We Need Every Bruce We Can Find

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Readings:
Acts 7:55-60
1 Peter 2:2-10
John 14:1-14

Pastor Johnson offered up the notion that as a pastor, one does a lot of funerals. And that they have less to do with death than they often do about affirming a life; they are less about passing to what’s next than about having lived a life in Christ.

Jesus is not (and never was) about the GOP or the Democrats, about consumerism or the economy. If we follow a life in Christ, we admit, we don’t need it all, we don’t even want it all. We’re much more about sharing, and not leftovers, but our first fruits. We’re about losing life to save it, about visiting the prisoner and giving up the ‘holier than thou’. Real Christians don’t sleep ewasy when kids go hungry, when homeless are sleeping in cardboard boxes. Unless we are sacrificing parts of out comfortable lives for such, we are not living ‘The Way, The Truth, and The Life’. It’s not about ‘those Muslims’, ‘those atheists’, ‘those Catholics’.

It’s more about what Bruce saw and what Bruce did.

Bruce was a non-practicing Jew who did not believe in God. On his 6 weeks of vacation, he provided free medical care at his own cost to the underprivileged in India. Bruce knows The Way, The Truth, and The Life. Bruce is a lover, a healer, a crusader, a respector, a carer. He wwas not a Catholic, a Methodist, a Lutheran.

Organized religion has its strengths, but it also gives power to the voice that continues to say ‘women shouldn’t be pastors, gays should not be pastors or even Church members’. Can women or gays be disciples? Maybe we’d best leave that to God to sort out on judgement day. In the meantime, we need every Bruce that we can find. Every Bruce that knows we don’t any of us win until we all win, that we are our brother’s keeper. Remember Pastor Johnson’s ‘fort friends’? Ricky, Christine and Mike? We’re all running from something. Once, we had a fort where we’d take stock … with Tommy Tucker who smelled, but he was funny; Frankie Schnobel who was a garbage picker, but he always had band-aids when we needed ‘em; Louie Shemansky whose bossy sister none of us could stand, but his Mom was the BEST cook. Yeah, that fort where we all had something we were running from, but to which we all somehow brought something. For we all bring something to the soup and, for all our eventual faults, we all have our saving graces.


Let’s let it to Jesus to say ‘who’s IN the fort’. He’s the real Truth, the Way, and the Light.