A Very Real Possibility

The Sunday Sermon:  May 22, 2022 – 6th Sunday of Easter

Scripture:  Micah 6:1-8


A Very Real Possibility

Well, I was worried this week since, for the first time since last September, I – or the others who have been preaching – did not have a topic, or theme, given to me by the Follow Me curriculum we have been using all year.  While we will never, ever, ever finish our experience and exploration of Joy, we did finish our exploration of Joy in that study last Sunday.  What would this Sunday bring?!

Turns out, it’s Milestone Sunday, as we’ve come to call it around here – the Sunday on which we celebrate, among other things, those young members of our congregation who have graduated from high school, college, or beyond.  And with that celebration already a part of this morning, the Spirit blew … and I followed … and now we listen to “a very real possibility.”

Pray with me …

So, I’ve had Jackie, Andrew, Lydia, and Sam on my mind all week – as well as those others listed in your bulletin insert and those whose names we’ll hear later when I ask you for more graduates in your families.  They’ve been on my mind because as one part of their lives ends this month or next, a new one begins.  And new beginnings are full of new possibilities, but those new possibilities must be made known to them somehow, made known to us, whenever any of us begin something new.

This morning, I want to speak into a possibility that we – even I – all too rarely make known to our young graduates, or to us “long-since-graduated” old people, for that matter.  (Get ready for it …)  It’s the very real possibility of seeking a career in the ministry – maybe even as a Parish Minister, a Pastor!

Now admit it (as if you’re laughter and smiles haven’t already admitted it!), you didn’t see that coming.  And many, if not most of you – of us – are kind of nervous right now.  Is he (am I) really going to suggest that I, or my child, consider going into the ministry?  I’m the father of one of our graduates again this year and I can’t believe I’m going here!  (Although, I’ll be more worried next year when Annie graduates.  She much more likely to actually think seriously about this ?).

But, no … I need to stop joking around.  It really isn’t something we talk too much about.  Why?  Well, I suppose many of us already “in the field” understand that ministry is the type of calling that is placed on people’s hearts from “beyond us.”  I mean we are part of that call, but “God” calls in a particular way to those who go into this profession, and I think we tend to let that “God” do most of the work.

But there are other reasons we don’t suggest this profession very often, if at all, to our children.  Exactly 200 years ago to the day yesterday – May 21, 1922 – Harry Emerson Fosdick articulated those reasons, at least in part, in a sermon he delivered to Frist Presbyterian Church in New York City.

“We have boys and girls growing up in our homes and schools,” he said, “and because we love them, we may well wonder about the church that will be waiting to receive them … the worst kind of church that can possibly be offered to the allegiance of (a) new generation is an intolerant church.”

We don’t want to suggest a vocation in ministry because the church then, and the church now, is too “controversial,” to full of intolerance, too full of judgement, and condemnation, we reason.  Except … it’s not.  It’s not here, at least.  And if it’s not at least here, then we can’t say that “the Church” (capital “C”) is all these things.  We must say, “some churches” … and seek to offer “the boys and girls growing up in our homes and schools” the Church we know – a church committed to openness and acceptance of everyone, regardless of creed, color, orientation, or economic status.

Fosdick went on, though.  It’s not just the intolerance and condemnation too often associated with “the Church” that keeps us from envisioning it as a career, like we do with science or law.  It’s our insistence that we already know all there is to know about this “field of study”:

Can you imagine (anyone) who is worthwhile, (Fosdick preaches) turning from a call that says “here is the universe challenging our investigation. Here are the truths we have seen, so far. Come, study with us! See what we already have seen and then look further to see more, for (this is) an intellectual adventure for the truth,” (turning from that call) to one that says, “”Come, and we will feed you opinions from a spoon. No thinking is allowed here except such as brings you to certain specified, predetermined conclusions. These prescribed opinions we will give you in advance of your thinking; now think, but only so as to reach these results.”

Fosdick is comparing, here, the call our young people hear from science and academia to the one they too often hear from Religion and the church.  The problem with that “call” from the church, he says, is that:

Nothing in all the world is so much worth thinking of as God, Christ, the Bible, sin and salvation, the divine purposes for humankind, life everlasting. But you cannot challenge the dedicated thinking of this generation to these sublime themes upon any such terms as are laid down by an intolerant (and entrenched) church.

And so, this morning I challenge the dedicated thinking of those whose graduation we celebrate this morning as a church that is “tolerant, open, seeking, needing-to-know-more, needing the imaginations and passions of young women and men” and I challenge them, I challenge you, to look further into the truths we have discovered to discover more.  There is infinitely more to discover.  Do you know how I know that?  Because we’re here.

The very reason that we’re here this morning, in this place, is because we know that “something greater than we are” is at work in the world.  Something that we don’t yet understand fully, that we’ll never understand fully.  We’re here for community and fellowship, sure, but I suggest to you that the real reason you’re here and you keep coming back is because you know that there is something more here when we gather – community, fellowship and something More.  In order to understand that something better, we most often call the More God, but that should never limit that this “More” is.

Unfortunately, it often does.  Once we realize that there’s something outside of our own experience, something more potent and powerful than we are individually, or even collectively as human beings, we get scared.  We try to control it by defining and labelling it!  We theologize and once we’ve made ourselves comfortable enough with what we think we know, we codify it, indoctrinate it, and wall it off.  Soon enough, “no thinking is allowed here except such as brings us to certain specified, predetermined conclusions … these prescribed opinions given to us advance of our thinking.”

The problem with that is obvious:  The More we most often call “God,” and the time we call worship and set aside to explore this reality in our lives, has not,  does not, and will never obey our enlightenment concepts of time and space and our need to define and contain them, no matter how much we want it to or how much we fool ourselves into thinking it has.  Theology – the core of any vocation in the ministry – is finally an attempt to know all we can know about a mystery, and by definition a mystery can never be fully known!  If we can acknowledge that, when we acknowledge that and share that with the boys and girls growing up in our homes and schools” then maybe, just maybe, they will see ministry as a very real possibility for their future endeavors.

God is ultimately a mystery.  That doesn’t mean we don’t’ have any knowledge or understanding of God.  We do know that this God is always bigger than we think; always more forgiving than we are; and, always calling us to worlds larger than our own.  “Those are the truths we have seen, so far. Now, come, study with us! See what we already have seen and then look further to see more,” for religion and faith are an adventure for the truth, as well!

You’ve been wondering, I’m sure (actually, I hope), when in the world I was going to read any scripture from our Bible – another source of revelation that we’ve closed off to new discoveries, but, that’s another sermon.  Well, now’s the time, because here is my final proof that most of what we’ve done to domesticate the mystery that is God is not what our God requires of us.  Listen for the Word of God …

Read Micah 6:1-8 … This is the Word of the Lord … Thanks be to God.

That is what the church should be all about.  And when we can teach that, and preach that, then “nothing in the world is so much worth thinking of” and ministry becomes a very real possibility for young and old to consider for a life time’s work.

May it be so.  Amen.

So now, if I haven’t scared you too much (!), I want to invite those graduates who are able to be with us here this morning to come forward …

Reverend Joel Weible, Pastor

Pewee Valley Presbyterian Church / May 22, 2022