September 10, 2006

Rally Day 2006

MAKING DISCIPLES, MAKING A DIFFERENCE

Churchman, song-writer, visionary, and occasional eccentric Herb Brokering of Bloomington wrote this parable: Once there was a man who tried to understand the Resurrection. Once when a truck was pouring a sidewalk, he planted a seed in wet cement at night. When the foundation was laid and the building was finished, he went to work there. It was dedicated in the spring when the apple blossoms were out. He looks at the sidewalk every morning.

What do you think he'll see there someday? He thinks it'll be apple trees - and he may be quite right. Small seeds can do amazing things to sidewalks, some-thing like the difference resurrection makes.

Making disciples, making a difference - or planting seeds, seeds of resurrection, in a hard-surface world, making disciples one by one without always knowing what will come of it. We have our hopes. That's certainly true for parents, eh? We have dreams for our children, hopes for them. Almost certainly some will not come true. That they never suffer loss or sorrow, for example. Yet what may come of such an experience for our kids as they grow up? Pain and disappointment may become a preface to resurrection in their lives. We adults know that quite well; it's been true for us. We're wiser, better people because of some things that have happened to us.

There couldn't have been anything harder, more impenetrable, than a cemetery grave-stone, but the seed called Christ that God planted burst forth like an Arboretum apple tree in full fall harvest, bushel-basketsful of... disciples.

Maybe God could see what would come of Easter but none of the original eleven disciples could, nor any of the 120 people in that first church or even the 3000 baptized right afterward - and none of us - can look that far ahead. What we see is right in front of us, but that's enough: That babe in arms... these children up here a moment ago... that person sitting beside you or in your bed... the schoolwork facing you tonight and the bus or the drive to work tomorrow morning... that person we deal with five days a week - that's what we see, but God has a longer look, and God sees resurrection planted in us, sees disciples... making a difference.

These next 20 or 30 words are the most important things I'll say today: You are called to do something no one else in the entire Christian church can do, because no one else is you in the chemistry of your relationships. No one else in the entire world can do what only you can do. That's been reinforced for us again as we remember 9/11 and the unique differences individual men and women made that day... on Flight 93, or in the stairwells of the World Trade Center. Individuals in just that place at that time made those differences.

You are either a seed or a sower of seeds. No, we're all both seeds and sowers, and either way, disciples making a difference. I suspect you're still a little skeptical. Do you doubt your own significance in this, the difference you make?

On the far southern border of Chanhassen right along soon-to-be-old high-way 212 is Seminary Fen. "Fen" is probably an unfamiliar word but it's a particularly unique natural environment, a wetland environment, that friends of the earth here in Carver County are now trying to protect from development. It's called Seminary Fen because of Assumption Catholic College and Seminary, which flourished in the 50s and the 60s. It closed in 1970, but before that the buildings and grounds originally were the Mudcura Mineral Springs Sanitarium (as they advertised...) for "those suffering from rheumatism and skin, kidney, and nerve diseases." Dr. Henry Fischer opened Mudcura in 1909. In its heyday people came from all over the upper Midwest and supposedly from as far away as Alaska... It's said they had particular success treating those with alcoholism, and indeed Dr. Fischer's son Jim was one of the two men who started AA in the 1930s.

Now what you see is a bare and abandoned site with little trace of what had been a busy place. The gate is locked and posted against trespassers, and the driveway leads up a hill to nowhere.

When the seminary left, the place started to fall apart. Grass grew in the cracks of the sidewalk. One thing untended leads to another left to run down, and soon vandals had their way with what was left, and in 1997 either arson or an unauthorized bonfire that got out of hand burned it down.

Now, what's that have to do with the price of beans, you ask. Well, that's the opposite of positive, small and individual differences that add up, creating the opposite the resurrection possible in seeds that we can sow. An apple seed can break a sidewalk and grass can wreck and entire driveway. One broken window lets in bats and night owls. One vandal can destroy an entire campus. One person in the right place can become a disciple with a bag of seeds and a harvest called resurrection.

Once there was a girl who had a special speech defect. When she was older she went to a modeling school to learn how to be more graceful. While doing that her speech defect fit in with the new way she walked. She dances beautifully, and those who know her especially like the way she talks. Now she teaches dancing to a professor of languages who thinks he was born with a dancing defect. Making disciples, in other words, making a difference.

Nathan Castens
Chanhassen, Minnesota


The two parables from Herbert Brokering, "I" Opener: 80 Parables, St. Louis: Concordia, 1974

Daniel John Hoisington, Chanhassen: A Centennial History