Let's Go for a Walk

 Friends, today is a great big hello. Hello to the friends I’ve known for two years from Honeoye Falls, and hello to new friends from Ionia and East Bloomfield. Of course, we’re far from strangers here, even if I’m new to this pulpit. Our new friends from Ionia have met me at Holy Week services that I co-officiated with Pastor Robin. Some of our East Bloomfield friends met me back in May, when DS Richelle pulled some of us together, along with Pastor Katrina, to contemplate new ministries that our churches might do better together than apart. And, besides, we’ve always been neighbors. I’ve spent the last two years living in the parsonage in Honeoye Falls, sending my kids to the HFL schools, shopping at the marketplace, going to the fire department carnival, watching parades and festivals, and falling in love with this wedge where Monroe County meets Livingston County meets Ontario County. It’s my home, and it’s your home, too. 

And today, here we are, together. Our DS, Richelle Goff, ultimately decided, when looking at how many churches in this area needed a pastor, and how few of those there are these days, that asking me to serve three churches was the wisest of all possible courses of action. She spent a moment with the crowds, then turned away, prayed on the mountain, came down, and walked out to the middle of the sea, where I’d been rowing my boat. And, after casually strolling on the surface of the water, she waved at me in my boat and said, “hey, ‘sup?” And I said, “well, dang, if this is what we’re doing now, let’s go,” and I walked with her. Because boats are overrated, and I can trust my friends and mentors in this work to not let me drown.

Following Jesus, for me, has meant learning how to be a leader. How to approach the world the way he did, with courage and trust. It means that now y’all are in your boats, here where Monroe County meets Livingston County meets Ontario County. Our canoes all met up where those currents flow together. And I’m standing on the water, and extending my hand. Will you go for a walk with me?

Mind you, that courage and trust didn’t come overnight. Far from it. It takes, in my experience, years of following Jesus before you ever look good doing it. Before you look like you’ve got this, you look a whole lot like Peter, walking with some real swagger on the water for all of four seconds before your brain steals your peace, we realize “oh wait, I’ve never done this before”, and you start flopping and flailing around in the sea like a kid in a pool who forgot her floaties.

For a few of our Honeoye Falls friends, this might be repeated territory, but bear with me, because I had to learn how to walk on water, too. The part that Matthew kindly left out is where Jesus doesn’t patiently wait for you, he picks you up out of the boat and tosses you in the sea, like a mother bird teaching her chicks to fly by kicking them out of the nest. Before I knew this whole ministry thing was going to be my plan, I had an entirely different plan in mind: I was going to be a math teacher. Yes, a math teacher. I didn’t have a canoe in the sea that Jesus invited me to step out of, I had a first class ticket on a cruise ship in the ocean, and Jesus shoved me overboard. Teaching is still a very important part of my ministry, but before I had any concept of using my gifts that way, I imagined teaching a classroom. I had three different tutoring jobs in high school, all at the same time. I was one of the most active tutors there were, and the two subjects I was called upon to help with most were writing and math. I’d sit down with you and your term paper and help you figure out what your central thesis was, how to use your sharpest wording to bring it out, and how to support your claim with textual evidence. It’s really God’s sense of humor that the exact skill set you use to write about the French Revolution you also use to write a sermon. But the place where my tutoring skill set was in highest demand was math. By senior year of high school I was taking college level calculus, I loved it, and I adored looking at the ways numbers interacted with one another. I especially loved helping all of that make sense to you, an underclassman sitting in front of me with his geometry homework. And it never occurred to me that there was another way to help people, and another way to point out the numbers and logic around us, find the problem, and sit and solve it together. Who knows, maybe all of life is just a big algebra problem? 

Either way, I was sure I knew the right path for me: undergraduate studies at the University of Rochester, with a major in math. One year at the U of R’s Warner School of Education earning my master’s degree. Some great student teaching experiences, and by September of 2010 I’d be standing in front of a high school classroom teaching Algebra I. As you may have deduced by the fact that I’m standing here instead, that didn’t happen.

The Calculus Cruise Ship sounded like a whole lotta fun to my uber nerdy brain when I was 18, but by the end of my first year of college, it wasn’t calling to me anymore. To my shock, I couldn’t help but start looking for lifeboats to get off, even if it meant I’d be in the ocean all alone. Suddenly, the idea of studying my old favorite subject to secure a perfectly reasonable job sounded terrible. And the idea of taking a lifeboat to sea level and then getting out and walking was starting to sound ludicrous, but irresistible. I wanted to follow an unexplainable intuition, an instinct calling me out into the dark.

Our three churches are in a similar position, and it’s what lead to weeks of conversations between me, DS Richelle, and Pastor Katrina before the next steps became clearer. Jesus sent our three congregations out ahead of him in canoes while he prayed it out on the mountain. And our congregations faced a rough sea, with high winds and waves that threatened to capsize our boats. You guys aren’t new to sailing, you know all about what the winds and waves have looked like. 

(Whoosh) Urbanization and people moving away from small towns.

(Whoosh) A cultural decentering of the Church.

(Whoosh) Declining attendance.

(Whoosh) Money problems.

(Whoosh) The UMC splitting.

(WHOOSH) AND HERE COMES THE PANDEMIC.

After centuries of strong winds and waves, we’ve ended up in a totally different place in the sea than where Jesus left us. We’re off course, and struggling to navigate back. Afterall, all we have working for us is an oar. Jesus has come down off the mountain, where he had an audience with the Creator and a bird’s eye view of the whole sea, and he’s come walking over to us, to catch us where we find ourselves. 

But it’s ok for that to feel very unnerving, because that’s exactly how eleven of the disciples felt. They saw a human-looking figure doing something he shouldn’t be able to do, and, rather than believing Jesus could bend the rules and do a new thing, those disciples yelled out “it’s a ghost!”

There were moments I felt that way on my walk in the water. It was dark, and I could only focus on the next step, not the whole journey. I asked myself, “if I could put this math teacher plan aside for just a semester, and take a few classes that call to me, what would I study?” And the answer, clear as a bell, was “take a religion class.” WHAT? Nobody goes to the U of R to study religion! They go to study STEM. I was a great big geek and I wanted to stay that way. IT’S A GHOST!

Or was it a holy ghost?

Because I loved The History of Religion in America to 1877. Turns out geeks like that stuff, too. And then I took the Philosophy of Religion. And then I took Intro to the New Testament. And I was sprinting across the water, gleefully splashing all the way to the academic office to sign up for a major in Religion. Turns out it actually paired very nicely with my other major, which was Psychology. Two different perspectives on how humans think, feel, and believe. Why we do what we do. I added a minor in German, which paired very well with Psychology and Religion, as I had to read lots of primary source material for both subjects in German, and I was already fluent. I was water skiing but without the boat in front pulling me along, and it felt awesome. And then I started my seminary applications!

Wait, what??? Where did that come from? I mean I had a great academic background for seminary, and the time I spent with the group I worshipped with in college certainly inspired this idea that I had some leadership aptitude, but ministry? Really? And the waves and winds suddenly became huge.

(Whoosh) We’ve been ordaining women since the ‘50s but there’s still a whole lotta sexism.

(Whoosh) Seminary is really expensive.

(Whoosh) The institutional Church can be very unkind.

(WHOOSH) AND HERE COME MY THREE KIDS!!!!

I’ve gotten scared and sunk. And Jesus has chastised me for allowing the obstacles to be bigger than the call. How can anything matter more than Jesus holding my hand?

So here we are, and I’m out on the water again. Will you come and take a walk with me? It’s only natural to hesitate, and more natural still to get cold feet. They are wet, afterall. And of course we still see the wind, and the waves.

(Whoosh) Bringing three churches together is logistically very complicated.

(Whoosh) And it’s so daunting to sit in a new building for the first time.

(WHOOSH) AND WE’VE NEVER DONE IT THIS WAY BEFORE!

And it’s not that those challenges aren’t big. But the call is so much bigger. Think of what we could do together.

Let’s go for a walk.

Amen.