My youthfulness is ever apparent to me. This is particularly
amplified because the ELCA is getting older, with the average member age now
over 60. The math of my specific church setting is eye-popping: there is a 43
year gap between my age and average age
of a churchgoing member of this metropolitan church located just a state away
from the Lutheran Meccas of Chicago and the Twin Cities.
I will never believe that the Gospel has gone stale or had
an expiration date of 2000 years. We have failed in reaching my age group with
an authentic evangelistic message.
This September, I was delighted to be asked to proclaim a
message at a wedding of my hometown best friends. Yet mixed into that delight
was a degree of discomfort. It was not challenging because Babylon was on my
people’s doorstep with plans for annihilation. It was challenging because I
needed to overcome all these things in the room: church is boring, or church is
hypocritical, or church is an exclusive bunch, or church is pro-Trump, or
church is a crutch of hope in a sleeping/absent/non-existent God, or church is
just part of the wedding day to please grandma and grandpa, or church is home
to a white male God.
Against these images of the irrelevant or harmful church, I see
Jesus as radical, wild, unpredictable, and ever-inviting the marginalized – he is
poet and outlaw and community organizer and healer all at once. I see the bold
promises of a genderless God who longs to be in relationship with us. I see the
expressive stories of our canon, rich tales that have been shared for millennia
to build the narratives of communities around the world. Faith feels
dangerously alive and inviting enough to ignite ongoing revolution in human
lives, both my own and certainly others of my generation. The religion I claim is not in hospice care
but is still growing and speaking and feeding the body of Christ.
So when I took the floor at the wedding, this was the
message in my head: “God has something to
say to these people of all ages right now, and this is real life.”
Yet at the same moment, I felt too (as I often do) that this
major gap exists between my identity as Christian and the identity I am
assigned as a Christian. How I long for people of faith to be liberated from the
restrictions of assumptions about who we are. Following Jesus and going to
church isn’t about earning merit marks or punching a ticket to heaven; it is
about tasting the rich hope of “the life that really is life” right now in a community of humans that
hold each other up. The church wasn’t built to lag behind cultural social
change in areas of human rights and inclusion; we are meant to be the prophets
at the forefront of the cry and initiation of justice and wholeness around the
globe.
I stepped up to speak. I wondered about friends in my age
group who spent time before the ceremony making jokes about church. I prayed for words that would offer a vision
of how God’s love gently pulls the human heart toward justice and peace, toward
wholeness and inclusion, toward generosity for neighbor, toward peace and
moments of divine communion…I prayed for words that would combat the images of
church listed above.
There are many biblical figures lacking self-confidence, but
the examples of Moses and Jeremiah help me understand that inspiration does not
come for perfect rhetorical speeches. It comes from settling into your single
identity—not the one you are assigned, but the one you are. In Parker Palmer’s A Hidden Wholeness, he laments how most
humans have “a well-rehearsed habit of holding their own knowledge and beliefs
at a great remove from the living of their lives.” When the wedding began, I
was living as a divided self; I was the groom’s friend and I was a candidate
for pastor. One side of me had unlimited baseball knowledge and swore alongside
my friends, and the other side of me had deep curiosity about God and human
stories and felt the urge to speak of the love that flows from God to us, and
then overflows to serve the world. When I filled the leadership void in the
room, my two selves united. I never want to live divided again, because it was
only as my authentic whole self that I could speak to humans and see
transformation.
I have no idea what evangelism means most days for my
generation. Usually it feels limited to the cross and equality stickers
side-by-side on the back of my car. But that day, evangelism felt like being a
leader as my undivided self, both faithful and flawed, both sinner and saint.
It was this realism that actually caught the attention of my peers.
This was my takeaway: authentic truth cuts through centuries
of assumptions about what Church is. All people of faith are given moments to
witness and express this truth. If we have the courage to speak, we may just
shock the world with a relevant message after all.
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