“My wife, Robin, has been reading a book called Becoming Human by Jean Vanier. Vanier founded L’Arche, which describes itself as ‘an organization .. of homes, programs and support networks with people with intellectual disabilities.’ That language of disability that they have chosen is unfortunate, because they themselves define their communities not as disabled but rather as saying ‘I think like you, but differently.’

As a lifelong educator, Robin continually challenges and teaches me about the language we use. I was sharing with her this week about a conversation I had with someone who self-identified as having ADD, and she pushed back strongly against that term – Attention Deficit Disorder — and as I have heard her say many times before, she said:

‘ADD is neither a deficit nor a disorder … we each think differently.’

Later, she showed me a passage from Vanier’s book, where he writes these words that have deep significance for an All Saints community that holds radical inclusion as a core value.

Vanier writes: ‘When I talk about “inclusion” of people with (and here I add “so-called”) disabilities … I am not just saying we should be kind to such people …. Nor “normalize” them to be “like us.’ …They have a gift to give to all, to each of us as individuals… and to society, in general.

‘The excluded … live certain values we all need to discover and to live ourselves before we can become truly human. It is not a just a question of performing good deeds for those who are excluded but of being open and vulnerable to them in order to receive the life that they can offer.’”

Sermon by Mike Kinman at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on St. Francis Sunday, September 29, 2019.

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“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life… Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.”
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You might have heard that a new force of nature recently has entered our family’s life … a Labrador-bull terrier mix puppy named Scout.

Scout … as we have come to say … is very “Scoutlike.” Now being Scoutlike is a wonderful mixture of curiosity, energy, and boundless enthusiasm. That amazing puppy joy where every new person is just the best-most-exciting- thing-and-you-are-my-best-friend-and-I-am-so-excited-I-just-can’t-keep-my-paws-on-the-ground-and-oh,-I-want-to-lick-you-and-now-I-want-to-chew-on-something-really-interesting-you-are-wearing .. and-oh,-never-mind,-I-LOVE-YOU-SO-MUCH!

And if she already knows you, the greeting becomes: YOU’RE HOME! ImsoexcitedSoexcitedSoexcitedSoexcited!
I LOVE YOU!!!

Feed me.

No matter how high or low I am, when I come home and become the target of this guided puppy projectile … I know I am loved.

We learn about God from so many sources. And … I am learning a lot about God from Scout. Because God’s love for us is a Scoutlike love. Regardless of what we have done or left undone, God spies us and God’s heart and entire being dances.

God sees you and says:

IT’S YOU!!!
ImsoexcitedSoexcitedSoexcitedSoexcited!

I once saw a bumper sticker that read: “God help me be the person my dog thinks I am.”

So here’s the thing … we are. You are.

We may not always act like it … but we are the people that puppies think we are. Because God’s love is a Scoutlike love.

And… that’s not all.

We have another dog, Frinkles. Frinkles is 10, and even though she has trouble getting up the stairs, every night, that’s what she does so she can plop herself down next to Hayden’s bed and stay there until morning.

Frinkles’ love is not unbridled and ebullient. It is deep and faithful. A “Frinklish” love watches over and loves deeply.

A Frinklish love braves aching joints to trudge upstairs to be with you.

A Frinklish love somehow knows when you are hurting and that just being with you through it, just making sure you aren’t alone, is the healing we all most need.

We may not always act like it … but we are the people our dogs think we are. We are delightful and wonderful. We are worthy of love. And that love is always there for us … no matter what.

Because God’s love is a Scoutlike love.
And God’s love is a Frinklish love.

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Francis. Francis loved animals, so today, we bless animals … knowing that they are already a blessing, because animals reveal God’s Scoutlike, Frinklish love.

And … there is another story – perhaps apocryphal – about Francis that is instructive for today.

Like many people of his time, Francis was pretty afraid of and creeped out by people with leprosy. That’s human. When people have a condition that makes them different from the norm, especially one that involves pain and wounds … we are aware of that difference and it can make us uncomfortable. And then that discomfort creates further division. Because we don’t know what to say or how to act … and maybe we are terrified of saying the wrong thing … and maybe it all triggers some things in us and makes us uncomfortable … and so we quietly pull away. It’s natural and human … and it’s also devastating. Because often, just at the time people need community the most, community recedes into the shadows.

So … anyway, Francis is riding on his horse and comes upon someone with leprosy. He wants to turn away, but God awakens the Scoutlike, Frinklish love in Francis’ heart and helps Francis see not “a leper” but a beloved.
And God’s Scoutlike love starts beating in his heart saying:

IT’S YOU!!! ImsoexcitedSoexcitedSoexcitedSoexcited!

And God’s Frinklish love starts beating in Francis’ heart saying:

“Oh I just have to be with this person and let them know they are loved and not alone!”

And Francis gets off his horse, walks over to the man, and embraces and kisses him.

In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus sings to us:

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.”

This translation perfectly expresses what I have heard from so many of you about why you have been drawn into the orbit of All Saints Church … and what we believe about the Scoutlike, Frinklish love of God.

So many of you have entrusted me with your stories of how you were about to give up on church when you decided to give it one more try at All Saints. Kind of a “Last chance saloon” before heading away from faith community forever.

Why? Because we have all seen what religion can do in its all-too-often weaponized form. And we are burned out on it. We are tired, worn out and burned out on religion!

And we long for the unforced rhythms of grace.

Religion, in this sense, is what happens when we take the unforced rhythms of grace and try to force them into the power structures of the world. When we give authority to those who have privilege in the world and expect everyone else to emulate them.

Religion, in this sense, is imprisoning love in dogma that says love can only be earned by right belief and right practice. It is trying to incarcerate in a forced march the wild and revolutionary, slow and faithful dance of God’s Scoutlike, Frinklish love.

A Francis bound by religion would have seen “a leper” and ridden past – because lepers were unseemly, dangerous and also not worth the time of someone of wealth and power. But God whispered her unforced rhythms of grace in Francis’ ear and awakened the Scoutlike, Frinklish love in Francis’ heart. And Francis’ life changed forever.

Now, this story is often used to reinforce the binaries of “us” and “them” that bind God’s unforced rhythms of grace. It becomes more dogma than dance. A command to help an unfortunate other so we can earn a love that is not ours to begin with.

That’s not what happens. Francis does not “help” the person with leprosy. They embrace. They kiss. Each is a gift to the other.

My wife, Robin, has been reading a book called Becoming Human by Jean Vanier. Vanier founded L’Arche, which describes itself as “an organization .. of homes, programs and support networks with people with intellectual disabilities.” That language of disability that they have chosen is unfortunate, because they themselves define their communities not as disabled but rather as saying “I think like you, but differently.”

As a lifelong educator, Robin continually challenges and teaches me about the language we use. I was sharing with her this week about a conversation I had with someone who self-identified as having ADD, and she pushed back strongly against that term – Attention Deficit Disorder — and as I have heard her say many times before, she said:

“ADD is neither a deficit nor a disorder … we each think differently.”

Later, she showed me a passage from Vanier’s book, where he writes these words that have deep significance for an All Saints community that holds radical inclusion as a core value.

Vanier writes: “When I talk about “inclusion” of people with (and here I add “so-called”) disabilities … I am not just saying we should be kind to such people …. Nor “normalize” them to be “like us.’ …They have a gift to give to all, to each of us as individuals… and to society, in general.

“The excluded … live certain values we all need to discover and to live ourselves before we can become truly human. It is not a just a question of performing good deeds for those who are excluded but of being open and vulnerable to them in order to receive the life that they can offer.”

Now, Vanier is perpetuating his own binary that I’ll get to in a moment, and … the Gospel truth for us in his writing and Francis’ action is that when we don’t fit into the subjective norms around which society is structured, we don’t just need accommodations to somehow try to fit in better.

It is when we don’t fit in that become primary agents of unbound grace for the healing and transformation of ourselves, our community and the world.

Last week, I read to you Nick Wolterstorff’s words lamenting his son’s death:

“I shall look at the world through tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see.”

When we think differently. Feel differently. We see and move through the world differently. And that opens us up to be the generator of the new idea, the beautiful dance, the plaintive lament that will transform the world.

It is no accident that the world’s pre-eminent prophet on the very destruction of this planet, Greta Thunberg, is someone whose Asperger’s means she “thinks differently.” And, as Greta would be the first to say, we need to look beyond her to those from even further flung margins. Children and youth of color whom we may be less comfortable hearing convicting truths from than from a white girl from Sweden.

Prophets like Jamie Margolin, the queer, mixed-race Latina, founder of the Zero Hour movement. Autumn Peltier, a 13-year old “water warrior” for the Anishinabek Nation … and 14-year old Leah Namugerwa, a Ugandan student who strikes every Friday by not attending class in order to protest plastic pollution and other environmental calamities.

When we are different from the norm, be it neurodiversity, generation, being a member of a marginalized race, culture, class or more … the way we move through the world disrupts the forced patterns of the norm that can become prisons for us all.

When we are different from the norm, our very heartbeats can become the drum majors for God’s unforced rhythms of grace.

God whispers in Francis ear and awakens God’s Scoutlike, Frinklish love in Francis’ heart and Francis embraces the image of God with leprosy not to be kind but because he knows that person is the Christ … the presence of God specifically embodied in what made that person different. And the Christ in all of us is always a gift to be shared.

And … there is an even deeper and more surprising truth that springs from Francis’ actions and that reveals an unintended binary in Vannier’s words.

The leper is not “the other.” Each of us is the leper, too.

Last Sunday, hundreds of you brought cards on which you wrote secrets you wished you could tell and songs you longed to sing. We realized we never said what we would do with these cards which, though anonymous, represented you trusting us with your deep vulnerability. We also realized we needed to close that loop with you as a congregation and not leave you wondering!

What Sally and I decided was to treat them as stories shared in confession … and that she and I as people bound by vow to preserve the sanctity of confession, would read them, pray with them and let them shape our care for one another in community. And because of that, all we would share more broadly were themes.

What were the themes? Exactly what you would expect from a community of thoroughly human beings. We are lonely and scared. We have affairs and have been betrayed. We have stolen and we lied. We have been abused and we are abusers. We dream of love and justice. We long to sing our songs of freedom.

In short, we are deeply, beautifully human. And while there was not a single card that shocked me, there were many that grieved my heart with the thought “Oh my God, whoever you are, you are carrying this secret all by yourself, and that must be so hard, so exhausting!” There were so many that made my heart burst with admiration, “Oh my God, whoever you are, you are so brave and strong even anonymously to write this down and lay this on Christ’s table.”

So, here is the second truth that comes from Francis. Each of us is the leper, too. And that is not a deficit … it is a gift. The secret we carry … even if it is a secret of a terrible wound we have suffered or caused …. even if it is something we wish we could stop and cannot figure out how … the secret we carry is a gift and opportunity for healing and transformation if we carry it together.

Because we do not have deficits and we do not have disorders … we have wounds that need healing, lives that are ever transforming and differences that are the embodiment of God’s unforced rhythms of grace.

And God looks at each of us and all of us … God looks at you … with all your secrets and all your songs. God looks at you and me and every single one of us and says:

IT’S YOU!!! ImsoexcitedSoexcitedSoexcitedSoexcited!

God looks at you, at me, at every single one of us and says:

“I just have to be with this person and let them know they are loved and not alone!”

And God longs for us to embrace each other the same way.

For we are not only Francis gifted with the opportunity to embrace the person with leprosy … we are the person with leprosy whom Francis is gifted to embrace.

We are … each of us and all of us … loved beyond measure with God’s Scoutlike and Frinklish love.
So, are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come together. Come to this table. Share your secrets and your songs. Let us carry and sing them together and you’ll recover your life.

God is longing for you, waiting for you to come through that door so she can tackle you and lick you … and trudging slowly up the stairs to lay next to you as you sleep.

God is longing for you, not to follow a set of rules but to love and be loved with God’s Scoutlike, Frinklish love … and together to learn the unforced rhythms of grace. Amen.