For church Sunday morning, I visited a local United Methodist
church. When I visited it last Easter, the pastor shared that she was
thinking of retiring. At church this morning, I learned that the church
is currently without a pastor and was expecting to be without one for a
while. She must have retired. The announcer was saying that all hands
need to be on deck, and, indeed, they were. The church was friendlier
than it had been in my past visits, since people were standing by the
door greeting people, and I was greeted and handed a hymn book when I
sat down.
The person giving the sermon was an elderly gentleman who was the church’s pastor sometime in the past. His sermon was a cozy feel to it, kind of like a Guideposts article. He related a lot of anecdotes: the plight of the IWW union (well, then again, I doubt the conservative Norman Vincent Peale would have a pro-union element to his sermons, especially when it concerns a controversial union!), Norman Rockwell’s struggle to cope with his wife’s alcoholism, David moving on after the death of his son with Bathsheba, the procedure pilots follow when their plane is shot down in battle, and a prominent psychiatrist who recommended that people do service work to solve their problems.
Essentially, the sermon was about what to do when one is at the end of one’s rope. The answer is that one ties a knot and holds on! And what are those knots? Performing one’s daily routine, service work, and devotions.
I thought about a United Methodist woman I knew. She lost her husband to leukemia, and that really shook her. She did not talk to anyone for a year. She did not go to church during that time. She did pray, but she expressed her anger at God to God. Eventually, she came back to church and resumed her service work. She did not exactly do what the pastor recommended, but she got through, and eventually she got back to her routine, her service, and her peace with God. She must have felt that she needed space before returning to that, though.
The person giving the sermon was an elderly gentleman who was the church’s pastor sometime in the past. His sermon was a cozy feel to it, kind of like a Guideposts article. He related a lot of anecdotes: the plight of the IWW union (well, then again, I doubt the conservative Norman Vincent Peale would have a pro-union element to his sermons, especially when it concerns a controversial union!), Norman Rockwell’s struggle to cope with his wife’s alcoholism, David moving on after the death of his son with Bathsheba, the procedure pilots follow when their plane is shot down in battle, and a prominent psychiatrist who recommended that people do service work to solve their problems.
Essentially, the sermon was about what to do when one is at the end of one’s rope. The answer is that one ties a knot and holds on! And what are those knots? Performing one’s daily routine, service work, and devotions.
I thought about a United Methodist woman I knew. She lost her husband to leukemia, and that really shook her. She did not talk to anyone for a year. She did not go to church during that time. She did pray, but she expressed her anger at God to God. Eventually, she came back to church and resumed her service work. She did not exactly do what the pastor recommended, but she got through, and eventually she got back to her routine, her service, and her peace with God. She must have felt that she needed space before returning to that, though.