When I got past that I looked at the gospel and went, “Oh great, it’s the apocalypse.” I didn’t want to preach about the apocalypse. The whole fire and brimstone aspect of God’s judgment is something I haven’t completely reconciled with my understanding of grace – it’s always been an angry side of a loving God that I don’t like to deal with. But I figured I’d let it sit until 8th week, and, as reliably happens at U of C, 8th week got closer and so did the fiery end of the world. In the middle of relationships falling apart, apocalyptic midterms and an unrehearsed choir with a furious director, I found that point last week where I just wanted to be done. That point when gray and damp seep out of the buildings and onto the streets, when life is just hard. The point when all I want is to go and be with God. When that love pulls me, suggests abandoning my difficult, broken relationships, abandoning my work and that difficult search for meaning in it to go and be wrapped warmly and finally in that love. The disciples in Luke’s gospel understand that desire. When is the end coming? They ask him. When is that time of relief when everything will be made right again, ordered according to God’s plan? Something in their question is eager, echoes of Malachi who understands the end as a time of ultimate retribution when the wrongs of the world will be righted.

So I, like the disciples, started looking to Jesus for answers. But he doesn’t answer the question. We think we’re getting an answer; after. After nations rise against nations, after betrayal, famine and plague. When will this happen? We know when the temple will be destroyed; 70 AD, when the Romans take Jerusalem or 8th week, about two hours before my econ midterm. And yet, not quite. Because these chaotic collapses are always happening. People and their societies are always fighting, always falling apart, always hurting one another. And the end does not come immediately after, Jesus tells us. Just after. If those things are happening now, and they always have been happening now, his answer doesn’t tell us anything. We pass through these points like the uptaken breath before midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999; then we deflate and unsquinch our eyes moments later to find the world has not in fact ended. We are in 9th week, or the year 2000. We are disappointed. Just a little bit. Because then we would have had answers. We would know. Jesus doesn’t give us the satisfaction.

“Don’t worry about when that will be,” he tells us. “First, you have something more real to deal with. Deal with your lives, because you will be betrayed and put in prisons and called to testify in my name.” That’s not what I was asking. I was asking, when do I get to be done? I was calling you to account, saying, “When are you going to come back and fix this broken world?!” There are people who sleep on the heat vents on the Midway. There are wealthy neighborhoods on the Northside that are unrecognizable as part of the Chicago I live in every day. The cellphone in my pocket is the complicated product of sweat shop labor in Taiwan and a civil war in the Congo. I ate today. My second grade student, Thabang, and his family didn’t. God alone can fix this world.

In this gospel, wars, plagues, famines and betrayals do not signal the end of the world. Those dark things are part of this world we live in. Before the end of the world, they will happen. But they do not signal an imminent coming. Don’t spend your time figuring out when the apocalypse will come, counting days, pages or problem sets until break or graduation. He tells his disciples, you cannot rely on food, health, states, communities, families or your own expectations. These structures will not always be here. This is true for the future, and true in the past and true now. Human creations fail, have failed, will fail. Jesus tells us, I do not fail. I am always and constantly with you, if you make up your minds to accept me. If you stop preparing for something else and live presently in the world around you. Endure, he says. We have from Thessalonians this command to work. “Do not be weary in doing what is right.” Even when I have taught Itumeleng this sum seventeen times, in seven different ways, Jesus calls on me to have as much patience and love the eighteenth time I teach him as I should have had the first. Even when there is this longing to be done, here is Jesus saying, “No. Stay and work, and testify. And it will not be easy, or pleasant or without pain. But it is what you have to do.” We cannot wait for Christ to come. Because we are in a broken world. But we are in it. And Christ condemning the state of our world does not condemn our contributions to it.

The verses of this chapter before the reading recount the widow, who gives a coin from her meager savings to the temple. Jesus praises her gift as greater than the gifts of those who give out of their wealth, but some read the story as a condemnation of the temple system, which forced the marginalized to offer money they did not have. The morality of the system, the temple’s structure, is profoundly questionable. But the widow’s contribution is not ruined by that fact. She cannot change the world, nor can we. We cannot end hunger. But we also cannot know God’s plan for bringing about its eventual demise. We are not supposed to. If we focus on ends – on creating significant political or economic change – we burn out easily, we quail at the futility of our efforts and lives. But we can continue to do the work, only because to do nothing is impossible, and because we know we find God in it. We are called by Christ to work with him and in him.

This is not an exhortation to put our heads down and work without asking why. Rather, it is offering a way to challenge that unanswerable why with an answer that does not abandon us to whether it’s a fulfilling optimistic day or not. We work for and with the God who made us. We endure each day to carry out whatever plan he has for us in a plan infinitely greater than what we can imagine or predict. That paradise of dimensions we cannot comprehend that we talked about last week. And we cannot be wearied by the fact that we do not immediately see that kingdom coming with our efforts. Christ calls us to have faith that, even in prison or finals week, he is with us, giving us words and unshakeable justification.

In the final line of today’s reading, Jesus says, “By your endurance you will gain your souls.” The word “souls” is in some places translated as lives. The Greek incorporates a sense of wholeness, personhood and integrity. By only anticipating the end of this life apart from God, Jesus tells us, we are in some sense not whole people. By endurance through this inescapable world, we come to call on Christ in the present. We require him as the only certain source of meaning and reliability. We know this in our own lives. It is by our trials that we learn to appreciate God and Christ’s sacrifice more dearly. God has saved my life more than once, and I have seldom felt closer to him than in these moments. We discover God in new ways when we fight with him, when we demand his presence and strength. He calls us to draw closer to him in that faith, relying on him alone. My teachers in South Africa knew God intimately because there was nothing else they could rely on. When food was on the table, it was often only and obviously a work of God. By our work in faith, we incorporate Christ into our actions as our only meaning and into our very beings. By our endurance, I would venture, we bring Christ eventually into the world.

No general definition of campus ministries can really do them justice. Even the four here in Chicago, which we represent, are each very individual and unique. So I’d like to tell you some personal experiences, both my own and those of my friends at Brent House at the University of Chicago, to give you a better feel for what we’re like.

When we were first thinking about this presentation, the other delegates from Brent House and I asked ourselves how best to describe our ministry at the UofC. Our answer was quite simple: food and prayer. I think I need to say a bit more than that, though.

Why food? you may ask. At Brent House, our Sunday services are in the evening, and we all take turns to cook a wonderful supper for afterwards. We all sit around the living room of the house, with our plates balanced on our knees and discuss deep theological topics, or just whine about our homework loads. These conversations, whether profound or banal, are an important part of how our community is built and strengthened. We aren’t just a group of people coming together for an hour or so to worship on Sunday and then ignoring each other for the rest of the week. We are a community of good friends, who can relax in one another’s company, and eating together is a key component of that.

Brent House has a comforting atmosphere. It is in fact an actual house, with a kitchen and living room, and so on. I think this helps the home-like feeling. At the end of her four years at the University, one girl wrote, “When everything at Chicago was new, [Brent House] was the first place I felt at home.” I think that most of us feel that way about Brent House. It’s the kind of place where you can wear jeans to church if you like, or if you’re like me, and prefer dressing up, you don’t feel out of place either. And if things ever get to serious, Casey the dog is sure to break the mood by jumping into someone’s lap and demanding attention. Most importantly, on an academic campus that can sometimes be, if not openly hostile, then at least unwelcoming to religious students, Brent House is a place to rest and take shelter from the occasional condemnation of our “irrational” beliefs.

This feeling of a refuge is common among the campus ministries. The students from the campus ministry at Northern Illinois University say that their campus ministry provides a relief from the daily grind of grades and homework and a chance to relax with people who share similar values. Canterbury, the campus ministry at Northwestern University, is also known as a safe place for gays and lesbians, a place where they are accepted as who they are. Most importantly, the discussions and conversations carry on outside of Canterbury house, extending to a wider community.

Discussion is also very important at Brent House, and that is one of my favorite aspects of our ministry. I’m a cradle Episcopalian, and like many, I was never really comfortable talking about God when I was growing up. In fact, I didn’t get over that until two years ago, when I lived and worked at an evangelical Lutheran retreat center in Bavaria, Germany. There I learned to talk about my faith and my God without embarrassment. Coming back, I didn’t want to change that, and to my great joy, I found in Brent House a community of people as eager to discuss God as I am. We are all questioning and seeking; I think especially at our age, everybody is, and it is so wonderful to have a place where it is safe to ask those questions and talk about our doubts. Last year on Easter, one of our members was baptized at the Cathedral. She had converted to Christianity about a year earlier, while she was living in South Africa, and when she came to Chicago, she was used to “praise songs and hellfire preaching” as she put it. And yet, she found in Brent House and the Episcopal church the kind of community she was looking for, a place to strengthen and grow her faith, a welcoming group of people, ready to talk to her.

At Brent House, students are involved in planning and carrying out the liturgy. We tend towards the traditional side, using the prayer book and hymnal, and even breaking out the incense on feast days. Unlike the popular misconception of youth, we don’t need trendy music and modern rewordings of the liturgy to appreciate worship. Although alternate services can be fun as well: last year Brent House helped plan a U2charist, a Eucharist service to the music of U2. The South Loop campus ministry, serving the several universities in the Loop, celebrates in a more relaxed style, singing along with guitars and other instruments. They also have quieter forms of worship, such as contemplative prayer and meditation.

Over the years, many Brent House students have gone on to divinity school or lay ministry, and currently 3 of us are discerning whether we are called to ordained ministry. Brent House provides a nurturing community to explore a sense of a call, which can be rather difficult to do sometimes. I am so glad to be part of the wonderful community that is Brent House, which supports us through whatever spiritual journey we are on. I know, regardless of our calling, all of us look forward to serving God in the wider church and the world.

REFRAIN
Hail thee festival day!
Blest day of Chicago’s Convention.
Day when our diocese
All comes together in prayer.

ALL TOGETHER
Bring us together on this
Blessed day of new bishop election.
Day to discern and cast votes
Joined in a kingdom of faith.

REFRAIN

ALL TOGETHER
Lo for our eight candidates
To choose from among and between
Gould and Johnson, Koomson and Lee,
Lind, Rose, Safford, Sabune!

CLERGY
Fiftieth Ballot’s been cast!
Who knows when we will be done here.
I’ve still got church in the morning
And my sermon’s not done!

REFRAIN

LAY
Please let us out of this place!
Come on, this isn’t conclave.
Nine days of work we’ve now missed,
Our jobs are sure to be lost…!

EVERYONE OVER FORTY!
Thurible, Mitre and Alb,
Lavabo Bowl a-and the verge:
Can our church be more obscure?
Help us to make clear our faith!

EVERYONE UNDER FORTY!
Ancient traditions live now,
Trust in the spirit to shine forth.
Authentic witness of truth
Will feed a world hungry for God!

“If you don’t have young people in your church, you’re gonna die. If you don’t have somebody making noise in the back so you can’t hear the sermon, you’re just gonna die.” ~Sabune
“I think the single most important constituency in this election is going to be the people who aren’t sitting in this room, and that’s people ages 5-19.” ~Safford
“Youths are not the future of the church, they are the church of today.” ~Gould, Lee, Lind

Who are we? These nebulous youths. Are we the beneficiaries of youth ministry, campus ministry, Sunday school, youth groups? Sitting in an audience of over thirty people, I am intensely aware of the fact that I am the only one under 40 in the room. One after the other, the bishop candidates tell me what the youth need and how we relate to the church. They all think we need to be included; some have ideas about how. Strikingly absent from their discussion is any coherent message about what we have to offer the church. Questions about the deacons and staff are phrased, “What are their roles?” while questions about youth ministry are phrased, “What is the bishop’s role in…?” What about me, I want to ask them. Surely you must have a job for a student, with energy and passion, every bit as devoted to her church and congregation as those with more settled lives. What role is there in the church for an activist, a person still actively challenging her faith and the church in which she lives it? What role, for someone without a family or a job to tie her down? What role for a child of God who still remembers her baptism and conversion? What role, for those of us in communities where the peace and love of God could never be more necessary? For me, the answer the next bishop of Chicago ultimately gives will be powerfully indicative of the kind of church we want to have. May God hold us ever in the palm of His hand.

~Laura

I returned to the house around 5:40 to find Melissa and Tammy cooking their hearts out (some really delicious pasta with sage and walnuts, and corn chowder–yum!) in preparation for the evening’s Dinner and Conversation with Martha Nussbaum. Within 10 minutes the doorbell began to ring and people began to arrive. David was incredibly hospitable, introducing himself and making sure that people had places to sit. We had around 45 people for the event, which was quite informative, with some great discussion.

We were still in full swing a little before 8 pm, when our diocesan convention delegates and alternates (the first students ever to represent Brent House at convention) arrived. They sat in the dining room (along with some some other interested folks) to talk about the nominees for bishop. In true U of C style, they engaged the nominee’s essays with a critical eye, looking for the contexts and subtexts, asking probing questions. That’s where I left them sometime near 9 pm. I am so impressed with the care they are taking in preparing for this election.

Not all days are this full at Brent House, but it’s becoming more common. All of the members of the Brent House community–residents, peer ministers, board, Casey the canine minister–want the house to be a place where people feel welcomed and can connect with each other, rest and be refreshed. Thanks to their dedication, it’s happening!

Thanks especially to Tyler Zoanni for planning and coordinating (and staying very calm in the midst of it all), to the volunteers (whose names I don’t know) who cooked and carried, and to Brent House’s peer ministers who helped us show our trademark hospitality!

Brent House activities 2006-2007:

• Evensong at Rockefeller (November)
• U2charist (March)
• Blessing of the Backpacks (September)
• Sex and the Altar, round 2 (spring series)
• Photos in the Maroon in fall and spring (Blessing of the Backpacks, Iftar and Easter)
• Two labyrinths (fall and spring) on the Classics Quad
• How to Speak Episcopalian (winter series)
• Bible study (spring series)
• Local parish visits: All Saints, Ascension, Cathedral, Church of Our Saviour, St. Paul and the Redeemer
• Easter Vigil/Laura’s baptism
• Province V retreat (spring)
• Diocesan Convention (November)
• Celebrate (in New Orleans) (December/January)
• Monastery visit (winter)
• Movie nights: Eddie Izzard, Vicar of Dibley, the Simpsons
• Bishops Associates luncheon (spring)
• Coffee Houses (with open mike) (fall)
• Study evenings (all year)
• Dinner & conversation nights – “How Intelligent is Intelligent Design?” with John Albright, “Ecumenical Journeys in Theology and Science” with Antje Jackelen, “Doing One Thing—Platonic Reflections on the Unity of the Soul” with Gabriel Richardson Lear
• Weekly Stations of the Cross during Lent
• Feast day parties: St. Nicholas, El Dia de los Muertos, St. Brigid, Bp. Brent, Mardi Gras, Epiphany/Three Kings, Super Bowl, Easter
• Spring Open House
• Wednesday Afternoon Teas and Knitting/Needlepoint (weekly)
• Diocesan Ministry Fair (spring)
• RSO Activities Fair (fall)
• Bishop visits: William Persell, Benito Juarez Martinez (fall)
• Apartment blessings (all year)
• Care packages to first years during winter quarter
• Casey, the Canine Minister
• Interfaith Iftar (fall)
• Sun. & Thurs. Eucharists (weekly)
• FOOD (all the time . . . )
• Peer Ministry Trainings (monthly)
• Holy Week services
• End of Year Recognition of Graduates and Brunch

No wonder things seemed so busy around here. We WERE busy! Many of these activities served to deepen and broaden our community, to use the physical resources of Brent House
more fully, and to strengthen the faith and discipleship of the members of the community.

We also did some dreaming and are very excited about what God has in store for us. Watch this space and the website for the news!