First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Deuteronomy 34 and John 16

“Hebel Hebelim; Hacol Hebelim”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

May 25, 2008

My understanding of the church has changed over the years of my ministry. Coming to the parish out of seminary I was convinced that the congregants would be very severe, very serious folk who had very definite ideas about how things should be. All the tales of church carpet fights and the urban legends that arise about the pastors who come to the office one morning to find the locks have been changed, while true, are not universal.

Mostly what I worried about early on was the need to oversee the preserve. The church is what it is; don’t mess it up. We have thousands of years of tradition don’t deviate. And the dreaded: this is the way we’ve always done it. I am someone who grew up in Southern California where everything that was not built by the conquistadors was built in the last fifty years. We were barely in business when art deco came into fashion. Years of studying history conjured a serious conviction that history was important and that I was a “Johnny come lately.” How could such an upstart be put in charge of the preserve?

Now I have heard parishioners say, “We’ve always done it that way.” I’ve heard that but only when it is followed by “Can you try something new?” Much to my surprise it was the folks who were sixty plus in my first church who were hungry for change, and they were real hungry. Bring in rock n roll? They smiled and did the seat shimmy. Take people to Mexico- just make sure you come back. Bag pipers and a kirkin’: they were just disappointed I didn’t wear a kilt.

Yet the most shocking element wasn’t that the members of the church were open to changes in the bulletin or to novel programs: the real shocker was that they changed. On our first day in town an elder came to my house. He brought beer because he was a trucker who found religion later in life and the idea that his pastor was human enough to share a beer on a hot Midwest summer day was big to him. It was a real stretch but I sat on our porch and did just that.

While we were sitting and talking a big Cadillac pulled up. The driver let it coast and then popped into park so the huge hunk of chrome and steel rocked back in forth. Out came a Bermuda shorts, black socks, wing-tipped shoed man in his seventies. He walked directly at us. Being in town less than 24 hours my thought was, I’m busted. Caught drinking the devil’s brew the new Presbyterian pastor was summarily shown the door before they unpacked a box. And the man didn’t help matters much. I asked his name and he said, “I ain’t gonna tell you.” Then he just stared at me.

The silence was painful until he cocked his head to the side and said, “Yup, just yesterday I was talking to old John and he said, ‘sure hope that new pastor likes beer.’ Good to meet you,” he said, shook my hand and said “Gotta go.”

As he drove away the elder explained. “That was Ed Lynd. He owns apple orchards here. His family has been here for generations. He’s a kind of a town father type. Great guy.” Two weeks later, during church, this great guy fell asleep as I preached. Now it wasn’t the sort head bob where you can tell the person is really fighting it. This was a head back mouth open full slumber mode. To Ed’s credit it was a mighty boring sermon. But this was a little too much.

The next week as I preached I only made eye contact with Ed. I never looked at any one else lest the snoring, while gentle, would persist for a second Sunday. At the end of the service Ed came through the line and shock my hand hard and pulling me close he said, Preacher were you eye balling me? I squeezed harder and leaned closer as well and with a grin said, “Ed don’t fall asleep while I preach.” He laughed and raised his hands in surrender as he walked on.

Two days later, Ed had a massive stroke and a few days after that he died. Two things big things came to me in Ed’s passing. The first was that I agreed to do his service only to realize that I had only attended two funerals in my life. Now I was expected lead one, do one. This was a great theme of my first call: a lot to learn. The second insight was how the congregation, which I had thought of as some sort of bulwark, some kind of castle made of stone lasting forever was actually very fluid, changing all the time.

It would be just a few months later when the elder who brought beer to my front porch and explained who Ed was would die an untimely death. His heart just gave out and he left a wife with two teenage daughters. Unable to gather all my emotions I struggled through his eulogy. His name was Glenn and Glenn was the kind of man who becomes your friend in short order. I can remember wondering how I was going to make it through this whole pastor thing if the people I get to know and love are going to keep dying.

Those first few months shaped me tremendously. Inside me came a sense of impatience with foolishness that keeps you from what is good in life. I don’t think I had a lot of patience walking in, but what I did have left soon and very soon. And this impatience was shaped by the church. The church that was supposed to be this monolithic supertanker of outdated traditions and bureaucracy, the church that was supposed to be the place where any change was a kind of brawl, the church became for me like trying to catch a fish with your bare hands, it was always moving, always just moving out of reach, darting away.

A number of years ago I saw a cartoon in a pastor’s magazine. The cartoon showed a member was giving a tour to a prospective pastor. Standing in the narthex there were marble walls with the order of worship carved into the stone. The caption has the member saying, “Oh we are very flexible, very open to innovation.” I remember thinking where are these churches that never change?

For five years in Washington I found the answer. I did. And like most things it wasn’t what I expected. The congregation in Washington was just as ready for innovation as the church in Ohio. But there was a big difference. In our second church there were a few folks who wanted to approve the changes, control the changes, have all decisions passed by them (none of whom were on the session). For me the stuff these folks perceived as change were not worthy to be called change anymore for me. Lose someone you love, bury a friend, end a marriage, see a child begin a life in marriage, change. When the announcements happen, where a table is placed . . . that was no longer worthy of the notion of change. Needless to say my views of change didn’t blend well with a few.

The more I have lived in ministry, the more I know of history, the more I see of life the more I am convinced that the church stays the same, not by resisting change and innovation, but simply by being the church. A church is a place of worship (no matter the order or the presence or absence of hooting and hollering); a church is a place where care is offered to the broken; a church is a place where people seek to understand the truth; and a church is a place of friendship. Go back two thousand years and that is the church you’ll find. The church is not a tradition; it’s not an order or a litany. It’s alive. And while ever the same, ever changing.

I’ve grown convinced that the greatest change churches in America have experienced took place in Brooklyn. In Manhattan during the middle part of the 19^th century boats would line the docks to ferry people across the East River to hear Henry Ward Beecher. Beecher was a Congregational pastor and his church was known as Plymouth. Thousands upon thousands would jump into Beecher boats, as they came to be called, to cross the river and hear him preach.

Beecher wasn’t the best orator. Like many famous preachers, his message wasn’t a masterpiece of sophistry. What it was was different. And the difference was profound. Henry Ward Beecher was the son of a famous pastor, Lyman Beecher. Beecher the elder preached a message of God’s elect being gathered to heaven by the eternal decision of God; he preached a lot about wrath and the need to be vigilant in all things holy. He preached about the covenant we must keep and the precarious nature of our salvation given the rotten sinful quality of our soul.

Beecher the younger, Henry Ward, offered a very different message. His message was radical; it was a categorical change from his father’s sermons. Where Lyman preached wrath, Henry Ward offered mercy; where God’s election, his choice so to speak, was the definition of a Christian’s life and salvation, the younger said, God loves you.

Love became the defining factor. I am not sure there has been a greater change in America than the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher. I know that is a big claim, but having seen and studied a lot of change, this one is the biggest I’ve seen so far. And it was so simple: defining our lives by God’s love instead of wrath. The change is so profound I dare say no one here can even imagine what it means to understand your faith in terms of wrath; we don’t even know what wrath is. Before the Civil War, those folks knew what wrath was. Believe me.

The story of Moses dying on Mt. Nebo this baffles us. How could God, who is so loving and kind and merciful not let Moses walk into the promise land? That just doesn’t work for us. Yet, Jesus starts talking about love and how this now defines us and how love has conquered the world, this we get. And by love we mean kindness and charity and compassion and acceptance. More than any technological innovation, more than putting a man on the moon, more than the GI Bill which changed America more than seems possible to explain, more than any of these, Henry Ward Beecher’s sermons about the love of God up turned the apple cart for us as a people.

Now this change, while the most profound, also had its limits. When Beecher spoke of God’s love he intended this to be the power that changes you and me; the power that conquers the soul, tames the spirit, rids us of sin. He really wasn’t talking about world peace, the violence of the world being overcome. He may have offered such grandiose claims, but what really set him apart was his believe that God’s love would tame us, not his wrath. Kindness not the stick would redeem our wily souls.

Today we have moved far beyond this. We have taken this innovation and stretched it very, very far. We don’t admire the single life of dignity, we talk world peace and justice; the man or woman who has overcome a hard life is good, but we want to talk about a world without violence and an end to poverty for all; we talk and talk and talk because we believe that God’s love has the power to redeem the world. We do. There may be times of cynicism; there may even be people we will call negative, but ultimately we believe the world can change. Not one person in the world, the world. We pray and sing and hope on Memorial Day that the ones we mourn now will be the last. We will beat our swords into plowshares forever: “peace in our time.”

It is a great irony that many people who rail against injustice and charge ahead against the wind believing that freedom will be for all at last, these are the folks who have no interest in the church. The irony of course is that the quest of such a sense of hope and people giving their lives away hoping in the power of what comes from love, coming from a sense of community, came from the church.

I’ve learned not to blink. If I blink around here I will miss a lot. You come and go. You are born and you die. Last week I watched my daughters weep as the service began and I knew what it was. Kathy told them we got a call that a dear friend and parishioner from Washington, a really lovely man, passed away. They mourned him as he ought to be. That is perhaps the best part and the worst part of raising your children in a church. If they live outside of the church children today can live their entire adolescence and never know death. And death, death is change.

I thought the church was some kind of bulwark against the world, some kind of shelter from the storm of change. Alas, it is perhaps the place where you can see change at it’s most profound. Here people go from unbelief to faith, here marriages that were broken are healed, here the weak are made strong, the lost are found. Beecher saw this and said that’s love; love does that. And he was right. Wrath makes me straighten up; love me right. A kick in the pants makes me toe the line; the love of a wife, a friend, a child, well, that makes me a better man.

On the night of his arrest Jesus talked and talked and talked to his disciples. He talked because change was afoot. Their life together was about to end. What he tried to tell them was that no matter what the change, whether he was alive or dead, they were loved and this love would conquer the world. I want to say that’s a good message to hear on Memorial Day. It’s a good word to the fallen, to those who gave their life trying to make us free, to make us right. We will conquer the world with love someday. And it’s okay to let someday be soon and very soon. It is okay to say let it be now. It’s okay. Amen