Speech Points from Two Years ago...

To Know Where We Were...

John 8:31 – 36/38

- So, let's break it down again...

-Jesus says to them "you need to be set free from this "stuff" and my Word is the Way..."

-They say "We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone."

- Maybe there's a little psychological reactance here~ as if to say "Don't tell us we're not free... we'll tell YOU how free we are—we're descendants of Abraham, not anyone's slaves"

- Here's the part that made me do a double-take: THEY WERE SLAVES IN EGYPT. Remember that whole Exodus thing? Apparently they don't... they also left-out the whole CAPTIVITY IN BABYLON part which is mysteriously similar...

- I don't think its that they don't remember or are lying... it's that they can't seem to reconcile it with their declaration. They can't reconcile being children of Abraham AND being slaves.

- So, when they reconstruct history in their minds, they remember where they came from and where they are but forget where they were in the middle. They skimmed over that part.

- Now, I've come as close to doing that as anyone here—it was my job to recap where we had been. I've been here five years.

- When I came to the university in August of 2004, Wesley was central to my social and spiritual life as an undergrad.

-This Foundation was a place where we could be accepted as part of a whole and nurtured as individuals. We went on mission trips and retreats: it was spectacular.

- We even had our own awesome praise-band that I got to be part of...

- ...and now, too, we have a great praise band. This year was a wonderful year—one that changed the way I'll think about this organization forever. I love these people and I love the way they love me...

- I could make things nice and neat and just sew together that first year and this last year. 04 and 09 are my favorite incarnations of the group.

-But to do that would leave too many parts missing

- this isn't the same program format that we had when I was a freshman, as many of you can testify.

-Many things have changed in the foundation since I was eighteen—we have a new campus minister (you're still new to me Tim)

-Some of you may have noticed our cool new lounge area in what used to be the Wesley office—or, more accurately, what used to be a giant cluttered mess where we stored everything.

-Yet, this organization did not become what it is over night—we had some darker places to visit first.

- Five years ago we had small groups spread throughout the week, which worked very well for the people who were in the Foundation when I got here. Here's the thing...

-It didn't work for us. We started to get fragmented— sometimes, only three people would come to a small group. We were too spread-out. That is a place where we've been—we were there.

- So, we got together and we talked it out. We worked through that and came up with a format that would bring us together better. We made it out of that valley... after a while...

Ú Now for another shocker: this organization is filled with human beings!!! People.

- Some forgettable times occurred during those transition years—many of us became slaves.

- Not slaves to Egypt or even necessarily to MSU but to some systemic interpersonal problems

--there was a time in this Foundation when some people were so afraid of the gossip chain that they held their experiences deep inside themselves. We were held captive—because self-disclosure is a key to relational development and it takes time and hard work to get there as a total group.

--In fact there was a time in this Foundation when we seemed to be developing nebulous factions of people. I've spent the past three years studying interpersonal communication... I STILL have no idea where that came from... except that we were more fragmented then.

--It was really difficult to tell what boundaries were social and which ones were purely psychological—at least not until we sat down as a group and talked about it.

-That was a place where we were. It wasn't anyone's fault—in fact I would say it was a giant misunderstanding. Members of the Foundation had to learn to be open again... to be vulnerable to each other and to God's purpose rather than staying slaves.

--It goes without saying that I don't like remembering some of these times.

- If people weren't getting hurt by each other, they were hurting themselves by staying isolated.

- These are places that we've been – but no matter what challenge we needed to overcome or mis-steps that were made or even successes we enjoyed—throughout that time, we never stopped being children of Abraham. AND we never stopped being part of this group's heart.

- The mistake was not being slaves because that can and does happen to us all the time, for this reason or that... the mistake is to forget that by Faith and the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ we are always children of Abraham.

--The Jews Jesus spoke to were just as much children of Abraham as Isaac and Jacob but they weren't any more children of Abraham than their ancestors who were slaves in Egypt or captives in Babylon.

- In one of my favorite Bible stories, those captives come back and rebuild a destroyed Jerusalem, you can find it in the book of Nehemiah.

- We're children of Abraham too, as Wesleyans, and we never stopped. There is no reason not to remember the difficult places we have been because we've been delivered by Love from above and by one another. Hard times will come again and they will pass again—but we're always brothers and sisters in Christ.

-And I'd also like to point out that we're here now because we wanted to be together in the end—and we are together in the end.

- It's a lesson I needed for myself when I was feeling like a fragment.

*pause*

-I wondered this afternoon what it would be like to finish my freshman year and then wake-up one August morning, years later, a twenty-two year-old man: older, wiser, still unemployed. What would it be like to wake-up as if nothing in the middle had happened... good or bad. Major or minor.

-What a terrible empty story that would be—to not have spent every one of those years with these people and remember it for the powerful experience it has been.

--We made this group work in the midst of changes that we could not help and in spite of our human nature we see flashes of God in one-another.

-I would never want us to forget the story of how we got to where we are today—

--because that journey was worth whatever life threw at us--- and I still love the Wesley Foundation.