Foretelling

Medina has everything. There’s all the food around the square. Stores that have things you can’t get anywhere else. For this and so many reasons, this is an amazing town!

You have a group that meets each Saturday during the summer. A LARP group gathers in front of the Memorial Park pool. LARP stands for Live Action Role Play. These guys play real-life Dungeons and Dragons. They do Game of Thrones in real life. They make their own medieval armor and foam weapons and come out and play in the park. You really have everything, Medina.

I was watching them at the start of the summer and one guy was giving a pep talk to his team. He quoted the movie Braveheart, “Every man dies. Not every man truly lives.” I was moved by his sincerity and laughed at the absurdity at such a quote over a foam sword battle.

Now many would mock the LARPers. Including me. I am a geek, but that is like the highest level of geek. Even other geeks who live in a world of imagination make fun of these guys for taking their imaginations too far. It takes a certain level of passion and courage to dress up like a knight or wizard and head to the public park and play. These are men of all ages. It takes dedication to crafting to make a foam sword, or an outfit that really shows the level of power your wizard has. It takes skill and training to best your opponent in melee combat.

I smile each time I passed our Medina LARPers this summer. I love that they are there. Sometimes I love it because it’s just funny to me, those aren’t my best moments. Yet I always smile because it touches something within my soul.

It takes a lot of courage to become who you are. It takes a lot of courage to root yourself so deeply in something. To live out what you want to be true. I think that’s why I love the LARPers so much.

Jesus has a lot of courage and roots his identity in his Jewish religion. His passion, knowledge, and love of God are palpable. He is firmly rooted in the Jewish faith. He has been steeped in faith. He takes the religion of his day and brings it to the next level of ethical behavior. Jesus is trying to remind others of their identity and what that means for them in their day-to-day living. He seeks to rekindle their passion for God and living in God’s way.

In today’s scriptures, we have the first time that Jesus beings to foretell his death and resurrection. Peter takes Jesus aside and says, “God forbid it! This must never happen to you.” And Jesus says, “Get behind me, Satan! You are not setting your mind on divine things, but human things.”

Man alive. I am like Peter in this story. I like living. I want to continue doing it for as long as I possibly can. I’m not a fan of conflict. In terms of “fight or flight” I’m a reconciler. I will try to reason with someone until I realize that there’s no reasoning. What Jesus is teaching today is to die. Lose your life. Let God handle the repayment of wrongs. In terms of “fight or flight” Jesus goes right in to give himself up.

Henry Emerson Fosdick wrote, “One of the most disastrous evils that can befall religion is to have the best moral conscious of its generation get ahead of it. When the effective goodness of one’s time moves on before while religion ethically lags behind, religion is obviously in a bad way. The assumption of conventional preachers is that men ought to become religious in order to become morally better. The realistic fact, however, is that often the most important and far-reaching ethical insights and endeavors of a generation are pioneering on ahead, while religion is behind, stuck in the mud or reluctantly dragging its feet.”[1] This was written in 1937 and still stands today.

We cannot miss that Christ was killed by the religious of his day. Jesus is asking questions deeply rooted in his faith and his tradition, but the current power structure doesn’t want to hear it. They trample on the poor, keep people in bondage especially the most vulnerable in society like widows and orphans, and instead of healing the sick, they send them off. He outpaces the religion of his day, and is called by the author of Hebrews, “The pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” He is out in front, and for this, he will be killed by the religious of his day.

Please note that I don’t think Jesus is magically telling the future either. Jesus is being rational here. This is what happens when you set your mind on divine things. Peter rebukes Jesus, being the voice of human reason. Peter’s reaction is my own. “Jesus, you don’t have to do this. There has to be another way. You can compromise. You can avoid getting killed.” But Christ goes and gets himself killed in a totally preventable way. Jesus knows what happens when you live into the fullness of your identity. It can attract others just as much as it can repel them.

Jesus is like those live action role players. He gathers with a group of people, and lives out his passion in public. He has a wild imagination. He wants to live out the world he sees in his head. He gathers a few friends and starts telling stories. He tells really smart parables to remind others of what living a passionate faith is about. These stories are exactly the opposite of how people of faith are living in his day and age. Jesus would be one of those LARPers about whom other geeks would say, “Well that’s just taking it too far.”

Jesus gives us his mission statement. He tells us at the beginning of his ministry in Luke 4:18 what he’s all about. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. Proclaim release to the captives. Recover of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” This didn’t come from out of the blue, it comes from his tradition: his favorite prophet Isaiah 61:1.

I am trying to learn how to live this way. Together, we as church are trying to learn how to live this way. But we often set our mind on human things. What would people say? What if others just don’t get it? It’s very human to want to live and avoid conflict. No one wants to be nailed to a piece of wood. We aren’t Jesus in this story, we are Peter. We compromise, we hide our identity, we don’t want to rock the boat. We look to the long-term and try to get as many people to like us as we can, as that’s human.

Living into our tradition is hard. People might call us weird. The Congregationalists have been on the side of social justice. They came to this country because they wanted to build the kingdom of God on this soil; to be a city on a hill, a light to the nations. They thought each of their members was a Child of God, and they pushed for the well-being of their communities, setting up feeding programs, orphanages and especially schools. They believed in education as the means to lift up everyone.

Theologically they believed in the Sabbath and instituted the “Blue Laws.” No work on Wednesday evenings for Bible study, and nothing open on Sunday. These laws spread across the country but many were repealed in the 1980s. Massachusetts, the first place the Congregationalists landed, still have these laws on the books today.[2]

In April, I went with Ken Zuehlke to hear a local historian. In the mid-1800s, we were committed to prohibition because we saw it as a domestic violence issue. Remove the tinder of alcohol, you wouldn’t spark the fire of spouse abuse. This proved not to be true, but we were so devoted to this women’s right’s issue that we tried to excommunicate someone who didn’t attend our church. A local tavern owner, who was an Episcopalian, moved away to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the tavern had raucous parties. We Congregationalists were so troubled with what was going on there, we passed laws and campaigned against the tavern. We also wrote to the Post Master of Fort Wayne demanding to give us the address of the tavern owner so we could bring him back to Medina and excommunicate him. We were very committed to our identity!

Yet it is good to know that we don’t always get it right. That the church has harmed people. That we have dragged our feet in ethical matters. In seminary, I was part of Leadership NOW! It’s a weeklong even that gathers youth from all over the eastern seaboard. Each day has a worship service that the youth are in charge of planning. One in particular was rather amazing. It was a procession. The group would start in the seminary’s chapel and then move outside to various prayer stations. The procession led off seminary grounds and into a local park. We would sing as we walked as we followed the cross.

The youth had the processional cross from the chapel, used only a few times during the year. This comes from the German Reformed side of our UCC heritage, specifically the Mercersburg Movement. Started in Mercersburg, PA, this movement tried to recapture some of the liturgy of the Catholic church and reintroduce mystery into worship. It is very high church, including all the bells and smells and weekly communion. And the processional cross.

Worship ended with a youth giving a sermon on the small hill in that local park. He spoke from the top of the hill while we gathered around below. And the cross was with him up on top. After each worship, we reflect on what was most meaningful. One of the leaders of the program stated, “I was surprised about how uncomfortable I was at first following the cross. I mean, we’re out in public. I was worried about offending someone. Or being yelled at. Or just embarrassed. Here I am working at a seminary, and I’m embarrassed. I wonder where that came from?”

I hope that we can be so rooted in our identities that we’d head to a local park with foam swords or crosses. In a way, we did that last week at Alive on the Square. May we remind ourselves of our history and identity. The tradition that we’re rooted in, while we listen to those pioneering ethical voices who are leading us into the future. I look to start the conversation and learn alongside you, not be the expert here.

Let us not be ashamed of who we are and who we’re rooted in. God is always out in front of us, calling us from the future. God celebrates where we got it right in the past and urges us to learn from our mistakes and more closely align to the ethics of the Beloved Community of God. In doing so, we discover the truth in what First Century Theologian Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is human being fully alive.”

It might lead to the cross. We might die an undeserved and preventable death, a social one or a literal one. To quote Braveheart again, “Everyone dies. Not everyone truly lives.” We follow the one who truly lives, the resurrected Jesus our Christ, the pioneer and perfect of our faith. To end as Rev. Fosdick did, “Wherever else Christ is, he is out ahead. For peace against war, for a world community against our suicidal nationalism, for human brotherhood against racism, for equality over inequality, for the motive of service against the motive of gain— there is no mistaking the general direction in which Christ moves. And we belong with him.”[3]  Amen.

Works Cited

[1] Harry Emerson Fosdick, Successful Christian Living. Page 97.

[2] Wikipedia contributors, “Blue laws in the United States,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blue_laws_in_the_United_States&oldid=796329570 (accessed August 22, 2017)

[3] Page 107

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