Sermons

“The Stories We Tell”

Matthew 13:10-17 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – September 17, 2017

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might have eyes that see and ears that hear. In the name of Jesus we pray, Amen.

When I was in third grade, we had a spelling bee every month.[1] What’s funny about that, is that one of my most vivid spelling bee memories is attached to second grade in my mind. I’m not even sure we had spelling bees in second grade, but I feel like this one was. Maybe it was the all-school spelling bee that was usually all about the fourth graders. I don’t remember how I did; I’m sure I didn’t win, because surely I would remember that. What I do remember is that the word I had to spell was “justice”. And I did. J-U-S-T-I-C-E. And later someone asked me how I knew how to spell the word “justice” and I replied that I’d seen it at church. Because doesn’t everyone?

There are other things you need to know about me to understand where I’m coming from on Reconciliation Sunday. You need to know about Becky & Beth Kennel. Maybe you’re from the right part of the country to recognize that Kennel is a Mennonite last name, but what you need to know about Becky & Beth is that they were the only Black kids in my school, adopted by White Mennonite parents. Neither one of them were in my class; Becky was two years older and Beth was a year younger. But you can bet I knew who they were, because they were the only kids in town who weren’t white. When I was growing up, the population of Eureka, Illinois, was listed on the sign at the edge of town as 3,500. What’s funny about that is that I assumed for a long time, because I grew up in a small town, that I also went to a small church. It wasn’t really until I went to seminary that I realized that my home church actually qualifies as a mid-sized congregation within the Disciples. But more importantly, my experience of my church wasn’t small because “my church” was never just my congregation.

For those of you who grew up in places like San Diego or the Bay Area, it may be hard to imagine, but for me, the wider church – my Region, and the General Assemblies my parents took us to – provided some of my only opportunities to experience the amazing diversity of God’s people.[2] Almost everyone in my home town looked pretty much like me and talked like me and ate the same Midwestern foods as me. But my parents did a great job of making my small town not so small, and they did it largely through the church. It wasn’t just that they took us other places; they also brought the wider church home. Whenever my congregation had a guest speaker from denominational headquarters in Indianapolis, it was pretty likely that person was going to stay at our house. And it sounds a little weird to say this, but that is how I met the first people of color I ever knew. Julia Brown Karimu, now the first woman and the first African-American to serve as president of the Division of Overseas Ministries (the Disciples half of Global Ministries), stayed with us one weekend when she was still working at Disciples Home Missions. Missionaries, activists, and other church leaders came through and helped my sister and I understand that the world was a lot bigger than the corn-covered plains of Woodford County.

And then there is the story of Ernest Newborn that my mother likes to tell. I had to email her this week because I was a little fuzzy on the details. Ernest Newborn was one of the directors of Reconciliation Ministry in its earliest days. My memory of him is mostly just that he was one of the classiest people I’d ever met in my 8 years. According to my mother, he was in town for an Illinois Council of Churches meeting at Eureka College. And after the meeting, my mother took him over to Peoria (the nearest “big city” – current population around 115,000) to Common Place, a Disciples ministry that benefitted from Reconciliation Ministry grants. Because I was 8 years old, and apparently needed somewhere to be, I went with them. After the tour, Ernest took us to dinner at Lum’s. During dinner, they were discussing Reconciliation funding.[3] At that time, our church had built Reconciliation into our budget, instead of receiving a special offering, because the pastor figured they would get more money for it that way. Ernest said his church did the same. Then he asked what our church’s overall budget was. And that was the point at which I piped up and said, “Actually we don’t buy very many overalls!”

Why am I telling you all this? Well, I’ll need to tell you one more story to explain that. This one is from not nearly as long ago. One of the things they didn’t talk about in that video about the history of Reconciliation Ministry is how they chose the dates when the church would celebrate it and collect the offering. Actually, the official dates are the last Sunday of September and the first Sunday of October. But since that requires overlap with two newsletters in two different months, and more importantly, because it schedules it over-top World Communion Sunday, I have moved it up a week ever since I began pastoring sixteen years ago. What I’m not sure about is why they picked September. I’m beginning to suspect it’s because they’d already figured out what I’ve just recently been learning about August. I have a new theory about August. The theory is that August is awful.[4] And that the nerves and patience of Americans are at an all-time low in August. By August, we’ve just been way too hot for way too long. And it seems like every August, there is some new horrible way in which the ugliness of racism erupts in the month of August. August is when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. August is when Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville, Virginia. I have always felt like one of the purposes of these Sundays officially scheduled for the Reconciliation Offering is to give preachers an extra prod – an annual excuse, if we felt like we needed one – to preach on our collective need for redemption and salvation from the sins of racism. And by scheduling it shortly after awful August, they knew we’d have plenty of material.

Anyway, this is all background to where I’m trying to go. Now, you might imagine, if you haven’t spent much time in Alabama, that a young preacher from the Land of Lincoln[5] preaching on racism every September wouldn’t go over all that well. But what you need to know is that my congregation in Anniston was proud that our Region there was the first to offer its congregations a mechanism for declaring themselves officially part of the Disciples’ anti-racist church initiative and they signed on early. Mostly, they wanted to hear what I had to say.

But one year in particular – I believe it was after one of those ugly Augusts early in President Obama’s first term when the “birther” movement was invented – one year in particular, things got a little ugly. I don’t need to go into detail about the email flame war that got going, because my point is about just one comment. At some point in the midst of a highly fraught chain of “reply alls” someone said “Why does Rebecca always make Reconciliation about race anyway? It could be about so many things.” I was almost embarrassed for her. You see, she didn’t know there is a difference between small-r reconciliation – the concept of repairing relationships through the power of confession and forgiveness – and big-R Reconciliation – the denominational ministry focused on dismantling racism. She had no idea I’d had dinner with Ernest Newborn when I was eight years old.

The scripture this year’s Reconciliation theme is built on encourages us to tell stories, so I’ve been telling you stories. We could have a long and fruitful conversation about the differences between what we heard from the New Revised Standard Version of Matthew 13:10-17 and Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase[6] from The Message. Peterson would have us understand that Jesus’ parables were a way of opening people’s hearts. And perhaps this is true. Perhaps my stories can help you understand why I preach on our desperate need to dismantle racism and race privilege more than twice a year.

But what I really want to emphasize this morning is not the stories I’ve told you, but the impact of the stories my church told me. It makes a difference if our children learn the word “justice” in church. It makes a difference if the story through which they learn what church is includes people of all colors and races and languages. The stories we tell – through what we say and even more importantly, what we do – shape our understanding of the gospel. The stories we tell determine whether our witness will be credible or not. If the stories our actions tell do not match the stories we tell with our words, our children will reject our hypocrisy and eventually wander away. If the stories we tell at church challenge the assumptions the world is pressing on our kids, they will eventually need to make a decision about which narrative they will choose. If our stories are life-giving enough, and beautiful enough, and hopeful enough, if our stories help them tap into the power of love and mercy in ways the world’s stories do not, and if we tell those stories not just in our liturgies and Sunday school lessons, but with our lives[7], perhaps they will choose the way of the gospel.

My church told me stories that convinced me that racial reconciliation is central to living out the gospel for Christians living in 21^st century America. My church told me that through our baptism into Christ, “there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female”. My church showed me that the amazing diversity of God’s people is one of the greatest glories of creation. Everyone has a story. Each of us has a multitude of stories. Here at church, we seek to find the ones that fit into the gospel story, the salvation story, so that we can choose carefully which ones we want to have shape our souls, our children, and our world. The stories we tell make all the difference. May the Living Word be present as we share them with one another. Alleluia and Amen.

[1] TS – Do you like spelling bees? What is your favorite word to spell? One time in Alabama I got to pronounce the words for a spelling bee, and one of the words was “Wednesday”. I wanted to pronounce it “Wed-nes-day” because that’s how I always say it in my head when I spell it, but I knew I couldn’t do that. The kid got it wrong, and I felt bad. What tricks do you use to help you spell things correctly?

[2] TS – Do you have friends who are “different” from you? Maybe a different race, or a different religion? How much do you think about those differences? Can you imagine what it would be like not to know anyone who was different from you in those ways? What have you learned from your friends?

[3] TS – Do you listen in when your parents are talking to other adults? It’s a good way to learn about the world. Sometimes you can even contribute to the conversation by sharing a perspective grown-ups don’t have.

[4] TS – How do you feel about August? Is there a month you don’t like? Is there a month you love? Is it a little bit silly to think one month is consistently better or worse?

[5] TS – Do you know where the “Land of Lincoln” is? That is a nickname for the state of Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln lived most of his life. (He was born in Kentucky though.) Do you know another place Lincoln lived?

[6] TS – Do you know what a Bible paraphrase is? A translation is when language experts take the words of the Bible and carefully put those words into another language (like English) so people like us (who don’t know Hebrew or Greek) can read scripture. A paraphrase is a looser kind of translation, when someone translates what he thinks the overall meaning is, rather than the exact words. This may offer better levels of understanding, but it also means you are trusting the paraphraser not to insert his own ideas too much.

[7] TS – How have you seen people from VLMCC live out the love we talk about in worship? Does it help you believe in God?