Tim Mackie’s friends in Portland, Oregon, have no clue about how awesome Madison’s Brat Fest celebration can be. Mackie is a pastor at Portland’s Door of Hope church and teaches Old Testament at Western Seminary. He developed a local following while he was studying for his PhD in Hebrew at the University of Wisconsin and was a teaching pastor at Blackhawk Church a decade ago.
Mackie said he had a lot of conversations with Portland friends about going to Madison for the weekend to preach a sermon at Brat Fest’s Sunday morning community worship service. “I couldn’t convince people that this would be awesome,” he said.
The reason, he suggested, was unexamined assumptions that create close-minded people. He went on to suggest that Jesus had to deal with a lot of close-minded people. “He broke open all of their categories and forced them to rethink their assumptions,” he said.
Mackie opened his Bible to Mark chapter 2 as a case in point, the story of a paralyzed man whose friends brought him to Jesus. The crowd around Jesus was so great that they had to break through the roof of the house where Jesus was staying, to get their friend to Jesus. And then when Jesus saw the man lowered in front of him, he said, “Your sins are forgiven.”
To which Mackie retorted, “How do you fact check that kind of thing?” When Jesus realized that some in the crowd had the same skeptical response, he asked them which was easier: to say “your sins are forgiven” or to say “Get up and walk?” And then he told the man to get up and go home, which he did.
“One by one, Jesus dismantled all of their assumptions,” Mackie said. “Jesus is worth every desperate effort in our life to get in front of him, hear his wisdom, and receive life from him. He has a away of breaking open everything you thought you knew with His mercy.”
Opening and closing music at the Brat Fest community service was provided by Bonray, a four-member band of siblings from the Philadelphia area. They also appeared later in the day in the lineup of Christian groups playing on the Lifest stage.
The service also included a promotional announcement for Compassion International by David Kirika, a comedian from Kenya who was sponsored as a child 18 years through Compassion International. He told a somewhat humorous version of his life, growing up in poverty. “I had to walk three miles to school; that’s a 5K every morning,” he said.
The 400 or so attendees at the community service were invited to consider becoming child sponsors themselves. Kirika told them: “When you love this child, they learn how to love others. When you sacrifice for this child, they learned how to sacrifice for others. When you believe in this child, they learn how to believe for themselves.”
Compassion International was among the Christian organizations which had a presence throughout the 4-day Brat Fest celebration. Others included the Madison Christian Giving Fund, Lifest, and Life 102.5 Christian radio.