Irvine UCC                                                                                                                 Rev. Paul Tellström

Candidating Sermon, “Gino the Eskimo”                                                                 February 26, 2006                                    

Hebrew Testament Reading: Amos 5:21-24

Epistle Reading: Hebrews 5:1-5                                                                                 word count 2,389

Gospel: John 21:15-18

I want to thank you for welcoming Carl and me here today, and special thanks to the search committee for all of the work that they have done.  We are here for a purpose today—we are looking at a possibility.

            Some of you might be asking, “Does he follow progressive Christianity?  Is his a life of the mind?”  Some of you might be asking, “Does he have a passion for social justice?  Is his a life of the heart?”  Some may ask, “Will he love us and help us grow our families and community?”  And still others who met me last week may be asking, “Yes, but can he really bowl?” (Reference to recent “Meet the Pastor” bowling night.)

            And since we have come together to talk about purpose and meaning, I have a story I want to tell, and it leads into how I feel about the church.

            I’m sitting at a dark table in a locals-favorite Big Bear eatery called the Captain’s Anchorage, a log building once owned by gravel voiced cowboy star Andy Devine, whose restaurant is equally famous for a ghost upstairs named George. 

            It’s early for dinner, it’s dark where I am sitting, the light from the fireplace is too low to read my book, and I’m alone.  A couple sits at the bar talking to the waitress at the other end, and in comes a man in his late fifties who announces that he is one of the first employees of the restaurant, and makes us all hear his story.  He buys a round of drinks for everyone except for me, the minister in the dark corner, whom he does not see.

            The juke-box plays, “Hot Time, Summer in the City,” though the aspens outside are turning an October yellow.  Gino, for that is his name, tells us that he was known in these parts as a hell-raiser, which is why he was called “Gino the Eskimo,” an explanation that no-one challenges. 

            It is clear that they have all sat at this bar many times.  Someone asks about George.  Even I know that George is the famous “Captain’s Anchorage” ghost, who can be heard walking and talking on the floor above us.  George may be with us even now.

            As they talk about George, they all look up, and so do I.  I don’t see a ghost—I see many of them; white paper ghosts tacked to the beams for Halloween, paper ghosts with raised arms and black holes for eyes, paper ghosts who haunt the bar and the people who sit there talking.

            I look down and notice that the man on the end is wearing shorts, and from his shorts come, not legs, but aluminum and steel approximations, jointed and tapering into specially fitted sneakers.  As I see this, Gino the Eskimo tells about his recent divorce, and how he felt the need to revisit this other time in his life.  “Here’s to happier times,” he says, as the second round arrives.  The pretty woman in the middle tells about her husband’s accident, about how he was a local ski instructor, and how the steel cables suddenly snapped and pulled across his torso one winter day and cut his legs from his body.  Gino wants to look, but holds back out of respect.  “I know about happier times,” she says, and lifts the glass of merlot.

            The man at the end of the bar touches his wife’s shoulder and says, “I celebrate a second birthday every year, the date that the accident changed me from six feet tall to three.  It changed everything forever.  Except for Maria.  Maria has never changed—she has been right by me all along.”  He kisses her neck, and Maria smiles.  He grabs two canes that lean against the bar, and stands up.  The firelight glints across the metal that clanks when he walks, and he moves to the men’s room.  Gino the Eskimo watches him move away, and his wife tells the joke she has told for years: “He’s the tin man, and the tin man was always the one with the heart.”  And, she pours hers out to Gino, who knows how to listen.  Gino the Eskimo is Gino the priest of the bar, as he probably was in the days when George the ghost first walked and talked overhead.  

            Gino waits until she finishes talking about how good people were to them, about the money that mysteriously came to pay bills, about the changes in their lives, the adjustments, the costs, the insurance, and the constant extra preparations that every activity takes.  Could she go on?  She wanted to, but what does life mean when people like her husband could get cut in two in a freak accident, and why did her life move suddenly into being both servant and advocate? 

            Maybe it is the wine that releases her to opening her heart up to this stranger.

            Gino the Eskimo rises up and places his hands on her head.  Framed by paper ghosts, he says, “Maria, I have a second birthday, too.  Mine was Vietnam.  Nothing in my life has made sense to me since then except that it was wrong.  The war changed me forever.  I could not be a great husband.  I hope I was an o.k. father.  I know what it is to doubt your life and live with personal demons. 

            “So, Maria, I got to tell you because it is true—your life has meaning.  Don’t doubt it.  We can’t change much—it is just too big.  But we can change a little, even if it is just a little.  We can spread our love, and live it up and party with the world as much as we can.  The whole world is in pain, Maria, the whole world.  God made us to have the guts to spit into the wind and stand up for ourselves and for anyone who gets hurt.  And Maria, God made you strong enough to stand up for more than just yourself.”

            I am silently impressed with Gino from my corner—I don’t say a word, because I would never steal focus from a minister in his or her own pulpit.  And I did have to paraphrase and clean up the language a little to bring you this sermon of the Rev. Eskimo of the Church of the Open Bar. 

            I liken Gino to the priestly tradition in today’s scripture from Hebrews, “He is able to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is subject to weakness.”  Gino is a weak vessel.  He understands pain because he has lived with it, enough to say that he sees the whole world as suffering. 

            I also could not help but think while watching this scene unfold, that here was “church” done in a way that many churches cannot fathom.  Here was a place where acceptance and healing took place in a genuine way, and in this most unexpected venue a healer could lift a face to the light and remind someone not only of her value and her strength, but of her connection to something greater than herself.  In what other places on what Sunday mornings can we be reminded that life itself is an act of worship, that we are loved as we are—participants in God’s extravagant welcome?

            And so we come to today.  I don’t always have the answers, but I know that I belong.  I am a child of the church, raised in the United Church of Christ and proud of it.  I have also known what it is like to be excluded and marginalized.  Because of that, I seek the “beloved community” and the “welcome table.”  

I want to be in a place that values family—seeking to give good grounding in faith to a new generation, and known as a safe place for our youth to learn that God is with them and loves them.  I want to be in a place that values our young people and our families, so that seeing who we are, others will be attracted to what is happening here, and so, I will be in a multigenerational family. 

I want to be in a place that values all kinds of family, that our own twenty year partnership is welcomed equally into the task of raising up the beloved community.  And, I want to be in a diverse family, in everything that means. 

I am a pluralist.  But, I want to be in a faith community that embraces the Trinitarian as well as the Unitarian, however I come to know God.  I want to be with people who are in dialogue with the Muslim, the Jew, the Buddhist and the Hindu, however I come to know God.  I want to be part of a universal family.

And I wonder where these faith communities are?  I spent eight years building one up in Hollywood.  I love those people, and I can’t lie and tell you that I am not grieving as part of my decision to move on.  But my mission is about helping these places to exist—with doors opened in welcome to questioning minds, open hearts for justice, partnered souls raising families and those seeking an accepting and loving community.  My mission is about “taking back” the symbols of the church from the narrow and sharing them with the righteous, not the self-righteous—giving them to those on the margins, and not to those whose surety draws too small a circle for God’s grace.

You are a faith outpost in a Christianist wilderness—you have a purpose. 

Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me?” and Peter said, “You know I do.”  Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.”  Three times he asked this question, and each time he replied, “Feed my sheep.”  Your purpose is to feed the community around you.  Let them know who you are and of the welcome of God to all of God’s people.  Feed this world.  Be the beloved community that can bear a particular and much-needed message of love, healing and well-being to faces that you have not yet seen, faces that you will hold up in your hands and speak to of hope and meaning.   

            Here is purpose; lifted up in faces at times streaked in tears, filled with joy, looking ahead, or lifting a toast to happier times.  New faces will come needing to be reminded that hope thrives and love is freely given by God and a community of well-being.  Peter tells Jesus that he loves him.  Jesus says, “Feed my sheep.”

            In the United Church of Christ Statement of Faith, we hear, “You promise to all who trust you…courage in the struggle for justice and peace.” (New Century Hymnal #855)

That struggle, be it centered around the pain that we encounter in daily life, or the larger issues that keep countries from having peace within or that cause them to act in devilish ways to make “pre-emptive” war, is central to the identity of our church.  But the discussion must be seen from the perspective of the poor and those who are in the struggle for liberation.  “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” says the prophet Amos; and Peter tells Jesus that he loves him once again, and Jesus once again says, “Feed my sheep.”

            Viktor Frankl wrote a book called, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” where he documents the profound power that a life purpose exerts over an individual under the worst of circumstances.  Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps, described how prisoners who felt they had no-thing to live for succumbed, while those who perceived themselves as having a mission to complete, struggled to survive.  Deprived of all external supports that might give life meaning, these survivors came to realize that, in Frankl’s words, “It did not really matter what we expected of life, but rather what life expected from us.”  Their sense of an inner purpose pulled them through the most horrible physical and emotional experiences so that they might make their unique contribution to the world.

            The true meaning of life lies in sharing our particular qualities of greatness that rise up from the depths of otherwise flawed lives with others.

Whether Frankl’s words, “It did not really matter what we expected of life, but rather what life expected from us,” ring true for you, or if Gino the Eskimo brings a more colorful and personal face to the task, we have been called together today for a reason.  And a third time Jesus asked Peter if he loved him, and when Peter said once again, “You know I do,” Jesus a third time said, “Feed my sheep.”  And this time he added words that indicated that it wouldn’t always be easy. 

            We are the priesthood of all believers, and to paraphrase Paul today, “We are able to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since we ourselves are subject to weakness.”  Each of us is part of the pain of the world, palpable pain, rough-edged pain.  Our own ghosts hang about our heads and remind us that we too, are flawed.  We too, lack capacity to change much of the world, yet we will surely succumb to numbness if we feel that our lives have not touched the world in some positive way, and will persevere if we feel we have a mission—to serve the world in ways that bring shalom—peace and justice, rolling down.  Can—“we” be a church that has that mission—together?  That question frames our purpose here today!

            As Rev. Gino the Eskimo would say, “I got to tell you because it is true—your life has meaning.  Don’t doubt it.  We can’t change much—it is just too big.  But we can change a little, even if it is just a little.  The whole world is in pain, the whole world.  God made us to have the guts to spit into the wind and stand up for ourselves and for the marginalized.  And God made you strong enough to stand up for more than yourself.”  AMEN.

Scripture for Sunday, February 26, 2006

Paul Tellström’s Candidating Sermon at IUCC

Amos 5:21-24

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.  But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Hebrews 5:1-5

            Every high priest chosen from among mortals is put in charge of things pertaining to God on their behalf, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins.  He is able to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is subject to weakness; and because of this he must offer sacrifice for his own sins as well as for those of the people.

            And one does not presume to take this honor, but takes it only when called by God, just as Aaron was.  So also Christ did not glorify himself in becoming a high priest, but was appointed by the one who said to him, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you”; as he says also in another place, “You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”

John 21:15-18

When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?”  He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”  Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.”

A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”  He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”  Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.”

He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”  Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?”  And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.”  Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.  Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished.  But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.”