A sermon preached on June 12th, 2022 – my last sermon before retiring – based upon Romans 5:1-5 entitled, “The Story of Our Time Together.”
As most of you know, I always took care in writing eulogies for peoples’ memorial services because I believe life stories are sacred. I would talk about the good things that happened in their lives, but also something of what they had suffered for as the words of the Apostle Paul tell us, suffering shapes us. Suffering can be the cauldron in which good stuff gets forged: endurance, character and hope, but other things as well: gratitude, humility and compassion.
We don’t get many opportunities to hear one another’s stories and as you’ve often heard me say, that’s unfortunate. We often know next to nothing about the story that shaped people with whom we spend a great deal of time. The more we know one another’s stories, and in particular the suffering we’ve endured, the more compassion we will have.
When I thought about what I should say in my last sermon, I figured I should use this time to tell something of my story and the story of our time together.
What a long, strange trip it’s been.
It would be reasonable to assume that before becoming a pastor, a person would have had a positive experience of church as a youth – or at least as an adult. But that wasn’t really the case for me. My parents took me to church when I was growing up, but that came to an end in my teen years after my parents divorced. Divorce was less common in those days and the church wasn’t particularly responsive to the pain our family was going through. Church seemed like the place for people who had their lives together, and with our family breaking apart it sort of felt like we didn’t really belong there anymore.
So, I pretty much gave up on church and on God.
But then in college my dormant spiritual longings were awoken in a theology class I stumbled into and I began making my way back to God. I became a religion major, and what do you do with a religion major other than to go on to divinity school which is what my college professors encouraged me to do. I went to a divinity school they recommended, one with impressive pedigree but with less of a connection to local congregations than a seminary like Drew.
Lacking a positive experience of being a part of a church, I resisted the idea of becoming a pastor. I thought I might become a chaplain and work in a hospital.
But a pastor is what I became, managing somehow to get the church I attended as a youth to endorse me for ordination, even though I had attended worship there only a couple of times in the previous eight years.
So, given this back story, it strikes me as pretty strange that I ended up serving as a pastor for 41 years, the last 33 years – half my life time — spent here. It does indeed feel like God was at work in this strangeness. As I mentioned last week, knowing what it felt like to be an outsider led me to have a lot of empathy for people who felt like outsiders when it came to church. Hence, the conviction that “There’s always room in the circle.”
My early years in ministry were difficult because of struggles I dealt with in my personal life. I was lonely and got married impulsively, and the marriage didn’t last long. It did however bring forth my son Andrew, a precious gift from God.
I arrived here at the Parsippany UMC a peculiar pastor for sure, one in the midst of a divorce and caring for my two-and-a-half-year-old son, not yet out of diapers. You welcomed me in spite of my weirdness with open hearts, and helped me care for Andrew.
I’ve received a lot of affirmation for my spirit of inclusivity and its impact on the church, and I’ll accept that, but truth be told this already was a pretty welcoming church when I arrived here. There were warm-hearted folks here like Jack and Lois – the patron saint of welcoming strangers – who herself had gone through a divorce in her early adult years. There was Madeline and Ken, Hank and Myra, Bob and Marge, Fred and Grace, Doris and Barb, the majority of whom have since crossed the river to be with God. In those days we didn’t have this wonderful, peaceful sanctuary we have now – so it was clear people weren’t drawn here by an edifice – people came because of the love they experienced together in this congregation.
When I arrived there were already openly Gay people here, which was extremely uncommon in United Methodist Churches in those days. Three years into my time here, Duane died suddenly of AIDS. Most people in the congregation hadn’t known that Duane had been HIV positive. His partner Jim — it wasn’t legal in those days for Gay people to get married – was utterly heartbroken, and soon people realized that Jim also was HIV positive. Back then, a lot wasn’t known about HIV, and there was a lot of terror and prejudice abroad in our country regarding the disease.
Jim was an extraordinary man — a humble, faithful Christian. He blessed our church with his gentle presence. As a memorial gift for Duane, Jim purchased a set of bells so we could start a bell choir which Jim himself lovingly directed. (There are couple of people here who might remember how I blew the opening of a Bell anthem two times in a row at an AIDS Day memorial service forcing us to start over two times, and Jim never once scowled at me.)
And over time, by virtue of knowing and loving Jim people worked through their fears and their prejudices regarding HIV/AIDs. And our identity as an open and welcoming church deepened.
I remember a woman who came for a while. She liked the loving atmosphere, and considered joining the bell choir. But – she told me – she had heard that Jim had AIDS and she couldn’t handle that. “This might not be the church for you,” I told her.
You truly welcomed me here, but one thing I want to share with you was that there was a time early on in my tenure when I thought seriously about leaving the ministry. Loneliness can be compounded when you’re carrying the mantle of pastor.
I thought about becoming a teacher instead. I consulted a friend who was a superintendent of schools and he suggested I put my name in to be a substitute teacher to get a taste for what being a teacher felt like, which I did, though the two times I got early morning calls asking me to come in for a day’s work I sort of freaked and said I wasn’t available. They stopped calling me.
I left all thoughts of leaving the ministry when thirty years ago I met Sarah, and a five-year-old Kate. Sarah never imagined she would ever end up married to a pastor, but she fell in love with me, and with Andrew as well, and I fell in love with her and with Kate as well, and together we created a family. Two years after getting married Bobby came along, and you shared in our delight in him.
Unlike myself, my children grew up feeling at home in church. They’ve had sort of the opposite challenge, finding a church that doesn’t pale in comparison with what they experienced growing up here.
I wanted to share with you the fact that I thought seriously about leaving the ministry because through the 28 years of our marriage — as Sarah will readily tell you — she has often felt like a “flunky” when it came to fulfilling the stereotype that exists in certain quarters regarding the role of the “pastor’s wife.”
So, the primary point I wanted to make here is simply that we all have Sarah to thank for the fact that I continued with my calling from God, which I do think was a very good thing. I’ve been grateful for the affirmation you all have given me that God did indeed give me gifts for the ministry – an affirmation I’ve felt particularly strongly in these last few weeks. And it would indeed have been unfortunate, tragic even to squander these gifts.
I made a decision fairly early on in my time here that I wasn’t interested in climbing the clergy ladder to bigger and bigger churches, which typically involves doing a good job for a couple of years in a church and then asking for a move to a larger church.
There were a couple of reasons for this – one, I realized that the gifts God gave me didn’t include administration – and I knew that bigger churches would mean more time spent in administration and attending committee meetings – and you know that’s not what makes my heart sing.
The part of ministry that does make my heart sing is the opportunity it provides to witness the life of souls, and it takes time to see deeply into the life of souls. It has been a holy privilege to be invited into your lives at sacred moments, both of joy and of sadness. It is a wonder to see babies grow up to be adults, and to witness folks journey into old age with their light shining more brightly than ever. It has been deeply moving to see the way you rally around one another in times of need.
I’m deeply grateful for the trust you put in me – your willingness to share your lives with me – and your willingness to embrace my weird creativity – to let me follow the winds of the Spirit wherever it blows.
Ultimately, I’ve stayed so long because you really are a very loving and healthy congregation. There are lots of dysfunctional churches out there that seem to feed on conflict and turf wars, and that has never really been the case here. This has been a place where I could feel at home. I am not by nature somebody who laughs a lot, and perhaps that’s because real laughter requires a feeling of safety. It’s felt safe to laugh here, which is why laughter is mentioned in our mission statement.
I’ve also felt free to cry here when that’s what the Holy Spirit was leading me to do. Unlike how I felt in the church of my childhood, we’ve been a church where we don’t have to pretend that we have it all together. Because if truth be told, none of us do. As the Apostle Paul would say, we are all sinners saved by grace through faith.
So, although I hope to live another thirty years or so, this has sort of been my eulogy for myself, or at least for our time together. And as you probably remember about my eulogies, after reading the words I had carefully written out telling as best I could the sacred story of a person’s life, I would always end by going off script at which point I would always say essentially the same thing.
Love is what matter. We were created out of God’s great love, and our purpose has always been to express that love in our lives. We get distracted from our true purpose, thinking that life is about something other than love. But when we stand before God, God wanted be interested in how much money we made. God will be interested in how much love we expressed in our lives.
Jesus is all about love, and if somebody doesn’t get this about Jesus, well they simply don’t understand him. When we open our hearts to Jesus, as Paul said, God pours love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, and our lives find their focus in expressing that love.
Love isn’t easy though. It requires perseverance. It requires getting up off the mat to try again when we’ve failed. It involves forgiveness.
This has always been a place where love grows. You will express your love for Marissa when she begins her ministry here. She will have some different gifts from the ones God gave me, and you will love those gifts out of her.
Because that is what you do.