To listen to this sermon by our CE Director Kristina Martin, click here.
It is my honor to speak to you today. As the Christian Education Coordinator and Youth Director here at First Congregational UCC, I watch all the learners of this community grow and change, and evolve into people I see as faithful believers of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God.
When I was two years old, I got lost. My family had gone to the mall in the big city to get school clothes for my sister and I soon got bored. One minute my mother knew where I was, and the next, I was gone. For the twenty-odd minutes I was missing, my mother’s panic increased with each moment until finally, I was found across the store in the hardware department. More precisely, I was found testing out a selection of claw tooth hammers. I was a bit perplexed over my mother’s tears and threats to spank me. Lost? What did she mean I was lost? I wasn’t lost. I knew exactly where I was. Sometimes we don’t know we’re lost until someone else points it out to us.
A few years later I started school. At the time, Wilbur was a town of 800 hunkered down between the sagebrush and wheat fields of the high desert of eastern Washington. It was the kind of small town that had 4 bars and 5 churches and not much more. These days it has even less.
The first things I learned in my kindergarten class were that my classmates took naps and they went to church. Both perplexed me because as far as I knew, these were both things that only old people did.
When I questioned my mother, she said I was welcome to nap if I felt the need and that I could go to church with my grandmother if I wanted to check it out. So one Sunday, I headed off to the Presbyterian Church where my grandmother was a deacon. Over the years, that building helped marry a handful of my family members and bury even more. And it taught me all about sin and feeling lost.
Christian education occurred before the service in that church and so Grandma dutifully sent me off to my Sunday school classes clutching a quarter and a tiny Bible. Each classroom was the same: big windows, a crucifix, a framed picture of a smiling blonde man in a white tunic and sandals surrounded by children and white lambs, and colorful posters listing off the 10 commandments as well as cheerful reminders that Yes! Jesus Love Me!
I remember being taught all kinds of crafty things to do with yarn and sticks, macaroni and a cigar box, and ways to lace my fingers into steeples and people. But what I don’t remember is how my Sunday school teachers connected Jesus loving me, to how the rest of the Bible talked about being a Christian. Instead, I remember lots of talk of sinners and hell and Jesus’ sacrifice. When I asked questions about things I found to be illogical in our bible stories, I was told that the stories of the Bible were the word of God and I just needed to have faith in that Word. As a farm kid, I couldn’t see how faith could possibly make a boat big enough to hold all those animals plus their food, and how did Noah keep the lions from eating the pigs anyway. Soon I learned that asking questions didn’t help make sense of this thing called church.
The message from the pulpit during the service expanded on those themes, reminding parishioners that we were born sinners, and our only hope of salvation was through Jesus Christ our redeemer. The sermons didn’t help me understand my logic problems with the scripture; they just made me feel badly for even questioning them. I was right smack in that developmental stage where I was grounded in thinking in absolutes – there was no gray. And I was sitting in a church that preached in absolutes. And yet it felt wrong to me.
The last time I worshiped that church, I remember sitting next to my grandmother who smelled of White Shoulders and Tide laundry detergent. Easter was approaching and the pastor was in fine form, talking about Jesus and his journey to Jerusalem. Then he interrupted himself to remind us that we were born sinners and were doomed unless we accepted Jesus as our savior.
I remember thinking to myself, “I’m just a kid. How bad can I be?” And then I remembered that I had just that week told Tiffany that yes I did like her new sweater when I actually hated the color brown. I’d said it because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but now I wondered if that had been the wrong thing to do. It was, technically, lying after all. And I knew that lying was a sin.
I wanted to be a good Christian, but I had no idea how to do that, especially in situations such as Tiffany’s sweater. I was pretty sure I could avoid breaking most of the commandments, but some felt like traps. After all, when you live on a farm, there are no days off. I knew I was a sinner going to hell and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
All around me sat people, most of whom I’d known most of my life, and I felt so lost, so alone. There was no way I could connect the love Jesus had for me, with the absolutes of the rest of the Bible.
Over the years, I tried the other churches in town – the Lutherans, the Catholics, the Church of the Nazarene, the Living Word. Each one had their own variation of the Presbyterian’s message but none of them helped me come to terms with what I read in the bible and what made sense to my young mind. When I’d ask my friends about how they knew how to be Christians, their answers were vague and were usually punctuated with “you just have to believe” or “because the Bible says so.” By the time I approached middle school, I was a historical-critical questioner surrounded by biblical literalists and I didn’t feel welcomed by any congregation. I finally got so frustrated that I set aside my bible and I stopped trying.
My experiences in middle school and high school were probably a lot like most everybody else’s. There were good times and some not so good times. I moved two times, I went to three high schools, had unrequited crushes, worked part-time jobs, and did my homework. For the most part, I did what all the other kids I knew were doing. Except that I didn’t go to church. Not once from middle school through high school did I ever worship in a church.
Looking back, I think that during those years, I really was lost. Far more lost than I’d ever been during those twenty minutes in the Sears hardware department. I was lost not of the body, but of my spiritual self. At a time when I had even more questions about faith, I was the farthest from finding a community that could help me answer those questions. I needed help finding my way. But because I hadn’t felt welcome in those other communities, it felt like there was no faith community for me.
Like so many people who have an innate faith and spiritual calling, I was trying to find my way to a place I wanted to find, but I didn’t know if it even existed. A place not of absolutes but a place of conversation and shades of gray.
Luckily, I ended up attending a UCC affiliated college and there I met a UCC preacher’s kid whom I liked well enough to agree to go to church with him. Of course, by then I was married to him, so it was easy to say yes to his request.
It was like finding the promised land of churches.
I found there was a name for someone like me: a progressive Christian. I met pew-fulls of believers in the teachings of Jesus Christ who also argued about the applicability of some of the bible in our current lives. I found people talking about the importance of translation and context, the subtle nuances of time and place and the many shades of gray in biblical interpretation. And I found out that Luke was written originally in Greek, from which the term “to miss the mark” was translated into the English word “sinner”.
The parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin were no longer derailed for me by my struggle with the absoluteness of the word “sinner” because I learned to read it as a message not about how bad people are, but instead, how wonderful the world can be when we all try again and again, to live in the way Jesus did – by welcoming all.
Jesus’ use of the parables of the sheep and the coin are his response to the murmurings of the Pharisees and the scholars. They were judging him for spending time with people who had missed the mark. And Jesus was reminding them, and us, that it is more important to sit together in unity with everyone, to welcome all to the table. That the greatest celebration is not because no one ever got lost; indeed, the celebration is because people strove to be better and in that struggle they found their way.
What a difference finding the UCC has made in my life. Although I don’t know precisely where I am going, I no longer feel lost. Instead, I feel like I have found where I am supposed to be. Right here.
I am so proud to work for a UCC church. We do such good work here, locally, in the Central Pacific conference, and nationally. We have always been a church of firsts and we should be proud of that. Yes, we were the first church to ordain a woman, had the first ordained black minister, and the first openly gay minister. We were the first to marry same-sex couples and we are the first to divest our financial investments from fossil fuels in order to combat climate change. We donate hundreds of hours of our time and labor to make our community better. And when we do that, we are finding the lost sheep and the lost coins of Vancouver and beyond, and bringing them home because we welcome them here.
But what makes me most proud is that we don’t teach our children that church is a place of absolutes that can make them feel lost simply for asking questions or being curious. Here, we affirm all children, regardless of who they are or how they are, and by doing that, we are ensuring our children don’t feel lost on their spiritual journey. Instead, they know they are truly welcome here.
Our children know precisely where they are: they are growing up in a church that shows them the many ways they are made in God’s own image. A church that shows them how to live as a Christian is by being compassionate and just, by welcoming all along the journey. Being a Christian means doing the right thing, and when not quite making that mark, to keep trying again and again until successful. These children are in a church that holds sacred an ancient text but continues to find ways of making ancient words relevant in our world today by studying its many shades of gray. Children are indeed found here.
And honestly, it isn’t just the children of this church who experience that message. Because, as we are reminded, we are all God’s children, made in God’s own image. We who all look so different from one another, who have such varied passions and skills, who may be mistaken for more different than alike, we are all one. Each of us, trying once again to make the mark rather than miss it. We are God’s children.
Here we know we are not lost. Instead, we are found. We are found by a community of faith and tradition that honors us and guides us. A community that lifts us up and holds us close and it teaches us to be even better versions of ourselves as we journey together. Amen.