digging through my own past...

Those friends and associates who see my Facebook postings know I am engaged in a new round of letting go:  books, memorabilia, clothes, music, art work and papers - OMG the papers - are all being shorted and disposed of in appropriate ways. Today's observation won't matter to many, but it is fascinating to me - and has to do with opening boxes of past sermons. 

Today I cracked open four of six boxes containing sermon notes dating back to 1978. I found the first sermon I preached in what once was Waller United Methodist Church in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. I still remember the title, "Spiritual Midwifery." The Rev. Bill Miller encouraged me to take the next step towards ordination - and opened his pulpit to me. A few months later our second daughter, Michal, was born at home with midwives and Bill and his late spouse, Jean, were there with our daughter Jesse. Like so much of my history, the old church no longer holds worship, but has become a retreat facility serving the creative and wildly diverse people of San Francisco. (check it out @ http://www.wallercenter.org/location) Something similar took place in what once was Trinity United Church of Christ: it is now a center for Latino Pentecostal congregations. It has been a long, strange trip.

Going through these boxes was humbling. I've already said most of the file folders and texts are going straight into the trash and/or compost. They don't need to be saved and God knows I don't have the energy or interest in revisiting them. A few, however, warrant a second look:

+ I have held out the first messages preached in each of my four congregations. I am curious to see not only what I said  but how my style of communicating changed over the years. Interestingly, I still recall each day vividly and continue to give thanks to God for each group of faithful servants. I have also held out the resumes I wrote for each of those quests. They'll be interesting to reread, too. I may not save them but I want to look at how my heart and head matured over the course of this journey.

+ I found myself humbled sorting through all the wedding and funeral

notes in those boxes. There are hundreds of couples I have had the privilege of marrying - and each file folder contained the notes and gen-o-grams I drew as we worked through premarital conversations - but I don't remember most of them. A few I recall - mostly young people from youth groups - but the rest are lost to anonymity. Same goes for the funerals and memorial services I have participated in over 40 years. Again, I have held out a few files from this realm, because some deaths changed my heart forever. They also altered how I did ministry because of the love shared during those deaths. I want to reread those homilies and see what they can teach me in 2018. The rest I give thanks to God for the time we shared before we all moved on.

+ I have discerned a thematic and stylistic shift over the years as I look at these folders.  In the beginning most of my messages were serious reflections on the lectionary passages of the Bible. Partially that's because my first decade of pastoral ministry showed me how much of the Bible I didn't know. For years I was furious with seminary for what I didn't learn and worked double-time to acquire Biblical literacy. Only later did I find that seminary provided me with the tools to discover and solve for myself what I wanted for ministry. Beyond my own biblical illiteracy, however, I was stunned at the profound Biblical and liturgical illiteracy of so many in our the liberal churches. Consequently, most of these early sermons were Bible studies with doctrinal conclusions. Maybe that's true for all young clergy. I don't know. It clearly was so for me. 

Sometime during my first solo pastorate in Cleveland, I started to learn the art of story-telling and it became normative. I still did TONS of weekly Bible study as well as series a la Calvin on discrete books of the Bible. Based on my files Job, Revelation, Romans and Luke were favorites in those days. By the time we went to Tucson, I had become more informal -  dialogical even - and while still working out a written text each week, I rarely used them during worship. That discipline ripened in Pittsfield so that the soul of my sermon became small stories about ordinary people choosing to live into acts of love by the grace of God.

Five big boxes are now empty with two more to go. Out of the past I have distilled one small box to revisit and will likely discard most of that, too. I have another on-going collection of newspaper articles and columns I have written over the years that I might synthesize sometime. It was fun to see myself back in the beginning even as I give thanks to God that those done are complete.