A Fourth Church Sermon by Dana Ferguson

April 29, 2001 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Born Again . . . and Again . . . and Again

Dana Ferguson
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

John 21:1–14
Acts 9:1–12; 17–19

Titling this sermon, I wondered if there had ever been another “born again” sermon from this pulpit. I suspect not, but I could be wrong. Born again. I figure it’s my job as a Southerner on this staff, born and raised in the heart of the Bible belt, to get “born again” in print at Fourth Church.

It’s language that makes many of us mainline Protestants a little nervous. Kathleen Norris, author of Amazing Grace says, “Negative stereotypes of conversion have some basis in reality. I suspect that all of us can think of people who use their newfound religious faith as a bludgeon.” I don’t know about you, but growing up in the Bible Belt, there were certainly plenty of those. I’m afraid that we Presbyterians were bludgeoned on occasion. We were, mind you, the ones who ordained women. And we welcomed and supported those who were divorced, even ordained them into positions of leadership. If that weren’t enough, we were known from time to time to have, as we say it in the South, “a big time,” which could include a little imbibing and even some dancing. No doubt about it, we were prime targets. Norris, continuing to talk about conversion says, “If conversion serves us a bit too well, if it reinforces all our prejudices and allows us to call ourselves holy at the expense of others whom we can now judge unholy, it is probably not the real thing.”

So being converted, being born again—what is the real thing? There must be some validity in it, some value, some realness, for right here in Acts we find the best-known apostle thrown to his feet, even blinded in what would be termed a radical conversion experience. What makes it real? Could it be the drama that makes it real? I certainly hope not, for I have never personally experienced such drama. Pastor Heidi Petersen talks about gradually growing into her theological convictions. She likens it to a flower unfolding petal by petal over days: “How then, can you mark the precise moment at which the bud ‘converts’ to being a flower?” (Christian Century, April 18-25, 2001).

For some of us, conversion is a matter of being jerked, grabbed, jolted, and for others, it is gradually being enticed through a long series of experiences, some joyful, some painful, toward the kingdom. Each and every one of us has a different story of faith. We have a different story of faith because God doesn’t speak to every single one of us in the same way. Instead, God calls to us individually in ways that are about our own lives. Flannery O’Connor once said of Paul, “I reckon the Lord knew that the only way to make a Christian out of that one was to knock him off his horse” (quoted by William H. Willimon in “Acts,“ Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching). That’s the beauty of it. God’s love knows our personal needs and steps forth to meet them. Sometimes it knocks us to the ground and sometimes it doesn’t.

How it happens isn’t really the most important part, anyway. Think about Paul. Would his conversion have been such a big deal if he then faded away. No. It was a big deal because it changed Paul. It changed his life, his perspectives, his beliefs. It changed the very core of who he was. Conversion is personal. And it is God pulling us closer and closer and closer. It’s Christ welcoming us more intimately into the household of God.

Conversion is personal, but it isn’t about individual life. It’s about communal life, about following Christ, about serving Christ. It’s about living in community and serving neighbor and friend alike. That’s what being born again is. You can’t be born again without also being led to a community. It’s being born into a new family, the household of Christ—living and serving that family.

So what does it look like? It looks like Berlin, Ohio. You may have seen the recent article in Sports Illustrated. I know that at least one of you did and sent it to John Buchanan. So if you hear this story again, look interested. The story was about Berlin, Ohio—the heart of the largest Amish settlement in the world—and a basketball coach, Perry Reese Jr. (Gary Smith, “Higher Education,” Sports Illustrated, March 05, 2000). As you might expect, “Berlin was a quiet town—a town without a high school football team, a fast food restaurant, or even a traffic light.” A member of the community—formerly Amish turned Mennonite (which by the way is not uncommon according to this article; it even has a name: jumping the fence, leaving the Amish tradition for the Mennonite)—wanted to bring some buzz to town, so he brought in a new basketball coach. That turned out to not be such big news. But the assistant coach did. Perry Reese Jr., former coach of the hapless kids at Guernsey Catholic High, having lost 66 of the 83 games of the last season.

Reese was a Catholic in a community whose children grew up reading tales of how their ancestors were burned at the stake by Catholics during the Reformation. And an African American. And a college dropout not even qualified to teach at the high school. A year after Reese started, the head coach quit. Berlin, Ohio’s new basketball coach, the man with one of the most important positions in a community that had dug in its heels against change, was an unmarried, black, Catholic, losing coach. The only African American man in eastern Holmes County.

Perry Reese never said a word when his first apartment fell through. The landlord who had agreed to a lease on the phone, upon meeting Reese in person, suddenly remembered that he rented only to families. Reese kept silent about the cars that pulled up in front of the little white house he moved into instead, about the screaming in the darkness, the voices threatening him on the phone, about the false rumors.

“They must not like us French Canadians here,” was all he’d say, when he walked into a place and felt it turn to ice.

Finally the ice broke. Community members invited the coach out to dinner at a fish joint. They had some food and drinks and laughs with him and sent him on his merry way. And then, what a coincidence, blue lights flashed in his rearview mirror. An arrest. The school board had been aware of the whole plot and not a peep to stop it. Perry Reese Jr. dug his heels in. He didn’t go away.

Some people honestly believed that the coach was a spy, sent by the Feds to keep an eye on the Amish, or a vanguard who plotted to bring African Americans into Holmes County. Yet he walked around town looking people in the eyes, smiling and teasing in an easy way. Winning is what bought him time. The Hawks kept winning. They won 49 times in 53 games in those first two years, storming to the 1986 state semifinal. It wasn’t all that long before something began to dawn on the fans in their seats, and on everyone else in town. This man’s values were virtually the same as theirs. Humility? No coach ever moved so fast to duck praise. Unselfishness? The principal might as well have taken the coach’s salary to pep rallies and flung it in the air—most of it ended up in the kids’ hands anyway. Reverence? No congregation ever huddled and sang out the Lord’s Prayer like the Hawks before and after each game. Family? When Chester Mullet, Hiland’s star guard only hugged his mom on Parent’s Night, Perry gave him a choice: kiss her or take a seat on the bench. He out-Amished the Amish, out-Mennonited the Mennonites, and everyone took to calling the new man Coach.

He earned his degree and began teaching history and current events in a way they’d never been taught in eastern Holmes County. He stood in the lobby of the school each morning, greeting the entire student body, searching everyone’s eyes to see who needed a headlock, who needed lunch money, who needed love. He annihilated what people there had been brought up to keep: space between each other. His door was never locked. Simply open to talk about race and religion and relationships and teenage trouble. His home became the hangout where parents trusted their children to spend the night. He took the players to one another’s churches and to his own. He climbed into a rented tuxedo for fifty or sixty kids who had to have Coach in their wedding party.

“Most of the petty divisions around here disappeared because of coach. He pulled us all together,” said Willie Mast, one who was originally opposed to Reese. “When my dad died, Coach was right there, kneeling beside the coffin, crossing himself. He has been there for all of us. I was wrong,” admitted Mast.

Perry Reese Jr. was diagnosed with a malignant, inoperable, brain tumor. Former team members flocked to his bedside, abandoning vacations and jobs and college. Nurses and doctors were stupefied. Didn’t folks know you couldn’t fit a town inside a hospital room? And then the town took him home, nursing him until his death.

On November 22, the day he died, seventeen years after he first walked through its doors, Hiland High School looked like one of those schools on the news in which some child has walked through the halls with an automatic weapon. Six ministers and three counselors walked around hugging and whispering to children who were huddled in the hallway crying or staring into space, to teachers sobbing in classrooms, to secretaries who could no longer bear it and had to run out the door. How much change resulted from this one man? Berlin is still tallying up that one.

Besides the Perry Reese Scholarship Fund and the Mennonite kids with tattoos of the coach’s face on their arms, there’s Kevin Troyer who has decided rather than teach and coach kids around Berlin, he’ll reverse the coach’s path and do it for African American kids in Canton. Shelly and Alan Miller adopted a biracial boy, a boy the coach had taken under his wing.

And there’s the Keims, adopting two African American boys, and the Schrocks adopting four African American girls, the Masts adopting two African American girls, and Chris Miller adopting an African American daughter. “I’m afraid we can’t explain what he meant to us,” says one of the townspeople. “I’m afraid it’s so deep we can’t bring it into words.”

“At the funeral, just before communion, Father Ron Aubry gazed across St. Peter’s, Coach’s Catholic church. The priest knew that what he wanted to do wasn’t allowed, and if he invited all of the non-Catholics to that table, he could get in trouble. But he knew Coach too. So he did it. Invited everyone to partake of the Eucharist. Steve Mullet glanced at his wife in her simple clothing and bonnet. ‘Why not?’ she whispered. After all, the service wasn’t the bizarre ritual they had been led to believe it was, wasn’t all that different from their own, in fact. Still Steve hesitated. He glanced at Willie Mast. ‘Would Coach want us to?,’ he whispered. ‘You betcha,’ said Willie. So they rose and joined all the black Baptists and white Catholics pouring toward the altar, all the basketball players, all the Mennonites young and old. Busting barriers left and right, busting straight into the kingdom of God.”

And that’s a quote from Sports Illustrated, “busting straight into the kingdom of God.” That, my friends, is conversion. Real, tangible, visible change “in a community whose beliefs had barely budged in 200 years,” in an already Christian community, “whose mailboxes still carried the names of the same Amish families that had come in wagons out of Pennsylvania in the early 1800s.”

Conversion, experiences of high drama, or years of gentle prodding and nudging, or brief moments of new insight and understanding. Conversion. Discovery. Redirecting. Examining. Changing. However we define it, we can never become immune to the moments that shake the very foundation of who we are or that massage our beliefs into new ones, that reshape us as a community. Our faith can never become so fine-tuned that we are immune from divine surprises in whatever shape, form, or fashion they appear. For we worship a resurrected Lord and Savior who is forever intruding, moving into our lives, sizing us up, and calling us forward. When you worship a living God, get ready to be grabbed, bumped, evoked. For Easter says to us that God will stop at nothing to redeem this world–to redeem you and me. So, be ready. Be ready, my friends. Be ready to be born again. To be born again. And again. And again. All to God’s glory and honor and praise. Amen.