Packing light

Jesus told his disciples: “Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt.” Nowadays you get 50 pounds.

Which is both a lot and practically nothing. For instance, a person could take unlimited underwear. But you don’t need to take unlimited underwear because underwear’s easy to wash in the hotel sink. Jeans, sweaters, not so much. It can be done, but it’s not pretty. So one pair of jeans for three weeks and hope against hope for a coin-op laundry?

Similarly, socks pack real well. They fill in the cracks between everything else and can even be packed inside shoes. But shoes take up a lot of room and weight. So, the question becomes, how many shoes do I need for all those socks?

The truth is I have too much stuff. Because I like stuff. Stuff is my security blanket. Stuff grants the illusion that I am in control. I like to have the right stuff for whatever comes and that translates into a whole lot of stuff for a three week trip, stuff for rainy weather, stuff in case it’s warm, stuff for the almost certainty that it won’t be warm, stuff for hiking, stuff for the beach, stuff for the pub, stuff for the remote possibility that we eat somewhere other than a pub, stuff for church, stuff for country, stuff for town, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff.

And then of course, there’s the camera, the iPad, the portable, packable keyboard, and books, guidebooks, prayer books, the latest Janet Evanovich. My friend gave me a beautiful Bible for my sabbatical. I love it. It feels so good in my hands. The leather cover, the glorious paper, the beautiful typeset inside. I don’t want to leave it home.  

It’s a lot of stuff, which I don’t have the room or the weight to pack.

Jesus said take nothing for the journey. I’m not there yet—probably won’t ever be. But in the spirit and discipline of sabbatical, this time I’m letting go and traveling light. The shoes on my feet and a pair in the suitcase. The iPad loaded with books in my purse; the Bible stays home. 

Which leaves room in my suitcase for my pillow.

Dude—get serious. I’m not traveling that light. The pillow goes.

The older I get, the less I know, but....

Perhaps you are thinking right now that you have never heard God speak to you. Well, I promise you, the preacher intoned with absolute conviction, you will hear God speak to you this morning.

I envy him his certainty. And his guts, frankly. That’s quite a promise to make on someone else’s behalf, two someone’s actually, God and the folks sitting in his pews. What if God’s not in the mood to chat up the congregation? What if the congregation and its several members are not in the mood to listen? Scripture and the witness of the saints certainly seem to suggest that God, on occasion, is silent. And that humankind frequently tunes God out.

I’m choosing to believe that what the preacher meant to say was that Scripture, understood in the Reformed tradition to be the Word of God written, would be read from the pulpit that morning and that, in the reading, we would hear God speak. Still, I didn’t hear a whole lot of the Scripture reading as I was preoccupied with the promise that I WOULD hear God speak. To me. That morning. In that place.

I do envy the preacher his certainty, especially when it was offered with such grace and compassion for those who sat under his preaching that Sunday. I envy it, but I don’t like it. That certainty makes me deeply uncomfortable. It implies, doesn’t it, that the preacher knows, absolutely knows what God will do. Which implies that the preacher also knows absolutely what God won’t do. Which implies that the preacher also probably knows other God stuff, too, like who God loves, who God hates, and what God eats for breakfast, and why God feels like that about the ones he loves and the ones he hates.

Certainty is how we end up with a high-profile preacher proclaiming that “God isn’t an open borders kind of guy.” Certainty is how we end up with another high-profile preacher stating as fact that 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina were God’s judgement on an unbelieving nation. Certainty is just exactly what brings us the faux doctrinal Nashville Statement, a whole bunch of high profile preachers getting together to inform an unbelieving world that God not only rejects same sex relationships as sinful depravity, not only rejects those who live and love in the way they believe that God has made them to do, but rejects also those who love and affirm and support their LGBTQ+ sisters and brothers in their loving walk with one another. 

And yet we are shocked that an unbelieving world thinks that the Christian God is at the beck and call of the rich and the powerful and the privileged against the poor and the dispossessed. We can’t understand why an unbelieving world would think that the Christian God sanctifies wars and walls and whiteness.  We are deeply grieved to discover that unbelieving world is certain that the Christian God is not love after all, but hate and condemnation and exclusion and rejection and that that same unbelieving world wants absolutely nothing to do with this Christian God of whom they have heard. 

A few years ago, two women came to me and asked me to officiate their wedding. They didn’t need my approval or my blessing. They were going to get married. God had placed this on their hearts, of that they were certain. But they wanted the church’s blessing on their love and commitment. They wanted the church to pronounce God’s blessing on their life together and they wanted to hear it said out loud “in front of God and everyone.” So I did. We all did. Loudly and with a lot of holy hugs, as I remember it.

The older I get, the less I know for sure. But of this I am certain. God is love. And God’s son Jesus asks us to be love, too, to love one another as he has loved us, to love one another sacrificially. What do you suppose an unbelieving world might think of our God if those high-profile preachers preached that?

For such a time as this

I preached this sermon on September 11, 2011 at Lawrence Road Presbyterian Church, Lawrenceville, New Jersey, just about 60 miles from Ground Zero ...

Esther 4:5-17

Romans 12:9-21

Ten years ago this morning, Jim and I woke up in the slightly down-at-the-heels Bridal Suite of the slightly down-at-the-heels Holiday Inn in International Falls, Minnesota, just about 300 yards short of the Canadian border. No—no special occasion or anything. The Bridal Suite was the only first floor room left at the Holiday Inn, which, being slightly down-at-the-heels did not, of course, have a working elevator.

I was in the bathroom, which I remember as being awfully small and utilitarian for a putative bridal suite, getting ready for the annual trip north to our cabin. Jim switched on the TV while he waited, the Today Show as I recall, Matt Lauer and Katie Couric talking about a reported small plane crash at the World Trade Center, down the road from where they sat in the NBC studio. Sad, we thought, but no big deal. 

As we came out of the dining room a little later, and saw the bar TV across the way, we realized how wrong we had been. Something awful, really awful, was happening and no one was quite sure what. Jim and I decided in that moment that if we were going to go to the lake, we’d better go right then. We made a run for the border crossing. A young man, a kid really, met us at the gate wearing body armor, something I’d never seen before, and carrying a machine gun like he wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to do with it. He waved us through without a word. And the border closed behind us. We were the last ones through for nearly a week.

That’s what Jim and I were doing ten years ago this morning. I’m sure that you remember what you were doing, too. September 11, 2001, was that kind of a day, a day to remember.

And remembering is, I think, part of what we are called to do as Christians. Our remembering honors the sacrifice of those who died in the attacks, and those who died that day trying to save them. Our remembering honors those who have given so much since then to protect the freedoms that you and I enjoy every day. Our remembering honors the grief and the loss of the families who lost so much on September 11 and on all the days that have followed. That’s a big part of who we are as Christians. We remember.

Which I’d like to suggest, by the way, as we, each one of us in our own way, observe this solemn day, may not be exactly the same thing as never forgetting, at least not for Christians anyway, for those who claim to follow Jesus. In a real sense, the idea of never forgetting  holds in itself an unspoken imperative to never let go of what we felt that day, the anger, the fear, the hatred, to never let oneself move past the hurt and betrayal, never, ever forgive, no matter what. Remembering is a positive action; it does something. It enters into the other’s pain; never forgetting holds on tight to that pain and uses it against the other like a shield. As Christians we work hard to forget and forgive, even while we remember.

Our faith knows the power of remembrance. That’s what Mordecai wanted his kinswoman Esther, the Jewish queen in our Old Testament story this morning, to do. He wanted her to remember. There he stood in the courtyard of the palace, dressed down in sackcloth and ashes, a living, breathing, shouting, lamenting reminder to Esther of who she was and what she alone could do. Remember who you are, Esther. Remember from whence you have come. Remember all those who aren’t as fortunate as you, who don’t live in places of power, who don’t have a voice with which to speak the truth in love. Remember what can and will happen to them. Remember, Esther, Mordecai insists, that you are one of them, one of us. In the face of terrible persecution, of the threat of total annihilation, remember. 

Remember—for such a time as this.

Paul understands this too, the power of remembrance. He spends eleven of the sixteen chapters of his extraordinary letter to the church at Rome reminding his Christian brothers and sisters who they are in order to push them to do what they alone can do, to walk in the footsteps of Jesus.

Remember who I once was, he writes, the worst sinner of all, a persecutor of the Lord and his followers. Remember who you once were too, sinners every one. Remember what the Lord did for you anyway, that while you were yet sinners, Christ died for you. Remember that you have been justified by the faith of Jesus Christ, a free gift that you have done nothing to deserve. 

Remember that there is now no condemnation for you, that in the power of the Holy Spirit, you have been set free. Remember that nothing, not your sin or someone else’s, not any power on earth or in heaven can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus your Lord. Remember that, despite who you are and where you’ve been and what you’ve done, God has shown mercy to you every step of the way. Remember who you are, who God has made you to be. In the face of great persecution by the Roman power machine, of the threat of total destruction, remember. 

Remember—for such a time as this.

Methodist theologian Will Willimon once wrote: Back in high school, every Friday and Saturday night, as I was leaving home to go on a date, I remember my mother bidding me farewell with these weighty words, “Remember who you are.” You know what she meant. She did not mean that I was in danger of forgetting my name and my street address. She meant that, alone on a date, in the midst of some party, in the presence of some strangers, I might forget who I was. I might lose sight of the values with which I had been raised, answer to some alien name, engage in some unaccustomed behavior. “Remember who you are,” was her maternal benediction as I left home.”

Remember—for such a time as this.

There’s something about the act of remembering who we are and whose we are that gives us the strength to live into that reality. When we remember, we once again enter respectfully, even humbly, into the story, whether it’s our story or primarily someone else’s. Our remembering brings great tragedy down to a human scale; it can and does call us into relationship with the other, with the neighbor and the stranger. Somehow remembering aligns us with the grief-stricken; it places us shoulder to shoulder with the widow and the orphan, the poor and the helpless, the lost, the least, and the last. We remember hunger and we share our food. We remember thirst and we pour another cup of water. We remember loneliness and we welcome the stranger. We remember grief and we hold on tight to the ones who mourn. We remember the sweet, sweet taste of forgiveness and maybe, just maybe, find in that memory the grace to forgive those who name themselves enemy, even those who have injured us so deeply and grievously. At its best, our remembering tears down the walls that divide us, the walls that refusing to forget so easily build up. It’s resurrection work, this kind of remembering; in the power of the Holy Spirit, the promise of our Christian faith is that even the dead will be raised.

Ten years ago, Jim and I rode out the first days after September 11 alone on an island in Canada, cut off from what was going on here at home. These were the days before everybody and their brother had a cell phone surgically attached to their ear and communication with our family and friends was mostly by payphone—you remember those relics of another time, right? We got what news we could get from the TV at the local bar and grill. It was so quiet, eerily so, and we felt so very, very alone in our sorrow and our fear.

 

One day shortly after we arrived, we headed into town once again to try and connect with the folks at home. As our boat came around the point into the marina, there on the flagpole hung the Stars and Stripes where the Maple Leaf had always flown before. The grouchy, crabby couple who had always taken our American money as if they were doing us a huge favor (my interpretation and I will absolutely own that) had somehow scrounged up an American flag from somewhere and hung it where we would see it first thing. They wanted us to know we were among friends. They remembered us—and for us, that day, it made all the difference in the world.

I don’t think very many of us would contend that the world is a better place since that Tuesday ten years ago. Maybe it’s just me, but the phrase “going to hell in a hand basket” seems to fit the bill pretty nicely. But the witness of Esther and Mordecai and Paul and the claim of our faith is that you and I have been given what it takes to make a difference, to change that world, one prayer, one holy hug, one cup of water a time. We can, if we only will, participate in what God has been doing since the beginning, what God was doing in Jesus Christ, and what God continues to do even in times such as ours in and through the Holy Spirit. Remember—we are the body of Christ in the world, and as our Lord and Savior healed and fed and forgave and raised the dead, so we too are called and gifted and sent out into the world to do the same.

 

Remember that, my friends, on this day of remembrance and every day. Remember who you are and speak the truth to power like Esther did. Remember what God has done for you, who God has made you to be and, like Paul and his Roman Christians, as far as it depends upon you, live at peace with those around you. Remember, and give your enemies bread to eat; share the cup with those who stand against you. Remember that you are loved beyond comprehension and love with everything you’ve got. Remember the One who gave his body, his very life for you and present your time, your treasure, your talents, your body, and your life to God as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable before the Lord. Remember and heal the sick, feed the hungry, forgive and forgive and forgive once again. 

Remember—for such a time as this.

 

The best laid plans

I’m a planner. On the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator scale, I’m a strong INTJ, that J meaning that I tend to approach life in a structured way, planning, organizing, fixing things to achieve my goals.

This past week, my goal was to get home to New Jersey and get started on a much anticipated and necessary three month break from my pastoral routine. And as a corollary, to not exhaust Jim and me in the process. Given the fact that I, what with preparing for my three months away as I would for my own death and all, was already pretty exhausted by the time we pulled out of Sioux City and headed the Winnebago down I-29 toward Omaha on the first leg of our journey home, I had planned carefully to make sure that Monday’s drive was an easy one, no more than 5 hours max from Jim’s sister’s driveway to campsite #4 at Honeycreek State Park. I’m a planner, a good one, and my plan was coming together nicely.

Until Mile Marker 105. Where the forward progress of our journey home came to a screeching halt. 

Three hours later, the driver of the biggest, heaviest, most impressively shiny tow truck I’ve ever seen hauled us into a farmyard carved out of miles and miles of soybean fields, announced that, chickens, pigs, and sleeping dog notwithstanding, this WAS indeed the right address and thus the auto repair shop we were looking for. He unhooked the RV, shook our hands, wished us good luck, and drove off in a cloud of dust.

It was now 2pm on Monday afternoon. We should have been sitting by the fire in campsite #4. Instead, we were in a farmyard, several miles outside of Onawa, Iowa, at the mercy of complete strangers. And there was absolutely not one thing that I could do to make it different, or better, or different, at the very least. We had promised to be home by Friday. People were depending on us. All our reservations were made, and my carefully plan depended on us arriving at campsite #4 sometime on Monday. 

What if the farmer/mechanic can't fix the bus, get the parts, find the time? What if it takes a couple of days, a week, a month? What if, what if, what if…

Meanwhile, it is a stunningly beautiful day, Iowa-at-the-beginning-of-September gorgeous. The farmer’s garden is lush with apples and tomatoes and giant zinnias of every color. There are chickens all over the place. I love chickens. If it weren’t for the 35-foot Winnebago up on the lift with its guts hanging out, life would be unbelievably good.

But there’s always a 35-foot Winnebago up on a lift, isn’t there? There’s always something, something to wind us up, to kick our anxiety into high gear, to pull our minds and hearts out of whatever small goodness there might be in the place where we are and into the chaos of what might have been and what might be coming next. And if our own personal 35-foot Winnebagos don’t do it, the siren song of unlimited 24-7 access to the agony of the world in the palm of our hands, and the concomitant powerlessness of the individual to affect or remedy any of that agony in the moment, is just waiting to suck us in.

There’s an ancient Celtic prayer that begins with the words: Lord, enable me to place my trust in you, and so live in the present moment. Lead me to accept the now. Guard my heart from stress over what has gone wrong before and what will without a doubt go wrong ten minutes from now. Enable me to trust Jesus enough to embrace what is, to find God in the place where I am.

It was nearly midnight before we got to campsite #4 at Honeycreek State Park, just this side of Tuesday morning. The night was beautifully still and the glory of God burst from the heavens. Lord, enable me to place my trust in you, and so live in the present moment. Not exactly what I had planned, but I’m pretty sure that’s the moment my sabbatical began.

Consider your call...

The following sermon was preached on Sunday, August 27, 2017, for the ordination of Dr. Cambria Kaltwasser to the ministry of the Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A.

A couple of weeks ago, I texted Cambria and asked her if she had any idea what scripture she would like for her ordination. I was preparing for a three month sabbatical from my pastorate at the Lawrence Road Church and I knew that, what with one thing and another and a pre-sabbatical to-do list that was merrily begetting baby to-do lists of its own, time was going to get short very quickly. 

So when Cambria wrote back and suggested this passage from 1 Corinthians, my first reaction was “Sweet!” I mean, easy peasy, how hard could it be. It’s an ordination sermon on a text where foolishness is featured prominently. Ministry. In the church. In 2017. Obvious foolishness. Done. 

Of course, when you pastor a church that sits smack dab in the middle of the hyper-aggressive secularity of the Northeast Corridor, a church sandwiched between the joblessness, poverty, crime, and racial unrest of Trenton to the south and the big estates, old money, and uber-privilege of Lawrenceville and Princeton to the north, the notion that the message about the cross is foolishness to pretty much the entire world is not exactly a newsflash. 

Those who study these things tell us that over 60% of millennials believe that Christians are a judgmental lot, while nearly 70% of young adults say that “anti-gay” best describes most churches today. I don’t need the Pew Research Institute or the Barna Group to tell me this. The one constant of my conversation with the brave souls engaged in youth ministry at my church is how to actually do the love of God, never mind the cross of Jesus Christ, in our current social and political environment when our youth have never heard of a loving God, when more than half the thirty or so teens and young adults who show up for Wednesday night dinner and fellowship don’t know if they were ever baptized, could care less than nothing about a Sunday School or church that has historically cared less than nothing about them, and are pretty much there for the free food.  

Ministry. Church. Obvious foolishness. Done. What with one thing and another and the state of the church in America and the world today, how hard could it be to put together an ordination sermon on 1 Corinthians 1:18-31?

Not hard at all, except for the fact that we’re here today to ordain a woman for whom the descriptor “foolish” would not be the first word that comes to mind, a woman wise by any standard, conversant in the language of the academy, a scholar who has been immersed for a decade in the accumulated theological and ecclesiological knowledge of the ages, both here as graduate and post-graduate student and abroad as a Fulbright scholar. And to top it off, not just a scholar, but a Princeton Seminary certified expert in the message about the cross Barth scholar, a newly minted doctor of the church. 

And, well, as it turns out, despite my best efforts, Cambria isn’t being ordained to a mission outpost in the secular wilds of urban New Jersey. God has called Cambria to Iowa, to  Northwestern College, a “…Christian academic community,” in the words of Northwestern’s mission statement, “engaging students in courageous and faithful learning and living that empowers them to follow Christ and pursue God's redeeming work in the world…and prepares them for fulfilling careers and faithful lives as thinking Christians.” 

As one of the Lawrence Road folks commented when he learned of Cambria’s call, it’s hard to get more inside baseball than that. Cambria will, by and large, take her place in a community of relatively like-minded Christians, teaching Christian young adults who have been raised in the church, millennials who unlike so many of their peers, are not unfamiliar with the message about the cross and the teachings of the church. 

And not for nothing, but it does not escape my notice that there are a lot of smart, wise, highly educated people gathered here who have a significant investment in all kinds of knowledge. I’ve been present at ordinations where the preacher managed, in the course of his sermon, to offend nearly every person present. Let me just say that as I approached this text today, I was not unmindful of the aggregate wisdom and learning that this beautiful college campus represents.

Because the truth is that although the church has historically used Paul to call out the myriads ways in which the wise of the world have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory, this passage from 1 Corinthians is about as inside baseball as you can get.

Paul here is not all that concerned about outsiders to the faith. As much as we might like to make this about all the folks out there for whom the message about the cross is foolishness, this one’s written for us who believe, especially for us who believe who are gathered here today for a completely inside baseball rite of the church, especially for us who lead a Christian academic community, especially for us who lead the church of Jesus Christ, especially for you, Cambria, who after today will not only wear the mantle of doctor of the church, but also the stole of minister of the Word and Sacrament.

Paul has no illusions about the world and its wisdom. Paul sees clearly the world and its addiction to human knowledge and human power and the desire to control and dominate and oppress. Paul sees the world, the wise ones, the scribes, the debaters of this age, and he dismisses them with the wave of the hand as ones who are perishing. 

It’s us, the ones who are being saved, the believers, the called, us who claim to follow Jesus that Paul is worried about.

And not without reason. The message about the cross is foolishness because the way of the cross is hard and the world wants easy. The church of Jesus Christ wants easy. As my mom used to say, we want to have our cake and eat it too. 

We in the church want the comfort of our buddy Jesus while we clasp tight to our bosoms our teddy bears of prejudices and bigotry and violence, our love of military strength, our admiration for great wealth, and our exercise of unfettered and unquestioned privilege. We in the church proudly wave the rainbow flag of inclusion, of love of God and neighbor, and stand silently by as the alien and the stranger in our midst are shut out and banished. We in the church bask in God’s kindness, mercy, grace and forgiveness and call those who disagree with us sinful, bad, enemy, less than human, irredeemable and unforgivable. 

The church needs you, Cambria. I told you that ten years ago when you came to the Lawrence Road Church as part of Princeton Seminary’s teaching ministry program. It was true then and it is true now, now more than ever. The church needs you to remind us of what we the church are about on behalf of the world. The church needs you to remind us in the words of the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the USA, that the church is …”called to undertake [its] mission even at the risk of losing its life, trusting in God alone as the author and giver  of life, sharing the gospel, and doing those deeds in the world that point beyond [itself] to the new reality in Christ.”  (Book of Order G-3.0400)  

We need you, Cambria, the church that you join today as a teaching elder. We need your clarity of vision, your unwavering focus on the cross of Christ and the ethical demands that the cross places on us who claim to follow Jesus. We need you to use the mind that God has given you, the education that you have worked so hard to claim, and the compassion and kindness and humility that are a gift from your family and in the power of the Holy Spirit part of your very nature. We need to use those things to teach and re-teach and teach once again the foolishness of a loving God to a church that is so tempted by human wisdom and human strength. 

And God will be with you. This is the core of a cross-centered faith, the foolishness of God made visible on Golgotha, the message about Christ and him crucified. God is with us. This is the promise of the cross, Cambria, for you as you ascend the mighty pulpit of academia to take up this awesome, fearsome calling for which God has been preparing you since before you were a twinkle in your daddy’s eye. God will be with you. When you walk into a classroom filled with 18-year olds who are not yet quite awake, God will be with you. When you speak truth to power, God will be with you. When you insist on Christ in a world that looks to culture, God will be with you. When the powers and principalities of this world are arrayed against you, and they will be, when life and death hit you in the face and knock you to the ground, when the work is hard and the words won’t come and you are most deeply and profoundly afraid, in exactly those moments and days and years, in exactly those places, God will be with you.  

In 1918, the summer that he wrote his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans and changed the face of theology forever, Karl Barth hung over his desk  copy of Grunewald’s Crucifixion. In it, John the Baptist stands alone, a bit diminished and a little ways off, a Bible open in one hand, the other hand pointing an incredibly long and bony finger towards the horribly crucified, dead Christ, strung up on the cross. Over the course of his long career, from his days as a young pastor until his death, Barth kept that painting where he could see it as he worked, referring to it over and over again in his writings. For Barth, as for John the Baptist, the call on his life was to be a faithful witness who could only point to Christ and him crucified. 

So it was, he wrote, the awesome and only task of the theologian and the church itself to point to a “wretched, crucified, dead man…[We] cannot,” Barth said, “and must not do more than this. 

But [we] can and must do this.” 

The church needs you, Cambria. We need you to tell us the truth. We need you to keep us honest and hold us accountable. We need you to keep us focused and proclaiming Christ crucified, the One who is the source of our life, who became for us wisdom from God, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.  

This glorious day has been a long time coming, Cambria, but you’ve got this. The Lawrence Road folk are so proud of you and of what you’ve done. We are so hopeful for where you will lead us in the future. From your family in New Jersey and for them, too, I offer this. 

Lift high the cross, my friend. And keep on pointing to Jesus.

Details, details, details

“Try not to prepare for your vacation as you would for your own death.”

Several months ago, as sabbatical became a reality, I jokingly quoted this admonition from a New York Times article on how to ruin one’s time off. The gist of the article was that if one tries to prepare for everything that could possible happen while you are away, you will never relax enough to actually go away and have a good time.

Seems self-evident, doesn’t it? Obviously, enjoying time away from one’s job is a matter of letting go and trusting that one is not actually indispensable, that work will get done, timelines will be met, life will go on, the sun will rise and set. For someone like me whose work is ministry in the name of Jesus, that would be mean living out of the truth that it’s Christ’s church, Christ’s work, Christ’s beloved brothers and sisters – and that Christ will be present in all of it, even if I am not. That would mean trusting that Sunday will come and church will happen and hymns will get sung, prayers will be offered, holy hugs will be dispensed, and somebody will be standing in the pulpit come Sunday morning proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ.

Easy-peasy, right? All I have to do is actually do what I say. Walk the walk, as they say, instead of just talking it. How hard can that be?

Well. For me, harder than you think. Or maybe you knew how hard it was going to be for me and it’s only me who has been surprised by the 2am bouts of anxiety.

About 18 months ago, the executive director of the English School at the Lawrence Road Church resigned. Jessica was the founder of the school and had led it for more than 12 years. It is not an overstatement to say that the school was her idea, the product of her creativity and imagination, the evidence of her dedication, her baby. So, hoping for a seamless transition, on her way out the door, she handed us a flash drive that contained, no joke, every detail and document, every procedure and protocol, every spreadsheet, pretty much everything that had crossed her desk in the 12 years of the school’s existence. In the months since then, it has become axiomatic that, whenever there is a question about the English School, someone will inevitably say: Check the flash drive…

So here’s the deal. I am surrounded by wonderful gifted people who make sure worship happens every week, not just now as sabbatical looms, but every week. I would put the Lawrence Road deacons up against anyone anywhere in the provision of compassionate, loving, and faithful pastoral care, not just now, but week in, week out. The church staff are at the top of their game, not just now when I will be away, but every day. Our ministry leaders lead—not just now, but always, not because they have to, but because God has called them to this and they are faithful ministers of Jesus Christ. I’m part of all that, but not indispensable to it.

And I know that. And what I’ve realized is that I’m not worried about worship or pastoral care or Christian Education or Properties or Finance or Outreach or Parish Life or any of that. Nope—my peeps have got that—and the love that God has given this congregation to share with one another and the community comes from a bottomless well. That love will carry them through.

What’s keeping me awake, my friends, is the undeniable fact that I’m the only one who knows where I hid the key to the supply closet. And my sweet husband, who will be on sabbatical from the church, too, may well be the only person living who knows how to turn on the ancient steam boiler that heats the sanctuary.

So I’m pulling a page from Jessica’s book. The Lawrence Road folk have the Jesus stuff covered. But if anyone needs the code to the sanctuary router, check the flash drive.