“Bullfrogs & Butterflies” comes from
Dottie Oakey. She read my reference in the Visitor to the “Chrysalis
Flights” for young people taking place here this summer. I had said “like
cuddly caterpillars becoming breath-taking butterflies, they will be growing
beyond themselves.” Dottie did meditation on bullfrogs and butterflies
because they both have to be born again to come to their truest selves. I
figure the more Dottie Oakey and John Auer can talk about the same thing at
the same time, the more Jesus is likely to hurry back! Butterflies and
bullfrogs remind us that tadpoles and caterpillars are always about to be
liberated and set free, about to burst forth with new life. And that’s
God’s gifts of liberation and new life may show up in the strangest persons
and peoples at the strangest times and places.
One such person is Sarah, far too
advanced in years to be told (actually to overhear from the tent as Abraham
is told – God was not speaking directly to women quite yet!) she is bearing
a son! Sarah laughs! “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall
I have pleasure?” Some of us very old marrieds still find that amusing!
The LORD, who is there in the persons of three sojourning strangers in need
of sustenance, sounds a little hurt if not offended. “Is anything too
wonderful for the LORD?” Sarah then seems horrified to have laughed at God
and denies it. But God is clear, we are entitled to our laughter,
especially to our delight at being so surprised! Our son Jacob was born to
Julie and me in “old age,” after we had adopted Jeffery and Jane. Our birth
announcements said, in effect, “Sarah and Abraham ride again!” God is just
full of delightful surprises. Look at all of our graduates! I will try to
address myself to you now.
You are bullfrogs, you are butterflies,
you have been born, again and again, to lifelong liberation and newness of
life. You are delightful to God and to us. We thank God for you this
morning, and for all who have brought you thus far in your life, your faith,
and your very hard work! Life is full of learning, laughing, limping (like
the biblical Jacob who wrestles with God all night!), and loving because we
know what both laughing and limping are like. And thanks to the
congregation for trying to provide so well for persons of all ages and
sizes. Thanks to our leaders, staff and volunteers. Thanks to those who
care for our basement spaces! Please check out the classrooms and youth
room if you have not seen them. We are at work on policies of protection
for children and youth in the building and in our programs. Children are
central to our worship each Sunday. Youth usher once a month and plan to
come with more music this fall.
I invite the youth to be visibly,
actively present and participating in worship as often as possible. If
anything in the past has served to discourage you in this, please leave it
behind you. This is a new day. Please tell us what it might take to make
time of worship to work better for you. If it is not working for you, it
may not be working as well as we think for the rest of us, either! We are
all in this life and faith and work together. God is still making things
new, not done with anyone, anything yet. God who liberates and brings life
to old age in the promise of many descendants clearly is more about future
than past. God still takes care of the past, still cleans up after us and
completes the past where we need to let go of it and to move on. God frees
us from the past to free us to embrace the future! God frees us to risk the
new thing God is doing! The questions are always, and especially as we
graduate, who do we say we are NOW, and where are we going from HERE? God
is very here, God is very now.
The great thing about church is what the
poet says about home: when you go there they have to take you in! We cannot
deny or avoid or ignore or escape one another, no matter how hard we may
try. No one has to answer any questions, or meet any qualifications, or
show any grades or diplomas, or pass any tests, or fill out any forms, or
claim any privileges, or establish any credentials. Is that right? We just
have to be who we are! Be fully and freely just who we are! Tadpoles and
caterpillars! Always in need of God’s liberation and new life. Learning
and laughing and limping and loving our ways along! For God is still full
of surprises! We ain’t seen nothing yet! Even suffering, claims Paul --
quite a laugher and limper of life himself -- is meant not to be any end in
itself but, through endurance and through character, to lead us to hope!
God does not mean for suffering or pain to have the last word about anyone’s
life. We are called to end suffering where we can, to make it endurable
where we cannot.
God calls us to see suffering, in others
and in us, as a wake-up call, to wrestle, to struggle with God for justice
and peace, personal and social. God calls us make life livable for the
sufferer, whoever they are. How do we know this, asks Paul? Because God
does not wait for us to get right before God is willing to do a new thing in
our lives. Even while we are weak, even while we are sick, even while we
are yet sinners -- not doing what we want to be doing, in fact doing what we
do not want to be doing -- God in Christ is there for us, taking on
everything about us, giving us God’s own life, pouring out God’s own love
for us -- whoever we are! They say you do not have to get right so you can
come to church. But you ought to be able to come to church so you can get
right.
Some of our youth went to Sacramento for
the conference youth rally last fall. They worked in the streets and in
part were asked to throw out possessions from a homeless encampment. They
were troubled by that. I would invite our youth to join us in finding our
way to respond to those who sleep in our window wells and our stair wells.
What is our calling to be the church toward them? What kind of strange
trust or belief in us do they show by coming to us in the first place? What
if they are not just a problem to solve, but also a gift to unwrap in some
way? In La Bousalla next door to us I was speaking with Meredith
yesterday. She loves all the church people she’s met. She can be a
tough-minded businessperson, and she’s not above telling persons she needs
to tell that the church has hidden surveillance cameras taking pictures all
the time and giving them to the police! But she’s also fiercely loyal to
persons she meets and befriends. When she saw one person going through
another person’s stuff in the window well, she confronted them angrily and
ran them off for her friend.
We are asked by our annual conference to
consider the calling of God in the life and the work of our congregation. I
know last summer when we gave special emphasis to “the call,” Foofi and Mike
told me how relieved they were to get through worship without hearing a
call! I know what they mean! And now they are called to retirement, even
more time to give to “the call” whatever that means! For them or for anyone
else. We are asked how we might open one another and even ourselves to hear
and attend to the word of God for our lives – especially if God might be
saying --even more especially to young people -- will you use the gifts and
graces I have given to you in witness and service with me to all the world,
beginning right where you are? How might we help one another discern and
discover the filling and leading of Spirit in the midst of our everyday
lives? How might we celebrate and support one another in receiving and
responding?
Dottie Oakey is right. We tadpoles and
caterpillars have been and are being born again! We are being set free from
cultural control and constraint and being set forth in word and in deed to
follow the very same Jesus who was, who is and who will be forever coming
again everyday – going about in the cities and villages, teaching,
proclaiming good news, feeding and healing from every sickness, every dis-ease
– and doing it now in us! In the church! In the body of Christ! With many
more eyes and ears and hearts and lungs and hands and feet than Jesus could
have all alone! We are now called to see the crowds, the masses of people
Jesus sees -- in suffering and pain, sickness and poverty, uneducated and
unemployed, dropped-out and detained, enlisted and incarcerated, harassed
and helpless -- like sheep without a shepherd.
The harvest is still so plentiful, even
lying at our very doorstep, Jesus is saying to us. The need is so great.
There is so much we can do. But the laborers are few. Look at the armed
forces of the military, and the interests they protect – they are in our
high schools, and they always have so many more resources for recruitment
than the disarmed forces of faith, the alternative, will ever have!
As brother Bob Olmstead said here a few
weeks ago, the work of church-leading and church-making may not pay very
well. But in so many ways it’s the last best game for good and for hope
left in town! You got game – let it be yours!
Our calling always is first to compassion
– which means, passion with. Standing with, sharing with, suffering with,
sustaining with, enduring with one another. Suffering to Jesus is not just
our pain and distress. In fact he says specifically, Suffer the little
children to come to you. Bear with them, reach out to them, lift them up,
permit them to be. Freely and fully to be. Jesus’ passion is not for death
but for life. Carter Heyward says, “Passion is that fully human and divine
spark which leaps in the face of cynicism and burns with a commitment that
neither God nor humankind is finished.” God is not done with us yet! The
promise of God to Abraham and to Sarah lives on in us – no matter how worn
out and washed up we feel! We must be able to promise to you, our
graduates, this morning – Like God, we will never give up! We will never
give up on you. We will never give up on us. We will never give up on our
church. We will never give up on our world. As Jesus asks us to do today,
so now we pray for the harvest of justice and peace. So now we pray for
you graduates and for us.
Philip Larkin writes in the poem “Faith
Healing” – “In everyone there sleeps / A sense of life lived according to
love. / To some it means the difference they could make / By loving others,
but across most it sweeps / As all that might have been done had they been
loved.” What all might I have done, had I been loved? What all might you
have done, had you been loved? What all might we have done, had we been
loved? Jesus loves you. Jesus loves me. Jesus loves us. This we know.
For the Bible tells us so. Jesus loves you. And so do we. Amen.
Rev. John J. Auer
