SERVICE OF INSTALLATION FOR THE REV. LAURA FITZPATRICK-NAGER
We welcomed to our pulpit this morning the Rev. Mary Nelson. Mary is the
South Central Regional Minister for the Connecticut Conference United
Church of Christ. She works primarily with churches in transition, and with
the four Committees on Ministry of the South Central Region.
FOLLOWING THE SERMON IS THE FORMAL CHARGE TO LAURA BY STEVE JUNGKEIT
The Rev. Mary Nelson, UCC Regional Minister
Installation of Rev. Laura Fitzpatrick-Nager
10 February 2019
If You Say So
It is my great joy and honor to join you here today in Old Lyme. I bring you greetings on behalf of the 233 churches of the Connecticut Conference and our Conference Minister Kent Siladi, and especially from the 65 congregations of the South Central Region, of which you are a part. In particular I bring you greetings from the First Congregational Church of Ansonia, where I preached two weeks ago, and with your permission I will bring greetings from you to the First Congregational Church of Middlebury where I will be preaching in a few weeks. I am grateful to Steve and Laura for inviting me, and grateful to all of you for welcoming me. And I want to thank you for your faithful support of the ministries of the United Church of Christ through your financial giving to Our Church’s Wider Mission, allowing the work of the United Church of Christ to continue across Connecticut and around the world.
Now, friends, will you pray with me please: may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in you sight, our Lord and our redeemer
The sea level is currently rising at a rate of about 3 millimeters a year, maybe a little more. The most recent information from the National Climate Assessment Report released last November predicts that by the end of this century the sea level in coastal areas like Old Lyme will have risen between one and four feet from where they are today.
I wouldn’t blame you if you haven’t read all 1600 pages of the latest installment of the report, or even its 100+ -page executive summary, but you can find some pretty handy summaries of the dire predictions online: a 10% drop in America’s Gross Domestic Product, trillions of dollars of economic loss, rising sea levels, ruined farmlands, more devastating wildfires in the southwest and hurricanes in the east, expansion of bug populations and the diseases they spread (including our very own Lyme disease), and we only have about 10 years, maybe less, in which to mitigate – not stop, not reverse, but merely buffer – the damage that is to come. And of course, we know that poor communities, rural communities, coastal communities, tiny island nations, and most of all, people of color—will be disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change. There is no good news in that Climate Assessment Report.
This is the news that Isaiah brought to the people of Judah in the year that King Uzziah died. Death and destruction and hopelessness made worse by willful ignorance and irresponsibility. How long will it be this way? Isaiah asks, “How long, O Lord?” And the response came: “Until cities lie waste without inhabitants, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate; until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the middle of the land. Even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains standing when it is felled.”
That is the prophecy that Isaiah was made to bring to his own people. His call story sounds so wonderful and majestic and noble, with the seraphim and the big throne and the “Here am I, send me!”
But if Isaiah had known the message he was going to have to bring to his own people, do you think he would have been quite so bold in volunteering?
Even when prophets and preachers do bring good news, it is often our instinct NOT to follow them – how can this be?
Jesus meets the fishermen who would become his first disciples on the shore of Lake Genassaret, also known as the Sea of Galilee, after a long and unsuccessful night of fishing. He is preaching on land to a gathered crowd. They’re just bringing their boats back in, when he tells them to put their nets down in the water one more time – riiiiiiight over there. And Simon (who would become Peter), the professional fisherman who has taken his boat out on that lake every day of his life, says to Jesus, “We’ve been fishing all night and we have caught nothing.” And then I like to imagine him shrugging here. I think it works better with a shrug: “But if you say so, I will let down the nets.”
And of course there is this overwhelming haul of fish that nearly breaks the two boats, and everyone is amazed, and Jesus is proven right, and Simon and James and John leave their families and their livelihoods and become followers of Jesus.
But in first century Palestine, as is still the case today for many people around the world, to leave one’s family is more than just an emotional and relational choice – maybe their dad wasn’t so nice to the brothers James and John, we might think; maybe Simon was unmarried, didn’t have kids to care for, didn’t have hypothetical attachments. No, in first-century Palestine, to leave one’s family was to leave one’s social and economic security. The family was not just a safety net, the family was a person’s entire economy—the Greek word “oikos,” the root of economy, is actually the word for “household.” To leave one’s oikos, one’s household, one’s family, was such an unimaginable act that we don’t really have a word for it today. Not just isolation. Not mere cutting-off-one’s-nose-to-spite-one’s-face. To leave one’s family was to choose a kind of living death.
And what we know in hindsight is that Jesus’ followers formed their own “oikos,” their own economy in which they cared for one another and provided for each other the kind of security and common life equivalent to the first-century family. But when they first met Jesus, Simon-who-became-Peter said, “No, there’s no way you can be right about putting down our nets, we’ve been fishing all night and we’ve caught nothing – we’re the ones who are out here catching nothing, while you’re standing on the shore showing off for a crowd of strangers!”
Sometimes God gives us words to speak that no one wants to hear. Sometimes God tells us that destruction is imminent, and God knows we’re not going to do anything about it. Sometimes God gives us all the tools, all the resources, all the words—and nobody wants to hear our message. Or they feel so caught up in systems, economies, families, oikos-es that won’t allow them to change without risking more than they possibly can imagine. For Simon Peter, he put his net back in the water because there seemed to be no risk in proving himself right and Jesus wrong – “We’ve been fishing all night and we’ve caught nothing. But if you say so…” The people of Judah who heard Isaiah’s words of warning—what could they even do to change course when Isaiah brought them a message of complete annihilation? What else could they do, besides nothing?
As followers of God, sometimes we are given hard news to share, and we want to share good news, instead. But that’s not the news God has given us to tell.
My friends in Old Lyme, you have called to minister among you one whose job is to tell you hard news, and then try to get you to do something about it. What’s more, she is a daughter of this congregation, and you know what they say about a prophet not being accepted in her hometown! I’m expecting you to run her off a cliff any day now—except that you, too, are prophets who have heard the truth she is called to share: that climate change is happening, and economic injustice is real, and racism is thriving in our own hearts and minds more ferociously than we understand, and these things will hurt others well before we are personally impacted, but as followers of Christ we know that we all belong to the same “oikos,” the same household, and we must act. It’s Pastor Laura’s job to get you to act—not to do the work for you, but with you—and she’s calling you to do the work in Haiti, and Palestine, and on the reservation, as well as right here in your own backyards, because that is the only way that the kindom of God will come on earth as it is in heaven.
So when she comes to you and suggests that you try one more time, riiiiiiiight over here, give it a chance. When she comes to you speaking a prophetic word that you don’t want to hear, listen to her. When she invited you to claim your place in the oikos, the household, of Christ’s followers, to become fishers of people, remember that you have asked her to do this prophetic work in your midst, and join her in the struggle, in Jesus’ name, and for his sake.
Amen.
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Charge for Laura Fitzpatrick-Nager’s Installation
The Rev. Dr. Steven R. Jengkeit
February 10, 2019
In the Bible and throughout the history of theology, there have been a lot of designations applied to Jesus. He’s called the Son of God, the Messiah, or Emmanuel. He’s called Master and Lord. Later, he was understood to be the Second Person of the Trinity. But the designation he himself seemed to prefer, the one he used to describe himself, was “the Son of Man.” A better, more fitting translation would be “the Human One.” The more I read and reread the Gospel stories, the more convinced I am that the good news of the gospel can be summed up in that small designation – Jesus is the human one who beckons us into the depths of our own humanity, while also asking us to regard the complicated and soulful humanity of others. As I read those stories, if God is to be found at all, it will be in the aching, beautiful, fragile, tender and lovely humanity of our individual lives, in all of our messy complexity, and in our lives together, with all of the messy complexity that implies. Jesus – the Human One – frees us to live into our own humanity.
I’d like to suggest that that’s good news for all of us. And it has profound implications for what we’re doing here today. Laura, it’s good news for you because it means that your task as a minister isn’t an especially complicated one. There are, to be sure, administrative details to mind, programs to run, agendas to be set, meetings to attend, and all the rest – that’s all true. But really, your task, above all else, is simply to be human, which is to say, to be you, who you really are, without pretenses, without the trappings that all too often come from playing church, without the masks or personas that we ministers can often adopt when we get in front of people. Your job is to let your own complicated humanity show, because if we are to glimpse God, it will, more than likely, be in the unguarded moments, when you are, just…you. You do that so well already, and it’s part of what makes having you here so wonderful. But the charge, really, is to model what it means to embrace one’s own fragile and vulnerable humanity, in the way modeled for us all by the One calling himself “the Human One.”
But that designation has another connotation as well. Our friend Mazin Qumsiyeh, living in Palestine, signs all of his correspondences with the phrase, “stay human.” That’s because he’s seen the inhumanity that people are too often capable of. It’s because we live in what can often feel like an inhumane time, when we’re tempted to treat one another as so many objects, as so many “its,” which is how we become reduced to so many forms of violence. A minister’s job is to be human, but it is also to help us all to stay human in inhumane times. And that implies a willingness to diagnose and work through the ideologies and the undercurrents, the powers and the principalities that too often distort our vision, that too often dehumanize us. That too is something you already know how to do, and well. That too is another reason that it’s been so good to have you among us. You know what it means to help others to stay human – young people, adults, everyone. It’s your task to keep on doing it.
But all of you have a task as well. Even as Laura lives out her own humanity among us, even as she does what she can to help us all to stay human, your task is to give her the encouragement, the support, and the love that she needs in order to do those things. Most all of us who find ourselves in this profession do it because something powerful and deep has called to us, and I want you to hear that being in ministry is a wonderful thing. But it can also be a strange thing. A lonely thing. A frustrating, and sometimes heartbreaking thing. A holy and sometimes mysterious thing. It can be all of those things together. Which is simply to say that I’m charging you with the responsibility to care for Laura, and to grant her the freedom she needs in order to live humanly. And that’s something this community already knows how to do well – incredibly well, in fact. But we’ll have to keep on doing it.
To live in the company of one another, while trusting the ancient vision of the one who called himself Human, is a gift beyond measure. Laura, we’re gifted to have you among us. We’re gifted to grow with you, and to become a little more human in your company.