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The Marks of the Church: Including

5/29/2022

Rev. Bethany Peerbolte
May 29, 2022

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Genesis 11:1-9; Acts 8:26-40

I got an F on the first sermon I ever wrote in seminary. Actually, everyone in the class got an F. We had three weeks of instruction, and then we all went down to the sanctuary to preach our sermons from the pulpit. When we were all done, the professor returned our manuscripts with giant red F’s on the front.

He asked us, “Whose words are more important, yours or the ones in the Bible?” Obviously, we all said the Bible. Then he asked each of us how much time we had spent writing and rehearsing our sermons. We all gave our estimated times (with maybe a little bit of inflation) and then the professor asked us, “How much time did you spend reading and rehearsing the scripture?” We saw what he was saying. We had spent hours on our words and a couple of minutes reciting the Bible’s words. Lesson learned.

A while back I preached a sermon with the story of Babel and as I spent time reciting the words in the bible, as I had learned were needed, I played around with different speaking tones just to try and make the words sound fresh. When I tried with a lighter brighter tone I had to stop and restart because I didn’t think I was reading the right words. They sounded very different suddenly. Normally when I read God speaking about the people of Babel I hear an angry, frustrated God fed up with humanity. But when I lightened up my tone it sounded like God was proud of them. Let me show you: (Excited, proud, tone) “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”

Such a different impression, but those are the same words! That version of a proud parent God echoed in my mind this week as I looked over the story of Phillip and the Ethiopian eunuch. Now don’t freak out but I am not going to focus on the fact that this is a story about a gender nonconforming person of color. Because the specific identity labels scripture gives this court official does not matter. The point scripture is making is that Philip and this court official represent two different groups of people.

Their ancestors that were at Babel ended up in different tribes. If Babel is God dispersing humanity, this moment is God drawing them back together. This is why for me the proud excited God makes more sense than a frustrated angry God. If God was angry that humanity had found unity it would be foolish of God to send Philip to the court official at this moment.

If the people being “one” caused them to sin and build those heaven-bound towers then this seems like a terrible idea. If the creation of diversity was God’s way of punishing humanity for Babel, encouraging it now feels like the wrong plan.

But if God was proud of the people of Babel, if God was thrilled that they had worked out their issues and wanted to live together as one people, in the same city, this is a huge development for humanity!! Diversity isn’t punishment, it is the next level in God’s design.

Does anyone play video games out there? What do you do when you beat a level in a game?

Right, you make it harder, start again. I recently began my exploration of the metaverse. Yes, I have a virtual reality headset. Do you expect anything else from the millennial pastor? There is a game called Beat Saber where a song plays and you have to slice these boxes that come flying at your head. You have to hit them with the correct hand, in the correct direction, and on the correct beat.

When I first started playing I was horrible! I could not beat a level! So I did what all good gamers do, I found cheat codes. I tricked the game to make the floor higher, I told the game I was shorter than I was, I turned off the walls (oh yeah, there are walls you have to duck around too), and for a few songs I found the place I could slow down the whole song until I got the pattern.

A week later I was feeling confident so I turned the walls back on. Then the next day I was honest about my height, and slowly I removed the cheats and now I can play the game as intended. I was only able to do that because I started with what I could handle. I took small steps to build my confidence, then attempted something harder. I failed a few times, went back to an easier level to build confidence up, then tried again.

We see God and humanity doing this in the Old Testament. Noah’s community could not stand one another, then we get Babel where humanity is choosing to all live in one city. They leveled up. Then we get Abraham’s partnership with God, which has a couple of issues with trust, but eventually, level up. Try having judges, then kings, we see this trajectory begin to form. With more responsibility being entrusted to humanity, and God, the proud parent, guides them along the way.

Then we get to Phillip and the court official. Their meeting sets up the challenge. Since Babel, the fullness of God’s creativity, from Philip to the court official, has been expressed in humanity AND NOW they are ready to be drawn together and begin building again.

Phillip and the court official prove that humanity is ready to see more in each other than just what is different. With Jesus’ teachings, the family of God begins to notice God’s image in “the other” and learns to value and include diversity in their community.

Babel was an accomplishment for humanity, but what they would have been able to build was not yet worthy of God’s intended world. God knew diversity would make what was built far better. And so the people of Babel were gifted with the fullness of human diversity and spread out into the world to develop their unique identities, preparing for the moment when they would be ready to be drawn back together to begin the work of building a grand kingdom, the kingdom of God.

Now a sermon about inclusion to Everybody’s Church is a bit of a soft ball topic. Just because we do this well does not mean we can forget why inclusion is a mark of the church. When we recognize how important diversity is to God we can push past our fears and go meet the strangers God is sending us to.

Phillip and the court official felt the same Spirit tug on their heartstrings, strings that ran through their family line all the way to Babel and they knew they were actually from the same family. That all humanity is meant to be united. All the things that made them different in the eyes of the world actually connected them to the same source. A God that is diverse in expression, a messiah that welcomes everyone, a Spirit that runs through humanity tugging and drawing us together so that we can build a city truly worthy of reaching God in heaven.

We have lived long enough hearing God’s words to Babel as a condemnation. It is not innately bad for us to work together. They were not punished for their unity, they proved they were ready for something greater. Let’s hear God’s words to Babel as our objective, to meet the challenges diversity presents, to include, to feel the Spirit drawing us together by that one string that connects us all so that one day God looks at us and says, “Look, they are one people, and they all understand one another, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”

May we meet the challenges and push ourselves past what we think we are capable of, and may we keep leveling up, improving and living closer to how God intended this world to be.

The Marks of the Church: Blessing

5/24/2022

Rev. Dr. John Judson
May 22, 2022

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Psalm 23; Acts 8:14-24

June 1938 was a year in which the world seemed to be coming apart. The Japanese war of conquest in China was in motion with battles across the mainland. The Nazi war machine was gearing up and the government issued a declaration that all able bodied men could be called up for service. Jews were being attacked with growing frequency. The civil war in Spain was raging and Franco’s forces were slowly defeating their enemies. Hitler was named Time’s Man of the Year. Italy was threatening other nations. The great depression, while abating somewhat, was still gripping most of the world. In other words, the world appeared to need a hero…and they got one. They got Superman. Yes, issue #1 of Superman appeared on the shelves of comic stores in June of 1938 and has been there ever since. The staying power of superheroes is amazing. Each of us probably has our favorite. But superheroes are nothing new. There was Hercules, Odysseus, and Gilgamesh among others. While all of these were fictional heroes like Superman, there were real life superheroes. These were the magicians. Magicians like Simon.

To be clear, magic in the First Century is not what we think of as magic. Magic today is David Copperfield with sleight of hand, smoke, mirrors, and illusions that can all be explained. Magic in the First Century was the act of manipulating the unseen forces in the universe to advantage one person over another. Think of it as casting spells, using magic potions that caused the unseen spiritual forces to bend to the will of the magician on behalf of his or her clients. This was the career to which Simon had been drawn, and as such he was probably constantly upgrading his skills. So when he saw Peter and John pray for the Samaritan believers and for the Spirit of God to inhabit them, he wanted in on the action. He wanted to buy the Spirit so that he could do the same “magic.” Let’s be clear, however, that we don’t know what the physical manifestations of the arrival of the Spirit were. Maybe a grouchy people turned into a people of love; maybe people started speaking in various languages as happened at Pentecost. We don’t know, but what we do know is that something dramatic occurred.

Simon’s request was met with Peter’s usual over-the-top kind of response, that the Spirit was not for sale, because the Spirit was a gift. And most importantly for our time this morning, that Peter and John were merely the conduit of God’s blessings that God desired to give to the Samaritans. I realize that this passage does not use the word blessing. But for me, that is what the gift of the Spirit is. It is the ultimate blessing of God. What is a blessing? To put it simply, blessing is the favor of God bestowed on individuals or communities to fill them with God’s love so that they are encouraged, sustained, and transformed. Let me say that again, blessing is the favor of God bestowed on individuals or communities to fill them with God’s love so that they are encouraged, sustained, and transformed. If you want to see blessing at work, we can look to David in Psalm 23. The context of the Psalm is that his life is on the line. He is in the shadow of death. But God blesses him with God’s own presence. The image that should strike us this morning is that of God anointing David’s head with oil. Anointing with oil was an act that essentially said to a stranger, you are welcome here and you are safe here. That the stranger has received the favor of the host, thus encouraging, sustaining, and transforming the stranger into a friend. Therefore, David can find the strength to go on.

I would argue that the same can be said of the believers in Samaria. Before the arrival of Peter and John, they were people who believed something about Jesus. When they were blessed by the Spirit, they became people who were something. They became people who were encouraged, sustained, and transformed, filled with the love of God. What I would also argue is that they too became conduits for the blessing of God; that they became those through whom the blessings of God flowed out into their community and into the world. What this means is that blessing, being a conduit for blessing, is one of the marks of the church. The church is to be the community that anoints others with oil. The church is to be the community that encourages, sustains, and helps to transform people through the work of the Spirit that we have been given. My friends, what this says is that the church is not simply another social service agency, or a gathering of like-minded people. We are instead a Spirit-filled, Spirit-led, Spirit-guided community, called to be the conduit for God’s blessings to the world. And this is something that you all do well.

You, the members and friends of Everybody’s Church, understand how to be conduits of God’s blessing to the world. You bless people through what you do at Alcott Elementary when you teach children to read. You encourage, sustain, and transform them. You blessed people when you took food to hungry families throughout the pandemic. You encouraged, sustained, and transformed them. You blessed children in Ukraine with your gifts of money and goods. You encouraged, sustained, and transformed them. You blessed the clients at Baldwin Center through the overwhelming gifts of diapers. You encouraged, sustained, and transformed them. You bless foster families and children in the foster system by the work you do with Rev. Dr. Kate. You encouraged, sustained, and transformed them. You blessed people when you gave to our covid fund that helped more than a hundred families avoid eviction or utility shutoff. You encouraged, sustained, and transformed them. You bless people by your constant prayers for those you know and those on our prayer list whom you might not know. You encouraged, sustained, and transformed them. And there are so, so many other ways in which you have blessed and continue to bless the world around you. You are living out this mark of the church.

This morning however, I would like us to celebrate one who has been a blessing to so many of us, and I know she does not want me to do this but I will anyway, to speak of the blessing that Jan Peters has been over the past 38 years. Jan has been a blessing to those of us who have worked alongside her. She has always been present; ready to listen, lend a hand, offer us encouragement, and help to sustain us when things have not been easy. She has blessed so many families in this church when they have been grieving the loss of one that they loved. She was ready to listen, give a hug, show compassion, and do whatever needed to be done to ensure that the church was a place of encouragement. She has blessed strangers. Most of you are probably unaware that we regularly have people call us or drop by looking for assistance. Jan was always there for them, even when we had nothing to offer. Many of these people became her friends over the years and Jan not only offered them financial assistance, but words of love and encouragement. Jan was a conduit for God’s blessing.

This morning we celebrate Jan and the example that she has offered all of us. My challenge to all of us this morning is to simply ask ourselves, how am I being a conduit for God’s blessing so that people might be encouraged, sustained, and transformed?

The Marks of the Church: Telling

5/15/2022

Rev. Dr. John Judson
May 15, 2022

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Acts 6:8-15; Acts 7:1-8

“Who are you?” I suppose there were lots of ways I could have answered. I could have said I'm John, or I'm John Judson, or I'm the Reverend Doctor John Judson, or I'm Roger and Carolyn's son, or I'm David, Richard, and Paul’s brother. Or I am the great, great, great grandson of the man who broke the law in England and brought the plans for the first throstle to the new world. If you don't know what a throstle is, just Google it. There are many ways I could have answered him, but because the question is often contextual, my answer was I'm Principal Judson's husband. One of the things some of you may or may not know about Cindy, is that when she was a Principal on the south side of San Antonio, she was tasked with opening a brand-new school. Meaning she oversaw new construction, ordered supplies, and hired new teachers. The weekend prior to school opening and the students arriving, there were no cafeteria tables at all. They finally arrived on the Saturday before by truck. And so, Cindy and I and our kids and some of the faculty offloaded the cafeteria tables and put them together. So, when the guy asked me, “Who are you?” I knew the best answer was I'm Principal Judson's husband.

So, who are we? If we think about it, that question has far more answers than we might expect. Some of us are husbands; some of us are wives; some of us are daughters; some of us are sons; some of us are cousins; some of us are aunts and uncles; some of us are people who work in the auto industry; some of us are retired; some of us are from Germany. There are, in other words, an almost unlimited number of ways in which we might answer the question, “Who are you?” But the one thing about all these identities is that we are shaped by the relationships to which those identities are linked; and they are especially shaped by our families. I say this because our families teach us who we are supposed to be. They teach us how to interact with other people. They teach us what we're supposed to believe. They teach us how we understand and engage in relationships. Our families shape who we are and how we understand ourselves. And it is that idea of being shaped by family that is at the heart of Stephen's defense of Jesus. Let me explain.

If we return to our story, we see that there were some members of the Jewish community in Jerusalem who did not believe that Jesus or his followers were really part of God’s family; that somehow Jesus and his followers were outliers who had left Judaism behind. This was the accusation against Stephen which opened him to persecution. The question was then, how would Stephen defend himself? How could he convince people that Jesus was part of God’s family? The answer was to tell a story. Well, not just a story, but THE story. Stephen tells the story of Abraham and then of Moses. He begins by telling the story of how Abraham was living in Mesopotamia where God came to him and said, get up and go first to Harran and then to the promised land. This led to God’s declaration that through Abraham, God would bless all the nations of the world. Stephen continues with the story of Moses; how God came to Moses and told him to lead the people out of captivity, into the wilderness, receive the Law and prepare them for entry into the Land of Promise. The climax of this telling of the family story is, essentially, that Jesus is the next chapter of THE story. Jesus is the next chapter of THE story because what THE story is about is God's desire to recreate humanity, to create a humanity in which all human beings are seen as having worth and value; of creating the kind of world we would all love to be a part of; a world of love, peace, joy. Thus, Jesus and those who follow him are not outsiders, but family; shaped and formed by the same family story.

This understanding that the followers of Jesus are part of this ancient story is one of the reasons that we preach out of the entire Bible. Over the forty or so years of my ministry, people have come to me and asked, why do we bother with the Old Testament? My answer is that we bother with it because it is our story. It is part of our family story and we cannot understand who we are unless we know the whole story. And this is the reason that the confirmands, those who are coming in a few minutes to confirm their faith, to publicly affirm their faith, used a curriculum called God’s Story, Our Stories, which covers the entirety of the scriptures. And in exploring that story, the confirmands had the opportunity to reflect on their own stories. To reflect on where their stories intersect with God's story and are being shaped by God's story. Again, not just the stories in the New Testament, but the whole breadth of the scriptures. And I have to say, that in reading the statements of faith of the confirmands, you will see how these young adults are wrestling with and discovering what their faith looks likes as it is being shaped by our common family story. And I admire these statements of faith because I don't think at their age, I could have written anything as powerful as what they have done.

Before we finish, I want to say that there is one more story that has shaped these young adults, and that is the story of this congregation. I say this because many of our confirmands mentioned the importance of this church; its community, mission, preaching, and teaching as instrumental in shaping their faith. And so, I want to take a moment and reflect on why this church is the kind of church that it is; why our church family is the kind of family it is that is shaping these young adults. I will do so by telling the story of Elijah Fish and how he helped shape our family D.N.A. First Presbyterian church was founded in 1834. Their first meeting place was Elijah Fish's barn. That may not sound like a big deal, but it was. It was a big deal because Elijah Fish was an abolitionist; meaning he worked for the abolition of slavery long before it was a popular cause. He invited abolitionist speakers to come and address the people of Birmingham and the surrounding communities. But Fish did not stop there. He participated in the Underground Railroad helping escaped slaves find safety either in Canada or in the Birmingham area. His barn, our first meeting place, was probably where he hid many of these formerly enslaved people. At least two of those formerly enslaved people, the Taylors became members of our congregation. What this says is that our family is one that from the very beginning embraced the full humanity of all persons. What this means is that our confirmands have been shaped not just by their families, and by the Biblical story, but by the story of Everybody’s Church; a story of a community in which all persons are loved and accepted and embraced by God in Jesus Christ.

The challenge for this morning for our confirmands and for the rest of us, is to continue wrestling with the question of “Who am I?” To continue wrestling with our faith as it is shaped by our families, the scriptures, and this community. It is to refuse to allow our faith to become dormant and cease growing. It is to refuse to allow what we believe to become stagnant rather than vibrant. To put it succinctly, my challenge to all of us is to ask ourselves, how is my faith still growing and changing that I might be more faithful tomorrow than today to Jesus Christ and to the God who sent him into the world?

The Marks of the Church: Serving

5/8/2022

Rev. Dr. John Judson
May 8, 2022

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Psalm 22:25-31; Acts 6:1-7

It was a great first church for a seminary student. It was the summer after my first year in seminary and I was fortunate to be invited as the summer pastor for a small Presbyterian Church in western Virginia. The church had about 75 members and I could begin learning the ropes of weekly preaching, teaching, and visiting. After about a month, I noticed that people tended to sit in the same spots every week. There was a group of people who sat on the right side of the church and a group who sat on the left side of the church. Out of curiosity I asked one of the regular attenders if there was a reason they sat on the side they did. The response was interesting. He said that he sat on the newcomers’ side, while the long-term members sat on the other side. I then asked him how long he had been in the church. Only about 25 years, he replied. I didn’t ask how long the long-term members had been there. But that was one of those powerful lessons on the tribal nature of human beings…that we gravitate toward and gather with those with whom we have something in common.

This tribalism was also at the heart of the issue riling the church in Jerusalem. There were the long-term widows and the new widows, and they were being treated differently. One of the realities in the first century was that many women became widows, and if their children had died and there was no one to care for them. In some cities there was a regular collection taken to feed these women so that they did not starve. Somewhere along the way though, the widows who belonged to the church were left out of the general offering. The church then collected money from its members and distributed it to their widows. The issue however, was that only the long-term widows, meaning those who had grown up in Jerusalem and spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew, were being fed. The newcomer widows who spoke only Greek were being left out because they had no real connection to the members of the church. When this issue was raised for the leaders of the church, they responded by turning the world upside down, by asking some men to become servants.

You may be surprised that I refer to this decision of asking the men listed in the passage to become servants as turning the world upside down. To understand we need to wrap our minds about how radical an action this was.

First, it was turning the world upside down because the early church was asking free men to become servants. Servants were usually not free. They were usually slaves and as such had no agency of their own. And even if they were free servants, they were looked down on by society in general. No one would grow up with the goal of being a servant. Yet here are the leaders of the church asking these men to take on a serving or subservient role in the life of the community.

Second, it was turning the world upside down because these men were being asked to serve women. This was not the way the world was supposed to work. Women were to serve men. Think of all the times Jesus was having meals and it was always the women who served. Even when Peter’s mother-in-law was ill and Jesus healed her, she got up and served Jesus and the disciples rather than Peter stepping in to help her out. For men to serve women, especially widows, was a radical departure from the societal norm.

Finally, it was turning the world upside down because not only were these men asked to be servants, and servants to women, they were asked to be servants to women who were outsiders. They were asked to be servants to widows who sat on the wrong side of the church. These women had come to Jerusalem to die in the holy city and knew no one. They had no family connection and so they were outsider newcomers. Why should someone be tasked with taking care of them? Yet this is what those men were asked to do, and they did it. They turned the world upside down with hesitation.

We are not privy to any of the discussions that took place or the mindset of the first deacons, which comes from the word diakanos, or servant. We are not sure why these men were chosen. Yet I would argue that they were honored to turn the world upside down because that was what Jesus had done in the upper room before his death. He too had turned the world upside down when he took off his robe, hiked up his shirt, got some water, and washed the feet of the disciples. Jesus, the Messiah, the rabbi, the chosen one, the Son of Man, the Son of God, chose to become a servant. The Apostle Paul would reflect on this in his letter to the church at Philippi when he speaks of Jesus humbling himself not only to become one of us, but to become a servant. In this way Jesus turned the world upside down, or should I say right side up. I say right side up because God’s plan was that all should serve and be served. That as the Psalm puts it, “…the poor shall eat and be satisfied and the rich of the earth will feast and worship.” There is no mention of the poor serving the rich, but instead it is an image of a world in which all persons share in the work and the riches of God’s creation. An outcome that can only happen when people serve one another.

I must admit the older I get the fewer memories of childhood I retain. Yet one of those that is burned into my memory is of one of my first pack meetings as a cub scout. I had on my blue uniform with the blue and gold scarf. I had my pack number on my shoulder where my mother had sewn it. And that night I received this pin, though you in the back probably can’t see it, my Bobcat pin. The Bobcat was the first step in becoming a full-fledged cub scout. When the cubmaster pinned on my and my friends, he pinned it upside down. Then he looked at all of us and said, this pin is upside down until you do a good deed as a reminder that scouts are to “do a good turn daily.” After that we all sat down with our proud parents and waited for the moment the meeting ended. Then we all ran for the back doors to open them for our parents, thus doing a good deed and getting our pins turned right side up.

As the church we are called to turn the world upside down and right side up by living into our roles as servants, servants of those we know and servants of those we don’t know. Of being servants to those who are on our side of the church and those who sit across the aisle. My challenge to you on this day is to ask yourselves this week, what I am doing or what can I do as a servant in order to get my pin, and the world, turned right side up?

The Marks of the Church: Giving

5/1/2022

Rev. Dr. John Judson
May 1, 2022

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Psalm 37:18-24; Acts 3:1-10

      The writer of the books of Luke and Acts is an amazing storyteller. I say this because he does not simply retell what happened, but he adds drama to the events. We can see this in our morning’s story. The story begins with Peter and John doing what good Jews living in Jerusalem did, they were going to the Temple for daily prayer. The scene is familiar. As the two disciples approach the gate into the Temple there are multiple beggars seeking alms. The beggars were gathered there because the entrance to the Temple was the perfect place to beg because Jews were called to share what they had with those in need, especially before they went to be in the presence of God. The lame man who, because of his disability, was unable to work and had to be carried to the gate was going through his daily ritual of asking for assistance. Luke, the storyteller, builds a sense of expectation when he describes Peter and John. turning to the man and saying, “Look at us!” Readers will anticipate that something is about to happen. Will Peter and John give the man more money than he expected? Will Peter and John tell the man about Jesus? What will happen? The response is startling. First, they tell the man that they have no money to give…and so the reader is deflated. But then Peter does the unexpected, in the name of Jesus he gives the man the gift of mobility. “In the name of Jesus, get up and walk.” And then the man not only gets up and walks, but he jumps, leaps and praises God. Everyone around them is filled with wonder and amazement. It’s a great story but what are we supposed to do with it?

      I ask this because chances are few of us have ever witnessed such a miracle. We may have heard of miracles, and we may have thought of the wonders of modern medicine as being miracles…which in my opinion they are. But we are people who live in an age of science, where miracles are no longer the norm. And chances are if we were to see someone in the same situation as the man at the Temple, we might give him some money, or see how we might give him some assistance, but we would probably not hold out our hands and tell him to walk in the name of Jesus. Which by the way, is part of our Reformed heritage. Calvin and other Reformers were clear that miracles were part of the early church, but that God no longer worked through them because there were other means of dealing with similar issues. So again, we would probably tell persons in need to seek a physician, or a social-safety net organization to assist them. Diseases are not miraculously cured, except…except…for one kind of illness, which 21st century Christians often believe can be instantaneously solved by prayer, determination, and will. And that is mental illness.

      I have been fascinated by the church and its response to mental illness. What I have witnessed is that mental illness is not really seen as an illness like heart disease or diabetes. Instead, mental illness, meaning everything from depression, to bi-polar disorder, and multiple other diagnoses have been treated like nothing more than a failure of the will of the individual. And that if the individual merely thinks more positively, prays to Jesus, or has people pray over them, then everything will be fine. And if it is not, then the fault lies with the individual. This can be seen in a couple of ways; first in the rise of what is called Biblical Counseling. Many of the degrees that are offered in this area are nothing more than teaching pastors which scripture verses to offer those in need, believing that by reading the Bible the person will be cured. The second way I have witnessed this is in the anti-psychiatric and anti-therapy movement in many churches, where psychiatrists and psychologists are seen as the enemies of faith because…and this critical…there is no such thing as mental illness. But the truth is that mental illness is a real illness. It is physiological. And those wrestling with mental illness need treatment, love, support, and acceptance. And so the question becomes, what can we give those suffering from mental illness? What can we offer them as Peter and John offered wellness to the man at the gate?

      Before I answer that question, I want to tell you why I am speaking about mental illness this morning. I am doing so for a variety of reasons. First, we call ourselves Everybody’s Church where all are welcome. Yet I know that for many people struggling with mental illness they are not comfortable sharing with others, even in this place, about their struggle. In other words, they are not able to be their true selves in our midst. And if we are to be Everybody’s Church then we need to be a place where all persons can freely be their true selves. Second, I am doing so because the Diversity, Inclusion, and Justice Committee of the Session has been learning about and wrestling with how we can be a place where people dealing with mental illness can find a home. Third, I am doing so because it is personal. It is personal because depression runs in my family. My grandmother suffered from it; my mother suffered from it; and one of my brothers and I suffer from it. And if there is one thing I learned from my mother’s experience with depression is that there is a stigma to mental illness and so rather than speak about it we are to hide our illness because of the fear of what others might say about us. So again, the question becomes, as Everybody’s Church, what can we offer to those wrestling with mental illness? The answer, I believe, is that we can offer a safe space in which they can be themselves and be open about their illness. There are many ways to do this, but I will offer three.

      First, we can create an assumption free space. What I mean by this is that we tend to assume that we know what other people are going through. We pretend that maybe because we have felt down or blue or had a bad day that we know what it is like to have deep and profound depression. We assume that we can have empathy and share others’ feelings, but we can’t. This reality was brought home to me by a speaker who has bipolar disorder. The speaker said that even he cannot understand what another person who has bipolar disorder is going through. So we are challenged to set aside our assumptions and simply listen, love, and learn.

      Second, we can create a paternalistic free space. What I mean by this is that many of us, both men and women, pretend that we know what someone else needs and how they ought to treat themselves. We know someone who has done well on one medication, so we tell others they ought to take it. We know someone who has been helped by a particular kind of therapy and so that is the cure for what ails everyone. When we do this, what we are actually doing is robbing those struggling with mental illness of their agency. We are treating people as if they are not capable of making informed decisions about their care and treatment. So, we are challenged to set aside our tendency to give advice and simply listen, love, and learn.

      Third, we can create a stigma free space. Again, we don’t want to believe that we bring a sense of stigma into our conversations about our relationships with those dealing with mental illness. But I want you to answer a couple of questions for me. First, would you feel more comfortable saying I have spinal stenosis, or I have bipolar disorder? Second, would you feel more comfortable saying I have a-fib or I have Schizophrenia. Can you feel the difference? See, many of us have internalized stigma against mental illness. So, our challenge is to set aside our tendency to stigmatize mental illness and simply listen, love, and learn.

      Like Peter and John, we are called to give what we can to those in need. In some cases, it is money. In others, it is our time. And in this case, I believe that we are called to create a safe space for all persons struggling with mental illness as well as all other issues that negatively impact lives. If you want to think more deeply about this issue, I recommend the book Hiding in the Pews by Steve Austin. We have some copies in the hallway. My challenge to all of us then is to consider how we can create a safe space for all people, and on this day, especially for those struggling with mental illness, so that we can truly be Everybody’s Church.

The Marks of the Church: Including

The Marks of the Church: Blessing

The Marks of the Church: Telling

The Marks of the Church: Serving

The Marks of the Church: Giving

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