September 1, 2024 – Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Psalm 133
Ecclesiastes 4.9-12
Colossians 4.7-18
Connecting the Dots
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Today marks a first for me. This morning we are going to welcome into our church membership an individual who has already made it clear that she will seldom, if ever, attend church with us again.
Last time we welcomed new members into our fellowship back in late June, you’ll remember we spoke about covenant, specifically the covenant we have as church members with one another as a congregation. This morning I want to expand our horizons a bit and have us think together about the covenant we have as a congregation among other congregations and other churches, specifically our sister UCC churches in our area.
As a way of getting to it, I’ve provided a road map – actually two maps – that tell the tale. The first is a map listing all the Christian churches mentioned in the Bible, and we heard a handful of these in Paul’s letter to the Colossians. Paul reminded the Colossians of their own sister churches, the congregations at Laodicea and Hierapolis, both of which we can find in what is today western Turkey. Even though I’ve been to Turkey, I never made it to the western part and so have missed places like Laodicea and Hierapolis and Ephesus, although as I look at the map I see I have been fortunate enough to visit churches in Rome, Thessaloniki, Athens, Corinth and Crete. But the point is that Paul takes pains to remind the churches of one another – to pray for one another, to support one another, and to remember that all the churches are the connective tissue of the body of Christ. He also calls out some individual church members he knows, people like Tychicus, Onesimus, Aristarchus, Mark, Justus, Epaphras, Demas, Luke, Nympha and Archippus. These are the people who make up the churches, and these are the churches that make up the body of Christ. By my count there are 34 churches in 6 different regions, and by virtue of the covenant they share, they all belong to each other across the Mediterranean. As you hear the church names, and as we think about other churches Paul wrote to, like the Ephesians, the Galatians, the Philippians, as well as the Romans, Corinthians and Colossians, we can see where they all are on the map, and like the apostle, we too can begin to connect the dots.
When an individual studies for the ministry, there is a near-endless list of disciplines available for study. You can take classes in Old and New Testament, in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, in Theology, Church History, Preaching and Teaching, Worship, Sacred Music, Counseling and Psychology, Philosophy, Archeology, Comparative Religions, the list goes ever on, although my forever lament has been that we had no classes on that most useful and practical of ecclesiastical disciplines, namely, how to repair the church copier. But one class that virtually every single candidate for ministry is required to take, regardless of institution or denomination, is church polity. It doesn’t matter where you are or what else you are studying. For example, even though I attended a Presbyterian seminary, I needed to take the United Church of Christ polity class, which fortunately Princeton offered. If it is a new word for you, polity simply means the history of the UCC as well as the ways we are organized and govern ourselves as a church and denomination. It sets standards for clergy and provides guidance and assistance to local congregations as we go about our daily ministry.
Now I’ll be the first to confess that to try to explain polity any further would ratchet up the sermonic snooze factor, on a scale of ten, to eleven. So rather than explain, I’m going to tell a story.
Once upon a time there was a minister who had multiple gifts for ministry. Let’s call them – let’s call her – Amie. Amie has already served a couple congregations, as an Associate and as a solo settled pastor. And as she assesses the growth of her gifts and skills, she decides it is time to give back to the church and stretches out into interim ministry. Interim ministry is a critical calling that helps churches in those times in between settled ministers; it is a time of rich opportunity for discernment, reassessment, and deciding just what kind of minister to call next. Fortunately for Amie and for the church, she is called to a church in a neighboring Association to help them in that time of discernment and assessment, although the church she is leaving is understandably reluctant to say goodbye. Now, you might remember I mentioned a couple weeks ago that in the UCC’s polity, our minister needs to be a member of our congregation before being installed by the denomination. However, this poses a problem for Amie; because of the nature of interim ministry, the interim is, in a way, just passing through for a season or two, and does not join the church she is serving. So where does Amie’s church membership go? She can’t join the church she’s going to serve, and she surely can’t keep her membership in her old church. But she needs to have a church membership somewhere in order to remain certified by the denomination. So here is the question: how does Amie negotiate this Catch-22 our polity presents and go to do important work for her interim congregation which she cannot join, but still retain her UCC standing vis-à-vis church membership?
I’ll give you a few minutes to think about that one.
The second Sunday of my sabbatical time this summer I had the opportunity to worship at the Westbrook Congregational Church where my friend and colleague Rev. Jeanette Cooper-Hicks serves. At one point during the service Jeanette was very thoughtful and introduced and welcomed me, and I love the way she did it. Jeanette is the Moderator of our Middlesex Association and I’m the Vice Moderator. Actually, we intended to be co-chairs of the Association but as it turns out the Bylaws don’t allow for co-chairs so we had a conversation about who would be Moderator and who would be Vice Moderator, and decided that it was best if Jeanette served as the Moderator of Virtue and I would serve as the Moderator of Vice. If the shoe fits, right? But Jeanette welcomed me that morning by reminding her congregation that we do in fact serve together in those roles both for the Association and for the Committee on Ministry and Executive Committee, and she thanked her congregation, as I now thank you, for the time you give me to engage in these wider church activities. We can only maintain these connections because of the work we do together as both clergy and lay folks, and all the churches and Associations you see on the flip side of the map are bound by covenant into the wider United Church of Christ. Go ahead and connect the dots: you can see our South Central Region stretches from Hartland CT in the northwest to Stonington in the southeast. Again, by my count there are 112 churches in seven different regions, and by virtue of the covenant we share, we all belong to each other. It’s rather like the churches of Macedonia on the first map that stretch from Rome to Athens to Crete. Here in our Middlesex Association, whose member churches I’ve listed in the left margin and number 17 on the map, we are 19 congregations strong. And because of our covenants between and among our congregations, Chester is connected to Lyme which is connected to Clinton which is connected to Middlefield which is connected to Essex and so it goes on.
So to return to our hypothetical, let’s say Amie is not only changing churches, but changing Associations, from the Middlesex Association to the New London Association. If she has standing, or certification in the one she is leaving but cannot carry her church membership into the one she is moving to, what is a poor clergywoman to do?
She calls on a colleague, in this instance she calls on the Moderator of Vice, I mean the Vice Moderator of the Association, who offers to receive her into membership in this church so that her standing stays here while she moves her ministry from the settled minister of the Congregational Church in East Hampton, CT to the interim minister at the First Congregational Church of Lebanon, CT. It is a win-win-win, and as we heard from Ecclesiastes, “A three-fold cord is not easily broken.” East Hampton can send Amie off to her new ministry with thanks and blessings, Lebanon can welcome her as their interim minister, and the United Church of Chester gains yet another member of the congregation – who is clergy to boot, bringing our total to five ordained ministers in our congregation. Amie concluded her ministry in East Hampton last week, and begins her new ministry in Lebanon next Sunday, so in all fairness we are not going to see much of her – we will seldom if ever see her again – but this comes with the territory. (Although Amie, I was thinking of asking you to cover Christmas and Easter for me!)
And by welcoming Amie as a covenant member of the United Church, you and I also affirm our covenant with our sister churches of the Middlesex Association, the Southern New England Conference, and the United Church of Christ. As we connect these dots together, we strengthen who we are as the body of Jesus Christ. For as Deb read from the book of the Psalms, “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!”