Sermon: Sunday, September 23, 2012: Season of Creation — Mountain Sunday

Texts: Isaiah 65:17-25  +  Psalm 48:1-11  +  Romans 8:28-39  +  Mark 16:14-18

In the name of Jesus, our mountain, our Zion.

Back when I was in seminary, there was a bar in East Atlanta that we seminarians liked to haunt named Mary’s.  Mary’s hosted karaoke on Thursday nights, and the Master of Ceremonies was this very short, dark-skinned man named C.J. who always kicked the night off with something by Diana Ross or the Supremes.  His standard was “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” and when he sang that song, you thought Ms. Ross herself was in the house.

Looking back, I’m surprised that none of us bright seminarians ever made the connection between the lyrics to that song and the text from Paul’s letter to the Romans that we heard this morning.  Paul writes, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  Diana Ross shortened the list and cut to the chase, singing in God’s own voice, “ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough, ain’t no river wide enough to keep me from getting to you!”

There’s an element of poetry to both Paul’s and Diana’s exclamations.  We don’t really imagine God coming down off the mountain to claim us any more than we imagine Diana Ross wading across the Mississippi River to get to her lover.  But the mountain and its peaks has held a place in the collective mythology of humanity from our very beginnings.  The ancient Greeks imagined their gods ruling and residing atop Mount Olympus.  The ancient Israelites imagined God to reside atop Mount Zion, and expected that it would be from there that God would act to protect God’s people.  Later, when they’d been taken into exile, prophets like Isaiah and those who later wrote in his voice imagined God’s restoration pouring forth from Mount Zion, as if it were the epicenter of wave of divine energy that would finally cover the whole creation making all things new.

It’s not hard to understand why the ancient religious imagination associated mountains and their peaks with God’s presence.  When you stand at the base of a mountain, or live in the shadows of its valleys, mountaintops seem to touch the skies from which life-giving waters fall.  Mountaintops, sometimes covered in clouds, seem to be the source of the thunderclaps and lightening bolts that accompany the power of the storm.  Climbing a mountain was hard work, and the rewarding views awaiting those who could make the climb made an easy analogy for the life of faith.

Throughout the history of Israel there were disputes about which mountaintops were the appropriate site for offering sacrifices to God.  King David built his city, Jerusalem, near Mount Zion and Solomon established the temple there.  Centuries later, when Jerusalem came under Roman occupation, mountains were a source of tension between Jews and Samaritans.  You’ll remember that Jesus, in his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, is told “Our fathers worshipped on this mountain (a reference to Mount Gerazim), but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”  (John 4:20)

Jesus’ reply to the Samaritan woman signals an important shift that was taking place in the first century, as Jews and the early Christians responded to Rome’s destruction of the Temple.  Jesus says,

“Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.  You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the worshippers the Father seeks.  God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:21-24)

Under imperial occupation, the mountain temple associated with God’s holy presence was destroyed, an event that effectively cut off the Jewish people from their religious practices and forced an amazing evolution in religious identity, leading to the development of what we would now call rabbinic Judaism.

At the same time, Christianity was being born, and the teacher Jesus became the resting place for much of the mythic freight previously lain on the mountain Temple.  Where once the faithful had ascended the mountain to offer praise and worship at the Temple in Jerusalem, the bridge between heaven and earth, now Jesus came to them — fully human and fully divine.

Matthew’s gospel, in particular, goes to great lengths to give us images of Jesus as the new mountaintop experience: Jesus experiences temptation on a mountain (Mt. 4:8-10); Jesus delivers the body of his teaching on a mountain (Mt. 5:1 — 8:1); Jesus feeds the multitudes on a mountain (Mt. 15:29-31); Jesus is transfigured on a mountain (Mt. 17:1-9); and the risen Jesus — in a scene that seems to have inspired the addendum to Mark’s gospel that we read this morning — commissions those who’d followed him from  to go out into the world, making disciples of all nations (Mt. 28:16-20).

The early church picked up on these images of the mountaintop Jesus, acting as the cosmic bridge between heaven and earth, and incorporated them into its religious art. To this day, if you walk into some Orthodox and Roman sanctuaries and look up, you will see an image on the ceiling of the risen Christ ruling from heaven.  In essence the church built its own mountaintop retreats, inviting us all to come in and encounter the God who met Moses on the mountaintop once again in the person of Jesus.

Even Protestant churches, ambivalent as we’ve been to icons in our worship spaces, have continued to raise up steeples like mountains and top them with crosses.  The function is the same, to elevate an image of the presence of God over our sanctuaries as a sign that God meets us here, at the cross, the bridge between heaven and earth.

Perhaps it is because we have, in our religious imaginations, removed God from the mountaintops and relocated God into our sanctuaries, that we no longer care so deeply for the real-life mountaintops here at home and around the world.  Sure, on an individual basis, we may still choose to vacation in the mountains so that we can hike or ski, but outside the resorts of Colorado and northern California, the mountains where our Native predecessors worshipped, the mountains so adored by Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, are being destroyed.

If you haven’t heard of Mountaintop Removal Mining (MRM), I highly recommend to you a documentary that came out last year, directed by Bill Haney, called “The Last Mountain,” which examines the impact of coal mining on our lands, our health and our culture.  The film centers on the battle to keep Coal River Mountain in West Virginia from being blown apart for coal — a process that, until very recently, was illegal under the Clean Water Act of 1972.

Mountaintop coal mining, which accounts for only about 5% of coal production in the United States, but almost 30% in areas like West Virginia, “has destroyed 500 Appalachian mountains; has decimated 1 million acres of forest; has buried 2,000 miles of streams and is contaminating thousands of miles more.”

The process of stripping coal from the mountaintops involves, first, stripping each of these mountains of the native forests that have grown there over centuries; then, literally blasting the tops off the mountains with 25 tons of explosives each day, a weekly total equivalent in force to the bomb dropped in Hiroshima, in order to expose the veins of coal.

Instead of radioactive fallout, this process releases coal dust and silica into the air, which coats surrounding communities.  In one small West Virginia town, six children and adults living within a few blocks of one another developed brain tumors, which typically occur in one out of every 100,000 people.  Most died.

Because mountaintop removal takes place near the headstreams that water much of America, the lead, arsenic, selenium and other metals released by this process have made their way into the water supply hundreds of miles away, increasing the risk of cancer.

Even we, here in Chicago, over 500 miles from West Virginia experience the impact of coal mining, as the coal shipped from sites like the ones in the Appalachians makes its way to coal-fired power plants like the Fisk and Crawford plants located in the Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods.  According to the group Chicago Physicians for Social Responsibility, these two plants alone annually emit over a quarter of a million pounds of particulate matter into the air, almost 18,000 tons of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide; and 269 pounds of toxic mercury.  These emissions are major contributors to the elevated incidence of asthma in these communities and have been linked to 41 premature deaths, 550 additional emergency room visits, and 2,800 additional asthma attacks each year.

In addition to measuring and reporting on the problem, Chicago Physicians for Social Responsibility acted in partnership with more than 60 other organizations, including the Catholic 8th Day Center for Justice, Protestants for the Common Good, SOUL (a coalition of congregations on the south side of Chicago), and Faith in Place — the interfaith environmental advocacy organization we supported with our justice offering at the beginning of this month, and whose first offices were here at St. Luke’s almost a decade ago.  Working together as the Chicago Clean Power Coalition, these activists — faith-based and others — succeeded in getting Midwest Generation, the parent company to these two coal-fired power plants, to shut down.  The Fisk plant in Pilsen shuts down this year, the Crawford plant in Little Village will shut down by 2014.

These victories, small in the scope of the global struggle for clean energy but significant when measured by the lives they will save, call to mind the vision for the new creation voiced in our reading from Isaiah this morning.  Too often we read the prophesy of a new heaven and a new earth as a forecast of some heavenly future waiting for us after this life, beyond this world.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The prophet was writing to a people who’d experienced exile, who’d been forced off their land by multinational powers spreading across the ancient near east and gobbling up the land’s resources.  The people this prophet wrote to console weren’t longing for an afterlife, they were longing to be restored in this life.  So, to them, the prophet writes, “no more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime… they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.” (Isa. 65:20, 25b)

Even the author of the postscript to Mark’s gospel, with its imagery of snake handling and exorcisms that is so foreign to us, is clearly talking about a power at work in us for the healing and liberation of this world and not the next.  Hear again, in the context of our concern for the toxins released by mountaintop removal, as Jesus says, “and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” (Mk. 16:18)

Friends, we may not have the sort of miracle working faith that can withstand a snakebite, but we have seen, here in our own city, the miracle of faith that happens when people of goodwill and courage act together to serve the interests of those most vulnerable among us, when we stand together with God’s creation and not against it.  Change does happen.  Plants are shut down.  We are a new creation.

But the powers and principalities against which we labor are not so easily defined as big coal, though they certainly have their part in this drama.  Almost half of the electricity in the United States comes from burning coal.  That equals 16 pounds of coal are burned each day for every man, woman and child in the United States, and one-third of that coal comes from Appalachia.

Big coal isn’t simply the problem, they are a provider of a resource, electricity, that we have come to take for granted.  Until we stop to examine where this resource comes from, how it gets to the outlets that power our home appliances and warm our homes, and whose communities are most negatively impacted by this process — we won’t understand the part that each of us plays in both the destruction and the restoration of God’s creation, which is being made new each day.

For this reason, I really hope that as many of you as possible will mark Sunday, October 7 on your calendars.  That’s the day, two weeks from today, that we’ll be screening the documentary “Gasland” here at St. Luke’s.  That film explores another controversial method for extracting fuel for electricity from the earth, hydraulic “fracking,” and will serve as a good coda to this year’s Season of Creation.

Living on the plains of the Midwest, along the shores of Lake Michigan, we may imagine ourselves removed from the province of the mountains.  We do, however, have the John Hancock building and the Willis Tower (which I still can’t stop calling Sears Tower), the place where our city touches the sky.  And here in the church, we still have our steeples and our crosses.  Ancient Israel imagined that God’s restoring power would begin at God’s holy mountain, Mount Zion, and would sweep across the face of the earth — that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation — would be able to prevent God from claiming us and reclaiming us.  Inspired by the power of the Holy Spirit, that blows across the face of the earth like wind over the wind farms that are spreading across Illinois and the central plains states, providing a new, clean source of power for communities not far from here, let us pray that we — acting in concert with others — might be a center for God’s healing power to roll down from and for the mountains.

In the name of Jesus, our mountain, our Zion. Amen.

Sunday, September 16, 2012: Season of Creation — Sky Sunday

 

Texts:  Jeremiah 4:23-28  +  Psalm 19:1-6  +  Philippians 2:14-18  +  Mark 15:33-39

When I was four years old my parents put a quarter-sized violin under my chin and started taking me to Suzuki lessons once a week.  In an instant, a star was born.  Anyone who’s taken Suzuki instrumental lessons knows that once or twice a year, no matter how little you know, you are expected to stand before your teacher and your peers and perform in a recital.  And so it was that I, not even five years old and having only recently mastered the art of holding on to a violin and a bow at the same time, performed in my first violin recital.  They had a small group of us, six or seven children, come to the front of the room and squeak out our painful rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”  There just happened to be a reporter in the room that day, so the moment was immortalized in a local Trenton, NJ newspaper and subsequently pressed into a scrapbook which now rests somewhere in my parents’ home in Des Moines, IA.

Now that I’m learning to play the guitar some thirty-five years later, imagine my surprise when one of the first songs my instructor used to teach me how to pick out melodies was the ubiquitous “Twinkle, Twinkle.”  What is it that makes this song such an international reference point for music instruction?  Surely not the lyrics:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are!

Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are…

Yet, it must be admitted, there is something timeless about the theme.  Across time and space, humanity has looked up at the skies and wondered what we were looking at.

As we turn our attention this week to the theme of the sky as we continue through our five week Season of Creation, we should remind ourselves that it wasn’t until the mid-1960s that humanity got its first glimpse of our planet from outer space.  We live among the first generations of humanity able to look up at the sky and to visualize what lies beyond.  For our ancestors, the simple song’s question, “how I wonder what you are” was quite sincere.

Scripture begins with an account of the creation of the sky in the first chapter of Genesis.  In fact, the first verse of the first chapter of the first book of the bible begins, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth…” (Gen. 1:1).  In the creation story told in Genesis 1, God creates the skies by separating the waters above from the waters below, reflecting an ancient belief that the dome of the sky held back the waters that fall on the earth as rain.  In that account, the skies were an integral part of creation — connected to everything else God creates: land and plants and creatures and humanity.

So, when the prophet Jeremiah laments in this morning’s passage that the earth was “waste and void” and the heavens “had no light,” he is commenting not only on the state of the environment, but on the state of the relationships between elements of God’s creation.  The verses preceding the ones we heard read this morning make it even clearer.  The prophet declares,

“My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain! Oh, the walls of my heart! My heart is beating wildly; I cannot keep silent; for I hear the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. Disaster overtakes disaster, the whole land is laid waste.” (Jer. 4:19-20a)

To Jeremiah’s prophetic eye, the earth and the sky reflect the chaos brought about by humanity’s warring.

Today the damage done to the environment and, in particular, to the sky by human warfare is no less chaotic, but exponentially more destructive.  Some of the damage done is obvious, as when the United States detonated atomic bombs in Japan during the Second World War, turning the sky into a carrier of radioactive fallout that poisoned land, water and those who survived the blast.  Other damage is less immediately visible, as when U.S. and Iraqi forces tore apart the natural gravel holding the underlying Kuwaiti soil in place in the early 1990s, turning the sky into an enemy of the earth and its creatures as accelerated wind erosion destroyed vegetation and eliminated the natural habitats of numerous species.

But the damage done to the earth and its creatures by our neglect of the sky is not limited to times of war.  Beginning in the late 1970s, scientists began to observe a steady decline of about 4% per year of the earth’s total volume of ozone in the atmosphere.  Ozone is what protects the earth, and its creatures, from the harmful effects of UV radiation — which has been directly linked to cancers like melanoma, cataracts, and the destruction of oceanic life low on the food chain that serve as the foundation for larger, more complex species of fish and sea mammals.

The lessons this morning remind us of the same truths we continually struggle to accept — that we are all connected to one another, that what affects one of us affects all of us.  So often we hear this wisdom as a statement about humanity, even our biblical and theological imaginations are trained to interpret passages like “so then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another” (Eph. 4:25) and the sacrament of baptism itself as being narrowly limited to the human experience.

The writer of the gospel of Mark saw things differently.  As Jesus hangs upon the cross the skies return to darkness, the state of being before God began the work of the creation.  In Jesus, the new creation is not limited to humanity and human relationships, but extends to the whole creation and the web of relationships that sustain all of us in relationship to earth and sea and sky.

As those who have been given stewardship of the earth, not dominion over it, humanity is both uniquely able and responsible for prioritizing the care and restoration of earth and sea and sky.  Twenty five years ago the United States signed onto the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty aimed at reducing the amount of synthetic substances being released into the atmosphere that were leading to the depletion of the ozone layer.  As a result of this treaty, cited by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan as “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date,” the ozone layer is expected to recover by the year 2050, within our children’s lifetimes.  This demonstrates our ability to make a significant impact on the health of our planet home when we find ways to work together across lines of national difference for the common good.

Unfortunately, the Montreal Protocol is only a first step.  As one set of human-made emissions was banned under this treaty, a new category of emissions known as hydroflourocarbons (HFCs), a known cause of global warming and climate change, have taken their place as a threat to the planet.

Writing to the community of Christians in Philippi from prison, the apostle Paul exhorts them to model themselves on the example of the Lord Jesus Christ, looking “to the interests of others.” (Phil. 2:4)  In a time filled with war, a time in which the toxic effects of empire and its expansion could be felt by the earth itself and those living closest to it, Paul compared those who followed in the way of Jesus “stars,” shining as a witness to the world.

As we gaze into the skies with our children and grandchildren, our nieces and nephews, hearing their wonder at the twinkling stars scattered across the dome of the heavens, let us be reminded by their wonder of the charge given to us at the creation of the world — to be good stewards of all that God has made; and when the waters of our baptism fall fresh upon us as we gather for worship, let us be reminded that these same waters fall from the skies upon the land, the sea, and all God’s creatures — making us one with each other and all creation.

Amen.

 

Sermon: Sunday, September 9, 2012: Season of Creation — Humanity Sunday

Texts:  Genesis 1:26-28; 2:7-8,15,19  +  Psalm 8  +  Philippians 2:1-8  + Mark 10:41-45

Good morning to you all.  If you worship here at St. Luke’s with us at all regularly, you’ve probably noticed that our assembly is a little larger than usual this morning.  If you haven’t noticed that, you’re probably among the group of people who are here this morning to celebrate with Justin Dluzak and his family his great achievement in earning the rank of Eagle Scout.  Welcome to you all, to Troop 115 in particular, and thank you for all of the ways you are exercising careful and faithful stewardship of our most precious natural resource — our children.

So, let’s do see a show of hands.  How many people in the room this morning are Boy Scouts?  How about Girl Scouts?  And how many of you are Eagle Scouts, or Gold Award Girl Scouts?

Alright.  Now, how many of you are Christians?  And how many of you are really good Christians?  It feels like a trick question, doesn’t it?  We’re not even sure such a category exists, but if it does, we’re fairly certain we don’t get to put ourselves in it.  There are no Christian merit badges or ranks.  There is only baptism and discipleship.  Confession and forgiveness and fellowship at the table of the Lord’s Supper.

Still, we long to know that we’re on the right track, that we’re doing the right things, that we’re getting ahead.  Each fall the students go back to school, they advance a grade, they show progress toward goals with the hope of graduation — from grade school, from high school, from college, from grad school.  Each year a new batch of people enter the workforce, get a foot in the door, get promoted, get tenure, receive a call, make partner.  We work hard to get ahead.  We judge our progress by the rate at which we advance, by the ways we set ourselves apart, above, each other.

It seems to be hardwired into us, the desire to distance and distinguish ourselves from each other.  Even the disciples struggled with a sense of competitive ambition.  The reading from the gospel of Mark this morning seems to begin mid-sentence, “When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John.” (Mk. 10:41)  Here’s what’s happened.

James and John, brothers and disciples of Jesus, have just heard Jesus teaching on the cost of discipleship. First a rich young man approaches Jesus to ask him what must be done to inherit eternal life.  The inquirer tells Jesus he has already done everything required by the law, and Jesus tells him to go beyond what is required to what is needed.  He says, “you lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” (Mk. 10:21) The people are shocked by his teaching, and they begin to ask each other, “then who can be saved?” (Mk. 10:26)

But Peter, a leader among the disciples, points out to Jesus, “look, we have left everything and followed you.” (Mk. 10:28) In reply, Jesus offers the strange reassurance, “truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age — houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions — and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” (Mk. 10:29-31)

This is not a clear system of reward and promotion.  This is an HR director’s nightmare.  Jesus says that the life of discipleship reverses the expectations of hard work and advancement.  There is no Eagle Scout court of honor for those who follow the LORD.  In fact, it’s just the opposite.  As they continue along the road, Jesus pulls the twelve aside and says to them, “See, we’re going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again.” (Mk. 10:33-34)

And it’s at this moment, after Jesus has taught the crowds that the cost of discipleship is absolute, after he’s shared with the disciples that he is leading them along the road that ends at the cross, it’s at that moment that James and John step forward and say, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” (Mk. 10:35)  And Jesus asks what it is that they want.  They say, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” (Mk. 10:37)

It’s such a painfully awkward moment, made all the more painful because of how recognizable it is.  James and John may seem deaf to Jesus’ teaching and oblivious to their surroundings, but no more than most of us.  We, who come to church week after week, who labor hard to live a good life, still torture ourselves and each other trying to get ahead, when Jesus is inviting us to get behind.  To get behind our children.  To get behind our co-workers.  To get behind our neighbors.  To get behind each other, and — particularly during this season of creation — to get behind the Earth.

It may seem odd that we celebrate a “Humanity Sunday” during this season of creation in which the surrounding Sundays have names like “Planet Earth Sunday,” “Sky Sunday,” “Mountain Sunday,” and “Animals Sunday.”  We are conditioned to think of ourselves, to imagine ourselves, as being set apart from the rest of creation.  How can we be like the planet?  It is a place and we are people.  How can we be like the sky or the mountains?  They are inanimate and we are alive. How can we be like the animals?  They act on instinct and we act on reason.  Aren’t we set apart from all these thing?  Don’t they exist for our benefit, not we for theirs?

That is the way many of us have been taught to understand even our own creation stories.  That God created the world as some kind of garden paradise for our own benefit, and gave us dominion over it, to do with as we pleased.  Students of the bible know that Genesis doesn’t just give us one creation story, but two, and that the stories can’t — and aren’t intended to be — synchronized into one.  You hear clips from both stories this morning.  In Genesis 1, the first story, God tells humanity to “fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion” (Gen. 1:28) over it.  In Genesis 2, the second story, God puts humanity in the garden “to till it and keep it,” (Gen. 2:15) though this is perhaps not the best translation of the Hebrew, which could also read “to serve and preserve it.”  Either way, the difference between the first story and the second is the difference between getting ahead and getting behind.  Is the Earth here to serve us, or us it?  What does it mean to be a human, created in the image and likeness of God?

It is to this point that Paul addresses himself as he writes to the church in Philippi.  For Paul, the cost of discipleship has been imprisonment, and it is from prison that Paul writes this letter to a community he cares for deeply and whose generosity is remembered not only by Paul but in the book of Acts as well.  The verses we read this morning are considered by some as the beginnings of the field of theology known as Christology, or reflection on the person of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ.  Because Paul’s letters are, in fact, older than the gospels themselves, we believe that what we read here in Philippians is the early Church’s emerging understanding of who Jesus was in relation to God.  Paul writes,

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross.” (Phil. 2:3-8)

This is what we hope it means to be a Christian, or an Eagle Scout for that matter, which is why I asked Justin to read this passage this morning.  It is our hope that in recognizing him before this congregation, his family and friends and his peers, we are not simply rewarding hard work, but also recognizing a set of values that run counter to the ones that too often prevail in the world around us.  Jesus recognizes as much when he says,

“You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve…”(Mk. 10:42-45)

We aren’t just celebrating the culmination of a series of merit badges, but affirming a childhood spent developing qualities of character — trustworthiness, loyalty, obedience, bravery, reverence and all the rest.  The badges earned along the way were markers of growth into a pattern of life capable of sustaining these traits, traits that the world needs, that the very planet needs during this time of ecological crisis.

And while we celebrate Justin’s achievements this morning, these traits are not reserved for him alone.  You are all laboring to get behind one another, in your homes and in your workplaces.  We are still small enough as a community to know each other’s stories well. We know that among us are those who have been wiping noses and changing diapers, and there are those who have been sitting at bedsides, keeping watch during dying days.  We know that there are those who been laboring to find work, and those who have been working on behalf of those who labor.  We know that there are servants scattered all among us, patiently, quietly, faithfully serving our neighbors, in hospitals, in schools, on the bread line.

Dear friends, you are good Christians, which doesn’t mean that you are perfect, or puffed up with the pride of contraband works righteousness.  It simply means, you are the baptized people of God, welcomed at this font, fed at this table, gathered and sent for the sake of God’s world.  Together, we are the ones who get ahead by getting behind, and we continue to learn how to do this together; good by the grace of God who created all things and gazed on them and called them good; taught by the one who makes us one, Jesus Christ our Lord, in whom lordship takes the form of service to all creation.

Justin, we congratulate you on your significant achievement this day and we pray that in your life you will continue to show us and to lead us into deeper service to our neighbors and the whole creation.

In the name of Jesus,

Amen.