among the poor he undertook in the El Salvadoran mountains during the most violent days of oppression there, in the early 1980s. Due to a grave miscommunication, the State Department listed him during that entire venture as missing.

 

Safely back in the States, alone in a Trappist monastery, Fr. Roy started to ponder the grief he caused his family when he was missing. “I’m walking around these beautiful grounds at the monastery,” he said, “and I’m thinking maybe I should just live a quiet life somewhere … cause no one any grief.”

 

The night before he was to leave the monastery, there was a knock on the door of his room. “It was one of the monks,” Roy said. “(The monk said), ‘We know who you are.’ That was a surprise. I hadn’t told them; I thought I was there incognito. (The monk then) said, ‘We’d like for you to address the community tonight.’”

 

And so, Fr. Roy spoke about what was happening in El Salvador, the murder his churchwomen friends and the archbishop while saying Mass, and the U.S. government’s role in it all. And in the discussion afterward, he recalled, “a wonderful clarity came to me, a deep inner peace. This is what I’ve got to do. To talk about what I had seen and heard. I felt that God was speaking to me through these monks, helping me discern what to do …

 

“I’ve always been grateful to that monk who knocked on my door,” he said, amused it was someone dedicated to silence who encouraged him to speak.⁵

 

“We know who you are.” So said the monk. Regardless of my life’s adventures, or lack thereof, God knows who I am. Regardless of your life’s adventures, or lack thereof, God knows who you are. A member of God’s human family – no more … no less. Truly loved. And truly meant to be joyful in the midst of being vulnerable.

 

 

 

¹Interview in Ken Burns’ “Baseball”, Public Broadcasting System, 1994.

 

²The opening two sentences of Wink’s book are classics: “Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world.” Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992), p. 13.

 

³Christian A. Schwarz, Natural Church Development: A Guide to Eight Essential Qualities of Healthy Churches (ChurchSmart Resources, 1996). Abstract of these eight essentials presented by Ed White of The Alban Institute, Inc. in the continuing education workshop, “Can ‘Old Dogs’ Learn New Tricks? Transforming Traditional Protestant Congregations to Thrive in a Postmodern, Post-Christian Society”, Oct 4-7, 2004, Union/PSCE, Richmond, VA.

 

⁴Blog of the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Rick Ufford-Chase, “U-C: What I See”, October 6, 2005.

 

⁵See James Hodge and Linda Cooper, Disturbing the Peace: The Story of Father Roy Bourgeois and the Movement to Close the School of Americas (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004).

 

 

 

On this, HIV/AIDS Awareness Sunday in our denomination – and I call your attention to the Moment for Mission on the back of our bulletins, chronicling the vulnerability of victims and survivors in Africa especially – I would like to let the late president of DignityUSA, Kevin Calegari, to have the final word about joy in the midst of being vulnerable. DignityUSA, if you do not know, is the largest and most progressive Roman Catholic organization advocating for lesbian, gay, transgender, and bisexual persons in this country.

 

I heard Calegari speak with Presbyterian lesbian evangelist Janie Spahr in San Francisco in October 1994. Four short months later, Calegari died of an AIDS-related illness.

 

In his speech that October night, a frail yet radiant Calegari said the following – words which I will take to my grave. “My body may be falling apart,” he said, “but my spiritual life is fabulous.”