25 Years in the Making

 

On September 9, 2001, I was ordained as a minister at Urbandale United Church of Christ in Iowa.  I still have a photo of Gina and me at the front of the church after the worship service.  After 25 years of ministry, I still remember the messy mixture of confidence and confusion stirring within me on that day.  Confidence because I now had a piece of paper conferring on me the degree, “A Master of Divinity.” Looking back now, I laugh at the absurdity of that document.  How in the world do you ever “master” Divinity?  You don’t!  I can’t.  No matter how many books I read, papers I write, sermons I preach, pastoral care visits I do, hands I hold, or vigils for justice I attend, I don’t master anything.  Isaiah was right, “For my thoughts are not Your thoughts, O God, neither are my ways Your ways” (Isaiah 55:8-9).  There is an honest confession there that is echoed in the Lord’s Prayer when Jesus says, “Thy/God’s will be done”.  As Richard Rohr says when Jesus prays, “Thy Kin-dom/realm/reality come ~ that means my kin-dom/realm/ and reality has to go!”  The Psalmist echoes and amplifies this by praying, “When I look to the macro-skies, dark and enormous, your handmade sky-jewelry, moon and stars mounted in their settings.  Then I look at my micro-self and wonder, why do You, God, bother with us?  Why take a second look our way?”  The more I’ve learned over the last 25 years of ministry, the less I know.  The more I want to hand back that piece of paper and sheepishly say, “Um, there has been some mistake here.”  There are days I wonder if I will ever complete the class called, “Ministry,” because the church is always changing, even though we sit in the same pew and try to frost over the shifting sands of the world with the same format of worship each Sunday.  The church is always changing, but like shedding skin cells, which we do each day, we don’t notice the new things God is doing.  The church is always changing, and too often we miss this amid “Robert’s Rules of Order” and voting on motions to help us feel in control.  God offers us the Wayless Way that doesn’t neatly fit into what our structured, stability-craving selves believe we want/need to thrive.

 

Two days after my ordination, our country experienced the violence, heartbreak, and deaths of 9-11.  The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq followed, alongside encouragement from our government to get out and spend money ~ because consumerism is the altar we are constantly called to worship at.  The financial crash of 2008, the politics of division and dismissing the “other” as dangerous to our country, declining membership of the mainline church, the COVID pandemic (which seminary really didn’t teach me how to lead!), and now we wrestle with faithfulness in a world that disorients us at a dizzying and disheartening pace. 

 

One of the earliest images of the church was a boat.  In fact, if you look at the ceiling of our church, with its peaked roof, it looks like a boat turned upside down.  The church was to be a safe space, not to disconnect from or deny the storms roaring outside, but to dry off, sing, support, and practice God’s love with each other.  You will hear a lot this week about 25-years since 9-11.  We will remember when and where we were when we heard the news and witnessed the heartbreaking images of the gray smoke billowing against the blue sky.  We will hear stories of family and friends who are still grieving loved ones who died in the planes, towers, and acts of terrorism ~ as well as the war that was started in the aftermath.  When we look back, it is always an invitation to look around ~ the past is always part of the present.  So ponder where you were living in 2001.  What were you doing on September 11^th?  How have the last twenty-five years left an impression on your soul that you are still trying to sort through prayerfully and with God’s love?  May this week offer us fresh insights and true experiences of God’s love we need in these days.  Amen.