From the 8:15 and 9 services. The youth mission trip preached at the 10:30.

We are in the season of the firefly and long summer days. It has been 103 days since I first joined you. I think it would be good to share my learnings in these first 100 days. Each day brings more learnings and familiarity. I feel that I and my family are settling into life here in Medina nicely.

I love this city and the stories I know about you so far. I am heading to a weeklong intensive for my doctorate down in Columbus. I had to write a congregational study on you. In my conclusion, I stated that Medina defies all categories. You are a small town of 54,000 and counting. We are a college town with no college. We are a suburb whose city is 40 minutes away to Cleveland and 20 to Akron. We are a bedroom community with thriving local industries and businesses. We are rural yet in tune with what’s happening in the world, like Jefferson at Monticello but without the human misery of slavery. We have jazz in the square and deer in our streets. Medina defies categorization.

And I love categories. Growing up, I loved learning about the ordered world of the Enlightenment thinkers. Of how flora and fauna were categorized. Everything has a reason for being, those early science-minded folk thought and I was trained to think, and each has its own place in the world. The new science of evolution seemed to support this. We were learning about our world and were excited. Yet this thinking turned out to be… misguided.

Out of this thinking, we learned to exclude in whole new ways. Eugenetics was unleashed, a social Darwinism. There was the superior race, the white one who ironically invited the system they were on top of, and then there were the Irish, Mediterranean, Eastern European, Asian, Indians from America and Indians from India and the African races at the bottom. They were separate races and many to this day are against “racial mixing” to keep the categories pure. There were laws in our country until 1967 until the Supreme Court ruled against them in Loving vs Virginia. There are unhelpful categories.

Yet I know I still have my categories. I still look to put things in boxes. This is natural. We can’t spend time thinking that slithery thing on the ground is a threat or not, we just need to react to keep on surviving. Categories are a helpful survival mechanism. Yet they can be unhelpful in other ways.

On the first day of seminary, I looked across the room and did a double-take. Here was Brenden Fraiser. You know, the actor who starred in various movies in the 90s. Bright blue eyes, a square jaw. I immediately hated this guy. He was handsome, exuded self-confidence, and had muscles vs. my stick figure frame. His name was Jim and we’d be neighbors and develop a great friendship in seminary. We picked up another guy named Steve and became known as the Three Amgios as we went everywhere together and hung out all the time.

One night, we were chatting over a few beers when Steve turned to me and said, “You know Luke. When I first saw you, I hated you. You’re tall, exude self-confidence, and were funny. You weren’t like me, and I knew I wouldn’t like you. But here we are, best of friends.”

If I stuck to my categories, I wouldn’t have made those friends. I learned so much from them and continue to do so. Jim and his wife Linda adopted two children from Ethiopia and China. If I didn’t know them I wouldn’t know the story of a couple struggling with fertility. Or of our adoption laws in this country. Or international stories of how children are treated and the compassion and patience it takes to adopt.

If I didn’t know Steve, I wouldn’t know what paramedics face on their job. Steve was a paramedic in Baton Rouge, LA before seminary. His stories are amazing from that time. They broke open my categories and opened me up to our health care system here in the states, Southern Culture, and amazing stories of tragedy and medical miracles.

We all have our categories and God is continually trying to break them. Take for example… the platypus. It is a mammal with the bill of a duck. It’s the only egg-laying mammal and also the only poisonous mammal. It’s aquatic and nocturnal. It seems to have no common evolutionary ancestors… aside from everything. It’s bird, fish, mammal and reptile. When it was first discovered in 1799, scientists thought they were victims of a hoax. Like someone had sown several animals together to trick them.

God has broken my categories in sending me here. First, I was content to be in Sylvania, so I thought. But God convinced me otherwise. In my assignment to categorize you, I found that I couldn’t. That there isn’t a box for you. Even my professor said, “What a town! I need to visit there in the near future!”

When you are outside your box, it is best to listen. I’ve been on a listening tour. Trying to soak you in, learn your names and stories, what you value, what you’re about and where God is leading us together. God has a purpose in mind for us. Thank you for listening to me. I can’t imagine how different I am compared to the pastors you have known and loved. Maybe I’m different than expected; for better or worse. Maybe I’ve busted a category or two for how a pastor is supposed to behave and act. We are outside one another’s categories, and that is very freeing and exciting just as it can be stressful. You are more freeing and exciting and I hope and pray that you remain that way for a good long time and I the same for you as well.

Unlike Nehemiah, our city hasn’t been destroyed and our ancestor’s graves aren’t lying in waste. Yet we are here to the restoration of the city. What that exactly is yet, I’m unsure. Like the prophet Habakkuk, I’m awaiting a word from God. A simple word that a runner can read. There are needs out there, lives which need restored. Lives that our Youth have glimpsed in their mission trip to D.C. We will hear about their trip in the 10:30, yet I have an idea that their categories were busted as well. New learnings have been poured upon them and they might have a vision for us and our community here. Sometimes you have to go out and travel and come back to the same place and see it again for the first time.

We each have a purpose. And when we come together, we have a purpose there too. Yet sometimes, God is outside our boxes and our cleverly reasoned categories. Sometimes we think we have everything ordered neat and tight and God gives us the duck-billed platypus. Or a Jim or a Steve. Yet the joy and fun in learning, the wild love of discovery and having to adjust and innovate and get creative. It’s like nothing else! It’s fun and exciting and I hope we can keep that and not settle for the drab routines of mere existence like bringing a cup of wine to a king we don’t even like. Instead we can leave and decide to build something on our own, or rebuild something.

I think Hafiz describes it best in his poem entitled, Lousy at Math.
Once a group of thieves stole a rare diamond larger than a goose egg. Its value could have easily bough one thousand horses,
and two thousand acres of the most fertile land in Shiraz.
The thieves got drunk that night to celebrate their great haul,
but during the course of the evening the effects of the liquor,
and their mistrust of each other
grew to such an extent they decided to divide the stone into pieces.
Of course then the priceless became lost.
Most everyone is lousy at math and does that to God— dissects the Indivisible One.
by thinking, saying
This is my beloved, God looks like this and acts like that.
How could that moron over there
really
be
God.”

May we abandon our categories that hinder us from finding lasting friendships and seeing God in one another. May we keep learning and not assuming we know it all. May God give us a heart for discovery and when we get lazy and bad at math, may God send us legions of platypi to break our apathy, our lazy thinking, and the impulse to divide the priceless. For the restoration of our community and our nation and our world. May it be so.