B R U M C I d e n t i t y T h e m e s # 2 : acceptance 1.9.11 Rev. Brent Wright Broad Ripple UMC Luke 5:30 The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to [Jesus ] disciples, saying, Why do you eat and drink with tax-collectors and sinners? Mark 1:40-41 A leper came to [Jesus] begging him, and kneeling he said to him, If you choose, you can make me clean. Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, I do choose. Be made clean! Mark 10:14,16 [Jesus said] to them, Let the little children come to me... And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them. Think back to middle school or high school. Remember cliques, who sits where in the lunchroom, who s in and who s out, the pointing and whispering, the namecalling? Do you remember what it felt like to be judged? Rejected? Do you remember what it felt like to know you didn t fit in? To feel like you didn t belong? I m sure it s not just an experience in the past. Sadly, most of us have experienced this as adults, too. There are few places in life that we can trust will be refuges from this sort of painful experience. For many of us, it s home, our closest family. Parents or grandparents. Close mentors. Ultimately, only places we experience unconditional love are free of judgment and rejection. So since God loves unconditionally, God s house must be the safest place around. Right? Unfortunately, it s not. Just look around at those who have been deeply wounded in church. Do you know anyone who has been wounded by the church? Just this week I was talking to Jordan, who is a very talented 20-something year old leader. He was a leader in his college church and then in his home church after college. Built a thriving ministry with area college students. But then his church sent him packing when the group
started discussing questions of doctrine, wondering aloud about their church s portrayal of God. My friend Dan is a flight attendant, and he was going to be in another city on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. He wanted to find a church and attend worship on Christmas Eve, but he didn t dare walk into just any church, because he s gay, and he s learned that he isn t welcome in all churches. He used the web to find a church that would welcome him as he is. (The fact that a website is necessary to help a particular group of people find which churches will welcome them is a sign that there s a problem.) My dad gave up on church. I didn t get to discuss this with him as an adult, but something about his home church hurt him enough when he was 18 or so that he never returned to regular church attendance. Sure, church communities are nice. Even friendly and warm. But nice can t hide judgment and the rejection that is so often implied even when it s not said. The most vigorously welcoming church I ve ever known (when Lauren & I visited once, 6 people sent us thank you cards for visiting) is also the least accepting church I ve ever known. That same church published ads in the local paper explaining why other Christian groups were unfaithful (for example, the United Methodist Church is unfaithful because we have women bishops). For many, church has become the battleground for a war of ideas, where disagreement requires personal rejection. The worst treatment I ve ever experienced from anyone has been church people. And I m not alone. The Barna Group, a well-known polling organization that researches all aspects of religious life, surveyed 1000 adults about their perceptions of the church and of Christians. One item asked respondents whether this statement is true: Christian churches accept and love people unconditionally, regardless of how people look or what they do. 75% of pastors said this is true of church. What percent of church attenders think this is true? 45%. What percent of non-church folks think this is true? 20%. Four out of five people outside the church experience that churches do not accept people or love them unconditionally. This is a problem. How can we expect people to believe that God loves them unconditionally when they don t experience it from the Body of Christ? The research showed that people outside the church (especially young people) experience the church as antihomosexual, treating them as targets for conversion rather than people, and morally judgmental, focused on surface behaviors like their appearance and foul language and smoking and drinking and anything related to sex. For most people outside the church, we may be trying to say you are loved, but what they re hearing is, just you wait til your Father gets home (complete with the raised eyebrows and wagging finger). No matter how many times I say, I love you! in an angry tone of
voice, the message is not love, it s anger. Or I love you with a silent tsk-tsk-tsk, the message is not love, it s scorn. Or I love you while shaking inside for fear that they might corrupt my kids, the message is not love, it s fear. I don t blame our neighbors for not believing us when we say God loves you. In fact, if I weren t absolutely clear that I m called to be a pastor, I would probably have given up on church myself by now. We have a problem with judgment and rejection in the Body of Christ, and like most serious problems, sometimes it s obvious and often it s well hidden. Regardless, the first step to recovery is admitting that we have a problem. Part of the reason it s so insidious is that we try to cover it up with our niceness. Church people are certainly nice. We ve learned to keep our judgments to ourselves (or at least speak them in low tones to our close friends). And underneath that, I think our judgment and rejection of folks is part of a misguided effort to do the right thing. We ve been taught in many ways that the Christian life is about not sinning, getting it right, behaving correctly, and that real Christians don t sin anymore. In this way of thinking, loving our neighbors means getting them to see their sinfulness and be like us, the people who don t sin anymore (or if we slip, we confess it and get back to not sinning anymore). If this is the Christian life, then getting others to stop sinning is our job. Becoming the sin police is a sign of our righteousness. It s no wonder some communities are extraordinarily judgmental, like the church that published ads in the paper telling the world that the United Methodist community is sinful. But it s not just them, of course. Judging others and proving that they re wrong so I can be right is too much a deeply imbedded part of our culture for any of us to be immune. We all need healing from this sickness. That s what Jesus was showing us through the way he lived his life. Our scripture today gives us a few glimpses of how Jesus experienced and practiced acceptance in his life. While the religious people were all crying foul, Jesus was pal-ing around with sinners and tax collectors and touching lepers and bringing children into the middle of the action. He chose to accept folks as they were, and this acceptance surely flowed from his experience of God s acceptance at his baptism. God s voice was loud and clear: That s my boy! Jesus experienced and then offered the acceptance of unconditional love to all people, especially those who were shunned by his society.
I was profoundly encouraged as I listened to you talk about this congregation in our small group meetings last fall. It s clear that experiences of open arms and embrace were shining moments in this congregation s life. You named that we aspire to be a safe place for all people. Do you know about SafePlaces for teenagers? Do you recognize this sign? This sign outside a building means that a young person who has run away from an unsafe home or an unsafe person can come inside and get help. SafePlaces are places where young people in need can go where they know they will be safe and where someone will take them seriously and where someone will connect them with help. That s our vision for this congregation: that it would be a Safe Place for all who seek God where people can know they will be safe from judgment and rejection, taken seriously, and connected to the source of all help. It s already in our mission statement: Inspired by God s love, we serve with passion and welcome all with compassion. Imagine our congregation as a Safe Place where religious wounds can be healed by God, where people can experience God s embrace rather than the spanking they ve come to expect in church. But isn t that just turning a blind eye to immorality or condoning wrong behavior? Isn t challenging harmful behavior part of loving someone? I offer you this encouragement: if you want to help people leave behind destructive behaviors and attitudes, scolding is much less effective than acceptance and truth-telling. Scolding and shaming can motivate someone to try to control themselves, but true transformation comes through acceptance. Shaming causes people to clamp shut, while acceptance helps people to open up. Real transformation happens when we let God in to heal our wounds, and it s tough to let God into a heart that s clamped shut. Being accepted and loved helps even the hardest sinner to open up and be healed by God. That s my experience, not only with other
hardened sinners, but with myself, too. I had some serious stuff in my life that needed to be healed. Being told I needed to heal didn t help. I knew that. My fear of others scorn and judgment didn t help, it just made me clamp tighter, hoping no one could see my brokenness. Scolding myself into healing didn t help. Even self-judgment clamps people shut. What changed me? Acceptance. Being among others who were broken like I was. Listening as others had the courage to tell the truth about their lives. Most of the time, our mode is very different from this: we see someone s brokenness, and we want to help them fix it, because we can see the suffering that their brokenness is causing, so (to borrow a phrase from a friend) we should all over them. You should just... You shouldn t... Our best efforts backfire; in trying to help people change, we cause them to clamp shut. But I have experienced an alternative that works: when we tell the honest truth about our own struggles, we give others permission to tell the truth about theirs. Hearing others tell the truth about their own life helps me to tell the truth about my life. And having named the stuff I prefer to hide from myself, from others, and from God, I experience being accepted by those around me. I experience being accepted by God. Being accepted by my neighbor helps me open my life to God for healing. That s what we re striving to do here. To build this kind of community, two things come to mind: first, we have to practice telling the truth about ourselves to each other. I talked about this in the first sermon in this series. Second, we have to let go of the idea that they should be more like me. That means I practice valuing you for who you are today not some idealized who you could become or who you should be or who God wants you to be. And that applies to how we approach everyone, from the saintliest grandmother to the sinner-iest outsider. Let go of they should be... and practice recognizing that they are a beautiful creation of God just as they are today. Imagine Broad Ripple UMC being known as a Safe Place to be real, to be accepted for who you are, warts and all. This is radical, Christ-like ministry to a world in which only 20% of non-church people (and less than half of church people) think they will be loved unconditionally in the church. May we have the courage to offer the radical acceptance of Jesus to all people.