Preaching on:
John 6:1–21

I remember being a kid in Sunday School and learning about God. The stuff that interested me the most was God getting her hands dirty in the real world. I loved all the stories about Jesus because they were so real and relatable. But I also loved the stories from Genesis and Exodus and Samuel—floods and plagues and giant slaying and all that good stuff. These are stories designed for the imagination of a little boy, of course, but there was something more there than just great adventures.

God in these stories was not some faraway King sitting on a throne somewhere up in heaven. God was not distant or removed or absent in any way. God was in the world and deeply invested in everything—from the lives and relationships of ordinary people to the politics and history-changing moments of great empires. And God wasn’t like the gods we’re trying to create for ourselves today through artificial intelligence—our future robot overlords perhaps. God was not logical or cool or measured. God was emotional, mercurial, even violent. God had appetites and, apparently, needs. God could be offended and would take revenge.

It’s a funny thing to have your Sunday School teachers tell you (because it’s what we’re supposed to believe!) that God is perfect, and then read you some of these stories where God behaves in—certainly impressive, but not always entirely admirable ways. Lucky for me, I didn’t need a perfect God. That would have been boring. In these stories, God was worldly. That was what was interesting to me. God was in the world with us. God was invested in us. And God seemed to be responding to us. And zooming out to look at the big picture, as a kid, God seemed to be growing up with me.

When it came time to contemplate God intellectually, to memorize catechisms, to be versed in the basics of Calvin’s Institutes, I was not interested at all. I remember being asked a riddle by a teacher once: Could God create a rock so big that even God couldn’t move it? I liked riddles, but this one was boring. Where in all those great stories was God ever creating rocks and carrying them around? And where in all those stories was there any suggestion at all that God was infinitely powerful in the first place? An infinitely powerful being coming down to earth and playing at limitations is boring. If you know the whole drama and tension of the story could be erased with a wave of God’s magic wand, who cares? If God is infinitely powerful and David defeats Goliath, who cares? If God is infinitely powerful and humbles Pharoah, who cares? Of course God wins every time. There’s never even any question of how it all turns out. But is that life? Is that life as you experience it?

No. And that interpretation, I think, is a betrayal to the experiences of the people actually living those stories out. And it's just not true to our own lives and struggles! How will things turn out? We don’t know. We’re holding on by our fingernails here. Faith isn’t the easy experience of believing that a God who always wins will always win. Faith is the experience of holding on by your fingernails, routing for the underdog, defying the odds, refusing to give up, refusing to curse God even when God seems to have failed, and to never stop looking for that small, narrow, dimly lit, barely noticed path which God is laying down in the midst of this chaos into what we hope is a better future. That to me is what is truly admirable about God’s character in these stories. God is fighting just as hard as we are.

It's not easy reading our kids some of these stories where floods kill everybody or everybody gets covered in boils or giants get their heads cut off. It’s far more comfortable to tell them, without any stories, God’s in heaven, God loves you, God’s perfect, everything always comes out right in the end. That’s nice, but it’s boring. And how will those teachings really hold up in our children’s lives when they face real challenges. Because a perfect, all-powerful God would easily and neatly solve our problems for us from outside the world. But how often have you experienced that? So, the Bible tells us stories about a God whose hands are as dirty and bloody as ours with the hard work of fighting for a way forward inside the world with us.

Fortunately, we have our scripture reading this morning. Nobody’s head gets chopped off, but we see the way that God seems to work in the world and in our lives. A large crowd is following Jesus. It’s time to eat. Where are we going to get food everyone? A perfect and “all-mighty” God would merely wiggle his heavenly nose and a banquet table would descend from heaven to feed everyone. And why not? That’s a great way to eat, if you can get it. But that’s not what happens. And if you pay close attention to the stories of miracles, God very rarely works from nothing. God almost always starts from something, something or someone in the world.

Let’s name a few. When the prophet Elijah went to Zarephath during a great famine and asked a widow there to make him some bread, even though she only had enough oil and flour for one last cake before she died, that little bit lasted through the whole long famine and kept them both alive. The wedding at Cana—Jesus’ first miracle in John’s gospel—the wedding reception runs out of wine. Jesus doesn’t create wine from nothing. Jesus has them fill six big cisterns with water—30 gallons each, 180 gallons of eater total. That’s hard work! They didn’t have a garden hose! They had to sweat for that miracle, for that water to become wine. What about David and Goliath? Why didn’t God strike down Goliath with a lightning bolt? Well, it would have been a boring story. And it wouldn’t have been a true story because bullies and tyrants are rarely overthrown by lightning bolts. It takes the little people of the world to stand up to them. So, God takes a shepherd boy, a sling, and some stones and works with them to win an entirely precarious and unexpected victory. Very often, when Jesus performs a healing he tells the healed person that it was their faith that healed them. We call this today the “placebo effect.” It’s a scientifically measurable phenomenon. If you give somebody sugar pills and tell them it’s medicine, they are more likely to get better than someone who hasn’t been given phony medicine. Belief has a measurable healing effect. So, Jesus doesn’t heal from nothing, he uses our faith.

Even in the most famous examples of God seeming to create something from nothing, there’s always a catch. In Genesis 1, for example, where the interpreters and theologians tell us that God created the cosmos from nothing, the very first line is not about nothing, it’s about what was already there when God started the work of creation. The earth was not nothing. It was chaotic, dark, deep waters. Just like today, God didn’t create from nothing. Just like today, God created from out of the midst of chaos.

And so, of course, the feeding of the 5,000 begins with a little kid holding five loaves of bread and two fish. And somehow those five loaves and those two fish feed 5,000 people. Did a miracle occur? Yes. Was it impressive? Yes. Was it the work of an almighty, infinite God who acts outside of all limitations? I don’t think so. Anyway this isn’t the story of a God who can do anything. It’s the story of a God who works within the world, alongside us, with the resources and limitations that we face. It's a story about making do with what we have, and multiplying what little we have for the benefit of others. This isn’t God showing off infinite power. This is God promising partnership, but needing us to join in, to share what we have, and to trust that together, something beautiful and miraculous can happen.

You and I can’t perform miracles. But we can provide the raw materials that miracles are made from. God doesn’t work from nothing. And if we don’t provide God with something to work with, to work through, it’s going to hard for God’s true power to get a toehold on the problems we’re facing. We’re living in interesting times, where it seems like every other day there is some huge event or revelation in the world that in the past might have defined a whole year or even a whole decade. But they just keep coming at us recently—year after year of surprise and tragedy and conflict and struggle. One response would be to batten down the hatches and to wait for God to fix everything. Another—to try to reassure ourselves that this too must all be a part of some crazy plan that God’s whipped up for purposes we can’t yet imagine. But another response, the response of a small child who loves a good story, the response of a small child who is naturally generous and just wants to share what little he has, the response of a small child who has no choice but to believe in the power of small actions, is to offer whatever we have, no matter how insignificant it may seem. And to trust that our small contributions will be multiplied in ways we can't fully understand.

Beloved, we are a part of something greater. Did you hear that? We are a part of something greater. Something greater is growing out of us. So, our little bit of bread and fish might just be enough to feed a multitude. Our little sling might be able to bring down a giant. The water I carry by the sweat of my brow may one day turn to wine. So, we can’t wait for a distant, perfect solution to descend from on high. Instead, we step forward with what we have, trusting that God will meet us there, to build a future out of our hopes and dreams, our loaves and fishes, our courage and our faith.

Preaching on:
Mark 6:30–34, 53–56

Lately, at my house, I’ve been hearing a lot of “Look, Dad! Look at me, Dad! Look at this, Dad!” It could mean a lot of different things. It could mean Romey has just invented some new death-defying stunt involving all the living room furniture, or maybe he’s doing a good job on his big-boy bicycle, or maybe he’s just drawn some new picture of a tractor-trailer truck with like 25 wheels. But whatever it is, it’s going to be more fun and more satisfying, and there’ll be a bigger laugh and a bigger sense of pride, if he knows that Bonnie or I are watching what he’s doing. And if we’re not paying enough attention? We might get some misbehavior to get our attention.

It's a fascinating aspect of human nature. I remember the feeling of it from when I was a kid (maybe you do too): that yearning, that need, to have mom or dad’s eyes on me was so strong. If we’re being rational or maybe pessimistic about it, we might say, “Well, this instinct probably evolved to ensure that the parent protects the child and feeds the child and doesn’t forget about them or neglect them.” But it’s not just the scraped knees and the hurt feelings that our kids want us to attend to; it’s not just tying shoes and cooking dinner and everything else that they can’t do yet that they want us for. They also need us—just as much—to pay attention to the things they can do for themselves and to affirm their joy, and to share in their accomplishments. I remember watching TV as a kid and if something funny happened, I would turn to look at my mom so that we could share the laugh. It was better together.  

For kids, being watched, being paid attention to, seems to me to be a need—a need as real as needing calcium or exercise or school. Being seen and knowing—knowing not just on a physical level, not just on a social level, but knowing on a psychological, spiritual level—knowing that we are not alone is a key ingredient to our healthy development as we grow up. We worry so much as parents. We work so hard to provide. We want our kids to have every opportunity. We don’t want them to suffer any disadvantage or loss or disappointment. We don’t want them to lack for any good or service that money can buy. But maybe what our kids need most from us in our busy lives, in a world full of distractions, is our simple, but undivided presence of mind. Yes, I see you. Yes, I affirm this joy you feel is real because I feel it too. Yes, together let’s turn that joke on TV, let’s turn your make-believe rock concert, let’s turn you climbing a tree into meaning.

Children teach us that life is full—absolutely full—of opportunities to experience meaning in our lives. And they remind us that we come to a healthy understanding of meaning in our lives primarily through shared experiences. An experience doesn’t need to be profound, character-building, or expensive to provide meaning—it needs to be shared, to be experienced with someone outside of myself who can affirm for me that this deep level of satisfaction and joy and purpose which we call meaning—which is so ephemeral and hard to define—is, in fact, absolutely real. Meaning is real. It exists. And we don’t need any science, any philosophy, any book, or even any religion to make it real for us. It’s real simply because Dad saw it too, because Mom experienced it with me.

Now, as we grow up, the ways in which we find and make meaning also grow up with us. But they’re all founded on those early shared experiences. And we all eventually develop a healthy desire for some level of privacy, but the desire to be seen, to be watched, and to share never goes away completely. We still need other people, we value community. Other people continue to help us identify what is relevant in a world full of information and possibilities. But, if we’re lucky, we’re not like a leaf in the wind, being swept along with the tides of other people’s opinions and social media trends. Because, if we’re lucky, we’ve discovered that the One who watches—who when we were young we could only discover outside of ourselves (in Mom or in Dad or some other close adult)—the One watches now lives within us. So, when I sit down and write a sermon alone in my office with the door closed and the lights off, I don’t feel alone. There is a watcher present with me who sees and knows and shares the meaning of that private experience. But that is a spiritual reality that I first learned to access through the intervention and care and attention of my parents.

A 2021 study by YouGov showed that 26% of the general population believes that life has no meaning. And an additional 15% aren’t sure life has any meaning. That’s a crisis—a tremendous crisis of meaning in our world. We’re becoming more individualized, more lonely, more isolated, more online, more polarized. Anxiety, depression, and despair are increasing. Many of the institutions that helped us to make meaning together—like churches—are in decline. We’re less likely to belong to clubs, social groups, sports teams, service organizations than we were in generations past. The pandemic and the precautions we took to stop the spread of the virus had very real and perhaps unintended but not unpredictable consequences, and it added to this growing sense of distancing and meaning loss. But I’m sure that the crisis in meaning also traces back to our most formative years and the intensity of the attention that’s lavished on us. Are the adults around us just providing for us and keeping us safe or are they present with us, paying attention, watching us, and by watching us and responding to us, helping us to discover that highest pinnacle of human consciousness—meaning.

We heard in our reading this morning, “As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” I think if Jesus were here today, he would find much the same thing. What is it that makes people “like sheep without a shepherd?” Is that we can’t find the best grass to eat? That we can’t protect ourselves from wolves? That we can’t cut our own hair? No, we can do all those things for ourselves. We’re like sheep without a shepherd when we don’t have that sense that someone is watching. And without those loving eyes affirming us, we become anxious and restless, we wander aimlessly and meaninglessly, we become lost, and we stray into dangerous territory.

Bringing your sick relative to see Jesus was not like a trip to doctor’s office to get a prescription for Amoxicillin. It was a trip into the presence of someone whose gaze had the power to hold you, a power so strong that it stayed with you long after you went back home. You felt it there watching you, experiencing with you, affirming you. It smiled with you, wept with you, longed with you, dreamed with you. It was there in every hour of drudgery, and it was in every epiphany of joy. And you felt less lost and less alone because that presence was tapping you into the most important connection of all—the connection to everything, the connection to God, the connection to meaning.

What our world needs in the midst of war, and mass shootings, and frantic social media antics, and political polarization is a new Spirit of meaning making. One of the problems with living in a crisis of meaning is that people will latch on with all their strength to anyone who promises loudly to provide meaning—cults, conspiracies, corporations, trends, subcultures, gangs, fascists. Providing meaning is not about telling people what to believe or not, it’s not about judging the morals of others, it’s not about some system or structure of belief. It’s all about being present, about giving people an opportunity to be heard, giving them a feeling of community, joining them where they are, wherever they are. And we have to do it in a way that challenges the volume of all the false prophets—the media, the markets, the politicians promising meaning that they’re not equipped to provide. We—the Church—need to be more present, more attentive than those false voices.

Beloved, the certain feeling that there is a power within (and beyond us) who is watching us and imbues our existence with meaning is not a psychological trick. It is the truth. It is the truth without which all the food and opportunity and money and success and accolades of the world amount to nothing. The trick, or perhaps the arrested development, is the idea that there is no meaning. And the disease is the desperate wandering and lashing out that arises from unmet need. Like an ignored kid, the world is screaming for attention.

Does Christianity stop at the stone wall that divides the Church from the outside world? Of course not. Do we come to church once a week merely to recharge our meaning battery for seven more days of drudgery and disconnection? No. We go out into the world as ambassadors of the Kingdom of God. We are the messengers of meaning. The world is shouting desperately, “Look at me! Look at me! Please, somebody, tell me I’m not alone! Please, somebody, tell me there’s a reason and a hope to this life!”

​Will you be paying attention? Will you look them eyes? Will you help the world to find the meaning it so desperately needs? The meaning, beloved, which I promise you is within you. Amen.
 

I had planned to sort of eulogize John the Baptist this morning. I was going to tell you about everything John had accomplished in his life, what he stood for, what he wouldn’t stand for, and about what a great influence John the Baptist has had on me personally, on my faith. But I know that the thing that is frontmost on many of our hearts and minds this morning (certainly on mine) is yesterday’s assassination attempt on former President Trump.

For those of you who may have missed the news, a gunman opened fire on Mr. Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. Mr. Trump was struck in the ear, but—thank God—he’s OK. Unfortunately, one other man at the rally was killed. Two other men were seriously wounded. The gunman was also killed by the Secret Service. That’s about all we know, regarding the details, at the moment. But I think all of us also know and feel that this is terrible news for our country, terrible news for this election, terrible news for those of us who continue to dare to hope that there is a possibility of healing the increasingly violent political polarization that is diving our country. This is going to make everything worse. OR—dare I hope?—maybe there’s an opportunity here to turn things around?

When I arrived here five years ago to become your senior minister, I began occasionally, in my preaching and praying, to intentionally include “political” material. There is no such thing--no such thing—as an apolitical Christianity. A Christianity or a church that attempts to avoid all political issues, that attempts to avoid offending the political sensibilities of its members or neighbors by making the mere mention of politics taboo is avoiding the fullness of the Gospel's call to engage with the realities and injustices of our world. When we do this, we neglect our prophetic role—crying out for justice, for peace, and for the almost forgotten common good.

Religious values are political values and politics are often wrapped up in or reacting to religion, and therefore abandoning political discussion forces a church to abandon its duty to participate in the most important discussions of our time. Imagine a church saying that the discussion of religious values is better left to the politicians. The Church should remain silent on issues like the morality of our leaders, mass murder in our schools, providing healthcare, defining marriage, addressing poverty. It’s ridiculous, but it’s the unintended stance of churches who attempt to avoid anything “political.”

There’s no such thing as apolitical Christianity, but that doesn’t mean descending into the muck of politics. Christianity has always been a path of transcending politics, getting past our worst political instincts, and coming together across very real divides. The Apostle Paul wrote to the first Christians in Gaul, “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” In Christ, Paul is saying, we do not ignore the world or the social and political differences between us. In Christ, we transcend those differences, not by ignoring them, but by creating a church where—against all the political and social norms of the world around us—we gather, we sing, and we eat—all of us at the same table—class, gender, ethnicity, citizenship be damned—all of us together. That church in Gaul wasn’t ignoring politics, they were defying politics. They were transcending politics and creating something new.

So, when I arrived here five years ago, I began intentionally and gently, inserting not political opinions but political reality into my preaching and praying. And it was hard on some of us. Because it was hard to hear even the mention of politics without thinking that this crazy long-haired guy is bringing up politics in order to try to force me to accept his politics. What I am hoping to do is to open up enough political honesty between us that we can learn to love one another despite very real political differences and disagreements, where we can learn to respect someone different than us even when we can’t accept their opinion. Imagine if I said to you, “I love you—BUT only because I don’t know everything about you. If you spoke freely about your thoughts on—let’s say—Joe Biden, I would probably stop loving you. But as long as you keep your mouth shut, I really do love you.” Would you believe me? Is that the kind of place we want our churches to be? Is that the kind of love we want to practice?

The very reasonable fear, of course, is that if politics come out in the open, we’ll become as profoundly divided in church as we are outside of it. And, yes, that’s a risk. But in the rest of the country, in the world outside these walls, politics and the discussion of politics isn’t going to go away--ever. And our culture desperately needs local, in-person communities of healing and restoration that are willing to do the hard work of loving one another across very real divides and differences. Shouldn’t churches be at the forefront of that political movement?

Imagine if in every town and city across this country there were these historic spiritual communities with lots of social capital and a respected moral voice holding community events, volunteer opportunities, and services where Americans could learn the countercultural values of loving and respecting and maybe even needing someone who is different from myself. Jane is a never-Trumper, but my kids love going to Vacation Bible School with her, and we couldn’t do it without her. Bob is way out there into some lefty stuff that just isn’t for me, but when I was sick, he brought me gluten-free zucchini muffins, and they were good. Who’s going to make that vision a reality if not us, if not the Church? And that vision, if we believe in it, requires us to talk regularly, respectfully and lovingly, about politic reality and to see one another fully in order to love one another fully. The devil’s in the details, of course, and it wouldn’t be easy, and there’d be growing pains for sure, but if not us, then who?

The price of our inaction is pretty clear: more violent rhetoric, violent speech, and violent actions as we lash out against our enemies. This kind of conflict doesn’t just go away. It continues to escalate unless it is somehow transformed. Where would you rather live? In a world where you were empowered to revile your enemies at the price of devolving into political instability and violence? Or a world where you were truly free to love those who were truly different than you with the benefit of an imperfect but evolving sense of the common good?

Beloved, our country needs us. Our community needs us to be bold and courageous. It’s easy to decry violence. It’s hard to respond to the deep-seated polarization and loneliness that are driving people further and further apart—that’s driving us to extremes, to hate and to violence. We can’t overcome this division by ignoring it. We’re going to have to turn around, face reality, face one another with charity and love, and learn through Christ to transcend the differences. If not us, then who?

Preaching on:
Mark 6:1–13

I had a great time on vacation in Italy two weeks ago. It was just Bonnie and me, no kids, so there was plenty of time to really unwind. I swam in the Mediterranean for the first time. I practiced my Italiano. I ate lots of pasta. I discovered the joys of ice-cold limoncello on a hot evening after eating too much pasta. And I saw a UFO—believe it or not, while eating an absolutely delicious pasta.

It was a seven-course wedding banquet, outside, right by the beach on the night of the full moon. Beautiful. When suddenly up over the horizon comes something in the sky like nothing I’ve ever seen before. There were some low fluffy clouds that night and this thing, all lit up, flew up through the clouds and was lighting the clouds up from inside. It was completely silent and looked like just a little dot in the sky. But it was very visible because it had an enormous, bright cone of white light coming out of the front of it and an identical cone of white light coming out the back of it. The two cones of light basically touching in the middle. And flying along next to it was a separate, very thin, bluish light. It looked like a flying snippet of blue laser light, just off to its left.

Through a mouthful of delicious pasta I shouted to the table, “UFO! UFO! Look at that! There’s a UFO! I’ve never seen anything like it!” Of the twelve of us at the table, only about half of us looked up. It came out of the clouds and moved across the open sky towards the sea. “What is that?” I asked everyone. “Has anyone ever seen anything like that before?” A couple people were intrigued and began discussing it at the table. Some were dismissive saying it was just a plane—it was not a plane. But still, even as it moved across the sky and out of view, about half the table didn’t even look up at all! Which shocked me. Even if you’re doubtful about UFOs, wouldn’t it have just been so easy to look up and see for yourself?

So, for the rest of the night, I was thinking about that reaction or lack of reaction. And I began to realize, I was naïve to feel shocked at people’s lack of interest. Much of my life can be characterized by being deeply interested and excited by things that other people think are just make believe. I’m interested—in whatever form it comes in—in the reality that lies at the very edges of our perception. And I have said to that reality—in whatever form it shows up—that when it shows up, I will pay attention, I will be led, I will believe.

If there’s ever been a word that I’ve struggled with in my life, it’s the word belief. It’s really like a contronym—a word that contains its own opposite. Like “fast” means both speedy and stuck; “original” means both the very first and the very latest; “forged” means both to make something and to fake something; “antique” means valuable and obsolete; “refrain” means stop and repeat. I could keep going like this because for a few years I became a little obsessive about noticing and keeping a list of contronyms. I had no idea why I was doing it. I just knew that I had to keep going and if I kept going with it, the reality at the edge of my perception would in time reveal itself to me. Eventually, I realized that I was obsessed with contronyms because I needed to work out my relationship with this one word that had so bedeviled me: belief.

Just like the word “cleave” can mean adhere closely to something or split something open, the word “belief” contains this same contradiction. Belief can mean both strict adherence to a particular worldview that is dismissive toward any new or unexpected possibility that is trying to reveal itself, and it can mean an opening up of a person beyond all preconceived notions to allow an authentic encounter with something truly new and unexpected. Belief can mean (at a linguistic level) both strict closemindedness and intentional openmindedness.  Linguistically speaking, everybody sitting at my banquet table was a believer. Some of us were “look up!” believers and some of us were “don’t look up” believers.

Jesus in his life and ministry makes it clear that God is not a worldview of limitation trying to keep out the new. God is rather the new possibility breaking wildly and silently into the world. There is so much potential in God and God’s potential is so easily overlooked.

An important component of Christian theology is that God is omnipotent—all powerful. I’ve more or less said this to you all before, but maybe not this directly: I don’t think that God is omnipotent. Or I think it’s slightly the wrong emphasis. Instead, I believe that God is “omnipotentiate”: God contains all possibility. Being all powerful means that God can snap her fingers and move any mountain. Containing all potential means that in God there is no unmovable mountain. But actually moving the mountain, if it is moved, will unfold through the possibilities and potentials at play in creation. In other words, God won’t or can’t override us, instead God is working through us.

Jesus makes this clear in our scripture reading this morning. The hometown crowd apparently see his great deeds and hear his wisdom, but neither the deeds nor the wisdom fit their limiting belief that Jesus is just some hometown schmuck. And the text says, “he could do no deed of power there.” The potential for power existed, but the power itself was in short supply because there was no openness to it among the people. It wasn’t that Jesus chose not to perform miracles there to punish them. He was trying his best, but God’s power was limited by our beliefs. All sorts of theological attempts have been made to rescue God’s omnipotence from this reality, but none of them really work. They cleave to God’s power where they should be cleaving open our understanding of the power of our own beliefs. We’re all believers. The question is “what kind?” Are we open to the possibilities? Or closed?

Jesus’ response to his hometown reception tells us a lot about the difference between the two kinds of belief—limited and open. Encountering stuckness at home, Jesus decides to send his disciples out into the world for an opening experience. He sends them out two by two on what seems like an unnecessarily risky journey. The disciples will be sent out with basically no supplies—no bread, no bag, no money, no extra clothes. They will have to rely entirely on the hospitality of other people. Now, if you really just wanted to ensure that they would be successful in spreading their message, you would certainly send them out with a care package of things that would help them along the way. Help them get through the tough times. But that is not what Jesus does because it's not necessarily about them being successful in that sort of worldly way. It's about the inner transformation that they will experience on this particular journey. Jesus understands a psychological reality—that leaving all our comforts and securities behind forces us into an attitude of openness. When we make reservations for a hotel a month in advance, we’re very discriminating. We’ll get the place that suits us best. When we’re rolling into town with no money and have no idea where we’ll be staying or how we’ll be eating, we’re suddenly open to anything.

As you all know by now, my last Sunday as your senior minister will be September 8. What comes after that for me is not yet entirely clear. And that’s scary. And I’m really looking forward to it. Because I know that God is calling me on to something new and the possibility will only reveal itself through me, through my belief, my openness, my willing to look up and to be led and to receive. While this is happening for me, something similar will be happening for all of you—the transition period between settled ministers. There may be pulpit supply, there may be a bridge minister, there may be an interim minister. Almost always in churches there’s a desire to rush through the transition zone and get back to what is known and what can be relied upon. That of course is only natural. And there are real concerns, of course. What if people disengage, stop coming, stop giving? What if we can’t sustain this program or that initiative? We want to continue to give our very best. But every once in a while, the very best we can give is an openness to possibilities. My prayer for you all is that there is some appetite to “look up” in the coming season of transition, that there is some room made for dreaming and visioning. When we open ourselves up to the God’s potential, that’s when God enters in. When we very well-meaningly try to rush past possibility to get back to security, we may sometimes close a door that God was trying to enter in through in a new and unexpected way.