diversity – This is the Day

Sunday, June 9, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Day of Pentecost

Before I went to seminary, I lived in Lincoln for a few years. I had just gotten back from the Peace Corps, and I was trying to readjust to life back in the US. Because of my experience teaching English as a foreign language, I quickly got a job with an organization called Lincoln Literacy. At Lincoln Lit, we worked with refugees and asylum-seekers and other immigrants – with and without documents – we taught them English and helped them find jobs and adjust to their new life in the US. I loved working there. Almost everyone I worked with – students and staff alike – seemed to feel in some way like fish out of water, just like I did.

We had students from all over the world: from Mexico and Guatemala and Venezuela, from Iraq and Afghanistan, from Bosnia, Sudan, Congo, China, Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, all over. In our classes, you would see people of every color, people dressed in hijabs and blue jeans and saris and intricately woven fabric. During one particularly hot summer, one of my colleagues even showed up to work a few times wearing his wife’s skirts to keep cool – and no one so much as batted an eye. Everyone belonged, just as they were.

Continue reading “Sermon: Potlucks of Epic Proportions” →

Sunday, May 19, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fifth Sunday of Easter

During my first few months in the Dominican Republic, I lived with a host family. They were very nice people and I got along great with them for the most part. But my host mom, Doña Nicia, never thought I ate enough – she was always trying to get me to eat more. The trouble was that, after a while, I had gotten really tired of eating rice and beans all the time. It was always the same thing every day: rice and beans, stewed meat, mashed plantains, and a big mug of fresh milk in the morning and in the evening – the milk part sounds really nice until you find yourself actually having to peel your milk twice a day (I never thought I’d appreciate the word “homogenized” so much).

One day, Doña Nicia’s daughter-in-law, Moraima, made a great big pot of a rice dish called chofán and brought a bowl over for me. It was basically fried rice with a mix of vegetables and some chicken – and I completely devoured it. Seeing this, my host mom was like, “Aha! She likes chofán!” So the very next day at lunch, Doña Nicia proudly set before me a big, heaping bowl of “chofán”; except, instead of rice and a mix of different vegetables, this was rice with a mix of different meats: chicken, pork, goat, and – I swear to you this is true – hot dogs, all chopped up into little pieces. I knew she was so excited to make it for me, so I ate as much of it as I could stomach. But to be honest, I felt a lot like I imagine Peter did in our reading from Acts. In Peter’s case, he has a vision of some kind of bizarre picnic descending down out of the clouds – and a voice tells him, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat!” and Peter takes one look at that picnic and is just like, “Uhhh… pass.”

Continue reading “Sermon: Us and Us” →