Thanks be to God for summer camp staff!

The following is an edited sermon preached at the closing Eucharist at Mustang Island Family Camp and then at Trinity by the Sea, Sunday, August 14. The Reading was Luke 12: 49-56

Build one another up!
Bishop David Reed asked to reflect on how we build each other up---he’s obviously a camp kid turned counselor turned staff turned director. So, maybe not everyone who starts as a camper becomes a priest or a bishop, but it does raise up loving leaders for our church and for the world.
Camp makes leaders who think about building one another up because that is what camp does in so many ways.

Laura, Eli, and I spent the weekend at Mustang Island Family camp for our eighth year, and the new construction is beautiful, and will work well for retreat groups. The chapel has just been completed except for the furniture…but we stood around a surf board altar to celebrate Eucharist in that beautiful space.

There are more camps than Mustang Island, Camp Capers, Duncan Park, and Camp Allen. I’ve participated in retreats at Bishop’s Ranch outside San Francisco, Trinity on the North Carolina Outer Banks, and Kanuga in Western North Carolina. Camps are a big deal in the Episocpal Church, and I believe one of the things that makes our church what it is. They of course nourish the souls of campers, and retreat participants, but they also raise up such amazing leaders who I got to know this summer and especially this weekend at Mustang Island. 

These young adults who work at our camp are empowered to become servant leaders, or Jesus-style leaders, to all who arrive at a camp session. I actually believe at least half of why we have camp is to raise up leaders. Some grow up as campers, and some come as interns--we have an internship arrangement with Sewanee, and always have a few Sewanee students in our diocese each summer. This summer a former intern returned to work in a regular staff position. At Camp Capers, Duncan Park, and here at Mustang Island, the staff live in community, work to find their voice and style of leadership, and through the struggle God is at work.

One of the great and sometimes testing things about their work, is that they never know who will show up for camp. Who will arrive week after week to be in these temporary micro-communities of the spirit? They can’t know. We just sign up and show up. We are all thrown in together because a friend invites us or our church persuades us it’s a really good idea. We enter these temporary communities in the liminal space of camp. We get to shift into a different gear, work from a different part of our brain--we can let go of our work week persona, receive Christian hospitality, and play! 

God is at work in it all. The little interactions with strangers becoming our friends. The discovery of God’s amazing creatures in the touch tank or along a Hill Country river bank. They are spaces held for God to work on us. We do not choose who we make this journey with, and that is a good model for church. We are thrown in with people and families different from our own. We meet people who make help us become more accepting of our own families or friends. And through it all, we are loved and learn anew how to love.

If you haven’t guessed, the camp model is my model for church life…adapted for a long-term community. I hope that we are learning to be servant leaders here, finding our ministry and learning to serve Christ in all persons.

In our gospel reading Jesus talks about dividing family. It was not the gospel I used last night at the family camp Eucharist, but without getting too deeply into this complex reading sometimes the healthiest thing for us to do is divide ourselves from our family. One thing the church provides us is a family different our family of origin. While our families can be supportive, loving, and places we learn servant leadership, they can also be limiting, demeaning, and keep us from becoming who God has made us to be. To oversimplify, no family is perfect, and we all need to be connected with the wider community for the diversity of God’s family to help us become who God created us to be. Like camp, we don’t get to choose who comes to church, who sits next to us in Bible study, who is in line behind us at pot-luck, or who is fielding the ball next us at the softball game.

By the way, we named our team the Trinity Potlucks because we love our potluck lunches, and on the field, we never knew who would be playing so the name worked in a few ways!
The MICC staff even played on our team a couple of games, and I’m grateful to them who have carried a heavy burden this summer of a larger camp population without any change in the staffing. I hope it was, for them, a beloved burden, and I know they did an amazing job. May God bless them as they leave our island and go back to the world. They were a blessing to all of us who were there at a family camp to sing silly songs, got to pet a bonnet-head shark, build sand castles with people we just met, and of course eat delicious food.

Our camp staff of young adults are about sharing God’s love, serving Christ in one another, and having fun while doing it. Thanks be to God for our camps program that raises up leaders for the church and for the world. They represent Christ to the world, they offer us the love of God, and that love isn’t to be put in a picture frame to collect dust, it is to be given away immediately and repeatedly in our lives in the world. This is, as our Bishop reminds us in the theme, to build one another up.