July 13, 2025 – Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 1.4-10
Matthew 4.18-22
Sapphire Up, With a Twist
Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Before I begin, I want to thank all of you for Tuesday’s memorial service for Juani Flagg. From the warm welcome you provided, to your crowd management skills, which were as deft as they were necessary, to the joy of the service [and I’m looking at you, Karli] to the hospitality offered at the reception, you rose to the occasion with efficiency and grace. And so many of you turned out to help – I joked with the family the next day that I saw more of our congregation at Tuesday’s service than I do on Sunday morning. This isn’t true, of course, but it was so gratifying to witness once again how well this church rises to the occasion. And even those of you who were not here Tuesday, you are still responsible for the fact that this community knows they can turn to the United Church in time of need, every one of you has helped to create an atmosphere of extravagant welcome, and in ways large and small you have borne testimony to the reality that love and comfort and faith and hope may be found here. On Tuesday, as every day, I was proud to be your minister.
It was exactly forty-five years ago this afternoon that I stood at the front of the sanctuary of Meriden’s Center Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, as a cohort of clergy come forward, laid hands upon me, and ordained me to Christian ministry. To borrow from the Grateful Dead, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” This morning I want to reflect a bit on the arc of my ministry on this 45th, or sapphire, anniversary of my ordination. My first thought was to share some stories and anecdotes from across the years, but since I already do this on a regular basis, I am going to add a bit of a twist to the sapphire. Over the years I have tried my very best to be both pastor and teacher to the all congregations I have served, and lately it’s occurred to me that my congregations have also been pastor and teacher to me, and I want to look back from this reciprocal point of view.
Three weeks after my ordination I climbed into the pulpit of my first church, the Community Church of Calumet, Michigan, a Congregational and Presbyterian church, to preach my first sermon. While at seminary, I had two years of field education, one in a Presbyterian church and one as a prison chaplain, and a full year’s internship in a UCC congregation, so I was reasonably confident I had enough experience under my belt to begin my career as a solo pastor of a congregation. God bless the Community Church of Calumet. When I look back on my four years among them, I marvel at the patience they showed me, the gentle encouragement and the subtle and not-so-subtle direction and correction they afforded me. I worked really hard on those early sermons, and it was not until I was with them for a couple years that I realized that, going directly from graduate school to the pulpit, what I was bringing them on Sunday mornings were not so much sermons as they were term papers. Every single week a thoroughly researched, densely packed excursus on the history, the context, the nature and nuance of the stories in the Bible. I will always remember with gratitude the kind smiles that accompanied the gentle suggestion that I update my sermons to the current century.
Which I did, to mixed success. I should probably have paid more heed to the words of Jeremiah at the beginning of his own ministry, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” The lessons that a still wet-behind the ears 26 year old preacher finds in the scriptures did not always jibe with the lessons an aging upper Midwest congregation wanted to hear. But here too the congregation taught me a valuable lesson. It had long been my prejudice that I would encounter the most resistance to new ideas from the eldest members of the church. As with all prejudices, I could not have been more mistaken. The church’s elders, a well-educated lot, were among the most eager to try new ways of doing things, and had ideas of their own, significant and valuable ideas and life lessons to throw into the hopper. And in those times when I ran into resistance for trying something different from the way things had always been done, I learned to lean on the wisdom and experience of those octo- and nonagenarians in the congregation for clarity and direction. God bless Lucille and Marjorie and Tracey and Peg and Donald and Juliet and so many others for their patience, encouragement, the lessons and care they gave to their young pastor and teacher.
As I considered what the arc of my career might look like, I decided early on I was not going to be the type of minister who wants to climb the ecclesiastical ladder, whose priority is to find the bigger, better, shinier, trendier church at every change of venue, so I didn’t have any problem going from the Community Church in a town of 6000 people to the congregational church of Bridgewater, Connecticut, a town of 1600 souls. I liked to joke that there were three churches in Bridgewater that met on Sunday mornings: the Episcopal church, the Congregational church, and the volunteer fire department; as fire department chaplain, I was minister to two out of the three. Many of the lessons I learned from my congregation were pastoral ones. For example, when Debbie, one-year-old Clare and our cats Figaro and Natasha landed at Bradley airport ahead of me, because I was driving to Connecticut from Michigan, they were met by a jovial deacon named Harry who was happy to help them wrestle with the cats and the toddler and the stroller and the luggage and all the rest for the hour drive to our new home. On arrival we found a refrigerator stocked with food, much of it lovingly homemade. Congregants were eager to host us for dinner, or to prepare meals and bring them over. They baby sat for us and took us out to dinner. One tender moment occurred on a Sunday morning when I was telling one of my deacons about ironing my shirt that morning – he kindly leaned in and asked, “Is everything OK at home?” thinking that ironing my own shirts spelled trouble on the domestic front. I assured him all was well, I enjoyed ironing and still do, and was grateful for his concern.
Pastoring in a small town often means becoming the de facto chaplain, not just to my congregations at the church and the firehouse, but to so many others. My Episcopal colleague was a wonderful person and a good friend who possessed many gifts, but alas, the pastoral touch was not among them. So townsfolk turned instead to me and our church in their times of need, which meant multiple weddings, funerals, a good deal of counseling and crisis intervention, and I am forever grateful that the congregation not only permitted but encouraged my fulfilling that role. (And it does not take a particularly perceptive ear to hear how my time in Bridgewater prepared me for my time in Chester.)
Sixteen years later I moved on to the Second Congregational UCC in Beverly, Massachusetts, which was a multi-staff congregation on the northern edge of town. I learned a lot at Second Church, and it was not just the congregation who taught me. During my seventeen years in Beverly, I mentored four Associate Ministers and one interim, and nine different seminary students from Harvard Divinity School. Nearly every one of them was a joy to work with, and every one of them deepened my understanding of parish ministry since they were asking deep questions themselves about their calling. The four Associates have made terrific careers of their own: Molly Baskette is Senior Minister at the Berkely, California UCC, Angela Menke Ballou is doing great things at the Cotuit UCC on Cape Cod, Heather Ramsey Mabrouk is Director of the Southern New England Conference’s Center for Transformational Leadership, and Tara Olsen Allen, whom many of you met at my installation, leads the Pilgrim UCC in Brentwood, NH. I don’t have enough time to tell you what each of my nine seminary students is doing these days, but I am grateful to remain in touch with nearly all of them, and they are shaping the church in ways large and small.
Second Church was a large congregation composed of multiple factions, and one of the things they taught me was how to have the difficult conversations a congregation sometimes faces. The conversation about holding same-gender weddings in the church was one of the toughest, and it took us a good year and a half to come to consensus around it. Of course the upside of this was that by the time we began having the Open and Affirming conversation, we had gotten pretty good at it, and we voted to become O & A with only one dissenting vote. But another hard conversation, which was systemic, that is, it was present before I arrived and continued following my departure, was the push and pull between the desire to make growing the church and increasing pledges our primary focus of ministry, what some called “butts in the pew and bucks in the plate,” and the desire to make mission and outreach our primary focus. And yes, it is entirely possible to find a balance between the two, but it was difficult to get folks to see this. Still, even a hard conversation can be a fruitful conversation, and I am grateful to all they taught me in those seventeen years.
And friends, what can I say about the United Church of Chester that I have not already said? That throwaway thank you I mentioned before the sermon? That was not a throwaway at all, as you probably guessed. Rather it is one of the central lessons you all keep teaching me as your minister. This congregation has taught our community they can always turn to the United Church in time of need, every one of you has helped to create an atmosphere of extravagant welcome, and in ways large and small you have borne testimony to the reality that love and comfort and faith and hope may be found here. And it is not just in the high profile events like Tuesday’s, you do this in ways large and small. When Deb Calamari calls you for the Nominating Committee, you respond, almost always with a Yes. When someone in town is going through a tough time, you reach out. When there is a need, you find a way to fill it. And when someone within or outside our congregation needs something a little more than you feel you can give, you don’t hesitate to turn to me, and I appreciate it. You continue to teach me and all those around us that the love and mercy and compassion of God resides here, and in every heart that beats here.
I cannot think of a finer gift for this sapphire anniversary of my ordination than to be able to name, to recognize and to celebrate the Christ in you, and in us, and to say thank you to you, and to God, for every good gift.