Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Sermon Text May 17th 2015

I was away on May 10th, so no sermon audio for that day. Then May 17th my phone (recording device) completely malfunctioned and my sermon audio did not record. This is the second time that a sermon did not record, and the second time it was a roller derby-themed sermon that I thought people would want to listen to. Oh well. Instead I will post the text from which I preached that sermon. It contains much of what I said, though as always the audio is the real sermon and the text is merely my guide. In particular, I suspect there was more to points 3 and 4 below, but oh well.

Sermon Sunday May 17th, Lutheran Church of the Savior, Kalamazoo


1.    It’s still the season of Easter, so one more time I’ll begin my sermon with the Good News: Jesus died and rose again for us, to forgive our sin and set us free to love God and love one another.
2.    Our first lesson from Acts today is one of my all-time favorite examples of the freedom we have in Christ, freedom to love God and love one another. The Ethiopian eunuch is the most outside of outsiders – foreign, dark-skinned, fabulously wealthy and powerful (which wouldn’t make him an outsider except that by that time Jesus’ followers had all given their money and possessions to the church and become poor), and a eunuch, a sexual minority explicitly excluded from worshiping God by the Law of Moses.
3.    Philip was led by the Holy Spirit.
4.    Radical grace. radical welcome. This is the fullness of the good news, that God’s love in Jesus truly is for everyone.
5.    But. The setting of this story is really important. Would he have been welcome in the church at Jerusalem? No. Later, yes, but this was the first non-Jew baptized, first African baptized, the first sexual minority baptized. No one “like him” in any of those ways was supposed to be welcome, and the church would have followed the rules, because that’s what churches do, even when they’re getting in the way of the gospel. This story could only take place on the road, where the wild and unpredictable Holy Spirit leads.
6.    For those of us who already know the gospel, sometimes sharing the gospel with others is part of the law. Because here’s the thing: we can say we’re welcoming, we can work hard to embody God’s grace, but as long as we’re sitting in here waiting for people to come to us we’re really keeping  the good news to ourselves. We’re doing what the church has always done: prioritizing our own safety and comfort over and above God’s radical grace. This is where God’s grace itself becomes law for us religious insiders: God’s radical grace shows us where we fall short, where we sin by saying, “good enough” and resting in our comfort zone.
7.    Let me give you a heartbreaking example of the consequences of our failure. Four and a half years ago – in the fall of 2010 – I first preached about how we as a church had failed to respond to the crisis of teenagers who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender taking their own lives. And we all agreed that we need to welcome these kids, to make them feel safe, to let them know that God’s love in Jesus really is for them.
8.    And we did a few things: we started having our table at Kalamazoo Pride, I got involved in the Faith Alliance of the Kalamazoo Gay Lesbian Resource Center and wrote some blog posts. Alvera donated a book called It Gets Better, and we kept it out on the table, and sure enough one day at a funeral a gay teen found that book and he and I had a really nice conversation about how his church had kicked him out, but how some churches, like this one, believe that God’s grace is big enough for him, that God loves all God’s children and welcomes them into the fullness of the life of the church.
9.    Anyway, a month ago I announced roller derby at Wings Stadium under difficult circumstances. A fifteen-year-old boy named Sam had skated junior roller derby near Detroit, and had ended his own life that week. Most people knew Sam as Samantha, because Sam was still in the process of coming out as transgender when he died. Others knew him as Casper, his derby name. Sam’s home league, the Darlings of Destruction, put out a call on social media for people to honor Casper and commit to protecting other trans* kids by wearing turquoise for suicide prevention and using the hashtag #DoItFor57. That hashtag went viral around the world, and leagues in every corner of the US, across England, New Zealand and Australia skated that weekend in honor of Casper.
10.                       As the announcer here in Kalamazoo, maybe the closest roller derby bout to Casper’s home league, I had to lead a moment of silence in Casper’s honor. I spent five hours on Friday writing up my introduction to this moment of silence, consulting with local and national transgender experts, trying to get the language just right for a kid whose gender became known to most people only after his death. I struggled with whether to add some Christian language, not knowing Sam’s religious background. I decided to include the phrase “love one another,” which has featured prominently in our lectionary readings during this Easter season, because according to the Gospel of John, love one another is Jesus’ greatest commandment.
11.                       Introducing the moment of silence at the roller derby bout, I said, “So now we join with our roller derby family around the world. We honor Sam tonight and tomorrow, and tomorrow, on the track and everywhere we go, by loving one another more fiercely and accepting one another more fully.” This was one of those situations where the roller derby community was doing the work of the church, because the church was busy staying here, not even aware that the epidemic we heard about four and a half years ago is still going on, closer to home than ever. We failed to tell Sam that God loves him, exactly as he was, in the midst of confusion and change, whatever his gender or biological sex or whoever he loved.
12.                       God’s love in Jesus is for everyone. We who know this good news, we who have been baptized and set free to love and serve God and one another, we have a responsibility to get out of our comfortable buildings and find the people who most need to hear that God’s love is for them, not just for us, not just for people who make us feel comfortable. We can’t just say it; we need to live it. We need to let the Holy Spirit lead us into uncertainty. And I keep saying “need,” not because our salvation depends on it – it doesn’t; Jesus has taken care of that. I say “need” because knowing what we know about Jesus, about what God has done for us, we are free to faithfully follow Jesus, out of the building, onto the road, even all the way to the cross and resurrection. Amen. 

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