Gopher Wesley Sermons

Romans 13:8-10

Matthew 18:15-20

The Reason We Are Here

            Well, you’ve made it.  You’ve survived your first week of college (of your first week of grad school), or simply you’ve made it through the first week of another endless year.  (Sigh)…. Don’t worry, you are on your way.  It’ll be Christmas before you know it. 

            Often when we first come onto campus and start up and start a new year there are these feelings of excitement, hope, and just newness.  But for many of us, including myself (even though I’m a pretty big extrovert) the feeling of the sheer number of people becomes overwhelming.  You’re once again just a number in a huge factory of people getting a degree.  In fact, there are now over 55,000 numbers just getting a degree.  And judging by how long I could have stood in line for Panda the other day at Coffman, I would definitely feel like a number on this campus.  It’s stressful

            And that stress, it remains so until you realize what you are supposed to do here in college.  In many ways, the first thing have to do when you set up shop on a college campus is to establish a place for you to find community, a community that gives you a place to thrive. And communities are important. Some are big, some are small, but they should a place where as the old saying goes “everybody knows your name.”

            Religious groups on campus often try to fill that void, but they do so with different intentions.  Some groups are there to provide you a space to simply come and worship once a week and to have a bible study.  These groups tend to spend most of their time talking about how your faith is the only thing you have to deal with, and that you simply show up, get given information about how to live your faith, and you walk away.  They tend to be more answer focused, less interested in probing into deeper questions, and generally are less concerned with who you are as much as what you believe. 

            But something always strikes me about these groups.  They never fully get that you are in college, and that there is something more to why you are here. And it’s not what you might think.  See college has become about getting degrees.  It has become this space for us to get in, pay a whole ton of money, and get out of as quickly as possible. Nevermind what people say about college being the best time of your life, we’ve got bills to pay and a life in suburban America to live.  This past week I met with a friend of mine and we were talking about how people on campus ask questions, or think deeply.  So many people just feel like they are here and just trying to punch a ticket or finish this or that so they can get a degree.  But that’s not why you are here.

            You are here to figure out how to live, how to be you.  How to be a part of a bigger world that you ever imagined.  You are being trained as global citizens, but you are ultimately trying to figure out who you are.  And that means something all together different than simply being an ecom major or a dance major.  I know some of you may be hearing this for the first time, and you may want to question what I have to say (and I encourage that by the way, but college is about probing into the depths of your own self and asking serious questions and searching for framing stories about your life and the lives of those around you.  This is not something you can learn exclusively in a classroom and certainly something that can not be measured by an assigned grade.  This about the real world and real things.

            Thus, you are here to figure out how to be you.  Ok. 

Ok, so why do I need a religious group.  Why can’t I just do that on my own.  WHY ARE WE HERE.  I’m here to tell you that if you want, you can do your religion, and everything else for that matter on your own. But you might find the world to be a lonely place.  What you need is a deeper sense of community, something authentic and real and hard to capture because it’s a place full of different people.  You need a place where people do know your name but not one where you are judged based on what you believe.  Religious communities can be positive or negative, and as a pastor I’ve spent most of my career working through stereotypes of what Christianity was and is.  I was there myself when I started college.  I thought religion for me was irrerevant, and it was based on what I had experienced, but something changed for me when I entered cautiously into a community of the Wesley Foundation at the University of Northern Iowa.  I had learned that there was something more than just simply a degree to be had.  I even had learned that I needed something more than to simply realize I was there to figure out myself.  But what I didn’t learn, was how!

            The scriptures tonight speak of mutual concern for one another.  Even in their sometimes aggressive stances, each of our scriptures speak to the idea that there is to be a mutual concern for others.  As Paul says in Romans, the sum of the commandments is to learn to love your neighbor.  And in Matthew, the specifics may not mean much, but the general idea is that qualms and disagreements are best solved directly.  Thus, the community does not suffer and the relationships between persons actually grow.  These may seem like rudimentary scripture lessons, but historically, they are very innovative ideas.  Most of the time in ancient Palestine and Israel, people were scrapping by for anything they could, which meant there wasn’t always a lot of concern for others, especially those of different families and especially those you didn’t know.  But this call, in these two different ways, one to sum up the commandments, another to solve issues, are exactly the opposite of what the culture was living, and in fact the very acts of sharing concerns and having love for one’s neighbor became a bonding agent and a mark of the early Christian movement. 

            In order for these early Christians to learn what is meant to be a member of this community, they were naturally drawn to be together. They were trying to figure out who they were, what this message of Jesus was, but in order to do so, in order to learn the how, they had to work together, to be connected.  If they didn’t practice their mutual concern, if they only held to their own needs and never gave of themselves, they would be missing the practice of the faith.  This means that being a part of this early Christian community was about learning to be something different the standard culture, but it could only be practiced in the presence of others. You can’t love your neighbor is all you care about is yourself.   The only way to learn how to be was to practice with others.

            So it goes with us as well.  You are not here to get a degree.  You may think you are, but your concerns are much broader than simply that which is the bookends of your journey of college. 

It is the experience of being in college that matters, that practice of finding oneself. 

And that practice, that almost holy experience that has captivated millions in the United States over the past, it can only be done when we learn how. 

So answered that you were here at college for your own self understanding, but I believe the reason we are here in this setting, tonight, in a United Methodist related campus ministry, is to practice finding yourself, understanding who you are, and to do so in community.  Now you may be really religious, sort of religious, not really that religious, or completely unsure where you fall. That’s fine with me, and I bet it’s fine with most of us.

            This place is for you.  This is the place where I hope you will realize college is about finding yourself.   The reason we are here is to find others who will travel this journey of college with us, who will ask deep questions about who they are and will practice and share then with you.  You will ask questions of your faith, your life, your purpose, your values, whatever it is.  You will find yourself here at college, and I hope you will realize that you are here in this space to learn how. You can find another faith community, there are a lot of them, but I doubt many of them will tell you to ask questions that don’t have answers, will tell you that it’s ok to be different, will tell you that you don’t have to believe the same things as the pastor to be right. And if that’s what you are looking for, then I can recommend some places. But if you want to be here to be in community, to experience something very different and something that has changed my life and several others sitting in these chairs, then I invite you here.

Because you will find something different. 

You will discover that the reason you are here is more than simply for the religion, but instead for all the things that can not be summed up in answers and can not be found in the classrooms, but can be understood only together in community. 

You are at college not for the degree, but for the experience of finding yourself.  And you are here, to find out how!