November 10, 2024 – Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Job 3.1-10
Revelation 22.1-5
What’s the Good Word?
Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost
I have made some mistakes over the course of my forty-plus years of ministry. Thankfully most have been minor and inconsequential, but a couple have not. One of the latter occurred the Sunday after the 2016 Presidential election. At my former church, we always had a seminary student from Harvard Divinity School whom I supervised. I had some terrific seminarians over the years, and I always tried to give them a taste of ministry in its entirety, not just supervising Youth Group or teaching Sunday school which, unfortunately, is often the case for seminarians. This means that our seminarian preached multiple times a year. We also had an Associate Minister who preached about once a month, so it was sometimes a challenge to find time for our seminarian and our Associate and me, all of us, to preach. So we laid out the preaching calendar in late August, and it just happened that John, our seminarian that year, was scheduled to preach Sunday November 13, 2016. Well, we all remember how that Tuesday turned out, and come the weekend much of the country was still in shock. I had a decision to make: do I let John preach as scheduled, or do I skip his turn because I felt I needed to address the election that day? It was a difficult decision, and the pivot point, for me, was, would I be facing the same conundrum if the Presidential election had gone the other way? And I decided No, I would not, so I shouldn’t let the result itself dictate my decision. So my congregation came to worship that morning, many of them still gobsmacked, expecting to hear a good word from their Senior Minister. Friends, I failed my congregation that day. It was a mistake to let John preach, although that says nothing about John and everything about me, and I still regret the decision. I should have brought a good word to my congregation that morning, and I swore to myself I would never make that mistake again.
Last Sunday Ed Sypher and I had the delightful opportunity to attend the Ecclesiastical Council for a young seminary student named Grace. An Ecclesiastical Council is when a candidate for ministry presents their credentials, speaks about their faith journey, shares their understanding of theology and ministry and the church and takes questions from the clergy and delegates in attendance. If successful, the candidate is approved for ministry by a majority vote. It is an understandably nervous and fraught moment for the candidate, and Grace more than rose to the occasion. She did all that she was asked to do and more, and everyone who attended was really moved and touched by her presentation and the way she held herself under pressure. One of the things that really struck me was when Grace was asked – full disclosure, I was the one who asked her – about her view of scripture and what parts of it were important to her idea of ministry. Grace replied, “Well, this may sound unusual, but I really like Job and Revelation.” And we couldn’t help but laugh because she had just named the two most difficult books of the Bible to wrap your head around. You heard that for yourselves this morning. Those ten verses I read from the book of Job, did they make you want to hear more of the same? “Let the day perish on which I was born… Let gloom and deep darkness claim it… let the blackness of the day terrify it!” And while Revelation is an opposite counterpart, its fantastical language makes it close to impossible to understand what’s going on. And there stood our bright candidate for ministry telling us these are the lodestars of her theology! God bless Grace, for her intelligence, for her ability to unpack the complexities of the scriptures, and for her dedication to the church of Jesus Christ. Grace was approved for ministry unanimously, and friends that was a good day for the church. That was a good word.
In the darkest days of the pandemic, former Chester First Selectwoman Lauren Gister assembled teams of local folks to help guide our community through the multiple and difficult challenges Covid caused. Each team focused on a different facet of municipal recovery, and I agreed to serve on the one that focused on community wellness. Its somewhat complicated name was the Chester Long-Term Recovery Task Force, or the CLTRTF. Now that is a mouthful. Not long after we became the more manageable Chester Community Partnership. And if I say so myself, we accomplished quite a lot. Our first objective was to help community members find Covid shots. You probably remember how complicated this was early on, you had to find a place that offered them, wait until a time slot opened up, then sign up for an appointment, which was not easy to do. I remember every time we located another place to get a shot it was like finding gold dust – Oh look, the pharmacy in Centerbrook has them! And there! Another one in Middletown, and a drive-through in Old Saybrook. And remember, the first cohort to be allowed shots was our eldest population. But we figured it out and found a way to get shots in the arms that needed them the most. It was gratifying work. Then, as shots became more available, we went deeper into the root of the challenge: one of the reasons it was so tough for seniors to find shots was because you had to do it all by computer, and that part of our population is among the least computer literate. So we set up computer literacy training for anyone who wanted it. That done, we turned to food insecurity, which spiked during the pandemic. We started giving away food, particularly fresh produce we grew in our own gardens – that was Alison Abramson’s brainstorm. And it was gratifying to see the ways so many people came together to fill pressing community needs at a critical time. The Chester Community Partnership did some good and necessary work. When the world began to open up again, I stepped away from the Partnership because we as a church were regathering and I needed to concentrate on this, and I’m grateful to Deb Calamari for representing our church by replacing me on the Partnership. You know a lot of this story because I’ve told it in bits and pieces before. Well, several months ago, the Partnership decided that its post-pandemic work was done, and made the decision to dissolve. Part of the process was to distribute the funds we gathered through grants and contributions, and in one final act of generosity, the Partnership gave away their assets. Earlier this week, our United Church of Chester received a check for more than a thousand dollars for our Backpack program from the Partnership as our church continues to meet the needs of our community This, all of this, the Community Partnership, the volunteers coming together, the strengthening of the Backpack program, is good work. This is a good word.
Approximately two hours from now, a few hundred people who the rest of the year are mostly in their right minds will put on swimsuits and jump into Cedar Lake. The air temperature will be around the high forties to low fifties by then. Chester neighbor Leah Kisslebreck organized the first Chester Polar Bear Plunge in 2020, again during the dark of the pandemic, as a way of raising funds for local food pantries and soup kitchens. Today is the fifth annual plunge; since its inception the event has raised over $87,000 dollars to combat food insecurity in our region. There’s an excellent chance that today’s event will push the total to over $100,000 since its inception. I know some of you will be plunging, and I thank you for doing it. This is important work; this is good work; this too is a good word.
Do you remember that scene near the end of The Wizard of Oz, when the Scarecrow discovers he really does have a brain, the Tin Man’s heart is revealed, and the Cowardly Lion recognizes he has been courageous all along? But poor Dorothy who still pined for Kansas, turned to Glinda and sadly said, “Will you help me? Can you help me?” Glinda replied, “You don’t need to be helped any longer. You’ve always had the power to go back to Kansas.” “I have?” And the newly-wise Scarecrow interjects, “Then why didn’t you tell her before?” “Because she wouldn’t have believed me,” Glinda replied, “she had to learn it for herself.” Like her three friends, who only had to look within to find their wisdom, heart and courage, Dorothy too already had what she needed in the ruby slippers.
I’ve been thinking about this all week in my conversations with friends and acquaintances far and near, at Wednesday’s early morning breakfast on the sidewalk outside Simon’s and The Villager, over lunch in the Wheatmarket, on the porch at the Little House, and on the phone and online with folks of so many stripes, all of them asking a variation of the question, What happens next? What are we going to do now? Friends, on Wednesday morning at 8:00 my thoughts were anything but organized, but I could not simply stand there and say I had no idea! And the first thing that came to my mind is all the good things we do together as neighbors, as a church, as a community. None of this has changed. We have always had within us the gifts, the tools, the compassion and the commitment to do whatever needs to be done. Job confronted his existential despair by reminding himself he was a person of faith, and no matter what he experienced, that faith was more than enough face his anguish. He boldly stood on his righteousness even when his closest friends thought him foolish. This is a good word. Revelation describes bowls of wrath being poured out on the people, the apocalyptic horsemen bringing war and famine and pestilence and death, and the thousand year fury of the forces of evil against the power of good, and yet it concludes with a vision of redemption and light and everlasting peace. This is a good word. And just this week – and I’m going to be enigmatic right now because I want to be – just this week a small handful of you quietly banded together and did a good thing for a neighbor in need, Good with a capital G in a circumstance you were already equipped to address. This is a good word, and I am proud of you and I am grateful for you. And what I take away from all of this is that we have always had it within ourselves to bring a good word in a difficult circumstance to a world which in these days sorely needs to hear one. We always have. And God willing, we always will.