Aug 24th: Jesus and the Party People, with Pastor Rick Russell.
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Jesus and the Party People with Pastor Rick Russell. Series: Beloved. Belonging. Delightful. A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: Matthew 11; 23; Luke 7; 11; 14.
Ever felt left out or lonely? This Sunday, our special guest Rick Russell of Mountain View Community Development is diving into a powerful story about belonging, community, and unexpected invitations. Join us online or in-person to explore how we can build connections that truly matter.
Transcript:
[Pastor Rick Russell]: So my older sister, who is in her 50s, now still reminds us of one of her earliest birthdays. She was first or second grade. She has a summer birthday late July. That’s a hard thing for a kid. Everyone is scattered on summer vacation, and that year, 40 years ago, she invited her friends from school for a birthday party at the swimming pool in the park, and no one came. It’s no wonder that memory still hangs around, and I suppose it’s okay that she retells that story as a warning to us to not forget her birthday amidst all of our busy summer plans, Jesus tells the story of a party, something like that. It’s a parable, a story meant to tell us what the kingdom of God is like. Jesus liked talking about the Kingdom of God. He talked about it more than anything else, more than heaven or hell, anything else the kingdom of God. He often told stories, to give us a picture of what that means. In Jesus story, he says, according to Luke 14, a certain man was preparing a great banquet invited many guests. At the time of the banquet, he sent his servant to tell those who had been invited come for everything is now ready, but they were all scattered on summer vacation. Actually, it says they had different excuses for not making it. The owner of the house said, then I want you to go quickly into the streets and alleys of the town. I want you to bring in the poor and the crippled and the blind and the lame, and then there was still room. So the master said to the servants, I want you to go out to the roads and the country lanes and compel them to come in so that my house will be full. You know, it’s quite an experience to throw a party and no one shows up for it. That’s a searing sense of rejection. And maybe the people most able to relate to that are the ones who never got the invitation in the first place, the desire to belong, to fit, to have friends, to have community, is core to all of us, and yet, we all know what it’s like to be left out, uninvited, not picked for the Team outside of the inner circle a couple years back, our hospital system initiated a survey of what the community needs. They said, we’ll prioritize our funding behind the greatest community needs. And in the past, I’ve seen topics like alcoholism, suicide prevention, they will survey hundreds of community members and listen to what the community is saying it needs. Just imagine if someone asked you, from your perspective, what would you say is the most pressing issue that our community faces after the hospital surveyed the community, do you know what they concluded? The community told them that it was loneliness, people lacking a sense of belonging. I find that fascinating, that that’s what our community said, loneliness, our region is growing as one of the fastest among the state. There are more people living here than ever. The population is always growing. We are more connected virtually, whether it’s cell phones in our pockets or high speed internet at home, or the capacity to do virtual meetings or video calls with devices we can wear. Somehow, we are more connected to people than ever before, and yet many of us feel so disconnected. National surveys reveal the average American’s pool of close friends is shrinking, and it seems increasingly harder to build and maintain something that feels like genuine community. So in the story that Jesus tells, the invitation goes out. It goes out to the people on the margins, behind the hedges. Some translations say to the people who live out there on the margins. I always thought that marginalized people was a metaphor. I never really took it literally, until recently, the work I do these days is mostly with unhoused folks, and they are marginalized. I don’t mean that metaphorically, I mean that literally. These are folks who live in our forest lands, outside of our city, or beyond the industrial lands, or, you know, the other places around town, just at the edges of our cities. These are the literal margins of our community, and we have a lot of people who live there. I’ve been a pastor for the last 20 years, eight, 910, years ago there, there was no homeless shelter of any kind in our community. Some friends from a nearby community came to our church, and they said, if you would host a shelter in the winter in your gym and bring some volunteers, bring some food, then our staff could take the lead. We’ll stay up all night. We’ll make sure it’s safe and operates well. I remember taking that decision to our church leadership. I think we all knew what Jesus wanted us to do in that situation, but it took us a lot of questions to get there homeless people inside our building. What about safety? What about sanitation? What about our children? What about our neighbors? What What about the insurance company? What about, what about, what about, they were the kinds of questions that church leaders should ask. It felt like we’d set this little idea of a boat out on the water. And then in that leadership meeting, we all took turns shooting holes in the boat. And that boat took a lot of water on but at the end of the meeting, it was still floating barely. And so we tried it. Every night, 2025 folks would shuffle into the gym and sleep on the COTS we had there every night, a half dozen volunteers from the church would come down and make dinner, and that’s when something like a switch went off. Homelessness was no longer an issue. It was names and faces and stories and neighbors, relationships were formed, and we were clear with our volunteers. If you’re going to come down to the church and you’re going to volunteer, don’t stand on one side of the counter and serve the food across to the people on the other side. You get a plate of food yourself, and you get out there and you find someone to sit next to, and you eat dinner with them, and you pour them a cup of coffee, and you let them pour you let them pour a cup of coffee for you. And someone get out a deck of cards. Let’s see who wants to play. And if someone goes outside to smoke a cigarette, then you go out there, and you stand out there with them. And if you haven’t started smoking yet, this might be a good time for you to start right. To start right now. Seven or eight years later, we’ve had no issues with safety, no issues with neighbors, no issues with insurance, sanitation, though, I’ll confess to this during the winter months, our church smelled like body odor for several winters. I tried to tell the church, well, that’s just what Jesus smells like. I don’t think they bought it, though. That’s when someone said, you know, we have that large storage closet down the hallway. It’s for the quilting group. They store all the materials in there. What do you think they would be willing to let us convert that into some showers and some washers and dryers? Someone said, I know a plumber who’d help out. I think he’d volunteer. And one of the other folks there said, Well, I’m a general contractor. I think we could get some volunteers and some donated materials, and we could do this whole thing for three or $4,000 and I thought, wow, showers and laundry for three or $4,000 we should do that. We did it. It was more like 40 or $50,000 but the seed had been planted, and it had taken roots, and volunteers set it up, and shelter guests would come in and they could do laundry and they could take a shower, and the building no longer smelled like body odor, and our volunteers opened it during the day for anyone else who needed access to A shower and some clean clothes. Last year, about 20 volunteers fulfilled over 2500 appointments. That’s 2500 showers, 2500 loads of laundry. From there, it just seemed like everything we did got bigger and more complex, but easier, because we had relationships with people who lived on the margins. The next thing you know, we were hosting a safe parking area in our parking lot. We were providing a safe and legal, sanitary place for people who lived in cars and RVs, and we provided a case manager to help them. Work toward a stable housing goal. And then we went down to the VFW, and we asked the vets if they’d like to do the same. And they said, Sure, yeah, we’ll do that. And the next thing you knew, we had 10 locations and 45 spaces and an office in two different communities. And I could keep on going. Of course, the challenge for unhoused folks to finding housing is to find housing that they can afford. And so our next project is bigger and more audacious and yet somehow still easy. Right now, we’re going to build a neighborhood of 75 homes for chronically unhoused people, folks with a disability, most of them in their 60s and 70s. It won’t be fancy, but it’ll be good. They’ll pay rent that they can afford. These are small homes, 400 square feet, 600 square feet, but real homes on a foundation with a kitchen and a bathroom. 10% of those homes will be for people who are not leaving homelessness, meaning they will be homes for people like you and for me, who want to belong to a community like that, people who want to be a neighbor of peace amidst people who have lived through chaotic circumstances in the middle of it all will be a big service center for case managers and support staff, and most importantly, a big banquet room for parties, for birthdays that never got celebrated, For open mic nights for artists who never got to perform, for bingo and karaoke nights for people who just want to have a good time. And who knows, if you come down, maybe you can be the card dealer. The kingdom of God is like a party. It’s like a banquet, according to Jesus. And if that’s true, then I think the followers of Jesus should be party people, not partisan people who identify with the powerful and the connected, but party people who know how to have a good time with people on the margins. Friend of mine used to travel once a week out to the margins of the city. There’s a prison out there. She’d bring with her guests business owners and hiring managers. She had a whole course for teaching men in the prison how to start a business, how to find a good job, how to interview, how to name their dreams for their lives. And each year, she’d have a group, a big graduation class for these men. At the end of the program, she’d invite me as a guest. The inmates, who would work in the kitchen, would make all of this food for the party. I remember cinnamon rolls as big as a dinner plate, and at the party, she’d bring these graduates up one by one, and she would heap praise on them. She would name their dreams and aspirations. She’d call out the distinctive good she saw in each one of them. Those graduation parties always felt like the kingdom of God. Maybe it’s time for you to join the party, to find people to celebrate with, to gather around some food, to send out some invitations, to put yourself in proximity to people on the margins, in essence, to become a builder of belonging. Let me pray, gracious God. I i pray for everyone that you would stir in us a desire and a calling to be a builder of belonging, Lord that you would help us to see those right around us, those who who may seem invisible at first, but help us to see the humanity right around us to whom you are calling us to build community with Lord. Give us that vision and give us the courage to respond to form relationships where, right now it’s strangers, and we pray all of this in Jesus name amen.
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