Out of Your Comfort Zone

Genesis 11:1-9, Acts 2:1-21  

I never wear my clergy collar on airplanes.

Even so, I sometimes have chatty seatmates who find out what I do, and then want to spend the rest of the flight talking to me about what churches do wrong, their own specific interpretation of the Bible, or sexuality and religion.

Now, some of those conversations have turned out to be pretty interesting and fun, but once I’m “out” as a pastor, I wonder if people will judge me differently if I take my shoes off, or read a racy romance novel.  Or if it will seem like another rejection by the church (or the decadent failure of the church) if I say “I just don’t want to talk about Leviticus and sex today.”

The thing is, for that hour or four, stuck in a metal tube hurtling through the sky, I am the church for my seatmate, for good or for ill.

But I’m a cradle Episcopalian, and I don’t get on planes to evangelize.

Neither did the disciples.

Leaving aside the question of planes, the hundred and twenty of Jesus’ followers who gathered in Jerusalem during the spring harvest festival were no more interested in evangelism than me in seat 21A.

They were still disturbed and uncertain about this death and resurrection thing Jesus had done, and were probably too nervous to go out in the streets where people might ask them about that dead rabbi they had followed.

And then the Holy Spirit comes to them,

like a stormy wind and fierce fire,

and they find themselves out on the street, preaching the gospel to all comers in languages they’ve never spoken in their lives.

I’ve always tended to imagine that evangelism would be easier that way, set on fire by the Spirit. That if you’re caught up in the Holy Spirit, all the anxiety and embarrassment and awkwardness would disappear; that you’d be confident and convincing without having to figure it out, and that people would believe right away.

It is a great idea, but I’m willing to bet that if we could get inside the heads of those disciples, they would be full of questions instead of tidy triumph. I’m willing to bet that on that day, those disciples in Jerusalem were wildly conscious of being far outside their comfort zone.

Because God does that to us.  The Holy Spirit is a big fan of pushing us out of our comfort zones into new and unfamiliar places. 

I learned that from Calvary’s Vestry, by the way.  In our Vestry Bible Study at last week’s meeting, we read today’s Genesis story about the tower, and language, and babble. And right away, someone noted that God takes one look at the people building the city and pushes them out of their comfort zone.

In fact, God does for them exactly what they were trying to avoid by building their big, strong city and tower: scatters the people over the face of the earth.

And that happens so that the story can go on.

If there’s no diversity among us, if we stay in one safe fortified place, we lose the wonder of discovery, the inspiration for change and invention, and – most of all – the need and desire for a relationship with God that transforms lives.

That’s what Pentecost is about.

That’s the gift of the Holy Spirit to the church.

Not something as simple and spectacular as a miracle of language,

but the stormy, fierce Spirit that keeps on pushing us out of safe places, out of our comfort zones, so that God’s story can go on.

If that little community of disciples – a congregation the size of Calvary on a good Sunday – had stayed in their safe room, wondering and talking amongst themselves, the story of resurrection and redemption would have faded and died,

and you and I wouldn’t be here today.

We wouldn’t be here, praying and living our relationship with God, taking the chance on being inspired to tell God’s story somewhere way the heck out of your comfort zone.

Lillian Daniel, a popular Christian writer and a UCC pastor next door to us in Glen Ellyn, talks about the times when one of us church folk is in a place with others who don’t know much about church, don’t feel confident about their relationship with God, and suddenly wonder.*

Say you’re in a hospital room with a friend or family member who’s never seemed interested in religion, but suddenly asks if you believe in heaven.

Or a friend tells you about a personal tragedy, and wonders out loud how God can let bad things happen.

Or your niece, or your daughter’s boyfriend, asks how you can go to church when Christians are so judgmental.

All of a sudden,

like a pastor on an airplane,

you stand for the church.  The whole church.

And you kind of stand for Jesus, too.

You make the church real in that time and place, for better or worse.

These things don’t happen to you everyday.  But they do happen, or something like them, and usually when we are least prepared to talk Bible or Doctrine.

And Lillian Daniel points out that in fact, that’s not what we need to do.

You don’t need to quote scripture.  You don’t need to know how to preach the gospel.  What matters in those moments is just that you tell your own story.

Your beliefs, your hopes, and your own questions about heaven, whatever they may be.

The time you, too, wondered if God was mad at you, or didn’t exist, because you were drowning in tragedy…and how you survived, still believing in God, or at least in your friends from church.

Or just taking the time to listen to the one who thinks the church is judging them unfairly.

When we stand for the church, it’s not a polished, convincing sermon that matters.  It’s taking a chance on telling your own story, offering your testimony that God has something to do with you, even if you couldn’t exactly explain what that is.

It’s letting the Holy Spirit nudge you out of your comfort zone to tell your own story, so that God’s story can go on.

I’ll bet that when those disciples found themselves on the Jerusalem streets speaking languages they didn’t know, it wasn’t a creed, or a smart, well-crafted sermon that they offered. 

I’ll bet they stammered a bit and lost their train of thought occasionally, as they told their own personal stories.

Stories about being healed, or loved, or found.  About a rabbi whose words changed them. Stories told way out of their comfort zone, unpracticed, untaught, and unplanned,

and that day three thousand people were baptized, and God’s story could go on.

Pentecost isn’t just a holiday to remember. Pentecost keeps happening, over and over.

And the Holy Spirit doesn’t necessarily make it easy, but she does make it happen.

When God is ready, the Spirit makes those times when someone is ready to listen, and invites you out of your comfort zone,

to tell a story,  or act with love, so that one more time, God’s story can go on.

*"The Stand-In Church", in When "Spiritual But Not Religious" Is Not Enough" Jericho Books, 2013

Prayed For

John 17:20-26

I didn’t really learn to pray for other people until I was in my twenties. 

Of course, I’d grown up praying with others in church, and I would occasionally ask God to help me if I was in trouble, or to help people I cared about get well.  But when I was leading a confirmation class, and found myself wanting to pray for that diverse group of 11-13 year olds  - well, it’s not as easy without easy specifics like healing an injury.  Praying for a whole person somehow seems to require a deeper commitment to trusting God.

And then I went to seminary, and spent a summer doing CPE; an immersion experience in hospital chaplaincy in which I suddenly I realized I was going to have to pray out loud for someone. In front of them.

I had no idea what I was doing.

But I remembered a lot of phrases from the Book of Common Prayer, some of which seemed appropriate, and I took a deep breath….

It turns out that you can talk to God about more or less anything, even in front of people, and if you mean it, prayers for finding missing glasses or for a better grade of hospital juice cups can be incredibly healing.

But in the end, the most important thing I’ve learned about prayer hasn’t been how to do it.

It’s been how to receive it.  How to be prayed for.

And I didn’t learn that until I was almost done with seminary.

I learned it from a child.  And from a community.

Every year, people who want to be ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church take a week-long set of comprehensive exams.  It’s a tough and risky week. You feel like your whole future is at stake. So at my seminary, we had a custom of having prayer buddies.  Someone who would pray for you, specifically, while you took exams.

I feel pretty comfortable with tests, so I thought I’d leave the prayer warriors for other students, so I asked a friend’s 9 year old daughter to pray for me.

I thought it would be fun.

Well, I woke up the morning of the first exam, and I had no idea why I felt so peaceful.  I spent the whole week in a baffling state of calm, humor, patience, and even comfort, despite hours bent over a keyboard.

You see, Morgan took praying for me much more seriously than I had imagined, and she made sure I knew I was prayed for.  She wrote me notes.  She invited me to dinner at her house, so I would not be alone. Most of all, she prayed as I had never expected, or thought I wanted.

And because she prayed in a way I hadn’t planned on, I began to realize that the prayers of the whole community were around me, supporting me on every side.  That I could lean into that support, almost float on it.  The sense of God’s compassion and care had never been so present, vital and holy in all my life.

Being prayed for changed me.

That’s not the only time it happened, of course, but that was when I learned to listen.

It multiplied my ability to trust – trust myself, God, and others.

It taught me hope – the heart-deep ability to believe in joy present and yet to come.

It grew my heart – I found space for love, for God, for myself, for friends and community, that I hadn’t planned to find.

Can you remember a time when that happened for you?

In the gospel story we heard today, Jesus is praying for his disciples.  It’s the last thing he’s able to do for them, before he goes to be glorified: to be killed and rise again, and return to be one with the Father.

He’s praying for the things that make us church. That make us brothers and sisters and children of God.

That we may be one.  United, in spite of – or maybe because of – our differences of opinion, experience, skin, speech or anything else. 

That we may be whole, and complete.

And love weaves in and out and through all this. Love for and from one another that’s inseparable from God’s love for us and our love for God.

Listen to Jesus pray for you:

Father, I pray for these who hear me, and also for those who will hear them.  Let them be united, like you and me, so that the world can see that you love them the way you love me.  Let them be one, whole, complete. Let them be loved, and know that they are loved, and share it with the world!  Amen.

What does it feel like, to know that Jesus prays for you?

That Jesus prays much more than that, for you?

If you’ve come here this morning, chances are pretty good that someone is praying for you.

It might be someone here. It might be a friend.  It might be your mother, or your child. It might be someone who saw you in the grocery store and doesn’t even know your name.

And for sure, Jesus is praying for you.

We pray together a lot here at Calvary.  We pray for people who are injured, sick, grieving, dying, celebrating, and changing. We pray for each other. We make and bless blankets that go out of here to be a touchable prayer - prayer that you can literally feel and wrap yourself in.

That’s essential. It’s the work of the church, of the Body of Christ.

But it’s also important – essential, for us to be disciples of Christ – to be prayed for.

Even – or especially – when we don’t think we need prayers.

We need to open our hearts and spirits to the presence of God in the prayers of others.  To listen, not the way we normally listen, but with an unfocused openness and trust; the kind that lets you be guided or supported or inspired when you weren’t looking for anything of the sort.

You can practice this right here.

You don’t have to be sick, or have something wrong.  You can practice being prayed for when things are great, and when you’re happy, or when you’re worried about someone else, or even if you’re just bored.

You can ask someone here to be your prayer buddy.

For a week, or a day, or much longer.

And you should.

Because if Jesus is praying for his disciples; if Jesus is praying for us, for you, then we have to be able to receive prayer.

So we have to practice being prayed for,

because it will, in the end - and sometimes right away - transform our lives, make love shine through us, and change the world.

42

I saw 42 today.

It made me cry.  Laugh, too, but often with gentle tears in my eyes. And I realized that’s why I went.  I went because I want this story to have power over me, within me.

It’s the feel-good story of Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey breaking the baseball color line: a sturdy, enjoyable movie that probably won’t win awards for cinematography and doesn’t have a particularly suspenseful plot.  After all, most if not all of the audience knows how this story ends.

But it’s precisely the feel-good story that matters to me.  It’s a story of triumph despite a deck stacked for the opposition; of virtue rewarded in spite of being both unpopular and unconventional.

Which makes it a kingdom of God story.

And like the gospel, 42 is told in highlights.  Although the movie does a good job of sampling the threat, frustration, vitriol and sheer awkwardness that comes with crossing the color line, there’s no way a two hour movie can show the grinding reality of justified fear and scary anger, the sheer cross-country drudgery of either baseball.  Just like weary sandal-footed miles and boring bits drop out of the Bible. The story we see is composed of moments of hope and action.

The problem with – and the necessity for – these stories are one and the same.  Most of the world’s struggles against fear and danger, hatred, oppression, and other faceless systems are invisible, or seen only by a few.  It’s scary, uncertain, and painful when it’s your own struggle; my own daily life.  Our challenges and victories are not narrated by Red Barber, or re-told to dramatic orchestration.  So many triumphs and resurrections are invisible, too.

That’s what makes movies like 42 important.  Because we have to train ourselves to believe in the triumph of character and determination, in resurrection and renewal, and that the world can be improved in real ways.

It’s why we tell the Easter story over and over in church.

Life is hard, messy, uneven.  So we need practice believing in the good news – the (inaccurate but fun) game-ending, pennant-clinching homer in the top of the 4^th; the victory of empathy over prejudice; the triumph of grace and joy.

That’s why we need to enter in to such feel-good stories, to cry and laugh and give them power in our lives, even if only for an hour or two.

I use baseball and the gospel.  You may find your hope and grace in romance novels, or hockey, or even politics (two of which are utterly beyond my comprehension), or something else entirely.  Whatever you use for hope and grace, keep it up, stay in practice. 

Because practice – in resurrection, like in baseball – makes us better.  Stronger, faster, readier for the next challenge, whether it’s the 15^th throw to first in a close inning or a life and death struggle against oppression or illness.

I practice this every Sunday, and lots of times in between, with my congregation and community. But I might just go see 42 again.  And I’ll buy it on DVD.  Because the tears in my eyes and the laughter on my lips are a workout for my soul, making hope stronger for the messy but essential daily business of living resurrection.