Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth,
for the former heaven and the former earth had passed away,
and the sea was no more.
I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of
heaven from God,
made ready as a bride beautifully dressed for her
husband.
I heard a loud voice from the throne say,
“Look! God’s dwelling is here with humankind. God will dwell
with them, and they will be God’s people. God will be with them as their
God.
God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be
no more. There will be no mourning, crying, or pain anymore, for the former
things have passed away.”
Then the one seated on the throne said,
“Look! I’m making all things new.”
God also said, “Write this down, for these words are
trustworthy and true.”
Then God said to me,
“All is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning
and the end.
To the thirsty I will freely give water from the life-giving
spring.”
***
I kept getting angrier and angrier at the last presbytery
meeting. The moderator was told he needed to open the meeting with a devotion,
and instead of just reciting a prayer, or scripture to begin us, he preached
his first of two sermons that weekend, one official in worship, and this other,
which was sweet and personal, but out of place, as things tend to be when
people are told to say something because something has always been said. He had
forgotten that the old earth had passed away and a new one had begun.
Then, later on, supposedly in celebration of the 500th year
of the Protestant Reformation, another pastor commandeered the agenda and gave
literally another sermon, this time using a cliched book from ten years ago,
which attempted to explain church’s declining membership by pointing out that the
church goes through a reformation every 500 years and we were just in one of
those now. The pastor preached about this shift intending to give the
presbytery delegates hope, but I didn’t need a book to do that. I didn’t need
some faulty historical prediction. I didn’t need an excuse because I was
already celebrating. I had seen the new heaven. But then all three of the
retired and remotely located pastors voiced loudly that we needed to discuss
this old earth and sea, and the Presbytery never had time to discuss things
like theology when clearly everyone wanted to discuss it, they thought. But I
didn’t want to discuss abstract theology and the death of the church, mine was
a practical theology based on life, for I new the former things had passed
away.
Then during the meeting, we looked at the Presbytery Mission
Budget for grants and again I was perturbed. There were just as many historic
programs that had to be covered by mission money, as new programs
applying. Two of those historic programs herald from a time when Eastern Oregon and Kendall Presbyteries were joined under
the Snake River Mission area. One of these mission projects was Shared Ministry
which, from being on their board, I knew had a bigger budget then it could use
and Shared Ministry literally tried to find ways to spend it. The other mission
project, was the Ring Praise ministry, which the Executive Presbyter said her
church no longer invited, as they gave the same program every year. I questioned if
these ministries should have permanent funding when programs like Open Door and
Backpack weren’t even funded because of lack of funds and our repeated
applications were this year denied, due to an attempt to make ministries
sustainable on their own. I didn’t need historic programs to be funded indefinitely
because I believed in a God who is always making all things new.
Finally, the Executive Presbyter gave what was considered a
report. We had to watch what looked like a church boy-band, slick, dyed, hair
included, singing in an over-acted way, while walking on a giant Celtic cross.
They were singing about the death of the church and asking questions about its
future. I think half of what made me annoyed honestly, was the cheesiness of
it, but the other half, was that by then, I was so tired of what I perceived as
the presbytery’s myopia. We were supposed to answer a question in a group about
the death of the church and this is what I raised my hand and said,
“When I was a camp counselor there was one day where all the
former counselors would come back and remember all the previous year’s stories,
of which, there were many. They had to do with the people that came before and
the way camp used to be. It was a fun day of nostalgia and a little grieving the
people who weren’t coming back that summer, and the ways camp had changed. Yet,
after that day, the old stories weren’t allowed to be told when the new
counselors showed up. It was time for creating new stories. Similarly, I feel
like at Presbytery meetings and many other gatherings of the church, I’m attending
a funeral of someone I never new. I’ve sat here and honored your grief, I’ve
done it for a decade now, and at this point I believe our focus on the past is
limiting our ability to see God in the present. This exercise alone is in and
of itself what continues to bury the Holy Spirit.”
I had seen something they hadn’t, or at least weren’t
recognizing, I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from
God. There were some delegates that were dumbfounded, there were others that
were hesitantly excited that there might actually be a way to move forward, and
there was one, who near enough to my age, felt I gave her voice. After the
meeting was over multiple pastors came up to me saying, I want to have a
conversation about this, and they started asking questions, but by that point,
we had been at the wake of a presbytery meeting for two days and I was ready to
go. It made me wonder how many visitors in our churches for so long had watched
the processional of what used to be, that they left. to go out in the world,
and experience the God that was there, I imagine them seeing heaven on earth
made ready as a bride beautifully dressed for her partner.
I thought about our church, how many times had visitors
walked by our virtually empty pews, even those roped off, and perhaps they have
felt they too were at a funeral. We know the names, whose families you
remember, and of the time when the Johnsons, and the Cassidys, and the McKim,
and the Lissmans filled pews with kids all in a line. You have a heart for
families and kids, First Presbyterian, that piece of you will always be heaven
on earth. Yet, interesting isn’t it, that many of the kids today have chosen
for their parents, that they want to sit up front where the action is. From the
front you can see that God is squirming, and giggling, and coloring away. I
wish I could have told those visitors, God is here, it’s just further up than
the people remember. What if we took that value of honoring children in worship
and made a space for them at the front? Some churches solve the too many pew
issue, in part by creating a children’s worship space for coloring, or
children’s books, or play dough, or felt-figures of Noah and the ark and
nativities you can touch with your hands. Is this the new Jerusalem, coming
down from heaven, where we tell the kids, let the little ones to come me? Can
you imagine the ways we would see God alive in the fervent rub of crayons, and
in the sharing of figurines?
Likewise, the Nominating Committee for Elders and Deacons expressed
concern to Session about the abundance of slots to fill and the lack of members
to fill them. It was a concern that drove me nuts because the issue is
exemplary of our congregation’s sometimes hesitancy to get out of its box; we
are Presbyterians, often called the frozen chosen, for good reason. The thing is,
our membership has not decreased since I arrived, but something has changed,
God has been at work and we were looking backward. Our Elder and Deacon job
descriptions attempted to put God in our box, with tasks like, “hang banners
according to the seasons,” rather than, “adorn the sanctuary to the glory of
God.” God moves in banners, but God also moves when Sharon Defrees asks the
Rohner’s for some stalks of corn, or the congregation brings in its bells.
Likewise, we forget to ask visitors, what are their gifts and how they want to
participate, and then to invite them, or even allow them to bring their own
thing, their version of a new heaven or a new earth. When we began with lack
instead of abundance we are always going to come up empty but when we look for
our abundance, there will be that. God is making all things new. It has been
proposed by the denomination that what if instead of membership, coming to
worship, or at least our baptism, was how we measured someone’s calling to
ordination as an elder or deacon. Because at this point, our stepping stones
feel a little more like you have to join the club to serve it. That tends to
feel yucky to millennials like me, even though they are as willing to serve.
And what if serving didn’t come from standing committees, and instead, we set
our values and our goals and people signed up on a task force to do that one
thing, and if no one signed up to lead it, maybe we let that one thing go.
Maybe we accepted that it was the sea, to be no more. I don’t know how the
system would work exactly. It makes me nervous too, but then I remember, “Look!
God’s dwelling is here with humankind. God will dwell with them, and they will
be God’s people. God will be with them as their God.”
This doesn’t just go for the system of the church, but this
holds true for you and for me, and for everyone who has gone before us, and who
is to follow. We gather here to remember, and to honor them on this All Saints
Day, but we also gather to remember and to honor a God, who says, “I am the
Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” Similarly, we have a bell in
this church that was given by someone that no one can remember, before this
sanctuary was ever built. I am sure when that person passed away, it rang, and
tears fell, and today, it will ring for them and for others and tears will also
fall, but on most Sundays, if there is a child, or a child at heart, with a few
spare minutes before 10:30, the bell also rings us into worship. It is a bell to
remember the names who have gone before, but it is also a bell that reminds us
that we have God of now, and always.
There have been times when the bell hung silent, where no
one came and pulled the string, but it did not mean that it could not sound.
Likewise, in our grief, there are times where it is hard to praise, hard to see
a future, and our tones fall silent. When I came to this church, I figured the
bell was broken, a relic from the past, until Luke said, “We used to ring it
when I was little.” I asked, "Why aren’t we ringing it?” “For awhile, we
didn’t have enough kids,” he said. I noticed we had a lot of little ones, but
Luke said, that the strength to ring took the kids being older and stronger,
but then I said, “Can an adult help them?” Truth was, as a kid, I always wanted
a bell to ring and as a grown up, that desire hadn’t diminished. So one Sunday,
during Children’s Time, we taught the kids, but had grown-up, “helpers.” Today,
it rings most every Sunday, whether there are kids or not, and especially I’ve
noticed if Gary Ball is around. What we learned was, that, in order for the
bell to sound, we needed to change our view of who could ring it, because the
God for whom we ring, is of us all. We needed to change the idea that because a
flock of kids had grown up and gone, it remained silent. A bell is never
silent, just the ringer. Likewise, God is never silent, just the worshiper. We
are called to ring out our praise, in a balance for what was once long ago,
like the Reformation, and the Church of the fifties, and old formats and
systems that once served us well, we balance with it the tones of children
lined up and walking through the sanctuary to pull the string with grown-up
helpers, and grown ups, like Gary Ball, who teach us how to be kids at heart.
We balance it with those that will ring when we are gone, maybe when this
building too is gone, but somewhere there will be bells and with them always
the praise of God, and God’s promise saying, “Look! God’s dwelling is here with
humankind. God will dwell with them, and they will be God’s people. God will be
with them as their God.” From beginning to end, Alpha to Omega. Always. Bell
