Irving Park Lutheran Church, Sunday April 30 2018 Sermon by Ole Schenk The Love of God: A Testimony We heard in our second reading this morning, Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. I want to share with you today, what I know about the love of God. Four summers when I was an undergraduate, I worked as a camp counselor. It was there that I found my voice as a witness to faith: The greatness of God s gracious, forgiving, life-giving love, as wide as the expanse of the lake that the formed the vista for our camp. The mystery of community in the Spirit, in the singing around the campfire, where all our individual voices were transformed, even logs on the campfire transformed into crackling blaze offered up to the night sky. The life of Jesus Christ, in whom the hurt, the fear, the guilt of this life was taken up and exchanged for faith, for confidence, for resurrection. Camp for me was coming in to faith, and community and confidence, and I had genuine joy in sharing that world with others. In college, I studied English literature. It was my sister who had suggested it would make a good pre-seminary degree. I poured over classic literary works, and reveled in explicating the tensions and contradictions of characters and the worlds they lived in. I also, at the same time, and quite intellectually, began to recognize my own contradictions, and my own tensions.
One afternoon, when my parents had come into town to visit me, to ask about what I was eating, (and if I had been eating enough!), what I was learning, I told them. The sun was shining through the window. Plates and forks were clinking in the ambient sound of the café. And I slipped over the threshold of disclosing a truth that I had been feeling and understanding for some time. Time slowed down, and I told them, that I was gay. That I expected that they would at some point get to meet someone who would be my boyfriend. I felt that I had the confidence to handle what would come next, the confidence in what I believed in a God who was as wide as a lake, whose Spirit transformed like sparks in the sky, whose saving love was witnessed in the place where love overcame fear, in the cross, I had the ability to interpret and understand from many points of view. Did I realize how heavy those words were going to be for my parents, particularly for my mother? I loved my parents. They loved me. They were afraid for me. They were afraid for what the world that they had grown up in, had taught them to fear about anyone who was not heterosexual, which even for part of their adult lives had still been criminalized. My mother was afraid, and in her fear, said that I had destroyed the ministry I had done, the summers at camp. I felt my world contract and, dizzy and afraid myself, I felt attacked by this sense of curse. What I mean by curse is the feeling of being caught under words that take away one s future. There are many ways that we curse each other. I yielded to the sense of curse and I cursed back: I said that I would cut her out of my life, if she would not accept who I was. I said that, but it was not true:. I wanted to stay as we were, but I lacked the strength, the vision, the
courage to handle the difficulty of the tensions. I abandoned my plans to study further in theology, and I abandoned myself to a dead-end job that was at hand. The months went by and turned into years. Because of financial problems, I moved back into my parents basement. My parents were willing and gracious to let me to do this, but the situation was symbolic of my withdrawal from my own possibilities. I wallowed in a sense of defeat, and this was about the nadir for me. I remember thinking and feeling, this could be it, I could just let myself dissolve into this negativity. And yet, I still had a mind, I still had a heart, I still had the Bible, the Word of God, in front of me. And as I opened myself toward the words of God, at the same time, my ears began to slowly open to the questions coming in from the outside. The hard questions. My sisters asked me. My friends asked me. My parents asked me. Did I have to live in my parents basement? Did I have to continue working at the same dead-end job? Did I have to continue living under the shadow of a curse? Did in fact I have to keep on acting as if my parents were not gradually coming around to accept the new reality of their son, and of his possibilities even in the church? Did I in fact hold the keys to the carefully compartmentalized cell I had built for myself? It was none other than my mother, who suggested, you know, you love teaching, and you love the church, and you love God, and if you re going to keep teaching ESL, why don t you do so with the church, there are programs with the ELCA for teachers. That spring, in 2013, then was the first time I visited Chicago, for the discernment event when applicants for the Young Adults in Global Mission program received the countries of their destination.
I was sent to Hungary, what was full of meaning for us was that Hungary was right next to Transylvania, the western region of the republic of Romania. My ancestors on my father s side were Lutherans and Catholics from Transylvania. Both my parents have a passion for genealogy, for researching family background. The fact that I was living in nearby Hungary, in a rural place just a train ride away from Transylvania, brought up this unlikely possibility that I could meet my Dad in Transylvania, and I could serve as tour guide, as host, as luggage assistance, as trip planner. And so, when I found him, there he was standing in the middle of a plaza in a Romanian city. I helped carry his luggage up to the room that I booked for us, and over the next three days, we found in the dusty church archives, the names of ancestors almost back to 1800. A few days in, we got an email from my older sister, letting us know that my mother had had a heart attack while we were gone, and she had flown out to be with her. In Romania we had this sudden hideous lurch, were we having this adventure of a lifetime, at the very moment my mother s life was slipping away? We were waiting for emails, hardly able to enjoy where we were anymore. We prayed. That s what we could do from there. And I was writing emails back to my sister with messages for my mother, wondering if these were going to be the last words she might hear from me. But we soon learned that she had made it, her heart condition was getting stable and she was recovering. In the urgency of concern for my mother, and at the same time in this experience of role-reversal in helping my dad in this faraway place, I felt that the background anxiety in my relationship with my parents was evaporating. The feeling of living under a curse, or of holding myself back from them out of fear or resentment. The place in me, where I was coming from,
out to them, it was different. There wasn t time anymore for the old way. In the time that had left with them, to thank them, and to bless them, I could do so both as their son, and as true to who I was, I could be open to them. Truth and love. A few months later, when my mother had long since recovered, and I was back in Canada. I asked them a question that I could have asked them years earlier. I looked both of them in the eye, and I said that I was feeling ready to go back to the church, and that I wanted to apply for candidacy to become a pastor and to apply for seminary. I would, in the future, be a public leader, and a gay man, one day with a spouse. I asked them if this would cause a burden for them, if the fear was still what was in control. There was no hesitation in their answer, it was yes. It was a question that they had already been ready to answer affirmatively, and I was at last catching up with them. Thanks be to God.