I have a t-shirt inscribed with the letters "YMBALI". The letters stand for "You Might Be A Lutheran If"... and on the back of the shirt are a variety of endings to the sentence. So you might read it as, you might be a lutheran if you... sit down to sing "Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus" or you might be a lutheran if you rush into the burning church to save the coffee pot or YMBALI if there are three jello cookbooks in the church library. We can make some laugh at yourself jokes about lutherans in general but we need to be careful and refrain from using those generalizations to judge others. We are not all the same nor should we be.
When my husband and I were first married, I remember finally being included in certain things at church as an adult, even though I had been living on my own for years and put myself through college. I was called and asked to bring fruit salad to church for a funeral. Now you need to know that even though I was a life-long lutheran, I had grown up all over the country. So I stretched our newly-wed budget and bought fresh fruit, which was an extravagance for us, and made fruit salad and brought it to the church.
I got to the kitchen and was greeted by an older woman who looked at my bowl and then turned to someone else in the kitchen. "Hey, Myrtle (I don't remember their real names). What should we do with this?"
Another woman came over and looked at my bowl (one of our nicer wedding presents) and then at me and said, "Put it in the back of the fridge, and if we run out of fruit salad, we can put it out."
I left confused between anger and tears. I didn't know that they had meant fruited jello with whipped topping. What I knew was that I had brought the best I could and it wasn't good enough. I have kept the memory on purpose; not out of spite or to nurse my anger but I have remembered and tell it now because it was a lesson. Whether those women meant it that way or not, I know that if I had not been as strongly connected to my faith and to service in the church as I was, I never would have come back after that day. I'm sure they had not thought of driving me or anyone else away from the Church. But the lesson I learned from that day is how little it can take for us to make judgments or pass comments that are enough to discourage especially young Christians (in age and/or faith) from feeling welcomed into Christ's community.
Sometimes those of us who are long-time or life-time members in the church feel as if we have a right to expect things to be done the way they have always been done. We have worked and given for years and so our wishes should matter more than new people and new ideas. So we complain, or comment, or without thinking, "correct" people who do it differently. It's probably not meant to be discouraging or to be taken badly and in fact often happens without a lot of thought. But our years of faith and service don't earn us that privilege. Instead, we are asked even more strongly to think not of ourselves but to think of how our actions and words might affect those around us.
Am I saying that Christ expects more of us who have been in the church for years? Yes. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 8:9 of those who are stronger in the faith, "take care that this... does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak."
We are asked to think always of how our words and actions may seem to those who are new to the faith and/or to the faith community and make sure that we are accepting and welcoming to them. This duty comes before any privilege that we may feel we have earned. The new and or young among us will learn more from our actions of love and charity than by any hasty words we may say.
When we live out our faith in gentle welcome, we find that our community will grow, and so will our faith because when we welcome those young in faith or years, we welcome Christ into our midst. Read Matthew 18:5-6
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