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A Story Worth Telling
June 12, 2022
Zion’s Lutheran Church, Trinidad, Colorado
The Rev. Dr. Rebecca Z. McNeil, supply preacher
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31, Psalm 8, Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15
***
It was a beautiful Sunday morning in June.
The teen-line phone rang in my childhood bedroom around 7:00 am. Bob Lewis said, “There has been a change of plans at church this morning.”
I was the ministerial intern at North Side Christian Church in my hometown for the third summer. Twenty-one years old, I was about to enter my senior year of college as a Humanities and Religion major.
The ringing phone awakened my parents down the hall. We looked out their bedroom window to the south together and saw a plume of smoke rising in the distance.
In the wee hours of the morning, hooligans broke into the church, had a party, and set the place on fire.
Firefighters created a wall of water between the fire raging in the education wing and the fellowship hall and kept the flames out of the sanctuary. The rest of the building was a total loss.
By 10:30 am, the fire crews were moving out while a crew of church members pulled the damp, soot-stained communion table onto the sidewalk.
Church women took the back way into the sacristy and managed to prepare communion.
Other folks grabbed arms full of damp, smokey-smelling hymnals from the pews.
A neighboring Baptist congregation delivered a trailer full of metal folding chairs, and, with smoky steam still rising from the brick shell of our building as our backdrop, North Side Christian Church held worship in the parking lot.
That evening the church board met in a member’s home.
We accepted the offer by Mount View Presbyterian Church to share space in their building.
They needed a little time to clear out the rooms that would be our church office and pastor’s study, so for the next week, our church office would be the pastor’s kitchen.
Beginning the following Sunday, our Presbyterian friends would adjust their schedule, making it possible for us to worship while they had Sunday School, and vice-versa, we would use their classrooms to have Sunday School while they worshipped.
With those details settled, the board also decided our pastor would leave in the morning, as he had previously planned, to go to the General Assembly of the Christian Church held in California that week. Every person in our denomination whom he needed to confer with about what to do in the aftermath of a church fire was going to be in California.
The board also affirmed, as previously planned, that I, a twenty-one-year-old kid who had not yet finished college, let alone been to seminary or ordained, would be their pastor until Dr. Sarton came back.
No worries.
Monday morning, I headed to the church to meet with the trustees. The moderator of the congregation was talking with a reporter from Omaha’s biggest radio station as I arrived.
“Oh, here’s our pastor now,” she said, “I’ll let you talk with her.”
An hour later, as I drove through mid-day traffic to meet with the congregation’s Monday lunch bunch, I almost jumped the curb on 72nd Street when I heard myself introduced as North Side’s pastor on KFAB radio.
After the lunch bunch, I headed to the hospital to make my first-ever hospital call on a church member.
I didn’t know Nettie Tromberg. She was quite elderly and had been a shut-in for a long time. I didn’t know her family either because they lived out of state.
I had a vague idea of what a pastor’s hospital call entailed. I did pretty well, parking my car in a clergy spot and finding the directions to Nettie’s room.
Her room was next to the nurse’s station, and the door was closed. I asked the nurse, “Mrs. Tromberg’s door is closed. May I go in?” The nurse asked, “are you, family?” “No,” I said. “I am a pastor from her church.” The words sounded so funny rolling off my tongue. “Oh! Good! The nurse said. “Perfect timing. Mrs. Tromberg just passed away, and we’ve notified the family. They should be here in half an hour or so.”
According to the Gospel of John, in his conversations with his disciples leading up to his death, Jesus said, “I still have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now. When the spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” (John 16:12-15) If the disciples had known all that was coming down the pike for Jesus and them, if Jesus had laid it all out for them, all the details of what, precisely, following him would mean, if they had understood all the challenges that lay ahead of them, they couldn’t bear it.
If I had known going into that summer that I would be officiating my first funeral without any of my mentors, not my home church pastor, not the pastor of the church where I was an intern available to guide me because they were all in California, and these were the dark ages before texting, and cell phones and zoom calls existed, if I had known I, who had yet to take a single homiletics course would be preaching the first sermons to a grieving congregation after their beloved building was destroyed, I couldn’t have born it. I think I might have decided to spend the summer waitressing and hanging out with friends in my college town instead.
But I was in Omaha. And the congregation I served needed me even if I was only a twenty-one-year-old ministerial intern novice still wet behind my ears.
I had twenty minutes to figure out what to do when Nettie’s family arrived at the hospital.
I headed to the pay phones in the lobby to call the church secretary to tell her what was happening and to pick her brain. (Because, truly, who knows more about what happens in a church than the church secretary?). Just then, the elevator door opened, and the Holy Spirit stood there. He was wearing a clerical collar. In my tradition, we don’t wear clericals, but Spirit knew I needed an obvious means by which to recognize him in that instant. I don’t know if he was Catholic, Lutheran, or Episcopalian, but he was the Spirit of Truth in human form. “Are you a chaplain?” I asked. “I am,” he affirmed. “I need you!” I exclaimed. And, for twenty minutes, over a soda pop in the hospital cafeteria, the Holy Spirit, in the form of a chaplain, talked me through what I needed to know and prayed with me before I headed back to Nettie Tromberg’s room.
All week long, and every step along the way, the Spirit of Truth was there for me in one form or another. God’s Spirit was in my pastor’s wife (because besides the church secretary, who but the pastor’s spouse knows more about pastoring?).
God’s Spirit was in my parents, who believed in me and gave me courage. God’s Spirit was in the funeral director, who wanted me to do well to help a grieving family. The Holy Spirit was in the presbyterian minister, who let me peruse his library in his study since all the books in our church library and the pastor’s study at North Side had burned.
According to the Apostle Paul, (Romans 5:1-5)
“Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
Going into that week, I was not qualified for the tasks I would need to do. But God’s love had been poured into my heart all my life, and the Holy Spirit had been given to me, as the Holy Spirit is given to all of God’s people at our baptism.
I had no training on how to pray at the bedside of the deceased. I had attended maybe five funerals in my whole life; a great uncle, three grandparents, and one friend. (And, when attending a funeral, does one really pay that much attention to what the pastor does to be able to replicate it oneself down the line? No!) But God’s love was sufficient. What does a grieving family need? God’s love. And, through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, it was God’s love I shared that Thursday in my very first funeral. When Mike and I were preparing to move here to Trinidad after I retired, I ran across my type-written notes from Nettie Tromberg’s funeral, and I have to say, it may not have been the most polished of eulogies, but it was not bad.
We praised God. We celebrated Nettie’s life, and we comforted Nettie’s family.
When the funeral was over, I started writing a sermon for Sunday. I had preached twice before. One sermon both summers I served at North Side. Neither time had there been any particularly pressing matters in the world or the congregation at the time. This was different.
The church had just burned practically to the ground. Only a shell was left. Before he left town, Don Sarton (the actual pastor) told me I should preach about the people wandering in the wilderness. It was a good suggestion, but I wasn’t even sure I remembered that story from my Sunday School days. As I sat on my folks’ back patio trying to figure out what I could possibly say to help the congregation on their first Sunday worshipping in an unfamiliar place, it came to me, just like Nettie Tromberg’s family was grieving, so was our church family. The sermon I wrote for that Sunday was a eulogy for a beloved building. I remember that the congregation responded well to my humble offering that day.
According to Proverbs (8:1-4):
Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights, beside the way,
at the crossroads she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
“To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live.
How could a mere twenty-one-year-old have words of comfort, vision, and hope for a congregation striving to rise from the ashes? It was only because Wisdom, who was with God in the very beginning of creation, Wisdom, who promises that she continues to cry out to all that live, Wisdom, God’s holy Wisdom is a gift to all who seek her. On my parent’s patio that Friday in June, I begged God for Wisdom beyond my understanding, and God answered my prayers.
So, why have I told you this long story of that week in June forty-one years ago?
Because I hope my story about God’s presence with me, about God’s ability to work through so imperfect a servant, about God’s provision of the Spirit and of Wisdom to meet the needs of his people in June of 1981 will encourage us on this Holy Trinity Sunday in 2022.
Had we known the conditions in advance under which we would be serving Jesus right now, we couldn't bear them. Maybe we would have found a way to live on an isolated island in the tropics somewhere, instead.
When Zion’s Lutheran Church is going through a transition we do not want to be going through, when the nation we love is more divided than it has been since perhaps the Civil War, when war rages in Europe that send shock waves through our economy, when our climate is in rebellion against our human recklessness, when grocery shoppers and grade school students are not safe to go about their ordinary daily business but, our fellow citizens still insist on being armed to the hilt, when the wider church is embroiled in culture wars that don’t come close to representing the ways of Jesus, I believe we need reminding that we are not the first followers of Jesus to wonder where we will go from here? How will we move ahead? We need reminding that even though Jesus is not right here to tell us what to do in these circumstances, we can still follow him, and we can faithfully serve our neighbors in his name.
Today’s texts tell us that Wisdom, God’s partner from the very beginning, she is with us. The texts tell us God trusts us and gives us the power to care for creation and fellow creatures. The texts tell us The Holy Spirit, our advocate, our teacher, and Jesus’ very presence is alive in our relationships with each other. Today’s texts tell us that God who became flesh and lived among us, lives among us still, guiding us, inspiring us, providing for us wisdom and courage sufficient for whatever lies ahead, no matter what it is, no matter how unprepared we feel.
That seems to me to be a story worth telling. Amen?
