Getting to preach here is always a joy. I love preaching. I love coming before you and sharing my faith stories. It’s also true that it takes a little stretching and loosening up to get back into the groove of writing sermons and perhaps most importantly, trying not to cram months of pent up sermon ideas into one morning. You may relax. I’ve got it under control.

“Experiential Spirituality” is a great theme. I will share the story of my faith, how it was most recently bumped in two dreams, which by the way transitions into the next theme here at UCG, “Things That Go Bump in the Night.”

My spirituality has been wrapped in my ministry for most of my life. I had a sense of call to ministry in high school. I loved youth group at the First Congregational (now United Church of Christ) in River Edge, New Jersey. Upstairs every Sunday in the sanctuary, we had a dour, sluggish minister, who would walk up to me and intone,  “H e l l o L a r r y…” I always thought someone had just died.

But downstairs in the church basement, with the youth group, everything was alive, exciting and challenging.

I realize now that I modeled my ministry at this church on the basement youth group rather than the upstairs sanctuary worship of my teenage years.

The key spiritual element of my youth group was to be challenged by my faith. We struggled with racial segregation of our town. We looked at what it meant to support and challenge war. We talked about what was loving and what was not in our dating relationships. My faith didn’t always bring me peace and tranquility. It made me think and grow.

My favorite quote at that time was from the professor of preaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York, Paul Scherer, who said, “The purpose of the gospel is not so much to comfort the distressed as to distress the comfortable.”

I went into ministry to live a life of comforting the distressed and distressing the comfortable.

The second quote that informed my ministry and faith came from the writer Frederick Buechner who said that the place God calls us to be is where our great gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. It’s no good to be working constantly for love and justice if we’re miserable. At the same time to just enjoy life with no purpose other than making money for ourselves and having fun doesn’t help the world, and in the end it probably isn’t very satisfying to our deepest selves.

In ministry I found a profession where I could do so many things I loved, but which also allowed me to immerse myself in service and justice.

None of this happened in a smooth, uninterrupted flow of amazing grace and spiritual reward. At every new juncture and move in my life, I hit a wall.

High school was as good a time as high school could be. There was of course the awkwardness, acne, heartbreak and inevitable rejection. But by my senior year I had faithful friends, good grades, myriad musical experiences, a letter sweater for admittedly second tier sports (track and cross country) and a very sweet girlfriend.

Then freshman year in college turned out to be one of the toughest years of my life. Suddenly every great experience from high school was gone. Everyone was jockeying to be cool. I was at the bottom of the heap. My carry over high school girlfriend (not the sweet one I mentioned above) explained how she was having sex with another guy. My community of support was gone.

I was lonely and alone. I had to find myself, my faith, my community, my meaning all over again.
That pattern repeated at major junctures of my life. It happened when I came to UCG. I hadn’t realized how much I would miss the community that was the first church I had served in Connecticut. Those were really my first adult friends. That’s where our children were born.

I encountered another truth: It takes a year for a new place to become a home, for the loneliness to subside, and for a path of belonging to emerge.

I developed here a new sense of faith in our compact where “We join as a spiritual community to worship God, however known.”

I had to find my own faith, my own ultimate meaning, in a community and world of diverse faith.
Two images helped me here. I found the search for God to be like climbing a mountain where different people and different religions also climb. Sometimes we travel those paths together. Sometimes our paths intersect. Sometimes we’re on opposite sides of the mountain. But we are all seekers, searching for ultimate meaning.

I also discovered a model of faith suggested by the psychologist Carl Jung. He said that no religious tradition calls us to study it. Instead our different religions call us to plunge deep into them and find their depth. And he said in plunging the depths we discover a flowing underground river, like the Florida aquifer the, a source for all of us. (Carl Jung didn’t know about the Florida aquifer. That’s my image). Jung calls this common, underground source the collective unconscious. Because we can meet one another at this collective unconscious, we can understand and love each other at our deepest soulful selves. It’s why we laugh at each other’s jokes, we cry at common loss, and we can understand each other’s dreams. This is the realm of mysticism.

All of this served me well in my ministry.

As I was writing this sermon, ready to continue these stories, something went bump in the night. I had two dreams.

The first dream includes Bill Zegel. He and his wife Carole came to UCG in 1976. We had just purchased the building across the courtyard now known as Reimer Hall and were in the process of renovating it to become our worship center/sanctuary. When Bill and Carole arrived, we still didn’t have a lot of chairs. That Sunday the only seat left for Bill was a small wooden children’s chair in the front row, into which Bill lowered his 6’4” frame. Remarkably he and Carole came back. Bill and Carole have been key figures in church life since then.

And I need to say that the real Bill Zegel has no responsibility for his behavior in my dream. Here’s the dream.

I am at a worship experience in our current sanctuary. Bill Zegel is singing a song while standing up on the rafter in the front of the church. About two minutes into the song Bill falls from the rafter and lands face forward, hard, hitting his head. I immediately run to the back of the church to call 911. It doesn’t work. I dial 911 three times. It still doesn’t work. In the dream I actually remember what our dream mentor Jeremy Taylor, once said, that 911 doesn’t work in dreams. I can’t call because the dream is telling me I can’t call for outside help. I have to deal with the situation myself, so I run back to Bill and stay with him as he recovers consciousness and quite miraculously, is okay.

The second dream occurred a few nights later.

In this dream Sandy and I are to go to a musical in New York. It’s a very big deal, sort of like “Hamilton”. I used to live near New York City, and always think I can find my way into the city. I head in to check out the play’s location, so I’ll know how to get there. I drive down to where I think it is, and I can’t find it. I go back and forth but I get more and more confused. I call Siri to ask where this play is, and Siri doesn’t answer.

The Bill Zegel/911 dream signals a shift in my own spirituality, which is echoed by the Siri dream. We go through stages of development in life when everything changes, and we have to face these changes on our own. Yes, friends and community are crucial, but we cannot depend on 911 and Siri to do it for us. We have to be agents of change in our own lives.

We have to take what is called the leap of faith, where we are confronted with a dark gap before us, an unknown. We have to step away from the God of our past traditions and find the God who appears where this God of our previous chapter of life disappears.

My dream shows me the Bill Zegel part of me, the solid church leader, now standing up on the rafter, in the spotlight, singing my song. This part of me falls off the rafter and hits the ground hard. The Larry part of me tries to run off to get help. When that doesn’t work, I regain my consciousness and begin my own healing for the journey toward the next part of life. No one is going to rescue me from my fall. It is my leap of faith trusting that even when I hit the ground I will rise again finding new directions.

This is a good image for where I am in this new chapter of my life. I retired from active ministry in this church 6 years ago this November. I believe retirement is as developmentally important as it is to leave home after high school.

I love having this time to live my dreams, to play with the Jazz Bandits, to teach trumpet, to be with my adult children and 5 grandchildren for their special moments. I love being able to take off with Sandy as we did this summer for 39 days and nights in our little camper, one less day than Noah in the ark. I cherish each day I’m alive. And I especially cherish that I can remain part of this UCG community.
At the same time, leaving my role as minister of this church was like ripping off my arm. My ministry embodied my spirituality. Social justice, prayer, and faith flowed through my daily routine.

But now I have to rethink it all. I have to figure out how I as a person, not as a minister, can understand my call to live my great gladness while also meeting the deep hunger of the world around me. That’s not a bad thing. It’s just different.

Life in this new stage of my journey is taking that leap of faith into the unknown.

I read the parable of the Prodigal Son and His Brother for this morning’s scripture, and asked you to hear it as freshly as possible. I have always found this story weighted with multiple layers of the challenges of forgiveness.

Today it came to me as a story in which every character is in a new situation where they are called to act in a different way.

The story begins when everything is settled. The parent had doled out the family inheritance to the children. One child had gone off for adventure. The other stayed nearby and set up house. The parent figured all had been taken care of.

Then everybody’s situation changed. For the younger child, life fell apart. It was time to go home admitting having messed up everything, asking simply to be taken in.

For the parent, life dreams had to start over, letting go of the original hope for that younger child, figuring out how to be a family again.

For the older sibling, the bitter question arose: What about me, the responsible one, the one who didn’t break your heart?

It’s a story about what happens when whole systems of life change. The parable says that this is where God is most present. I have found this to be true in my life.

The wonderful, mystical Rabbi Lawrence Kushner says,
“Everything will change. And the Holy One will meet everything back stage, in between performances… The Holy One appears when one thing ends and another thing begins. A baby is born. The child becomes an adult …One enters a room. One leaves a room. One sets out on a journey. Blessed may you be in your coming in and blessed may you be in your going out. God is there. In the spaces between.” (Honey in the Rock, Lawrence Kushner).

That’s my experiential spirituality, poured through my life by nurturing grace, and stirred by a few bumps in the night to make me keep taking those leaps of faith. I offer you this experience, that God appears, sometimes most fully in the spaces between the chapters of our lives.

I have a postscript here. Our hearts were wrenched by the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford on Thursday and then the response by Judge Brett Kavanaugh. In the aftermath, it is difficult to see how we and our country move forward through the division of this moment. My thought again is that in this dark night of the soul as well, the Holy One appears. The exile of the Israelites, when they no longer knew how to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land, became the soil for their awareness of a God greater than their own narrow definitions. This is where we take that leap of faith, where God has promised more light and truth to break forth. This is what I hang on to right now.

For this moment for ourselves and for our nation, I invite us into prayer.
In your own silence, with your own names for God and search for meaning,
Pray for the gap in your life and for that gap in the lives of those around you.
In your own silence, and in your own search,
Pray for this moment, this time between times in our nation.
Trust and pray.
See light. Be the light. Make a way for light.

Amen.

 

Experiential Spirituality and Something that went Bump in Night
Luke 15:11-31
Larry Reimer
September 30, 2018