Hoverboards and Holy Mistakes
Matthew 5: 1 - 12
5 1 Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up a mountain. He sat down and his disciples came to him. 2 He taught them, saying:
3 “Happy are people who are hopeless, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.
4 “Happy are people who grieve, because they will be made glad.
5 “Happy are people who are humble, because they will inherit the earth.
6 “Happy are people who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, because they will be fed until they are full.
7 “Happy are people who show mercy, because they will receive mercy.
8 “Happy are people who have pure hearts, because they will see God.
9 “Happy are people who make peace, because they will be called God’s children.
10 “Happy are people whose lives are harassed because they are righteous, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.
11 “Happy are you when people insult you and harass you and speak all kinds of bad and false things about you, all because of me. 12 Be full of joy and be glad, because you have a great reward in heaven. In the same way, people harassed the prophets who came before you.
Preached February 2, 2020 at Decatur First United Methodist Church
I don’t like to mess up. And I really, really don’t like for other people to see me mess up, or even know that I’ve messed up.
But I need to tell you that, I messed up, and Ginny’s last Christmas gift of 2019 did not arrive at our house until January 7, 2020. She got home from school and immediately cracked it out of the box - a shiny, yellow, hoverboard. If you are unfamiliar with hoverboards, you need to know that it doesn’t actually hover off the ground. It’s more like an electric skateboard, but instead of moving sideways, it moves forward and back and in circles.
She wanted to take it outside, but I made her learn how to ride it in the house first, and I made her wear a helmet, in the house. I wanted to put knee and elbow pads on her, but she resisted and boldly stepped on the board. She found her balance, and learned how to turn her toes down to move forward, or up to go backward. She took a couple of spills on the hardwood floors, but within an hour she had mastered it.
What happened next is a little hard to explain. Their dinner was ready, so I called the kids to the table. When Ginny stepped off the hoverboard, I decided to step on it and ride it myself.
I balanced ok at first, because I was holding on to the dining room table, but then, almost immediately, I heard the humiliating thud of my body hitting the floor, hips first, and then I felt the pain. So sharp that I couldn’t speak.
The kids were crying, screaming really, I don’t think they had ever seen me fall before. I tried to say, “I’m ok” but I might have only thought it. Once I realized my body still worked, I propped myself up to a seated position on the floor, leaning on the wall for support.
A little while later, Andy came home from work and found me still sitting on the floor with my back against the wall. “Bad day?” He said. I looked up, tried to locate some dignity, and said, “I fell off the hoverboard.” He smiled. “Really?” He said. I don’t think he believed me. “I did,” I said, “I saw Ginny doing it and it looked fun and I can roller skate so I thought it would be like that, but it’s not, and now I don’t know if I can get off the floor.” Andy looked at the kids, who were nodding in agreement. He knew it was true. He reached down and helped me up off the floor.
There’s something really humbling, and oddly empowering about realizing how much you don’t know. I had researched hoverboards enough to buy one for Ginny, but I didn’t really understand that they come in different sizes based on weight. I am far too heavy for Ginny’s hoverboard. My experience with balancing on skates made me think I could handle the hoverboard, but balancing on a battery powered board is completely different from foot powered skates. I knew a little about hoverboards, I knew a little about balancing on wheels. I knew just enough to be dangerous.
There’s actually a scientific name for that. When a person knows a little bit about something, and has false-confidence in their knowledge and skill, it’s called The Dunning-Kruger effect. The term describes a mental bias where people who know just a little about something are unable to recognize their own incompetence. And not only do they fail to recognize their incompetence, they’re likely to feel as though they actually are competent. The irony of the Dunning-Kruger Effect is that the knowledge and skill required to be good at something, are the same qualities needed to recognize that one is not good at it—and if you lack such knowledge, you don’t know how much you don’t know.
So, it’s easy for me to see, when I look back on it, that I misjudged my own competence with the hoverboard. But in my defense, I don’t always do that. I often recognize how much I don’t know. When I’m sick, I go to the doctor. When my car needs work, I look at the manual, but then I’m going to take it to a mechanic. When I felt the call to preach, I went to seminary. Even though I’d gone to Sunday School all my life, I knew that I didn’t know enough. Sometimes I recognize how much I don’t know, and sometimes I think I know it all. And I wonder, what makes the difference? What puts us on a path grounded in reality about who we are and what we can do?
In the spring of 2018, a group of folks connected to our Engage Team had an idea for a shower ministry to our homeless neighbors. We happen to have showers that are almost never used. So this scrappy little handful of volunteers, some of my favorite people, got organized.
They reached out to a couple of local agencies that work with our homeless neighbors to let them know that the showers would be available on the first Saturday of the month from 8am - 10am. They got towels and soap and shampoo. They realized they needed to provide coffee and food, and made plans for that. Then one Saturday morning they just did it. They opened the doors of the church and invited folks in to use our showers and have a light breakfast with no strings attached. It was a beautiful idea, it still is.
But here’s the thing, in six Saturdays of offering showers, only about 4 people ever showed up looking for one. That’s all. Everyone that we talked to in the community said this was a real need among our neighbors without housing, so why didn’t it work?
Homeless folks are a complicated population to serve. They often don’t have reliable transportation to get them here. Those suffering from addiction and mental health issues are rarely able to keep to a schedule - like showing up once a month between 8am and 10am. And the agencies that we tried to partner with were overwhelmed themselves, and not reliable in helping us spread the word to their clients. These were all things that the team learned after they’d started the shower ministry. So, having learned a few things about what they didn’t know, the Engage Team paused the shower ministry indefinitely, recognizing that it was not an effective use of our volunteer resources.
Then about a year later, the Engage Team got connected to a local non-profit looking to partner on a warming shelter for those with no safe place to stay on freezing nights. I was an observer in this process, I was not a part of the decision making for it, but I’ve been around Decatur First off and on since 2004, and I was worried about this one.
You’ve probably heard that the dying words of the church are “we’ve never done it that way before.” But equally dangerous are these words, “we tried that once and it didn’t work.” My fear, from where I sat, was that the failure of the shower ministry would provide just enough information to be dangerous, that we had learned from it that a homeless ministry in our gym doesn’t work, and we’d have a Dunning-Kruger moment on our hands.
But, that didn’t happen, we’re hosting the warming shelter this winter and successfully partnering with a non-profit to house folks in our gym on freezing nights, and they are using the showers. It seems to me, that the failure of the shower ministry opened the door for the warming shelter, making the team more receptive to the new idea, not less. Their apparent failure, wasn’t a failure at all, just part of the process but we only know that because we kept moving forward.
And I’m really happy about it, but again I’m wondering what made the difference? How did the church know that it didn’t know everything, instead of thinking that it did?
If the Dunning-Kruger effect convinces us that we are smarter, better, and more skilled than we actually are, what Jesus says to us this morning turns that upside down. There’s no mental bias here, just hard truth about life. Even though these statements start with the words, “Happy” or “Blessed” this is a list of things most of us would like to avoid - Grief and mourning, persecution, and harassment, hopelessness and despair, hungering for righteousness, working for peace in the midst of conflict, showing mercy. Hard stuff.
While the Dunning-Kruger effect essentially lies to you about the state that you are in, these statement, often called the Beatitudes, tell the truth. Life is hard. Following Jesus is hard. Anyone who says it’s not is trying to sell you something. But I think most of us are here this morning not because we have escaped the hardness of life, but because we have experienced it, and we know that there’s blessedness in the midst of it. We know that what Jesus says is true.
I said earlier that my kids had never seen me fall before, and as I speak those words I think, that’s terrible. I was talking specifically about the hoverboard, but my need to present myself as someone who always gets it right, who doesn’t fall, goes far beyond that.
If they’ve never seen me fall, they’ve never seen me get back up. They’ve never seen me accept help in getting back up, and that’s not the kind of example I want to set for them. If they’ve never seen me in a hopeless situation, how will they know that I have faith in something beyond myself? To never let my kids see me fail… that’s not an adequate witness for Jesus Christ, and it’s questionable parenting.
I need to get more comfortable messing up, but I’m not the only one. Our church needs to get better at it. Far from being a source of regret, we have to claim it as a path to knowledge and a part of blessedness. We need to remember that before there was a warming shelter, there was a shower ministry. It was faithful and well organized, and it didn’t work. The church had to give up hope on one thing so that something else could come into being.
Ginny’s third grade teacher, Ms. Foster, had a big poster in the classroom labeled, “Our favorite mistakes.” If you made a mistake and you learned from it you got to celebrate it by writing it on the board. What’s your favorite mistake? Where have you gotten it really wrong? Maybe hopelessly wrong? Because that’s where God breaks through.
I would really like to see us make some amazing mistakes here at Decatur First in 2020. I’d like us to find out just how much we don’t know about some important stuff.
I’d like to find out how much we don’t know about our neighbors, particularly the ones who aren’t interested in church.
I would like us to find out how much we don’t know about racism*, which is going to hurt like falling off a hoverboard, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. There are several isms and phobias that we don’t know how much we don’t know about yet, and we’re going to need to find out if we are going to be the kind of welcoming church we say we want to be.
I am ready for us to make some really great mistakes around discipleship and small groups. Did you know that our classroom space is maxed out on Sunday mornings? We have room for new folks in our existing classes, but we can’t start new groups because we are out of rooms, and that’s just enough information to be dangerous.
That’s the kind of thing where we could say, “We are really good at Sunday School, in fact we’re full, so we’ll have to wait until we build a new building to teach more people about Jesus.” I don’t want to work for a church that says that. Do you want to go to one? I don’t know what the answer to our problem with space and small groups is, but I’d bet that the first thing we try won’t work. Maybe the second thing will, maybe the third, and when we look back on those attempts they’ll seem less like mistakes or failed attempts and more like the blessed path that helped us expand our small group ministry.
As we gather around the communion table this morning, I’ll be thinking about the bread and juice. We don’t each get our own perfect, small loaf of bread. It’s one loaf, and it gets broken in order to be useful. We don’t each get a whole perfect grape, we get juice that comes from smashed grapes. And this broken bread, and these squashed grapes are holy and a means by which we know the grace of God. Let us do our best, but also never forget that our brokenness, our mistakes, our squashed plans and our mess ups, those are a means by which we share the grace of God with the world. Amen.
* So much of what I said I wanted the church to learn more about played out during the deep, dark, early days of the Covid 19 Pandemic, which began just six weeks after I preached this sermon. In particular, the murder of George Floyd brought about both personal and national recognition of how much some of us don’t know about racism. For some thoughts on that, check out this sermon from May of 2022.
