The Comma

I say it to our kids all the time:  your understanding of God and your relationship with God has to “die” again and again in your life in order for you to make room for a new relationship with God and new understanding of who God is. 

The problem is most of us get stuck.  We get stuck often somewhere in our early adolescence when something bad happens, something hard and unfair happens.  And it doesn’t fit with our “childhood” understanding of who God is and how God works. 

For those of us who I’d say are fortunate, we had a relationship with God that was a lot like a relationship with a loving parent.  We were in need and our needs were met.  We were hurting and we were comforted.  We were lost and we were found. 

And what happens when something bad happens and the hurt isn’t taken away?  What happens when we first experience the death of a loved one or favorite pet?   It isn’t fair.  It isn’t right.  And where was that God as Perfect Parent to come and save us – to keep us from this hurt?   At times like this – and they happen again and again in our lives as we mature – we need to “die” to understandings of God so that the new that is always God can be born in us. 

I can only speak of my own experience.  I have and have had a central, vital, deep, long and CHANGING relationship with God.  A CHANGING understanding of who God is and how I am to be in relationship with God.  There are constants for me – like love –  a presence, knowing of love.  Like forgiveness.  Like relationship.  But HOW I have been in relationship to that which is God and HOW I experience God working in my life and life as I know it has changed and I know will continue to change.  For it is what happens in any of the good, grounding relationships in our lives.  They change.  They grow.  As we change and we grow.  What we need changes.  What the other needs changes.  How we are in relationship change.  And that is a good thing.  But it first is often a hard thing.  It is hard for relationships to change for it feels like they have died.  Something about what was has died.  And something new is waiting to be born. 

I hope for this new generation what I hope for all of us – that we will not get stuck.  That we will risk being part of a growing, deepening, changing relationship with God.   That when we run right up against an understanding that doesn’t work any more, a way of relating that doesn’t fit us anymore, we won’t throw away the relationship with God – with church – with faith – with spirituality – with Jesus – but use this as an opportunity to “die”.  To let go.  To make room.  Listening, hoping room for a new way of relationship and understanding to be made.  To share these times of ending and new beginning with each other.  To seek accompaniment and support from others who know this way – at church, spiritual directors, loved ones.  To walk through the unknowing into the new knowing.  To dare to believe that God is still speaking, still calling, still seeking us out in the always forever NEW that is God.

Last week I got to hear Alain de Botton at the Central Library speak about his new book,  The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.  What most of us do between say, 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. is a great mystery.  What are people doing in all those offices?  What is it like at home with moms and dads at home caring for their children?   What is any day for any one of us really like?  For all of us, whether we are paid for it or not, there is “work” that we do.  We type at keyboards.  We drive.  We attend meetings.  We negotiate.  We figure things out.  We do all sorts of things.  Through our work, Alain de Botton believes, we become more fully human. 

Through work we gain an identity – or lack of identity.  Through our work we have the opportunity to do something of meaning.   To do what most of us say we want to do – to make a difference, to alleviate suffering or to increase pleasure for others.  To make life a little better.  To create things that are better than we are.  Work is essential for the “good life” we all long for.  Indeed, I have witnessed that those who have done “retirement” best are those who have not “retired” – but used this new stage of life to share what they have learned, to continue to do what they love, to make a difference in the world. 

But for something so important as our work, there is a curious silence about it.  If you looked at the top fiction best sellers, you’d think most human beings sit around thinking about love, falling in and out of love, in and out of relationship with their families and contemplating murder.  Rarely do the stories we read talk about what we all DO during this time of day called “work”.  We have job titles that few understand.   Desks or workspaces that few closest to us have even seen.   Hours we spend during the day which are a mystery to those we love.  When we go on vacation, we visit museums and restaurants and parks but we don’t go visit the places where people spend most of their days – those places we work.   

After he completed his university degree, Alain couldn’t find work.  And someone told him, “Do what you love”.  So he did.  He wrote a book.  And he’s been wondering about big questions and talking to interesting people and writing books ever since.   For him, doing what he loved was the way he found as well to make a living and live his life.  I told him that he is one of the creative thinkers our world really needs and asked him, “Where did you learn to be a creative thinker?  What keeps you at it?   What keeps you growing in your creativity?”  He said that he isn’t creative all the time.  Sometimes he too hides behind his own fears.  But then he remembers.  “Do what you love.”  Then he remembers, “Life is short.  Live it now.”

Angels and Demons

In times of transition, great spiritual forces are present.  They come in many guises and particularly, what I term, “Angels of Faith” and “Demons of Anxiety”.  Their presence is real and they tussle for room in our hearts, lives and institutions in times of change.  In our church we know both of these angels and demons well. 

The Demon of Anxiety shows up among us in an old familiar story we tell ourselves over and over again.  I still don’t fully understand WHY we tell this story to ourselves, but we do.  It’s a very old story present long before I began my ministry with you 15 years ago.  My sense now, in fact, is that it has been around since the founding of this church and shaped our ministry ever since.  It’s a story that we repeat to ourselves about our “lack”, our “deficiency”. 

It’s an anxious story we tell each other about how we are not doing enough.  Not doing enough for our children and youth, college students and young adults, parents with young children, middle age adults and the elderly in our congregation…the list goes on.  It’s an old story we tell ourselves about anxieties about our leadership and anxiety about where we are going.  It shows up in anxious behaviors among us.  It’s an old story that has at its root often unnamed anxious questions, “Are we okay?”  Are we loving, doing, being enough?   Am I okay with God? 

It is not that the anxious issues we tell each other about again and again are not issues and will not always be.  In fact, this is our “work” of the church, is it not, to care for and pray for each other as God’s people and creation.  We seek to do that with God’s help the best we can. 

And yet, we hold these issues within an old anxious story that does not serve us well.  An old story that cannot lead us forward.  An anxious story that lacks a wider vision and call and keeps us trapped in the past.  An old story that can and has trapped our ministry and its leadership in wearying, deadening work of fixing and pleasing instead of claiming our faith and risking wider dreams. 

Like all stories, we tell it to ourselves over and over because something in it brings us some comfort.  I wonder if maybe it is comfort from the fear of being changed. 

But there is something else.  Alive among us is also an Angel of Faith.  It is an angel that spurs us on to take bold action in the way of Jesus and to share abundantly to support a common call.  The Angel is wild and live and among us as well.

The issue before us as church is this:  Will we be the church of the 21^st Century?  Will we be the new, reformed and reforming church that is always being called out by the Spirit of the Living God?  The Spirit that calls us to wider imagination, deeper loving, firmer faith.  Nothing thwarts the Angel of Faith, like the Demon of Anxiety which calls us circling back upon ourselves in an old anxiety that makes no room for us to dream anew.  To meet the Demon of Anxiety we need to know its name and call it forth.  To thank it for how it has served us and now to set it free.  To make room for the new, that soaring, Pentecost Dove, that Angel of Faith, flying like light, like fire, among us.

Yesterday afternoon a talked with a reporter from the Seattle PI.  I was looking forward (with some trepidation I must admit!) to getting the paper this morning because I wasn’t at all sure about how his story would come out.  It’s not a bad piece.  The part I take issue with was how I was quoted:  “People talked about risk,” he said.  “But I was so proud of the congregation because of the deep care that people showed.”

This about exactly misses the point of what I was trying to say and get him to hear.  Oh well.  Congregational meetings don’t make good sound bites.

As I tried to say at the congregational meeting one thing that I have found so moving and strengthening in this process of discernment has been care.  Everyone has cared.  People that have been in support of Nickelsville moving here care.  People raising objections and concerns about risk care.

The point is that everyone cares.  And that is what unites us as church – we all care.  I kept hearing that yesterday at the meeting.  I’ve been hearing that all week.  We care deeply about our ministry with each other and deeply about our ministry in the communities we serve.  How we express that care – and the issues we see, the things we are concerned about vary.  That’s good!  That helps us take in the full breadth of our care.

But we live in a society where we divide people up by those who care – and those who do not.  We do it all the time.  If someone thinks like me, they care.  If they don’t, they don’t care.  That is exactly what didn’t happen at a really extraordinary congregational meeting yesterday.  With deep respect for each other, careful listening, the congregation showed its care for each other and the variety of ways that we expressed it.  We didn’t become divided into us and them as we see religious communities behaving all around the world.  We showed something different.  We re-imagined care.  A care that is big enough to take in the variety of opinions, concerns we carry within us as church.

Three months from now our time with Nickelsville will be drawing to a close.  We will have learned a lot through this time.   Through this experience I have heard our congregation hope that we might re-imagine ways to continue to take steps in walking with the homeless in other new, bold and creative ways.

But something just as important I hope may also be a gift of this time.  I see it already.  That is, that we as a congregation are re-imagining what it means to care.  Re-imagining how we talk with each other as we see and hear each other knowing that we all care.  Our care is what unites us all.  In fact, I think it is the core of what following Jesus and being a Christian community of faith is all about.

I sent this note below about the congregational meeting today to church council and the coordinating committee for discernment about inviting Nickelsville to our parking lot.

We could not have been blessed by a greater community of leaders who have held with such faithful care and responsibility the issues that are involved and done that from a place of such deep respect and care of and for each other, the congregation we serve and the community we serve.  I have told people again and again this week of how proud I am of the church for how we have been about this discernment process. 

I want to thank John Lewis for outstanding leadership at today’s meeting.  It was an excellent congregational meeting that enabled the congregation to hear and speak to each other from a place of deep respect and care.  And it is that deep care for each other and the community’s we are called to serve that is our strength as we walk ahead.  As Kathy Kripps shared, we walk out of this meeting with a charge to move in a particular direction and with a variety of concerns expressed about that direction.  Now is the time for us as leaders to be good listeners to and with each other.  We walk into this next step in ministry with our eyes wide open.  We will seek to walk into this commitment that the congregation made faithfully as always. 

We have been in this place before as church, and will be again, when a direction as been called for and there have been reservations and concerns about that direction.  But we have come together as church again and again.  And we will now.  I know that because of what I have seen, heard and experienced today and this past week.  Deeper than any particular thing that we might wish for individually is our longing to be God’s people of love and justice, compassion and care. 

We saw that at the meeting today: 

In the words that everyone spoke, deep care. 

In how we talked with each other, deep respect.

In discerning what is the right way forward, deep listening to God and to each other. 

It is that care that we have for each other and the community’s we serve that will lead us forward. 

We will have incredible leadership (that would be all of you!) as we saw these past weeks, step in and put in countless hours of ministry to look seriously and carefully at all questions and concerns. 

We don’t always have to agree, and won’t.  But we will walk forward together as church because that is our call. 

We will be the body of Christ because that is who we are – which means we are always broken and always full of resurrection, full of hope. 

We will stumble and fall at times, and we will get up again and again because that is just what we do. 

And we will be reminded of the tie that binds us together, deeper, so much deeper than all that might seem to divide us. 

It is what we say in our covenant each Sunday – that we “Care for and pray for each other in trials of the spirit and times of joy.”  Today was a meeting where both were present – trial and joy.  As leaders, we must lean back on the covenant that we make with each other and show ourselves and each other how to walk, in the way Jesus calls, in faith, in hope, in love together.

God is present with us.  I have no doubt of that.  And Jesus there, beside us and before us on this road ahead.

Three weeks ago, on a rainy Wednesday evening, I drove home and into the garage and saw that it was gone. There, against the wall, where I always kept it, my bike was gone.

It wasn’t just any bike. It was my bike. My twenty-eight year old, rusted, dented bike.  The bike that my Dad and friends thought I should have traded in years ago. But I just couldn’t part with it. It wasn’t just any bike.

This was the bike I bought after graduating from high school for my summer job leading middle school kids on bike trips through Nova Scotia and New England. This was the bike I rode in a “Century” bike race. (Actually we rode 120 miles. We found out at the 100 mile mark and 20 miles from home that they had marked the route wrong!) This was the bike that I rode through the streets of New Haven and hills of upstate New York. The bike that I rode on the lakeshore of Chicago and that took me now each day to work. This was the bike that I had taken apart and put together again and again. The bike I yelled at when I got yet another flat tire. This was not just any bike. It was my friend. It’s funny to say that, but true. We had gone through a lot of living together. Here, on this old bike, I’d found a lot of pure joy that I didn’t find in any other way.

On the bike were a set of thirty-two year old ripped and faded orange panniers. I had just finished 10^th grade when I got them on my first bike trip with Student Hostelling Program. Eight of us and our leader spent that summer biking for three weeks through New England with these very panniers. (These were the days before anyone wore bike helmets but this safety conscious program had us all wear plastic Canadian hockey helmets that we decorated with magic markers. Yes, we got quite the reactions on the road.) The panniers had been on my bike ever since that trip and I had taken them in many times to get stitched up. “Are you sure?”, the guy in the shoe repair store would always ask. “Yes, I’m sure”, I said, “I got them in 10^th grade” (as if that explained

something). That trip made a real difference to me. It may have been the first time I was part of a group. A little group of friends I really liked and with whom we did something challenging and sweaty and wet and hard together. A trip and a group that connected me to something that I love and something important about myself. I still don’t know all that it is: The outdoors? Biking? Being with friends? I’m not completely sure. But something I carried with me in those old panniers.

So, yes, a lot of memory on that old bike. A lot of stories packed away in those torn, faded panniers. No one would have known. How could they? What the things we carry really mean.

Funny thing. Whoever took my bike took my helmet with my reflector vest and biking gloves in it and placed it on the ground. Like they knew that I was going to need this stuff when I got a new bike again.

The police who came that night were so kind. I surprised myself by putting up signs offering a generous reward. I left messages at a bunch of used bike shops on the chance that someone had sold it that day and I offered to buy it back. I was sort of hopeful that I might see my bike again. I didn’t.

I took the bus to work the next day. Told my colleagues what had happened. They too were very kind. David said, “Would you like to borrow my bike? I bought it at the Superfluity sale a year and a half ago and have rarely ridden it. It sits in my storage unit taking up room.” “Sure”, I said, “I’d be glad to have a look at it.”

We left right then for his house, and pulled out of his storage unit a several year old Schwinn hybrid. It was just my size and in great shape. When we got back to church David said, “I’ve been thinking. Why don’t I give you the bike and you have Tim and me over for supper sometime?” I was so moved. What a gift. What a gift. I said “Yes” and took my new bike home that night on the bus.

The next day, I rode into work. I’ve told friends it is like having a new car. In fact, I have told many people that it feels like I have a Cadillac. Such a smooth ride. So fast. So fun. I love sitting up like this – shifters at my finger tips. I zoom down the street pretending I am a Seattle cop on patrol. That afternoon I buy a large pair of plastic panniers.

We’ve been bonding – this new bike and I. I have purely delighted in it. I ride singing down the street. The gears jump and I yell. The brakes catch and I squawk. We are getting to know each other.

How is it that some of these precious things in our lives carry such importance? It feels silly to cry over them when they are lost, and yet we do. For these precious things are not just an assembly of metal, plastic and rubber but a holder of memory. A connecting point to all that has been and a starting point for all we hope may be.

Days full of memory. Days full of grief. Days full of this amazing gift of surprise. Of being gifted, and generously, by a friend with the exact thing that we needed right now: this new thing, a new bike, a container for all life’s memory and joy.

IT’S NOT ABOUT FAIRNESS; IT’S ABOUT LIFE

(Matthew 20.1-15)

A sermon preached by Peter Ilgenfritz and Dave Shull

Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ

Plymouth, New Hampshire

The Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time: September 21, 2008

PETER: It is a gift to be here.  A gift to be home with family to New Hampshire.  A gift to be with a congregation that had the courage and faith to become the first Open and Affirming UCC church in this state.    It is only because of the courage and faith of churches like yours that Dave and I could live out our call to be pastors.  It is only because of the courage and faith of churches like yours that gays and lesbian Christians and their family members and friends can find places to worship where God’s all-embracing love is fully known.  Thanks be to God for you.

DAVE: There is a chant from the French community of Taize which I would like us to sing together.  The words are Ubi caritas et amor, ubi caritas Deus ibi est.  Where charity and love are, God is there.  Let us sing it through several times.  If you don’t know it, please join the rest of us as you learn it.   

PETER: The Gospel reading for this morning is from the 20^th chapter of Matthew.  It appears in your bulletin.  Let us listen for the Word of God. 

DAVE:  Jesus said to his disciples, “The kingdom of heaven is like the owner of an estate who went out at dawn to hire workers for the vineyard.  After reaching an agreement with them for the usual daily wage, the owner sent them out to the vineyard.

            “About mid-morning, the owner came out and saw others standing around the marketplace without work, and said to them, ‘You go along to my vineyard and I will pay you whatever is fair.’  At that they left.

            “Around noon and again in the mid-afternoon, the owner came out and did the same.  Finally, going out late in the afternoon, the owner found still others standing around and said to them, ‘Why have you been standing here idle all day?’

PETER: “‘No one hired us.’

DAVE: ‘You go to my vineyard, too.’

            “When evening came, the owner said to the overseer, ‘Call the workers and give them their pay, but begin with the last group and end with the first.’  When those hired late in the afternoon came up, they received a full day’s pay, and when the first group appeared they assumed they would get more.  Yet they all received the same daily wage.

            “Thereupon they complained to the owner,

PETER: ‘This last group did only an hour’s work, but you’ve put them on the same basis as those who worked a full day in the scorching heat.’

DAVE: “‘My friends, I do you no injustice.  You agreed on the usual wage, didn’t you?  Take your pay and go home.  I intend to give this worker who was hired last the same pay as you.  I’m free to do as I please with my money, aren’t I?  Or are you envious because I am generous?’” (The Inclusive New Testament, published by Priest’s for Equality, 1994).

PETER:  I try to imagine myself standing in the crowd listening to Jesus tell this story.  He finishes it talking about the owner’s generosity.  But after Jesus leaves, and my fellow listeners and I talk about what he said, I don’t think we’ll be talking about generosity.  I think we’ll be talking about what a bumb rap the workers who were hired first got.  We’ve worked all day in this hot Mediterranean sun before.  We know what it would be like to see people who only worked an hour get paid the same as we did for when we worked all day.  And Jesus wants to emphasize that.  He says the people who were hired last will be paid first.  It’s like he wants the people who worked all day to know how unfair life is.  

            You hear it in school playgrounds, in homes, in any setting where kids are present.  “That’s not fair!”  “You’re not playing fair!”  And though most of us adults might not use those exact words or that exact tone of voice, we feel the same way.  We’re raised in this country to believe life is fair.  If I work hard, if I play by the rules, I’ll get what I deserve.  I’ll be treated fairly.  

DAVE:  There’s only one problem.  And we know it. Life isn’t fair.  And God isn’t fair either.  Many people stop believing in God when a tragedy happens. Because we think God should have prevented it.  But where does this belief come from?  The Bible is filled with stories of unfairness.  In the story of Job, God makes a deal with Satan.  God brags about how faithful Job is.  And then God lets Satan do whatever he wants to Job except kill him.  Satan drives Job to anguish and despair.  No fairness here.

On the other hand, the Bible is filled with stories about people who break God’s laws. If life were fair, these sinners would be punished.  But instead God showers them with love.  Take the Adam and Eve story.  God tells the first couple, You can eat anything you want here . . . except the fruit of this one particular tree.  Eat that, and you die (Gen. 2.17).  So of course they eat that fruit.  Their eyes are opened.  They realize they’re naked.  They feel ashamed.  If life were fair, Adam and Eve would receive the punishment God had promised them.  But fairness is not a big part of how God operates.  God knows their nakedness makes them feel ashamed.  So before God sends Adam and Eve out of the Garden, God makes clothes for them (Gen. 3.21).  Instead of treating them fairly, God restores their dignity.

And where in the Gospels do we see any sign of Jesus being treated fairly?  So as his followers, why do we expect anything different? 

I know God never promises life will be fair.  But I know I still expect life to be fair. 

PETER:  I expect life to be fair.  And maybe you do, too.

What happens when we live our lives expecting life to be fair, and realize it isn’t?  

DAVE: One thing we can do is become be-gooders.  We can become people who try to be really, really good.  In the hope that if we’re good enough, people will love us.  If we’re good enough, we’ll get what want.  We’ll get what we think we deserve.

PETER: Or we can feel like we’ve been treated so unfairly that we become a victim.  We feel like we never get the breaks other people do.  We expect to feel misunderstood, judged, discriminated against, and lonely.  

DAVE: When Peter and I started looking for a church job in 1991, we knew we had to be really, really good.  Churches like yours had done the hard and holy work of becoming Open and Affirming.  But in 1991, no church of any denomination had ever hired a gay couple as pastors.  We knew pastor search committees weren’t exactly going to be lining up to call us.  

We got lots of rejections.  I mean, LOTS of rejections.  Over a hundred of them.  We even got rejected from churches we didn’t apply to!  It was like a pre-emptive strike.  Somehow search committees found out we were applying.  So they were kind enough to let us know we didn’t need to expend any energy applying to them.  

For some reason I didn’t understand, Peter felt like we needed to save all those rejection letters.  But he didn’t file them away in the back of the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.  No.  He filed them in the front of the top drawer.  So every time I opened that draw to file away a phone bill or pull out a copy of our church application materials, there it was.  That file of rejection letters that each week looked more and more like the Hindenburg.  

For a while, seeing all those rejection letters gave us the drive to work even harder to get a church to call us.  It inspired us to be be-gooders.  We believed if we were nice enough, and flexible enough, and open enough, and willing enough to put up with anything, some church would hire us.  That’s what we deserved for being so good.  That’s what was fair.

And being be-gooders almost worked. 

In the summer of 1992, a search committee of a UCC church in Columbus, Ohio, became really interested in us.  I was excited.  I’d lived in Columbus for three years after college, and still had very good friends there.  My parents live 90 miles from there.  I was really excited.  Peter and I put everything we had into that call.

PETER: But the congregation voted us down.  And what they said they didn’t like about us was that we were gay.  Their actions reflected that sentiment.

We led worship on the Sunday the congregation was going to vote on us.  Dave stood at the door of the church welcoming people.  And about every fourth person who came in refused to shake his hand.  When Dave called the children forward for the children’s sermon, none of the parents let their kids come forward.  

We flew back to our home in Chicago that night.  Having tried to be so good.  Having believed that if we were good enough, God would reward us by giving us what we’d worked so hard to get.  That was only fair, right?

After Columbus, we stopped trying to be be-gooders.  We were way too angry and hurt for that.  So we went to another place people go when they expect fairness and don’t get it.  We became victims.  If you’ve felt like a victim at any time, you know what it’s like. 

There can be a certain pleasure in seeing yourself as a victim.  No one likes me.  No one understands me.  We concluded the world hates gay people.  The Christian church, especially, hates gay people.  No one understands us.   We shut down. We stopped going to church for awhile because it was too painful.  We didn’t want to be in the pew.  We wanted to be up in front leading worship. 

It would have been so easy for us to get stuck in being victims.  But as we held onto our being victims in our clenched hands, we realized we were dying.  

DAVE: If we let go of the need for life to be fair, what might we receive?  If we unclench the hands that cling to being be-gooders and being victims, and open our hands to God, what might God place in them? 

            If we let go of our need for fairness, we make room for life.  New possibilities, new beginnings.  We make room for life.

            Writing 10 years ago, a Benedictine monk describes this process: 

            Every moment is more brightly precious than we can possibly understand. . . . We did not bargain for most of what we get in this life, but life itself is worth holding onto, and worth valuing.  It is a great loss if we greet every day with clenched hands stuffed with our own devices.  We will never know what is out there waiting for us if we don’t extend an empty hand to the world and wait for the wonder to happen (Radical Hospitality, p. xxxvii). 

            Writing almost 800 years ago, the Muslim poet Rumi also invites us to imagine the ife that comes from unclenched moments.      

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.

This is what Jesus is talking about when he says, “I have come that you may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10.10.  It’s what Paul is talking about when he writes, “I am convinced that nothing in all creation nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8.39).  

The monk, Rumi, Jesus, Paul: they’re all trying to tell us, It’s not about fairness.  It’s about life.  So unclench your hands.  Receive life.  And live.

PETER:  A couple months after being voted down by the church in Columbus, Dave and I began to do this.  In some mysterious way, God’s grace gave us the strength and healing and imagination to do this.  Something shifted.  We began to open our hands.  And Jesus began to lift from us the being good and the being victim we’d been clutching to.  As he lifted these from us, our hands were emptied of our deadening need for life to be fair. 

And I felt something new placed in them.  I knew we still needed to keep applying to churches.  We still wanted to be pastors.  But it wasn’t about getting a job at all costs.  The most important thing was to knock at the doors of those churches.  And force those search committee members to read our application.  And wrestle honestly with their fears and hopes.  And discuss faithfully whether they feel like calling a gay couple as pastors is anything like what being Open and Affirming means to the church they love.    

When we let go of our need for fairness, what God gave us was life.  It was incredibly empowering and strengthening.  Life in the form of a new call to knock at church doors.  And see what happened.

DAVE:  Not long after receiving this call to new life, a letter from a church search committee landed in our open hands.  It was a rejection letter.  But it wasn’t like the hundred others that still lived in the top drawer of our filing cabinet.  It didn’t say, “We’re sorry that your gifts don’t match our needs.”  This rejection letter started with the words, “Your application brought our search process to a halt.”  The letter went on to say the committee thought Peter and I were almost exactly what they were looking for.  Then they wrote, “With sadness, we confess that the sin of homophobia remains in us.  So we cannot consider you any further.”  And they blessed us on our search. 

PETER: Which ultimately was successful.  And which is why we’re here this morning.  On June 12, 1994, University Congregational United Church of Christ in Seattle, called us to be their pastors.  And we served there together for 11.5 years.  A couple of years ago, Dave moved on to other ministries.  I just began my 15^th year there.

DAVE: It’s not about fairness.  It’s about life.  Open-handed, lying down in the grass, abundant, nothing-can-separate-us-from-the-love-of-God life.  It’s not about expecting fairness.  It’s about expecting God’s love and Christ’s presence to be with us always, no matter what life brings.  Always God calls us out into that open field.  To open our hands to new life.

PETER:  Horace sat in the front pew at University Congregational United Church of Christ.  Right below the pulpit where he could make comments on the pastor’s sermon. He was most cantankerous of the 24% of the church that had voted not to call us.  One Sunday, I met him at the back of the sanctuary – right at the end of the postlude he boomed, “I don’t think you two have done a damn bit of good since you got here.”  That was Horace.

Later that year, Horace was dying.  I went to visit him.  He made a surprising connection.  He talked about how his college had prevented him from joining a fraternity because he was Jewish.  And then he went right on to say, “I said some stupid things about you two before I even got to know you.  I didn’t give you two a chance.” 

            When I was a be-gooder, I tried to be who others wanted me to be.  When I was a victim, I hid my strength.  Horace shows me how God calls us to be authentically ourselves.  And know that is enough.

DAVE:  These days, as I try to keep my hands open to new life, I find myself drawn to the wisdom of people who have lived on the edges of life.  People who have lived in very different places and ways than I have.  

            One of those wise people is a woman I’ll call Jackie B.  Jackie B. is an African-American woman in her 40s.  And she’s one of the most beautiful spirits I know.  I met her last year through my work at the Recovery Café in Seattle.  The Recovery Café helps homeless people in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction learn how to build healthy relationships.  Jackie B. lives with addictions to alcohol and cocaine.  When you ask, “How are you doing today, Jackie B.?”, she almost always replies, “I’m blessed!” 

            In a group I facilitate, a middle-aged man said, “I’m starting to feel hopeless.  All my life I’ve been beaten down by people.  They call me stupid.  Loser.  Failure.  God’s mistake.  No-good.  Addict.”

            Jackie B. looked at him with her loving, wide-open smile.  She said, “I’ve stopped answering to all the names other people call me.  Now I only answer to the name I’ve been given: God’s beloved child.”

            When I was a be-gooder, I couldn’t believe God could love me just for being me.  I needed to try to earn that love.  When I was a victim, I felt like God had rejected me.  So talking about God’s love made no sense.  Jackie B. shows me we can believe the names others call us, and the names we learn to call ourselves.  Or we can open our hands to life.  And believe our only true name is God’s Beloved.

            We can imagine new life when we open our clenched hands and let go of the ways we think life is supposed to be.  Or the ways we think life has to be.

            Michael was a 10-year-old at University Congregational United Church of Christ.  Ours was the first church he attended.  He’d gotten to know Peter and me.  And he’d gotten to know our other clergy colleague, Gail.  Then a new pastor, Don, arrived.  One Sunday after Don had been at the church a while, I was talking with Michael and his parents.  Michael was looking like he was thinking really hard.  He said, “Don’s a pastor, right?”  His parents said, “Yes.”  “And Don’s married, right?”  “That’s right.”  More silence.  More intense brain work.  Finally a look of enlightenment.  “Oh,” Michael exclaimed, “I thought you had to be a woman or gay to be a minister!”

PETER: So much is possible when we live with open hands.  So much is possible when we let Christ free us from the prison of expecting the world and life and God to be fair.  We did not bargain for most of what we get in this life, but life itself is worth holding onto, and worth valuing.  It is a great loss if we greet every day with clenched hands stuffed with our own devices.  We will never know what is out there waiting for us if we don’t extend an empty hand to the world and wait for the wonder to happen. 

            May wonder land in our open hands . . . and take our lives where we never thought to go.  Amen.