Now That's a Story (Pentecost 2)

I'm experimenting with some different things, and one of them is moving to manuscript preaching after not using them in about fifteen years, except rarely. This sermon focuses on the idea that our own stories and the stories of those around us make a real difference, well beyond what we'd typically consider. 

December 2020. Now that’s a month to tell stories about.

I was concluding an interim at The Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer in Foxboro — I have a feeling y’all might be familiar with that town for some reason or another. I was working full time as a hospice chaplain in Fall River, and preparing to begin my call as pastor here at St. John. On Christmas Eve I led four services, two in Foxboro and two at St. John, then drove all night to see Lauren and Willoughby in South Carolina so I could spend Christmas with the rest of my family. 

It was a hard moment, because I began my time in Foxboro as a supply preacher in November 2019. Their pastor began medical leave in an effort to recover from an illness he’d been fighting for over two long years; an illness that the congregation had walked through with him, and as irascible as that man was, those people loved him even when they didn’t all always like him. After about two weeks, the medical leave became a medical retirement, and in the summer of 2020, he died.

That funeral was something to tell stories about.

It wasn’t just a funeral for an old pastor, though in my experience those are some of the most powerful services I’ve ever attended — and St. John does not disappoint in that regard — this was a funeral for a pastor who was teaching confirmation, preaching, visiting the sick, and tending his flock even in failing health until only a very short six months before.

But those months? We’ll be telling stories about those months for the rest of our lives, because just after Ash Wednesday 2020, the world ended for all of us.

I know, it sounds dramatic. Honestly, if I told Past Eric that week that the world had just ended, I’d’ve laughed it off by saying something like, “It’s only going to be two weeks, a month tops. How long do you think this could really last?”. How long could the end of the world really last? A lot longer than you’d think, apparently.

It wasn’t hard to leave Foxboro, but it was hard to leave those people in that pandemic foxhole who welcomed my family in a moment when we were still reeling and grieving and adjusting to life after a move from South Carolina to have our Great Adventure. It was hard to leave those people in that pandemic foxhole who I nurtured and came to love when they were still reeling and grieving and adjusting after their most recent loss in their great adventure.

But I remember reading the paperwork for this congregation around July or August 2020. I remember the interviews by ZOOM, and the unparalleled awkwardness of preaching for the call committee from a side room in our house over zoom. I remember realizing that I was once again following Larry Wolff, and nearly fell out of my chair laughing at the fact that I’d been doing that in one way or another my entire career.

And I remember telling Lauren that there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that St. John is a place we’ll tell some amazing stories about.

I met this congregation in earnest for the first time on Christmas Eve, 2020. For the first time since Ash Wednesday — March, y’all! — the congregation gathered for worship in person. We stood in the parking lot, and I described the order of worship this way, “all we’re going to do is pray, read the Christmas Gospel, maybe I’ll say something, then we’ll pray, and we’re going to sing Silent Night by candlelight at Noon and seven”. That’s what we did. I believe most of us cried in that parking lot that Christmas Eve.

Now that’s one heck of a story.

It’s a story of faithful resilience; courage in the face of fear. It’s the