May 20, 2007
(Seventh Sunday of Easter)
Youth Sunday Sermon
by Alexandra Connors
Acts 16:16-34 • Psalm 97 •
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21 •
John 17:20-26
(From
The Lectionary Page)
Writing a sermon is hard. I spent countless hours at my computer staring at a blank Word document thinking to myself, “Okay…now what?” I am not usually short for words, but when it came to this particular task I certainly was. I read over the readings for today time and time again, not really coming up with anything “deep and insightful” from them. What this made me realize is that God does not merely reside in the readings set aside for each week. Many people come to church hoping to get their “God fix” for the week, hoping that it will enlighten and fill them spiritually enough until next week. You hear a couple of readings, sing some hymns, and share in communion…that should hold us over, right? While that may be sufficient for some, it most certainly does not work for me, as my struggle to pull some philosophical meaning from a few lines of surely scripture proves.
What I am proposing is that God is everywhere and in all things and all people. So, if you are looking for Him in only place and can’t seem to find Him, never fear…just look someplace else. I am of the philosophy that if you are having trouble finding God in some action or another, then maybe you are not taking the right approach. For example, with this sermon I first tried to be someone that I am not. I tried to come off overly scholarly and all knowing, neither of which I am. It was only when I let go of all the things I am not and let my real self shine that I was able to write this.
In order to further illustrate my point, I would like to take you on a short journey through my Christian life thus far. I will never forget my first church experience. I was about two or three years old and had been snuck into an older age group’s Sunday school class. The teacher announced that it was time for snack and we needed to say grace. All of the other kids seemed to know what this meant as they stretched their arms into the air forming a giant “O” above their heads. I stood there confused, as I was a pretty new Episcopalian. After a few seconds, the rest of the classed launched into “Ohhhhh….The Lord is good to me, and so I thank the Lord, for giving me the things I need, the sun and the rain and the appleseed, the Lord is good to me. Amen. Amen amen amen. Ahhhhh….men!” The Johnny Appleseed grace is my first church memory, but it was most certainly not my first experience with God. In fact, being only two, I probably didn’t understand or recognize many of my first encounters with God to be, well, encounters with God. I instead understood them as great moments of happiness and compassion, which they were.
Skipping ahead a few years, I was in the sixth grade. I was in those dreaded middle school years, filled with awkward school pictures and tumultuous friendships. I was in the midst of changing schools for the first of two times, and came to church every Sunday simply because I had been doing it since I was two. Our church had just gotten a new priest and he was going to start a youth program. For the first time I was finally old enough to be a “youth” instead of just a “kid”. During the years that followed I would learn a great deal about myself and God, but not all of this learning took place while doing stereotypical “church” things. Through my middle school and early high school years I spent a lot of time hanging out with my church friends and learned what kind of a person I wanted to be through my interactions with them. I learned that you don’t always have to do what is popular and sticking up for yourself is crucial. I learned that being yourself is not always easy and, most importantly, I learned that even if it felt like I was all alone, I never was. I think if I had to pinpoint when I realized that God was pretty much everywhere, it would have had to have been during those conflicting middle school years. Ironically, I did not learn this from a sermon, or from reading the Bible, or even from sitting in a church service. I learned it from living my life; showing only that God will find you no matter where you are or how busy you might be.
After I fully came to understand the fact that God would always be there for me, no matter what, I began to get more and more involved in youth ministry. I spread my attendance to diocesan, provincial, and national events. I became actively involved with the Provincial Youth Network, diocesan networks and planning boards such as the Youth Action Council, and parish boards. All of these things opened my eyes even further to all of the unusual places in which God resides. Youth ministry is a very active and lively ministry (trust me; I learned more about this as I moved to more of a staff and planner role from a participant one). I think that it was my deep participation and involvement in youth ministry that really opened my eyes to the fact that God can be anywhere, in anything.
Over the past years of my life I have seen God come alive in many forms. I have seen Him shine forth from the eyes of a first time MissionPalooza participant, learning what all the hype was about. I personally have served God breakfast at St. Paul’s KCK during their Breakfast at St. Paul’s program which provides a meal on Saturday (when most soup kitchens are not open) to the homeless and working poor in a dignified setting. I met God through the eyes of Gene Robinson at General Convention when he looked me in the eyes and gave me communion. God and I have even sat down and discussed schedules with the staff for a diocesan Happening. To me, God is present in every person I meet, whether or not I realize it. Aha! Finally I have found a way to tie in today’s Gospel! As Jesus was praying in the Gospel reading from today He said, “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one…” God the Father is in Jesus and Jesus is in every single one of us; no matter what race, religion, gender, etc. they may be. We are one, and to me that is very comforting.
My experience in youth ministry has allowed me to see God in many more areas as well. Because God is everywhere at all times, encounters with Him can be quite diverse. I have been an acolyte for almost seven years and absolutely love our “high church” atmosphere. However, I saw God just as brilliantly, if not more so, standing for the last time with the Provincial Youth Network at my last meeting with them in April as we had our closing service outside in Oklahoma. God is in trees and flowers, the baby bunnies in my backyard, butterflies, are you getting the picture here? God is in everything.
I’m off to college next year, and with that comes leaving many of the things I have learned to love and see God in over the years. I’m leaving the more material things behind (like my house, my bed, and my closet full of shoes) and also the deeper things such as being a “youth” in youth ministry, my church home, and my family. Despite all of this, I am not worried, because I know that God will pop up in all of the new things that will occupy my life just as forcefully as forcefully as He appeared in the past.
So, in closing, if you got absolutely nothing from my sermon this morning, don’t worry, God is out there waiting for you to encounter Him in your own way. For however many people there are in this world there are that many ways and more to see God. So, if you’re having trouble finding Him, just remember, God is inside us all.
Pray for Me
by The Rev. Bryan England,
Deacon
I was really hard pressed to come up with a sermon this week, partly because our readings for this Sunday are kind of lackluster. We are in an eddy in our progression through the liturgical year. We celebrated the Ascension on Thursday, commemorating when Jesus concluded his post-resurrection appearances and ascended into heaven, and the fires of the Day of Pentecost are still a week away. So we’re caught in the period between were the Gospels end, and the Church begins.
Accordingly, our Gospel lesson takes us back to the upper room of the Last Supper, and Jesus’ prayer for his disciples, for their unity, and by association, for our unity. But I would really feel hypocritical preaching about the church’s unity while I am strenuously advocating the recreation of the Boston Tea Party, with the substitution of Anglican primates for crates of English tea. And I really don’t think Jesus had the Most Rev. Peter Akinola in mind when he prayed, “that they all may be one.”
Furthermore, I have always stalwartly resisted preaching on the book of Revelation. I feel it is much better left to fundamentalist preachers trying to warp an apocalyptic writing about the early Church and the Roman Empire into a diatribe against the Roman Church. That leaves me with the story from Acts about the result of Paul’s interference with free market capitalism in the Macedonian city of Phillipi.
We just heard the tale of the fortune-telling slave girl who followed Paul and Silas around town, proclaiming them to be “slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim . . . a way of salvation.” When Paul became irritated and performed a quick and easy exorcism, he freed the slave girl from the spirit that was oppressing her, and freed her owners from their major source of income. They responded like you would imagine, and Paul and Silas were stripped, flogged and thrown into prison for disturbing the peace.
What intrigues me about the story, is what happened after Paul and Silas are incarcerated. The writer of Acts tells us that about midnight there was an earthquake so violent the doors of the prison were thrown open, and the chains holding the prisoners were unfastened. When the jailer woke up and saw the doors were open, he logically assumed the prisoners had escaped, which would have resulted in his own disgrace and execution. He drew his sword and was about to kill himself, when he heard Paul shouting, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.”
Paul and Silas had not behaved like the jailer assumed they would, they hadn’t behaved like any rational being would assume they would, and this difference opened the door for the jailer and his entire family to receive and accept the word of God. The only difficulty I have with this story is that I identify more with the jailer than I do with Paul and Silas.
One of my major ministries is being a chaplain for the Missouri State Highway Patrol and the Lee’s Summit Police Department. In fact, I’m on call for Lee’s Summit right now, so if I leave in the middle of the service, it won’t be the first time.
One of the aspects of being a police chaplain is to ride along with police officers on their shifts, learning how they do their job, getting to know individual officers, and overcoming their fear that you are there to “bring them to Jesus,” or to anyone else, for that matter. But over the years this process can cause the lines between chaplain and officer to blur, and in some situations I think more like a police officer than a chaplain.
Several years ago, in our home town in Iowa, I was on a ridealong when an officer pulled over a car with two men in it for suspicion of drunk driving. As the vehicle came to a stop, the passenger bailed out and began running through the industrial area next to the Mississippi River.
The patrol car I was in rushed to the scene, just in time to see the suspect run between two warehouses. Reacting on instinct and stupidity, as the patrol car came to a halt I unsnapped by seatbelt and threw open my door. “Yeah,” the officer behind the wheel said, “make him think he’s being chased,” and he sped the car around the warehouse to intercept. So a chaplain ended up chasing a suspect on foot, wondering what I was going to do when I caught him. Luckily, the original officer was running along the riverbank, and the suspect eventually stopped and threw up his hands. I helped to handcuff him and place him in a squad car, and he was transported back to the station.
I stayed in the interrogation room with the man while officers began the process of finding out who he was, and why he was running in the first place. He originally gave a false name, said he was from Rockford, Illinois, and said that he ran because, “I heard you beat brothers here.” Right. His name was Kervan, he lived Moline, across the river, and he was running because there was a warrant for his arrest.
He was still breathing heavily from our little jog, and asked for a drink of water. For some reason the words, “I thirst” popped into my head, and I thought I would be a prudent idea to get him a cup of water. I remember Kevan looking at me quizzically as I held the cup to his lips so he could drink, like he didn't expect a police officer to do that for him.
Every once in a while he would look at me while the officer’s were interrogating him, as if he were trying to figure out why I wasn’t asking him any questions, why I was the only one not in uniform. Finally, when everyone but me had left the room for a moment he asked me, “Who are you?”
“A chaplain,” I responded. Then after receiving a confused look, I said, “A minister, a preacher.”
“Pray for me,” he said. It wasn’t a request, it was a demand.
That was his big mistake, because once he asked me to pray for him, to be a chaplain, to be a Christian, he opened himself up to unrestrained sermon warfare.
“I will,” I said, “but at some point in your life you are going to have to take responsibility for the things you are doing which gets you into situations like this, and stop doing them. You’re going to have to change the way you live your life.” And then I talked about God’s power to transform lives, but how we need to be willing to allow that transformation to take place.
Something I said apparently sank in, because when the officers came back into the room, Kervan began to respond truthfully to their questions, and they, in turn, responded by removing his handcuffs and allowing him to use the telephone. The moment his hands came free, he pointed to me and once again demanded, “Pray for me.”
I continued to talk to him as we transported him to the county jail, encouraging him to connect with a church when we go out. We shook hands when we parted, and I said “God bless you.” It seems deacons do bless sometimes.
Was this amendment of life, or the beginnings of it, or was this man just conning me, trying to make the best of a bad situation? I don’t know, but he continues to haunt my memory, and I continue to pray for him.
But not I alone. In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus prayed for his disciples, but not only those with him in that upper room, but for those who believe in him, through their word. That’s you and I. Jesus prays for us, and by extension he prays for those who believe in him through our word and our action.
The Phillipian jailer asked Paul, “What must I do to be saved?” Ultimately, for Kervan, for Paul and Silas, for the Phillipian jailer and his family, for you and I, salvation, true freedom, begins when we allow the power of Jesus Christ to transform our lives. Only then, only when we truly accept him into our hearts, when we acknowledge him as Lord, only then are doors of our cells thrown open, and the chains on our hands and feet are unfastened, and only then do we become truly free at last.
