Embrace Irrelevance

GC Chapel Address

February 10, 2012





I live three miles from Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.  And, of course, as many of you will know, this was the location of last Sunday’s Superbowl.  Our city had been preparing for this event for two years with fresh construction projects and attempts to clean up the streets (although thanks to the efforts of many, Indy did not push away the homeless as most host cities do around Superbowl time).  We were eager to put on our best face not only for football stars like Tom Brady and Eli Manning, but also for the other celebrities.  The local new stations reported on Madonna and Kim Kardashian sightings.  I joked with one of my female friends (who happens also to be single) that she needed to find Ryan Gosling.  She smiled sheepishly.  For a few days, the city of Indy drew the attention of the nation as we gathered around our TV sets to pay homage to the true god of our age.  And in the two plus years of our preparations as a city, we operated under the assumption (as all cities do) that bigger is always better.
·         As Americans, we are a people utterly addicted to the grandiose.  That which has sex appeal, that which sparkles and shines, that which is earth-shaking grabs our attention and is plastered in the headlines.  Unfortunately, the church in America has too often been infected by this mentality to its core.  Everyone, it seems, wants to be the next Willow Creek or Mars Hill Bible Church or Saddleback or whatever is in fad at the time.  But today, I want to encourage you to reject the impulse to seek that which is cool.  A fellow graduate of ATS, Rachel Held Evans, recently wrote a post on her blog called “Blessed are the Uncool.”  She wrote it so well that I’d like to read you a part of her entry:

·         People sometimes assume that because I’m a progressive 30-year-old who enjoys Mumford and Sons and has no children, I must want a super-hip church—you know, the kind that’s called “Thrive” or “Be” and which boasts “an awesome worship experience,” a  fair-trade coffee bar, its own iPhone app, and a pastor who looks like a Jonas Brother. While none of these features are inherently wrong, (and can of course be used by good people to do good things), these days I find myself longing for a church with a cool factor of about 0.  That’s right. I want a church that includes fussy kids, old liturgy, bad sound, weird congregants, and…brace yourself…painfully amateur “special music” now and then. Why?Well, for one thing, when the gospel story is accompanied by a fog machine and light show, I always get this creeped-out feeling like someone’s trying to sell me something. It’s as though we’re all compensating for the fact that Christianity’s not good enough to stand on its own so we’re adding snacks. But more importantly, I want to be part of an un-cool church because I want to be part of a community that shares the reputation of Jesus, and like it or not, Jesus’ favorite people in the world were not cool. They were mostly sinners, misfits, outcasts, weirdos, poor people, sick people, and crazy people.

·         Ministry among the urban poor has been infected in just the same way.  We who minister in the inner cities of America are attracted to the magnificent success stories such as the work of Geoffrey Canada in Harlem whose innovative school is transforming the community and lifting hundreds of children out of the cycle of poverty.  Of course, I rejoice in stories like this; they provide hope and inspiration.  But sometimes the question comes up, "But why am I not so successful?  What are they doing that we're not doing?  How can we do something truly great so that 60 Minutes will come and interview us?"

·         But God usually does not choose to work through the grandiose.  In fact, just the opposite.  God more often chooses to work through the slow, the small, the simple, and the subtle.  The kingdom, Jesus says, is like a mustard seed -- a seed which cannot be rushed in its growth.  The growth from seed to magnificent tree with spreading branches does not happen overnight no matter how much we might want it to and no matter how much Miracle Grow we might spray on it.

·         One of the projects we’ve undertaken in the last few years is to create an urban community garden.  I really shouldn’t say “we” because all of the work behind this has been done by my wife Courtney.  We see this simple plot of land which we call the Friendship Community Garden as a very small glimmer of hope, a peek at the kingdom of God in the midst of a world where Cheetos and Pepsi are considered part of the four basic food groups.  But for those of you who are gardeners, you know that there is no such thing as instant results.  You plant, you water, and you water, and you water, and you pull weeds and eventually after months and months you get to pick that ripe tomato or spinach, take it inside, wash it off, and make a salad.  This is a radically different experience than popping a TV dinner in the microwave.

·         I don’t believe it was an accident that when searching for a metaphor to describe the nature of God’s kingdom, Jesus turned to agriculture:  the farmer spreading seeds in different types of soil, weeds mixed in with wheat, and the mustard seed.  The growth of a tree takes incredibly long, especially when we contrast it with the fast pace and instant results our modern world offers to us.  As Gandhi once said, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”  Our pragmatic, results-oriented culture must heed those prophetic words.

·         Now why am I talking about this when our theme for this semester is “crossing boundaries, overcoming barriers”?  Because the work of overcoming barriers – especially the barriers that divide us from one another, be it ethnicity, socio-economic status, gender, language, religion, sexual orientation, and so on – requires extreme patience.  It is slow going.  As an energetic graduate from seminary four years ago, I wish someone would have told me this:  “The work of crossing boundaries is slow going.  It is a long, gruelling march through deep mud.”

·         Our God wants his followers to learn to embrace the long, hard march that is discipleship.  We run in a marathon, not a sprint.

·         I admit that part of my sense of calling to pastor an inner city church came through moments of inspiration at seeing marvellous, almost cataclysmic inbreakings of the kingdom.  Seeing a movie like "Born into Brothels" which tells the story of how photography was used to rescue children from postitution in the slums of India brought tears to my eyes and made me want to stand up and scream, "Sign me up!  I want to dedicate my life to this work for social justice!"  But, of course, I didn't know that years later when we were starting our own photography class in the inner city at the LYN House the main problems would simply be driving the kids to the program, getting them out of bed in the middle of the afternoon so that they would come, and seeking grants so that we can get enough cameras.  And this is what 99.9% of urban ministry (and probably all ministry) is... it is mundane.  It is unsexy.  It goes unnoticed.  It rarely seems to produce fruit.  For every story of someone radically delivered from drug addiction, there are forty to fifty stories of people who we invest in (sometimes for years) who pick up and leave and decide they really do love Vicodin more than Jesus.  It's the family of five across the street that we spend a year investing in, building up in the faith, training for leadership... all to find out one day that they are moving without notice and barely even bother to say goodbye.  (This perpetual transience and utter lack of geographical stability is a rarely noted problem in urban America.)

·         Today in my final moments of speaking to you I stand here offering an invitation.  As college students, you have your lives ahead of you.  The possibilities for what you choose to do with your lives are limitless.  Sitting in chapel roughly ten years ago, my wife and I heard an elderly couple ask us to consider spending a year in China as English teachers.  Courtney and I were very moved and, as a result, we decided to move to China and live there for one year following Courtney’s graduation.  Today I’m here to plead with you to consider devoting your life (or part of your life) to seeking Jesus among those on the margins.  Now that could take many forms – it could be pastoring and living in the inner city like my family does, but it could also be working with refugees, fighting racist immigration laws like those passed recently in Alabama, volunteering to tutor a child once a week, going down to that prison on the south side of town and hanging out with the inmates, providing legal services to those who cannot afford it, speaking out against the mountain top removal taking place right now in Appalachia, or simply befriending someone who seems to have no friends.

·         Some of you are education majors.  Consider using your skills in under-resourced communities that are desperate to attract good teachers.  Some of you are studying business.  Good!  We need businessmen and women who will prioritize revitalizing poor communities by creating jobs and infusing capital into economic deserts.  I challenge you to think about how you could use business to not only generate a profit, but to provide stable employment for the least of these.  Others of you are becoming scientists, musicians, historians, writers, and doctors.  Will you use the jobs you find to provide yourself with comfort and ease?  Or will you take the risk of following Jesus to his beloved ones on the margins, using your skills to provide hope among those who have no hope?  Will you seek first the kingdom of God and his justice and trust that all of these other silly things like money and clothes and food will be provided to you by the Father who provides for the birds of the air and the flowers of the field?

·         In order to persuade you, I could tell you grand, inspiring stories.  I could pull out from the last four years of my life examples of mountain-top experiences to convince you (at least on an emotional level) to sign-up for radical incarnational ministry among the poor.  But I refuse to do that today because it would be misleading.  Yes, there are mountaintops on occasion, but the valleys are far more familiar.  No, my call today is not for you to do something cool (as cool as liberal urban social justice hippies like Shane Claiborne can be), but a call to do something irrelevant, unattractive, unappealing, and usually unnoticed.  I am calling you to mop floors, to serve cheap meals to ungrateful kids, to scrub toilets, to hug people who haven’t bathed in weeks, to genuinely listen to people who are illiterate or mentally handicapped… get the picture?

·         Personal hero:  Henri Nouwen who gave up a career of teaching at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard in order to live among the mentally and physically handicapped in a community called L’Arche.  Once when wiping up vomit from the floor, Nouwen sensed God speak to him and say, “This is your finest hour in the ministry.”

·         If you do choose to use your abilities to build the kingdom among the marginalized, you are embarking on a long, slow, and oftentimes painful endeavour.  You will not always see the results of your work and, if you do, it will not be instant.  You will question if what you are doing is actually making any difference.  Nevertheless you will know that this work will serve in a miniscule way to further the work of God in the world.

·         Story of Lydah helping me to build a snowman.  “Here go, Daddy.”  That’s all we can offer God (at the most) – a few measly snowflakes in his giant project.  The kingdom of radical inclusion and shalom that God is building doesn’t belong to us; it belongs to him.  And it is coming.  Make no mistake.  You could even devote yourself to thwarting God’s kingdom, but it will come anyway.  The only question that remains is:  Do you want to work to build the kingdom of God as God’s co-laborer or not?

·         I’ve walked on the Great Wall of China.  There’s nothing quite like it.  It stretches 5,500 miles in all.  New York to Los Angeles is roughly 2,800 miles.  It was a project that began around 200 B. C. and construction continued off and on until the Ming Dynasty which ended in the 17th century.  Imagine being a construction worker building that wall and knowing that it was there before you were born, you will work on it our entire life, and it won’t be finished for generations to come.  There must have been a feeling that “I’m part of something much bigger than myself.”  The kingdom of God is the great construction project of human history.  It has been being built for millennia and may continue to be built for millennia to come.  Would you like to invest in the slow, simple, and subtle work of God?  Would you like to give yourself to something bigger than yourself?  There is no greater project on earth than to tear down those boundaries and walls that divide us so that God’s peaceable kingdom will reign on earth as it is in heaven.