A Dinner with Camp Counselors, A Feast Day that Celebrates Possibility

Late yesterday afternoon, something happened that gave me renewed hope for the future.  No, not the return of guilty verdicts in Donald Trump's NYC hush money trial; I'm still processing that bit of information, which will leave me with a huge mix of emotions.

No, for renewed hope, I highly recommend having dinner with a group of college students who are about to spend their whole summer as camp counselors.  In some ways, it will be idyllic, spending a summer in nature, around campfires, singing and talking about God and the best ways to live life.  In many ways, it won't be idyllic.  They will live in rustic cabins and even more rustic platform tents.  They will eat foods like corndogs and other food that is beloved by 8 year olds, but less so by grown ups.

And they are so excited.

Many of them come to this summer of camp counselor employment because they, themselves, were campers.  That's a great testimony to the power of camp.  Half of them have been camp counselors before.  

The group of people who live in the houses at Lutheridge and the camp counselors have dinner a few days before the first campers arrive on Sunday.  Many of us will live here will volunteer through the summer in a variety of ways.  But I don't expect the counselors to memorize our faces.  Similarly, it's a huge group, and I'm not going to recognize a non-counselor college student, should one appear during the summer.

No, the reason we do this is so that both sides can remember what a team effort camp is.  I like having a chance to talk to the next generation.  We had a great dinner conversation about musical theatre, about fairy tales, about feminism, about Shakespeare.  But even better, I got to hear about an even wider variety of interests that they all have.  One student is a double major in equestrian management and drama, for example.  It was interesting hearing about her typical day.

Today is the feast day of the Visitation, which adds an additional layer to my thoughts this morning.  This day celebrates both Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, and their time together, both improbably pregnant, both facing the future that will take them in places they can't fully imagine.  And so, they spend time together, in solitude, yet together.

I love this view of community, the one offered by Mary and Elizabeth, the one offered by our dinner last night.  Some of us are older, but we are not yet finished with our glorious lives.  Some of us have the enthusiasm of those just starting a journey.  Some of us have prior experience, which may or may not equip us for what is to come.

But together, we can make a better world for the generations that are coming behind us, both the generations that we can meet, and those yet to be born.

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, June 2, 2024:

First reading and Psalm:

1 Samuel 3:1-10, (11-20)

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18

Alternate first reading and Psalm:

Deuteronomy 5:12-15

Psalm 81:1-10

Second reading:

2 Corinthians 4:5-12

Gospel:

Mark 2:23-3:6

This week's Gospel asks us to think about why we adopt the religious rules and rituals that we do. We see the Pharisees, those old adversaries of Jesus, feeling and acting offended when Jesus ignores the laws of the Sabbath. We see Jesus in what seems to be a confrontational mode.

We might ask why Jesus had to take this approach. The man with the withered hand could have waited for healing for one more day. The disciples plucking grain to eat on the Sabbath seem to be doing it mindlessly. They could have found some other food.

We could ask similar questions of the Pharisees. Why do these rules have to be so rigid? It's important to remember that although we think of Pharisees as hypocrites largely because of their interactions with Jesus, this could not be further from the truth. They were very sincere and committed to what they believed, far more committed than most of their contemporaries.

And it's vitally important to remember that their motivations for keeping strict standards were very good. In The Secret Message of Jesus, Brian D. McLaren notes that the Pharisees hoped that their own purity would prompt God to send the Messiah to liberate them, specifically to liberate them from Roman oppression. Therefore it's understandable that they would try to recruit others to this cause, and that they would grow frustrated with people who couldn't meet their own requirements--the actions of those people polluted the whole population, thus resulting in more alienation from God.

Before we get too snooty about those Pharisees, before we feel too superior to them, it's important to look at our own time. Anyone who has done any kind of church work probably recognizes the Pharisees in Mark's Gospel. Whether we're fighting over big issues or small, it's always been astounding to me to see the energy that some devote to a fight. And I'm sure there are people who would say the same thing about me.

Of course, it's not just in our churches. I've also described many of our workplaces, and the larger world of international relations. Some of us may recognize our family life. Some may recognize ourselves.

Let me stress it is important to recognize our own inner Pharisee. No one is blameless here. Let's return to the one of the questions the text asks us to consider: what are these religious rules and customs for?

We live in a time period where it may seem that the very moorings of our society have come undone. Like Pharisees, we, too, may fall in love with the idea that laws can save us and either restore past glory or propel us to the deliverance that has been promised.

Christ calls us to a different vision as he reminds us again and again that too rigid a love of the law is idolatry itself. Christ calls us to create a world of open borders and solid bridges, not one of walls and impenetrable defenses. Christ calls us out of our graves of fear and sorrow.

Metaphors for the Holy Trinity

Last year for Holy Trinity Sunday, I brought an extension cord, an electric tea kettle, and water for a demonstration for the children's sermon.  This year, we had something even better:  dry ice!

It wasn't my idea.  I've been afraid of dry ice since learning of its damaging qualities; my uncle was bullied by bigger kids holding him down and burning his stomach with a chunk of dry ice.  A Sunday School leader was much more bold than I, and she was up for a quest.  She arrived with dry ice in the cooler.

We had fun before church pouring water on the ice and moving our hands through the resulting steam.  The adults did discuss whether or not the youth would remember the larger lessons of the Triune God.  Who can say?

In some ways, the rest of the day was downhill.  It's hard to compete with dry ice.  I came prepared with a different metaphor:  braids of bread, the same dough with different add-ins (red hots, chocolate chips, and butterscotch chips), same essence/substance but different experiences.

At one point, I thought about having bread braids as part of the adult sermon too.  I thought about having the congregation pull the strands apart while we talked about the different ways we perceive the Divine.  In the end, I decided it would be too messy, for both youth and adults.  I decided that those who wanted to could take a loaf home with them.

I ended up with a lot of bread, and based on what was left, everyone who really wanted a loaf was able to take one home.  

Will congregation members remember the bread or will it inspire deeper thoughts about the Trinity?  I think about the words of Jesus in the Gospel for the day, John 3:  8:  “8The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Memorial Day 2024

Today is Memorial Day, and through the years, I've come to realize how many different things this holiday can mean to people.  I've met people who won't celebrate it because of its roots in memorializing the Civil War Union dead.  My dad was an Air Force officer in the Reserves until he retired, so Memorial Day was personal for him.  I don't think I know anyone who was killed while on active duty, but I do want to honor those who died.  Some people I've known seem to have no inkling that the holiday has anything to do with soldiers at all--for them, it's about getting a good deal on a holiday sale or opening up the vacation home or having a cook out.

I remember feeling desperate for Memorial Day, for a day off, but during my days of working as an administrator, I was always desperate for a day off, a day off that didn't require me to use up any of my paltry allotment of vacation time.  For the past several years, Memorial Day as a three day week-end was not top of my mind.

I also know that many people don't get to have time off.  All of our grocery stores are open today, for example.  When I taught in community colleges in South Carolina, we didn't have Memorial Day off.  Our nursing students needed every scrap of time in the summer, so that holiday had to be sacrificed so that we stayed in compliance.  Or maybe it was because of the Civil War; I got different explanations. In past years, I've used the day off to catch up on grading for my online classes.  This year, my summer classes don't start for a month, so I'm not teaching at all this holiday. 

This year, I'm thinking about past years, when war seemed far away.  Could we really be at a place where peace was the norm?

This year, that doesn't seem to be the case.  This year, I'm hoping for containment of threats, for dictators to be defeated.  When I say that, I'm thinking of Putin.  This year, of course, the war in the Middle East is the one that most people are contemplating, if they are contemplating war at all.  This year, I am willing to admit how much I do not know, while trying not to dread what may be coming in the next year or two.

But let me circle back to the intent of this holiday.  On this day which has become for so many of us just an excuse to have a barbecue, let us pause to reflect and remember. If we're safe right now, let us say a prayer of gratitude. Let us remember that we've still got lots of military people serving in dangerous places.

Let us remember how often the world zooms into war. Let us pray to be preserved from those horrors.

Here's a prayer I wrote for Memorial Day:

God of comfort, on this Memorial Day, we remember those souls whom we have lost to war. We pray for those who mourn. We pray for military members who have died and been forgotten. We pray for all those sites where human blood has soaked the soil. God of Peace, on this Memorial Day, please renew in us the determination to be peacemakers. On this Memorial Day, we offer a prayer of hope that military people across the world will find themselves with no warmaking jobs to do. We offer our pleading prayers that you would plant in our leaders the seeds that will sprout into saplings of peace.

Sermon for Holy Trinity Sunday

May 26, 2024, Holy Trinity Sunday
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott


John 3:1-17


Today we celebrate Holy Trinity Sunday, which comes just after the season of Easter, just after the festival of Pentecost. Today, we contemplate the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Christians have been contemplating the mysteries of the Holy Trinity since the earliest centuries of the faith.

Unless you’ve studied the first several centuries of Christian history, you might not realize how deeply the doctrine of the Trinity has divided the faithful. In fact, we have the Nicene Creed because in 325 A.D., the ruler of the Roman empire, Constantine, called an assembly to settle the question of what Christians believe. Did the Father create the Son and the Holy Spirit? Did they all exist together? Are they made of the same stuff? Do they have equal authority? Questions about gender would come much later.

I do realize that most of us here in this worship space spend our time thinking about issues other than Trinitarian theology. We may think that the identity of God has been established, and we may wonder why we return to it each year. We might say the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed on Sunday and not realize the bitter history that brought about these creeds.

What does it mean to worship a God who is three Gods in one? Why does it matter? Why do we have a special Sunday to talk about the Trinity?

Our texts for today aren’t very helpful. On a day like today, I yearn for a text where Jesus tells us in a more straight forward way what he’s talking about. Instead, we get Jesus asking Nicodemus a variation of this question: “What? You, a scholar, don’t understand? You’ve done all this studying and you don’t understand what I’m saying?” Jesus might say that to me, too: “You’ve had Systematic Theology class for 9 months, and you still can’t explain the mysteries of the Trinity?” Well, no, not in a short sermon I can’t. Systematic theologians often take 10 or more books to explain theology completely.

When I think about my need for explanations, I think about what Jesus says in verse 8 of the text for today, “8The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” And yet, Jesus spends a substantial amount of time trying to help people understand what it means to be part of the inbreaking Kingdom of God that he announced wherever he went.

Nicodemus takes Jesus literally, asking about a literal rebirth, how we can climb back into the wombs of our mothers. Jesus is talking about a spiritual rebirth, as he often is. As I think about the text for today, I’m struck by how often Jesus talks in figurative language. Jesus often talks about a mystical process, and so many of us talk about the process in literal terms.

Let’s take that most famous passage, John 3: 16. Many Evangelicals can tell you the exact time that they invited Jesus into their hearts to be their Lord and Savior, the exact way that they were born again. Many Christians proclaim this passage as the one that tells us that Christians are saved and others are damned. Many of us treat Jesus as our “Get out of jail free” card, the “Go to Heaven when You Die” card.

Jesus doesn’t see this world as our jail, though, certainly not creation itself, not creation as made by the creator. To be sure, there are parts of this world that imprison us, and Jesus does come to set us free from those. Some of us are in literal jails, but many more of us are incarcerated in cells of society’s making: the tangle of injustice that can leave us feeling powerless, the hopelessness that tells us not to bother with trying to believe anything but our own worthlessness, the death of joy that comes from hearing the relentless beat of doom that comes from every corner. Maybe it’s the doom of economic inequality or the doom of climate change or the doom of various forms of corruption. On and on the list could go.

Jesus comes to give us new life. We must be born again—but not so that we get to go to Heaven when we die. God comes to us in the form of Jesus to proclaim that we can experience divine love right here, right now. We don’t have to wait. We don’t have to complete a list of tasks. In fact, parts of today’s reading from John lead some scholars to say that being born again is something that the Spirit does, not something that we choose to do.

God is at work in the world, as much as the Creator was at work in the world in the creating of this planet that we call home. God is at work in the world today as much as the Redeemer was at work in the world when Jesus taught Nicodemus and others. God is still moving through the land, in the same way that the Holy Spirit motivated those first Christians to go out and preach the same Good News that we proclaim today.

The Good News is so much more than life after death, eternal life; if we stop there, we, like Nicodemus, have misunderstood what Jesus meant. Jesus is about so much more than a ticket to Heaven. Jesus comes to transform the very lives we’re living. Jesus talks about the quality of the lives we’re living, and so many of us hear him talking in terms of quantity.

Although it happens much less frequently now, occasionally, someone still asks me if I’ve been saved. My first response, although I don’t usually blurt it out, is to ask, “Saved from what?” Jesus might ask us that same question—are we saved, and if we are saved, as we believe that we are, then what are we saved for?

Holy Trinity Sunday celebrates God who lives in community, and this God who believes in community invites us into this communal relationship. The braided bread that I created for today’s Eucharist is the simplest kind of braid; there are some bread braids that incorporate 5 or 7 or more strands woven together.

Jesus comes to reweave this loaf of life that humans are only too happy to rip apart again and again. Happily, the Holy Spirit continues the work done by the Creator and Jesus. The Holy Spirit comes and enables us to be part of the great re-weaving, right here, right now. And tomorrow, the Holy Spirit will still be here, inviting us to be part of the inbreaking Kingdom of God, inviting us to be part of the braided community, many strands, coming together, woven into one community.

The End of Spring Term 2024

In some ways, this week has been the first week of summer break.  In some ways, it's felt more like the end of spring semester.  I've been waiting for grades, and this week, the last of them finally came in.

I've had some grades for several weeks.  My internship class was pass-fail, so once I completed the assignments, it was easy for my instructors to submit the passing grade.  My paper for Systematic Theology was graded a day or two after I turned it in, and I was happy to get my grade of A.  Even after 9 months of Systematic Theology class, I still wasn't completely sure that I was creating Systematic Theology.  And in fact, creating a complete systematic theology, in the way that the best systematic theologians have done, would mean I'd be writing multiple volumes of books, not just a paper or two.

This week, I got my Foundations of Worship class grades.  I had gotten grades throughout the term, so I was fairly sure all would be well.  But it was a relief to get grades for the last assignments I turned in.  I had to go back to the assignments to even remember what I wrote, so that I could fully appreciate the comments, that's how long it had been for some of them.  I was happy with what I had written, and so was my professor.

I turned in my last big paper three weeks ago.  It was for Environmental History of Christianity (EHC) class, and in some ways, I was covering some of the same territory as I did for my Systematic Theology class.  I wanted to talk about the ways that Substitutionary Atonement Theology has failed us.  For the EHC class, I talked about how our ideas of salvation leave us willing to let the planet die, since we're just waiting to go to Heaven.  I got an A on that paper.

But more important to me, I restored my hope.  In my paper, I talked about our failure of vision, but I reminded the reader (and myself) that we worship a God who takes the worst kind of brokenness and transforms it into beauty.  I found myself asking myself if I really believed in the possibility of resurrection--not the specific resurrection of Jesus, but resurrection in general.

The answer:  yes, yes I do.  Here's how I concluded my paper:

Throughout the centuries, Christians have declared their faith in a God who can work miracles and bring redemption to the grimmest of situations. We are facing such a situation now. Christians have looked at the history of the planet and pointed out the places where God takes brokenness and transforms it into beauty. Our faith is built on those stories of transformation, and the world is desperate to hear these stories too. Christians have preached and proclaimed that they believe in the powers of God and the powers of resurrection, and the coming century will test that faith. Christians can create the rituals and theology that will help explain and guide humanity through desperate times. Christianity is a religion that has supported humans through the biggest challenges throughout history. We are called to do likewise now.

We may feel like we’re too late. N. T. Wright assures us otherwise. In Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, N. T. Wright says, "What you do in the present--by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself--will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether . . . . They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom" (page 193, emphasis in the original). Wright goes on to reassure those of us who are prone to apocalyptic thinking: " . . . what you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that's about to roll over a cliff" (p. 208). Jesus, too, issues this promise in John 8: 31-32, 35-36: “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (NRSVUE). We are resurrection people, free indeed. Let us move forward in faith, developing a new theology for this time, trusting in God’s promise that the forces of death and destruction do not get to have the final word.

The Bread Braid of the Holy Trinity: A Sermon for Youth (and Adults?)

Last year, Trinity Sunday, the Sunday after Pentecost, was the first Sunday where I was the Synod Appointed Minister at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee.  I knew I needed to do a children's sermon, but I hadn't met any of them yet.  I thought about all the ways of explaining the idea of a Triune God.  I finally settled on water-ice-steam as a good demonstration (for more on last year's sermon, see this blog post).

I still think it was a good sermon and a good way to introduce myself to the youth and to the congregation.  It was more than just me droning on; although some of my youth sermons are just me, droning on, that wasn't the first impression I wanted to give.  But I no longer think it was as original as I might once have thought.

But maybe originality isn't the goal.  It certainly isn't this year.  This year, we'll be thinking about the Trinity as a braided community.  I thought about fabric, about something for everyone to take with them.  Then I thought about bread.  My church community seems to love the homemade bread that I bake and bring for communion, the youngest ones most of all.  And it's easy to make different colored bread dough.

I could make three different doughs:  pumpernickel, oat, and white/egg.  Or I could use food coloring for something dramatic.  I could have different flavorings, maybe made with chips like chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, and red hots--and those would also color the dough.

Three bread doughs, one substance--if I created a Systematic Theology, it would be anchored in bread dough.