Coming Out: Leaving Comfortable Places

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – October 1, 2023

Coming Out: Leaving Comfortable Places – Hebrews 11: 1-3

I think it might be fair to say there were as many different experiences of the pandemic lockdowns as there were humans. Some of us never completely locked ourselves away whether by choice or due to being deemed an essential worker. Some of us welcomed the break from doing and peopling, at least initially. Some of us descended into close quarters chaos because we were working from home and supervising children doing school at home all at the same time. Some of us were stuck at home in an abusive situation. Some of us didn’t have much of a home to be stuck in and found resources growing scarcer. Some of us experienced profound loneliness, isolation, anxiety, and depression that wreaked havoc on our health in myriad ways.

So, maybe it should be no surprise that ending or transitioning those lockdown protocols happened differently for different people, too. What many of us shared though was an awkwardness to transitioning those protocols. Late night shows joked about the too true reality of Americans struggling to remember how to talk to each other in person.

I know there were some people who I knew for months if not years before I saw the bottom half of their face or the rest of their body not confined by a Zoom screen. I just would never have imagined that experience pre-2020.

And there were awkward parts to picking things up in a different way. I wonder if we’d gotten comfortable with our pandemic cocoons even if we didn’t particularly like why we were stuck in them. I wonder, too, how much we’re still in a place of transition as individuals, as families, and as a faith community, navigating the awkwardness of living into this new reality together.

There are likely many other reasons among us today, too, for finding ourselves in a time of transition and for feeling maybe not unlike a cautious caterpillar turned butterfly starting to pry open our cocoons. Emerging into new realities and new identities is difficult work often filled with anxiety and unknowing.

The writer of this book of the Bible we call Hebrews seemed to understand that predicament, imparting this lovely, encouraging bit of poetry that the NRSV renders: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Faith is what it takes to face the anxiety and unknowing of any change.

The audience of this book of the Bible were in a time of enormous change. They were at the forefront of a diverging faith movement that saw them persecuted by Rome and at odds with their own cultural and religious hierarchies. It seems to me they wondered: is it even worth it? As much as we believe in the truth and good news of Christ, is it worth all the effort and struggle we’re undergoing to live out this new reality and new identity?

Into that question the writer speaks of the conviction of things not yet seen and encourages them to believe in and to live out the good news of God’s love in Christ as they have come to know it. “Indeed, by faith,” the writer goes on, “our ancestors received approval.” Nearly the rest of the chapter continues to cover the story of Abraham and Moses and other ancient Israelite ancestors who put their faith in God to live into a new reality and a new identity.

It even turns out the Greek for approval could also be translated as testimony, bear record, or report. Maybe the writer means to convey that the faith of the ancestors was rewarded.

Looking back, we can see how those who have come before us took risks that bore tremendous outcomes. We don’t always know when we’re living through it what risks and ventures of faith that we take now will one day lead to the world we want to see. But neither did our forebears know. Yet, we are the recipients of so much risk taking that has come before.

Standing in this pulpit before you today, I am the recipient of so many women preachers and their allies who broke open the way when others would have kept it closed to men only.

These days, I am moved by the Pacific Northwest District’s intention to ordain my friend and colleague Elizabeth Ullery Swenson this month despite her identity as an openly queer woman and the denomination’s lack of official support for her full inclusion as a church member and as a gifted, faith leader.

My prayer is that young people in our congregation and everywhere would have the opportunity to be part of a larger community of faith that welcomes them with open arms in the fullness of who God has made them to be.

I am willing to keep faith in that yet coming wider church reality even though it is too often not the one I currently see before me.

What is the reality and the identity God has put on your heart to imagine into being? What is it you pray for faith in even when it is not yet what you can see?

I believe every step we take toward that new reality is a way of our bearing testimony to all that God is yet bringing to be in our world and in our hearts. We may not live to see all that our efforts will bring to bear but we can trust that like those who have come before us, God will use the risks we take and the effort we put forth to help something new and wonderful emerge.

“By faith,” the writer of Hebrews claims, “we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.”

So many of us already believe in so much that we cannot see –at least not with our naked eyes. We wash our hands to free ourselves from germs. We take medicines and vaccines to fight off invisible viruses. We trust that the sun will come up in the morning and the spring will come after the winter even when the hour is still cold and dark.

So many of us here believe in this invisible thing called love.

So many of us here believe in the invisible presence of God.

Maybe we have seen love in action.

Maybe we have felt God in those loving actions and beyond them, too.

However we have practiced faith in what we cannot see has prepared us for the next step in continuing to grow that muscle of faith.

However we have practiced faith has prepared us a little more to support each other when our faith wanes or to have the humility to ask for support when we need it, too.

However we have practiced faith has been an inoculation, preparing us so that whatever we go through, we can have a better chance of trusting that whatever the future holds the God of love will meet us there, too.

A caterpillar turning into a butterfly is one of the most amazing processes of the natural world. But if you’ve ever watched it happen up close. You may know that it doesn’t happen all at once. There has to be a hungry little caterpillar. Then the long cocoon or chrysalis stage. Then even when it’s time to start emerging, that doesn’t happen fast. It’s slow and awkward.

As a child, I remember a few times my mom adopted Monarchs for us to protect indoors through their growing stages. We would walk along the railroad near my grandparents’ house, looking for the teeny-tiny eggs on the undersides of the broad Milkweed leaves. We must have harvested plenty of Milkweed to feed those voracious growing yellow, black, and white wormy things because I remember vividly the green chrysalises they eventually formed. As a child it seemed an interminable wait for that butterfly to come out. Do you think it will be today, Mom? What about today? I must have asked her a million times. I don’t know, it looks a little a different today. Don’t you think? And it happened. Eventually it happened.

But there was a lot of waiting involved. For a young, growing me, it took a lot of faith to believe everything my mom said would happen was true. And there was no guarantee every little one would make it either. I think that made the waiting even worse. But it was good practice because I have found there is so much awkward, uncomfortable, anxious waiting in life.

Change is guaranteed, and it’s not guaranteed to be comfortable nor to come with clear instructions.

Whether we are growing up or growing old,

Whether we are starting something new or ending something else,

Whether we are hopeful or discouraged, change is with us.

One way or another we will have to leave our comfortable places.

The good news is that even when we cannot be sure what the future holds and however we are being called to emerge into something new, the God who calls forth the butterfly and who called Christ forth from the tomb, will meet us on the other side of our emergence, too.  

For as the writer of Hebrews proclaims, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.”

May you go forth trusting in yet invisible things, too.

May it be so. Amen.