Sermon: So what does it look like

By: Steve Runholt

Text: Matthew 13:31-33; 44-52

Context: Warren Wilson Presbyterian Church

Date: Sunday, July 24, 2005

If I may engage in a bit of understatement, I'm very glad to be here this morning. Actually I'm more than glad. I'm deeply honored to have been called to be your new pastor, and I want to publicly thank the PNC for granting me this wonderful privilege. And I want to thank all of you for voting to accept their recommendation. I trust you won't live to regret your decision!

I know that the call process has been a long and arduous journey not just for the PNC, but for all of you. So it's a relief to be at this place where we can gradually start being real with each other, this place where genuine love and support and depth begin.

In that spirit, I thought it might be nice this morning to give you a little sense of who am. And I figure I might as well just get it over with and tell you one of the most embarrassing thing about me. You know how some people were teenage werewolves? Well, I was a teenage fundamentalist!

It's true: I was raised in the First Baptist Church of Belle Fourche, SD. Among other things, we believed that God created the earth in six 24 hour periods before taking a day off, and that when "he" got back to work - and God was always thought of in masculine terms - when God got back to work "he" somehow dictated every word of the Bible, and so we understood all of Scripture to be literally true and obviously true, without need for fancy scholarly analysis.

At First Baptist we also believed that to be a Christian one had to be "born again." Indeed, the commitment to that one verse is and was so prevalent and powerful at First Baptist, and thousands of other churches like it around the country, that the phrase - "born again" - has worked its way into the American religious lexicon. There are "born again" Christians and then there is everyone else - including, presumably, most Presbyterians.

Perhaps it's a sign that I was destined to be a Presbyterian, but as I got older I began to question whether that one single verse - indeed, that simple two-word phrase - could be the key to everything the Bible is about. For one thing, Jesus only uses the phrase once, and it only appears in John's Gospel, none of the other three.

But what you're taught as a child stays with you a long time. So even though I wasn't absolutely convinced that the idea of being born again was really at the heart of Jesus' teaching, I was equally reluctant to think something else might be.

Then one day I found a surprising and, as they say, a uniquely qualified ally in my struggle to resolve my dilemma. My last year in seminary we were studying the history of the church in India. As part of that, we studied the life and work of the missionary E. Stanley Jones.

Like most evangelical missionaries, Jones was compelled by this same idea-that to be a Christian one had to be born again. And truth be told, he never stopped believing that.

But after he'd been in India some 30 years he began to realize something. He began to realize that he and his contemporary missionaries spoke very little about an idea that dominated Jesus' teaching.

And that idea happens to be the centerpiece of our gospel texts for today, namely the Kingdom of God, or the realm of God if you prefer not to think of God as a white-haired King sitting on a throne.

If you want to know what Jesus was really all about, read your Gospels and count how many times he uses that phrase. As E. Stanley Jones discovered, you'll find that, indeed, it utterly dominates his teaching.

But still, what does that phrase mean? What is Jesus getting at when he talks about this Kingdom, this new realm? All of the parables we read today are focused on that very question. The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed; it's like yeast; like treasure hidden in a field; like a pearl of great price; like a fishing net.

Well, if those similes don't help you much, don't despair. You're not alone. They didn't seem to help the disciples much, either.

In the opening chapter of the book of Acts, just as Jesus is about to disappear from the disciples forever, they ask, "Lord is this the time when you will restore the Kingdom to Israel?"

It would seem that after three years of watching Jesus do miracle after miracle, of watching him love people in startling new ways, of watching him redraw the religious borders of his day in the very shape of God's new realm of inclusive love-after all this, they still don't get it. They have no idea what the realm of God looks like.

What's so interesting is that Jesus does not castigate them for their dim-wittedness. Instead he takes perhaps the greatest risk in history. Even though it's clear they're as clueless as ever, Jesus takes perhaps the greatest risk in history. You shall be my witness, in Jerusalem, Judea and even in Samaria - the figurative end of the earth.

What follows in the book of Acts is essentially a running commentary on how this small Jewish sect struggles to make God's new, radically inclusive realm a reality. But that is a story for another day.

Today, we are left with that question: What does the Realm of God look like in our world, in 21 st century America?

To my great surprise I found a wonderful answer to that question not in, say, the Christian Century but in Sports Illustrated . And it's centered around the story of Perry Reece,Jr., the high school basketball coach in Berlin, OH.

The story begins with Willie Mast, a resident of Berlin, who wanted to bring some excitement to his town. Berlin happens to be the largest Amish community in the world, and thus, alas, a very dull place.

In 1982, Willie persuaded his friend, Charlie Huggins, to come and coach Berlin's woeful basketball team, the Highland High Hawks. Charlie was a coaching legend in Ohio. The residents of Berlin were thrilled that he would come to such a small place to coach their children.

They weren't so pleased the next year, however, when Charlie, for reasons no one is quite clear about, hired Perry Reese to be his assistant coach. It wasn't just that Perry Reese had never had a winning season as a coach, though that was part of it. And it wasn't just that he was Catholic, though that was part of it too. Truth be told, the real reason people were unhappy with Charlie's choice was that Coach Reece was an African American. In effect, Samaria had come to a small town in Ohio.

Things got worse the next year when Charlie, the legendary head coach, quit. Now there was no barrier between these young Mennonite and Amish kids, and Mr. Reese, their new black, catholic head coach.

Perry never said a word when his first apartment fell through after the landlord met him in person and suddenly remembered that he only rented to families. Perry did not complain when cars pulled up outside his house in the night, and just sat there silent and ominous, or when he heard racial epithets voiced to him anonymously over the phone. "They must not like us French Canadians here," was all Perry would say, though he was neither French nor Canadian.

Winning is what bought Perry time, but it was something else that caused the magic to happen, the magic of community, the magic of God's realm made real. Something else caused the mustard seed to germinate and begin to grow in Berlin, OH. That something else was grace and shared humanity.

Eventually it started to dawn on the town folk that Perry's values were virtually the same as theirs. Is coach unselfish, someone once asked. "Well, the principal might as well have taken Coach's salary to pep rallies and flung it into the air," someone else replied…"most of it ended up in the kids' hands anyway or in their stomachs in the form of pizza." Family? When Chester Mullet, Highland High's star guard only hugged his mom on parents' night, Coach Reece gave him a choice: haul yourself back up in the stands and kiss your mother properly or take a seat on the bench. Reverence ? No congregation ever huddled and sang out the Lord's Prayer with as much sincerity as did the Highland High Hawks before and after their games.

The reverence went much deeper than public prayer, however. Perry became, in effect, the town's honorary African American Catholic Amish priest. As Willie Mast put it-Willie, who got this whole story started, "When my dad died, Coach was right there, kneeling beside the coffin, crossing himself. He put his arm right around my Amish mother. She couldn't get over that. When she died, he was the first one there."

You see, Coach Reese practiced boundary-breaking love, and it fundamentally changed the character of Berlin, OH. As one resident put it, "Coach simply annihilated what people [here] had been brought up to keep: space between each other." He just bridged it.

There was other magic, too. The team went on to win a state championship in a story fit for a tv movie. But life sometimes has a way of stealing the magic, of turning dreams into nightmares. For Perry and the people of Berlin, OH, hard cold reality came to them in the form of four words: Brain tumor. Malignant. Inoperable.

When the word got out that Coach was dying, Perry's former players and students began to return home as though on a religious pilgrimage. "The nurses and doctors were stupefied," someone observed. "Didn't folks know you couldn't fit a whole town inside a hospital room?"

How much did this one man change things? This one man? How far did he redraw this small town's boundaries in the shape of God's realm?

Well, Kevin Troyer - one of coach Reeses' first players -- he decided that someday, rather than teach and coach around Berlin, he would reverse Coach Reece's path and go to Canton to teach and coach inner city kids. Shelly and Alan Miller decided that for their role in this story they would adopt a biracial boy. The Keims and the Schroks and the Masts, all followed suit, adopting unwanted, at-risk minority babies, changing the literal completion of Berlin, OH, forever.

But the power of this story about boundary breaking love, about God's realm made real, doesn't stop there. You'll Remember that Coach Reece was Catholic. At his funeral, just before communion, Father Ron Aubry gazed at the congregation gathered in St. Peter's, Coach's small parish church. Father Ron knew that what he wanted to do was against the rules, and that he could get into deep trouble, not unlike the trouble Jesus routinely got into. But he knew Coach too. He knew that Perry Reece's whole life was about breaking down the boundaries that exclude people and keep them separate and segregated into all sorts of boxes. So he did it. The catholic priest invited everyone up to receive the bread and wine.

It's worth noting that this final boundary-breaking act wasn't so easy for the town's folk either. Sadly there are deep divisions in God's church over communion. So Steve Mullet glanced at his wife, in her simple Mennonite clothing and veil. "Why not?" she whispered in reply to his unspoken question. Still, Steve hesitated. He glanced at Willie Mast. "Would Coach want us to," Steve asked. Of course he would. So they rose and joined the procession of black Baptists and white Catholics pouring toward the front. All the basketball players, all the Mennonites and Amish, young and old alike. They all streamed to the front, "[b]usting laws left and right, busting straight into the Kingdom of Heaven," as the writer from Sports Illustrated described this miracle in language that could be right out of the Gospel of Matthew.

"Lord, is this the time when you will restore the Kingdom?" the apprehensive disciples ask Jesus as the curtain is about to rise on the story of the Church. Yes, it is, he says. And you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, and Berlin, OH, and, by God's grace, a certain patch of Western North Carolina.

Amen