Sermons for the Month
Dare to Dream
DATE: June 24, 2001
SERVICE: Last Sunday at Faith Lutheran Church
TEXT: Acts 2:17-20“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
A couple of weeks ago a member of Faith upon hearing that I was leaving, came up to me with tears in her eyes, "Oh, Pastor Stan, we are going to miss you so much. We don't want you to leave!" Well the only thing I could think of to say on the spur of the moment was, "Well bless you for the compliment. But you don't have to worry. A Pastoral Search Team will soon be appointed by Council and I am sure that the pastor who takes my place will be even better than me." "Yeah," she said, with a tone of disappointment in her voice. "That's what they said the last time too!" (Pause) A traveler encountered a guru on the road and asked him, "Are you a deity?' The guru said no. "Are you a saint?" The guru said no. "Are you a pastor?" The guru said no. Exasperated, the traveler asked, "Then what are you!" The guru answered, "I'm awake!" Well, I have to say that I am finally awake to the fact this is my last Sunday with all of you here Faith Lutheran Church. It really hit me yesterday when I read about my leave-taking in the Akron Beacon Journal. 19 years! Not quite a record but apparently significant nevertheless. This week I was visiting Pat and Howard Snyder. We began to wax nostalgic about the Pastoral Search Team when I arrived back in 1982. The school of thought when I started out in the ministry was that every pastor was always to be open to the possible call of the Holy Spirit. So when Bishop Ken Sauer called me out of the blue to ask me to interview at Faith, I said, "Yes sir, whatever you say sir!" And to be asked by the Bishop to interview the only church he ever served, "Yes sir; whatever you say sir!" Now this same school of thought also said when interviewing you were to do so with the attitude that it would not be beneficial to the congregation for the candidate to tailor his (and back then it was only 'his') answers to questions based I what he thought the committee wanted to hear. Well, surprise, surprise! That was the first memory Howard shared with me--that I was so very open and upfront. (Brazen little 34 year-old whipper-snapper wasn't he?) On the other hand, I remember returning home and telling my wife after my first meeting with Faith's Pastoral Search Team, "Linda, they are looking for someone older." You could have knocked me over with a feather when I received a phone call asking, "We would like to meet and talk with you further." Memory was not working that well for either of us but besides those we did recall the search group included not only Howard but also Charlie Ramsey, Charlotte Shuff, Dick and Betty Kesti's daughter Ruth, the children's choir director at the time Robin Donald, Andy Kunos and Bill Pierce, chairperson, who I think is here this morning. A couple of weeks ago, Bill who now lives over in Medina and I chatted about the clandestine meetings we held in a restaurant in downtown Mansfield called the "Castle Keep." As its name implies, it was an underground restaurant built in an abandoned turn-of-the-century cistern once use by the fire department as a water source to fight downtown fires. My "trial sermon" was on Valentine's Day in the evening. My first day on the job was May 1, 1982. At first, I lived in an upstairs room of a house down the street from Judy and Terry Vernon. Linda, Stacy and Skip finally arrived August 1st when we moved into the house that now nobody now wants at 4670 Rolling View Dr. And the rest of these last nineteen years as they say is history. A month or so ago, our webmaster Ed Rich wanted some of that history to be preserved. So over the last month I wrote for him a short history of Faith to be placed on our website. As I wrote it I noted how making that history has taken a lot of effort on the part of so many people. Time does not permit me to list all those individuals but suffice it to say, I want to commend to you your staff. They have been loyal, persevering, willing to work for peanuts, for the sake of Jesus Christ. They deserve your loyalty as well particularly in the weeks and months ahead. Living, just living, takes work and focus. Not only building churches, developing worship services, comforting those in distress but also raising children, taking tests, earning a paycheck, dealing with family crises, etc. takes most if not all of our attention. In light of that, over the years I have considered the greatest part of my responsibility as pastor to help people wake up and smell God, to wake up and taste his future. I felt I had no choice but to help my sisters and brothers of God's creation to wake up on the right side of salvation history even as they go about creating their own personal histories. However, in the last decade or so I have learned that I also had no choice but to wake up and breathe out the cold, arctic air of the modernity into which I was born and in its place breathe in the fire of our postmodern future with all its omens, amen's, and amends. Another thing I was taught once upon a time was that we who call ourselves Christian were to live in the world but be not of the world. Translated that really meant we were to have nothing to do with the culture in which we lived but instead were to adopt some kind of Christian lifestyle that meant fencing out the world in which we lived. I remember when I bought my first computer back in 1979--an Apple--before coming to Faith. People told me it was evil and I should have nothing to do with it. I loved it. I could finally write my sermons without having to write in the margins or literally cut, paste and staple to make corrections. After all Martin Luther had made use of the latest technology of his day--the printing press much to the chagrin of his superiors. It seemed to me to reject in Toto the culture in which I lived was counterproductive. I believe now that as we understand our culture and accept that even though we Christians may be part and parcel of another kingdom, that we are no longer really OF this world, that does not mean we have to fear everything from this world. I was not given the choice in 1946 to be born a baby boomer. During my early years I lived in a very tidy and predictable world full of Musketeers and Howdy Doody. The suburbs were my home and that's the way it was. But then something happened. Some say it had already started with the automobile in the 1930s, others TV and still others the computer. Whichever it was, the results are the same. More has changed in the world during my 55 years of life than in all the previous 500 years put together. It is really true that I have spent my whole life living in a time of transition, of increasing change, of mind-boggling transformation. People who fuss with this kind of stuff say that the new world to which we are inching will not really come until about 2020 or ten years after I retire. In other words, we Boomers will make it to the river but we won't cross over. We will be able to see the promise land but we will not have the opportunity to be a part of the new world to which we are marching. The crossover to the post-postmodern world will only be made by those of you in who are, GenXers, Millenials, and the like. We live in a time of dramatic change. We live in a time that is both exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. We live in a time that is anxious to live in peace even as we are anxious why there is no peace. We live in a time not unlike that of Jesus and the Disciples. We live in the best of times and the worst of times. But has that not always been the case? And has not God always found a way to make His message, the good news of Jesus Christ, heard in the world, regardless of the times? My friends, the challenge before you and Faith Lutheran Church, before me and Messiah Lutheran Church is to put away the puny, hack dream of trying to just "make a difference in the world" and start dreaming God-sized dreams of making the world different. Can the church help invent and prevent, redeem and redream, this post-modern future that is so relentlessly engulfing us even as we speak? If the future ain't what it used to be, as the great philosopher Yogi Berra once said, who else but the church can make the future what God wants it to be. Bill Woodall once in a while sends me copies of his own home-grown poetry. When he sent me this one I knew I would be saving it for just such an occasion as this. It's titled, "Fences." Fences
By Bill Woodall, Retired
Most have read of Robert Frost, what his fences bring to mind, But I would like to reminisce, about a different kind. For sure all of us relate, to "fencing in" or "fencing out", Of something we're protecting and really care about. But I'm sure there is another kind that we rarely do perceive, Where we fence in our initiatives on what we dare achieve. Where we hide our fear of failure behind a wall of stone, And never take that timid step beyond where we have gone. For we have a lifelong image of what we feel is "me", And we hesitate to "dip that toe" in what might set us free. Giving us "permission" to go forth and explore, Some area of achievement where we've not gone before. In my life I've had what I would call, an epiphany of three; In each I crashed into that "wall", and looked up helplessly. And each would mark some turning point I'd need to pass on by. In each I had assured myself, it was hopeless just to try. The first time it was swimming where I knew that I would fail. No way would breath sustain my trek of that underwater trail! As I swam along this last attempt, I must have closed my eyes, And missed those visual cues I'd used to signal my demise. As the far end of the swimming pool did give my head a blow, I was still sure that the half-way point was yet for me to know. Once this feat had settled in on me-- a new self I became, The doubts of what my lungs provide would never be the same. The second was in reading code-- words per minute in the flow, I'd duly count the dits and dahs-- over eight I couldn't go. Now I'm in the middle of a snap quiz test at twelve I gave up counting back a while-no need to even delve. I let my mind go wandering-what this failure would imply, Amazed I watched my hand write code-- before my very eye. For it seemed there was this part of me that got on very well, If my conscious mind would leave the "loop", it really would excel. The last involved the building of tires-during college summer break The pay was of the piece-work type-(how many one could make). Though I tried and tried to pull my weight-- always short I'd be, And the shift would end with work undone and "what is wrong with me?" One night the hours went shooting by and I'm the slowest yet, The least output I've yet to make, some record I will set. But I kept plugging at it, and despaired how things would look, A worker asked of the "break" for lunch-the one we always took. My watch said we were well past that-- that the shift was at an end. He told me that my watch had erred-I had several hours to spend! So it was my watch had "magnetized" from static in the plies, And I had learned to swiftly build, in spite of all my tries. And so it is I think I know, we build a fence unseen, To keep ourselves from doing things that'd move us past the mean. How many skills God gave our hands that we will never know, Because we choose to tie those hands and never let them go. Faith Lutheran Church is one of the few churches our size in the Northeastern Ohio Synod poised, ready and currently engaging our post-modern culture with the good news of Jesus Christ. We are one of the few churches that have awaken and begun tearing down the fences that have held in check Jesus' call not to just make a difference in the world, but to make the world different. We are one of the few churches that has a chance of surviving as a place of light for our children's children. I believe you have all the skills necessary to accomplish what God expects you to do at this time and in this place. And what you are called to do is to share the good news of Jesus with everyone; to transform followers into disciples with a faith that works in real life; to joyfully go and share his love in the world.
AMEN