Sermon, "Unafraid: Fear and Death," 2 Corinthians 4:7-15, Isaiah 40:27-31, Psalm 46

Sermon 8/11/19

2 Corinthians 4:7-15, Isaiah 40:27-31, Psalm 46

Unafraid: Fear and Death*

We’ve been talking about fears for the last several weeks. We started about thinking about fear and security, our need to feel safe and the ways we can let that need close us off from anyone and anything too different from us, if we forget that God’s perfect love casts out fear. We talked about fear and failure, and the pressure we put on ourselves when we mistakenly believe that our value as a person is derived from our supposed successes. We thought about fear and loneliness, and how we can perhaps best fight off our sense of isolation by focusing instead on making sure others are not lonely. We talked about fear and change, and how change sometimes feels like grief, but though weeping lasts for the night, the joy of God comes in the morning.

Today, we’re concluding our series by talking about fear and death. I know, a light-hearted wrap-up to this series! But that’s the thing - we human beings have a lot of different experiences, different hopes, different fears - but death is a common experience that every single one of us will face. Everybody dies. And yet, despite the universality of our experience, despite the fact that everyone dies - no matter how healthy you are, no matter how rich you are, no matter what country you live in, no matter what, your journey on this earth, this plane of existence, will one day end in death - despite that common bond we have - humans, plants, animals, all of us - in our culture we tend to shy away from talking about death. Sometimes, when I’m meeting with a family to plan a funeral for a loved one, the family can’t answer any questions for me about what their loved one wanted in a service. And they can’t easily answer questions about what they want in a funeral service - because they’ve avoided thinking about it, avoided talking about it. I get it - I do. I’m in the process of making my will right now, and making sure I’ve communicated in writing the kind of decisions I’d want someone to make for me if I was in the hospital, on life support. I told my Mom that I was doing this, and that I’ll make sure to communicate with her and my siblings about where important documents are. It’s not a light and easy conversation to have. And I’ve always teased with my Mom that we don’t need to talk about these things for her because she is not allowed to die - ever. Of course we don’t want to talk about death when it comes to our loved ones because despite whatever hopes we have for eternal life, we know the loss and grief we’ll experience right now when we lose someone we love is the worst kind of pain we’ll experience in this life. 

But I think it is more than that - our fear of death. I think we especially fear the unknown, and what happens in death is the great unknown. No matter what we learn about the process of death, no matter what we read about visions of eternity, we can never really know what death is like until we experience it. Death is an unknown, and that is what is most frightening about it. I think about a poster I had on my wall in junior high. It was an image of our galaxy, with an arrow pointing to a tiny spot on the image that said, “You are Here.” I can’t remember where I got it - something from school probably. I thought it was pretty clever. But the more I looked at it over time, the more uncomfortable it made me. I could get pretty lost in my head thinking about the size of the universe - how either it having an edge or not having an edge - both possibilities seemed impossible and baffling. And then to think that I was a tiny speck on a tiny planet in one solar system in one galaxy out of that whole perhaps infinite mess - it was just too much to consider. I had to take the poster down. Sometimes I think ours fears about death are kind of the same. There’s too much that’s unknowable about death, too much that is beyond what our minds can really take in, and so it’s hard to look death in the eye too often. 

So we do it in snippets. On Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent, we start by remembering that we’re mortal, literally marking ourselves with ashes. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” And at funerals, at the graveside, the prayer of committal says, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” When someone else has died, for a little bit, we have to face our own eventual death. 

Adam Hamilton spends time in his book Unafraid reflecting on the fear of death as he studies the words of the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians. By the time Paul writes this letter to the young church at Corinth, things aren’t going so well. There’s been tension between the young faith community and Paul. He’s had to correct some of their beliefs and behaviors, and in turn, some of the Corinthians call Paul’s leadership into question. Paul’s a bit on the defensive. He and his co-workers have been through a lot. He so wants the church at Corinth to thrive, because he wants the gospel message to thrive. And he’s given heart and soul to make it happen. You can hear the weariness in his tone: “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.” Adam Hamilton picks up on Paul’s metaphor of the clay pots. “We have this treasure in clay jars,” Paul writes. Hamilton says that our bodies are the clay jars, and clay jars of Paul’s day weren’t meant to last forever. They get crushed and broken and destroyed. But they hold a treasure - the real, essential us. (211) 

I’m struck particularly by Paul’s words starting at verse 10. Paul says he and his co-workers carry in their bodies the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus might be visible in their bodies too. “For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.” Paul seems to say that we can only fully reflect the life of Christ when we embrace the sacrificial death of Christ as part of us too. After all, something can’t be resurrected unless it has first died. So how can we embrace new life without first embracing death. Since Paul was pretty hopeful and intent on continuing to preach the gospel, we know Paul didn’t mean he was signing up to die - although he did eventually give his life for his faith. No - Paul means that we die to self - we die to “me first” so that we can embrace “Christ first” if we want to embody Jesus in the world. The unknown of death, the grief and sorrow of death - they can be scary things to contemplate. But when Paul talks about his life making Jesus visible to others - I want that! I want others to be able to experience the life of Christ through me and my work. I think we’re called to that. If that means we have to also carry the death of Christ with us, in us, are we ready to do that too? I recently saw a post on facebook talking about people speculating on what they might do if they knew they had one day left on earth. Maybe we’d eat our favorite foods. Visit our favorite places. See our dearest loved ones of course. And the post said, “Jesus knew he had one day left on earth. Jesus washed feet.”    

Hamilton notes that the Bible has many different images of heaven - from the beautiful images in the writings of the prophet Isaiah, to the streets of gold in Revelation. Hamilton thinks of these different descriptions as ways of saying, “‘Think of the most beautiful and treasured things you can in this life - the next life is even more beautiful than these!” And then he shares this story, an illustration that is more than 100 years old. There’s a man, dying alone at home. “His doctor, traveling by horse and buggy, came to make a house call. He went everywhere with his faithful dog, whom he left on the front porch as he entered the home of his patient. The patient, lying in bed, said to the doctor, ‘Doc, I’m scared. What’s it going to be like on the other side?’ At that moment the doctor’s dog began scratching at the door and whining, hoping to be let in. The doctor said, ‘Do you hear my dog scratching at your door? He’s never been in your house. He doesn’t know anything about the inside of your home. Here’s the only thing he knows: His master is on the other side of that door. And if his master is inside, it must be okay, and it is where he wants to be. That’s what heaven is like.’ Believing this about death changes how we face our mortality.” Hamilton says. “It doesn’t mean we have no fear, only that we’re not controlled by fear. It means that, despite our fear, we can live with real hope.” (219) 

I find hope in this: In facing death, we don’t experience anything that God did not experience in God’s own self. Jesus died. His death was at the hands of enemies. It was painful, violent death. It was not something Jesus did easily, not something he faced without fear and anxiety and wishing there was a different way. He was crucified. He was put to death. So I find comfort that we follow a savior who faced death head on - washing feet the night before with his servant’s heart, trusting in his Parent, ready to embrace death to demonstrate the abundant life God promises us. That gives me hope.  

I find hope in the fact that whatever aspects of the unknown await us in our experience of death, whatever different pictures of heaven, of eternity we might conjure, whatever metaphors the scriptures use, there’s a consistent theme: we’re united with God forever, God who created and loves us. Being with God who is goodness itself can only be good!

And I find hope in this - hope, and challenge: We can only experience resurrection if we experience death first. Eventually, death of this body, this life. But we’re always being called to face the death of some part of ourselves, our old selves. To have room for my resurrected life, I have to put to death everything in me that isn’t of Christ. That’s maybe as hard and as scary as facing physical death. But isn’t resurrection worth facing death? 

As we come to the end of our series, of this go-around with wrestling with our fears, I return to 1 John, where we started out weeks ago: “Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgement, because as God is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” We aren’t perfect. Sometimes, we’ll be afraid! But God is perfect. And as we let God in, as we put aside everything but God, God’s perfect love casts aside our fears. Fear not! God is with you. Thanks be to God. Amen. 

* All quotations are from Adam Hamilton’s book Unafraid: Living with Courage and Hope in Uncertain Times. New York: Convergent Books, 2018. 

Sermon for Ash Wednesday, "In the Wilderness," Psalm 63:1-4, Isaiah 35

Sermon 2/14/18

Psalm 63:1-4, Isaiah 35

In the Wilderness

            In Jewish and Christian tradition, ashes as a symbol convey two primary meanings. First, they are a sign of repentance. When people realized that they had been turning away from God’s path, that they had been disobeying God, and wanted to recommit to God’s way, God’s path, and ask for God’s mercy and forgiveness, sackcloth – a rough fabric – and ashes were worn as signs of that repentance – turning away from sin and toward God. They’re signs of humility, reminders that God is God and we are not God.

            Second, ashes are a sign of our mortality. Although we claim the gift of eternal life with God, in this life, in this world, we live and we die. We are finite. We are not invincible. God creates us from the dust of the earth, and to dust these bodies one day return. This is a message we need to confront regularly. Sometimes we fail to treat our lives as the sacred but finite gifts that they are. We don’t treat others as though their time with us is precious and limited. We build up possessions and wealth in ways that suggest we believe that we will live forever, have our things forever. We spend our time on things that don’t matter to us, and put off doing what God is calling us to do, what we are dreaming of doing. We have a decided lack of urgency when it comes to nurturing our own faith and sharing faith with others. We give the impression that we believe that we have limitless time to get done whatever is on our heart’s to-do list. Ashes are a sign of our mortality, meant to be a wake-up call. We are dust, and to dust we return.

            And yet, perhaps you feel a bit like I do this Ash Wednesday. Like I don’t need to be reminded of our finiteness just now. We know it all too well. I have my own personal loss and grief on my heart. And I know we are all processing our grief and sadness over Retha’s death. And it isn’t just Retha. We’ve had a hard season as a congregation. A generation of loved ones, people who have shaped us individually, and shaped our church. Together they represent a season in our church and community heritage that we sometimes long for, a season when, with our somewhat rose-colored glasses, feels like a simpler time. And just today, I was reading news of the school shooting that happened in Florida. It isn’t yet certain how many died there today. My attention was caught by the headline photo – a woman, a mother perhaps, in tears outside the school, with ashes on her forehead. Just this morning, some pastor had reminded her of her mortality. We are plenty aware of our mortality, aren’t we? We’re feeling very finite jus now, I think. Very much like we are dust.

            It seems fitting then that our theme for this Lent is “In the Wilderness.” I don’t know what images come to mind when you hear the world wilderness, but I can tell you that until I became a pastor and was preparing sermons, I thought of a wilderness as like a forest-y type place. Indeed, we use the word wilderness in this way. I went to “wilderness” camp at Camp Aldersgate when I was in elementary school, and it meant we were out in the woods in tents instead of in cabins. But in the scripture, when we hear about the wilderness, we’re not talking about the woods. We’re talking about the desert. We’re talking about desolate terrain, rocky, barren places, place with little water or vegetation. We’re talking about terrain that can be dangerous, isolated. It’s a place where you are vulnerable, at risk.

            The Bible is full of stories of people who end up in the wilderness, for one reason or another, from Genesis to Revelation, and this Lent, we’ll be reading some wilderness stories, thinking about these figures of faith who spent time in the wilderness, and seeing what we can learn from their journeys there. Jesus spent time in the wilderness too, as we’ll talk about on Sunday, and it is his 40 day time in the wilderness that particularly gives shape to our Lenten season of 40 days. But tonight, we are thinking about our own experiences in the wilderness. When have you felt like you were in a barren land in your life? When have you felt like you were spiritually parched and dry? When have you felt vulnerable and at risk, exposed? When have you felt like you were off the beaten path, lost? Maybe you are even feeling that way right now.

            This Lent, we are listening for God’s message to people who in the wilderness. We’re listening for God’s message to people who are well aware that they are dust. We’re listening for God’s message to us when we feel faint with thirst. Our reading from Psalm 63 is a Psalm attributed to King David, said to be written when he was in the wilderness of Judah. David was on the run, being pursued by his own son Absalom who wished to succeed David as King. David was literally and figuratively experiencing a wilderness time, and he knew whether Absalom was successful in taking power from him or not, David was closer to the end of his reign and life than the beginning. From this context, we read, “O God you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”

            In Lent, we seek to attune our hearts to the reality that we are in wilderness, we’re parched, we’re dust, and we’re longing with a thirst that only drawing close to God can quench. God is the water of life for our souls that have become a desert place, a wilderness place. Thankfully, this very God whom we long for is the one who has the power to bring life to the desert, and bring hope in the wilderness. In our reading from Isaiah 35, we hear these hopeful words: “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing … For the waters shall break forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool and the thirsty ground springs of water … A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way.” In the desert, life. In the wilderness, a holy highway for God’s people. God brings crocuses to bloom where it seems no life could survive. Where there is only dust, God brings a spring of water.

            We are dust, and to dust we return. That is the stark reality that we face on Ash Wednesday. But just as real is God’s promise to bring life from the wilderness. Tonight, as we receive ashes, this sign of repentance, a sign that we are turning our hearts back to God, a sign that we are mortals, dust, we’ll hear a song called Beautiful Things sung by Mark Gungor. Listen to some of the word: “All this pain. I wonder if I’ll ever find my way. I wonder if my life could really change at all. All this earth. Could all that is lost ever be found? Could a garden come up from this ground at all? You make beautiful things. You make beautiful things out of the dust. All around, Hope is springing up from this old ground. Out of chaos life is being found in You. You make beautiful things. You make beautiful things out of the dust. You make me new, You are making me new. You make me new, You are making me new.”

            Maybe we are in the wilderness. But have you heard about what God can do in wilderness? Maybe we are dust. But have you seen what God can make from dust? This Ash Wednesday, may we be reminded that we are dust. May we turn to God with all our hearts. And may we remember that God promises that in due season the wilderness will be glad and the desert shall rejoice and blossom. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Laying Down My Burden

Laying Down My Burden

As many of you know, my father died last month, after sustaining injuries in a motorcycle accident. I’ve shared that my relationship with him was estranged, and I know some of you have had similar tensions in relationships with your family members. I want to share with you about why my relationship with him was estranged. I have spent a long time debating with myself whether or not I should write this, and whether I should share with just a few or more publicly. There are people who love my father very much, who were close to him, and I regret the pain that this will cause them to read and live with knowing. I’m sorry for that. But I feel compelled to speak, not to cause harm, but to speak truth, and to let go of a heavy burden I’ve carried with me for a long time.

I am writing this now because I’ve promised myself for years that I would and could. I promised myself that whenever my father died, whenever I no longer had to worry about or had the excuse of not telling my story because of not wanting to cause conflict with him or seem like I was “out to get him” or something, I would finally say it all, share it all, and unburden myself. Perhaps this seems like a selfish act, but I consider it an act of self-care, one that I have been putting off for decades. I have needed to do this for a long time.

When I was a child, a young girl who hit puberty especially early, around 9 years old, my father started sexually abusing me. He did not rape me or force himself on me. I feel compelled to make these disclaimers. So many have suffered much more horrific abuse than I did. Nonetheless, I was abused. I think it started with my father wanting me to lie down with him on the couch. He’d want me to lay on top of him. I felt – weird. I knew something wasn’t quite right with this. But I didn’t say anything to him, or to my mother about what was happening while she was working. Eventually he did things like pull up my shirt, expose my breasts, and lay on top of me, or pin me against a wall, and put his hands on my buttocks inside my pants. It wasn’t necessarily often, or every day, but I worried about when it would happen. He would also make sexual comments to me, especially threatening that he would try to come into the bathroom while I was showering so he could see me naked. Our bathroom door didn’t lock, and for a long time, I would barricade the closet door in front of the bathroom door and use towels to keep the door in place so that I would at least have a warning if he tried to come in. He didn’t come in, but I worried about it. He’d always try to slap my butt if I was walking ahead of him on stairs. Things like that. I had the clear understanding that he desired me sexually.

I’m not sure when this stopped. I think when I got closer to being a teenager, and when we moved to a new home. But even after my parents separated, the comments with sexual innuendo did not stop. One day, while I was in high school perhaps, I was washing dishes, and I splashed water on my shirt. My father suggested I just take my shirt off. After that instance, I wrote about what I’d experienced in my journal. I didn’t even use as much detail as I did in the paragraph above. I think the paragraph above is the very first time I have ever so explicitly shared ever what I experienced.

Perhaps in a Freudian-slip kind of way, I left my journal out on the table, and my mother read what I written. She was devastated. Heart-broken for me. Feeling incredible guilt for not knowing what had happened. Livid, as an understatement, with my father. She wanted to confront him. I begged her not to. I pleaded with her not to tell anyone, or say anything, or do anything. I was so mortified and ashamed of what had happened. All the classic responses of a victim of sexual abuse. My mother believed, and I think rightly, that not agreeing to be silent would cause me such trauma that it wouldn’t be worth it. She wanted me to go to counseling, and again, I refused. I told her I wasn’t impacted by what I’d experienced. I was over it. I could handle it on my own in my own way. Again, worried that I’d shut down if she forced me, she acquiesced. I know it hurt her, wore on her, to be in this weird, secretive, middle-place. She did it because I needed her to let it be this way, at least then. 

What followed were some years of uncomfortable, lukewarm interactions between my family and my father. This was unsustainable and unhealthy. But it got us, me, through. And slowly, we became less and less involved in his life, and he in ours. 

Finally, with some distance from him, I allowed my mother to confront my father. I realized we both needed it. I think maybe I was in college? I’ve honestly lost track of the exact timeline. Anyway, she confronted him, and told him she knew what had happened. He didn’t deny it. In fact, he had read my journal both when I originally wrote about it, and then read my journal when I wrote about mom finding what I’d written. He’d known all this for years. And when she confronted him, he said, “I can’t believe that still bothers her.” I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT STILL BOTHERS HER! Infuriating! It still baffles, shocks, appalls me. Even so, even as enraging as his response was, it also made me weep with relief that he didn’t deny what had happened. I felt justified in some way. He wasn’t going to try to paint me as a liar or crazy or delusional. He sexually abused me, and he admitted it.

For the longest time, I didn’t, wouldn’t, tell anyone about my experiences. The best I could do was allude to it vaguely: “My dad isn’t a great guy.” In a strange turn of events, the first time I ever actually willingly said, “My father sexually abused me” was during seminary during a game of “Truth.” (Hey, it was seminary. We played Truth but not Dare.) It was not even exclusively among my closest friends. I was not the only one in the circle who had such an experience. But it was a turning point. It was easier – not easy – but easier to share my experiences when I needed to. Sometimes it still takes me years to be so revealing even to people I am close to, and sometimes it slips out just as a fact about my life with people with whom I am less close. But I can say it, speak of it. Speak the truth. 

And so, I am writing this, for me, and for others. I’m writing this because my church, Liverpool First UMC, has participated in Vera House’s White Ribbon Campaign every year, and the ribbons mean, “you will not commit, condone or remain silent about domestic or sexual violence.” I have been staying silent about my own experiences, while telling others to speak up, and I don’t want to do that anymore. 

I’m writing this because #notallmen, but #yesALLwomen.

I’m writing this because what happened to me is not ok, and because the abuse that children experience is not ok, and it is not their fault, and because they are victims, and because if in anyway my voice can help someone else find theirs, I should speak up.

I’m writing this because it shouldn’t be wrong to tell the truth about things that have happened.

I’m writing this because I want to continue a process of healing and grieving, and telling the truth is part of that process.

I have to talk about my mother in all of this. My mother is one of the best people I know. She just is. If you know her, you know that already. She embodies unconditional love. She once argued in a class she was taking that none of us, except God, could truly love unconditionally, faulty as we humans are, but she disproves her own argument. I have never, ever, doubted or questioned my mother’s complete love for me.

My mother didn’t know what was happening when I was a child. She wasn’t at home when these things happened. She was working hard – sometime multiple jobs – to take care of us. And I never told her. Children don’t, often. I was ashamed, and confused, and didn’t know how to even put words to what I would try to say to her. So how could she know? The comments and innuendos he never made in front of her. She had no way to know. And yet, I know, she’s struggled with feeling guilty and responsible somehow. That’s what happens with abuse, with victims of abuse. They try to take responsibility. They end up being the ones who feel guilty. But that’s a part of the lie. This was not her fault. It was not my fault. My father was responsible for his own actions. The end. However many times I have to tell her that, tell me that, I will. We will remind ourselves until we know it. 

I tried, as I mentioned, when my mother first found out about what had happened, to convince her that I hadn’t been impacted by what had happened to me. But she knew better, and I knew better over time, as I became an adult.

What happened to me meant my first experience with my sexuality was an abusive experience inflicted by someone who was supposed to love me and protect me from harm.

What happened meant that I found it difficult to accept people finding me attractive. I found and find it difficult when people look at me in this way. I feel uncomfortable and exposed, and have had to work hard to process healthy, normal interaction between adults seeking out romantic relationships.

What happened makes it hard for me to watch fathers and daughters together without an eye of scrutiny. I’m glad that I’m aware of and intuitive about unhealthy relationships around me, but I regret that I sometimes overanalyze, sometimes have to check myself and ask extra questions of myself to figure out if what I am seeing is normal, that I have to make those assessments. 

What happened made me feel ashamed and dirty and wondering what was wrong with me that my father would want to treat me that way. Why did he want to do that to me? What was I radiating that made these things unfold? Rationally, I knew I was a victim. But I’m amazed by how hard it is, emotionally, to not feel like you are at fault, somehow, in some way, causing the abuse. It was hard to tell people what I experienced because I was embarrassed, mortified at what happened. I could only ask myself, what kind of girl has a dad who wants to do that to her? It’s hard to explain that feeling, and it is hard to shake it.

What happened made me so very thankful for my mother, and for her courageous breaking out of an abusive relationship, breaking a cycle of violence, abuse, mistreatment of women. She endured a lot too, and has her own story. And when she decided to separate from and then divorce my father, she didn’t always get a lot of support. She didn’t want to tell folks about why she was ending her marriage – in part, because she didn’t want to betray things I wasn’t ready to talk about. I think some people she had been close to believed she was leaving my father to be with someone else. In actuality, she was ending her marriage because over time, with help, she learned to value herself, to see herself as a precious child of God, created in God’s image, worth being treated with kindness and love and respect, to see herself as capable and able to be on her own and take care of her children on her own. I am so thankful to Bruce Webster, my pastor, for the role he played in helping nurture my mother as she ended a deeply unhealthy relationship. It is so hard to leave abusive situations. If you’ve ever tried to walk with someone and help them exit an abusive relationship, you know that. If you’ve ever tried to leave yourself, you know that. My mother is strong and brave, and I’m thankful for people who helped draw that out of her. And I am thankful for the strength she then had to protect and help and love and care for and go to bat for me in so many ways. And I am thankful for her getting my brothers out of an environment where they would only be learning to repeat patterns they would grow up with every day. I am thankful for the men my three brothers have become, for the way they treat women, for the respectful, caring ways they are in relationship with women. I am thankful for my brother Jim, for the way he is an excellent, loving father to Sam, who is teaching him already, explicitly, how men should treat women and all people. I am beyond thankful for the men in my life who were not like my father, and who have tried to step in and nurture me and my siblings in the ways that we missed. I am thankful for my grandfather, Millard Mudge, and his extraordinary gentleness, and extraordinary kindness. I am thankful for Bruce, his mentoring, his friendship, and his commitment to help my family when we so needed a hand to pull us through the biggest change in our lives. I am thankful to Uncle Bill, who still tries to protect me from harm however he can. I am thankful for Uncle John, who has modeled “tough guys” with big, loving hearts. I am thankful for men who get it, who speak up for and with women, who are advocates for and with women, who do not keep silent, who do not see women as objects, but partners, and who teach their children to do the same.

I don’t know why my father did what he did. I remember taking a class during my freshman year of college called “Family Violence.” We learned a lot about the reasons, the causes, the factors, influences that led people to act with violence toward their families. And I remember saying in class, “Isn’t it sometimes because they’re just jerks?! Is there always a reason, an excuse?” Of course, I know some of the things that influenced my father, some of his family history, some things that shaped him. But I also know that he has to be responsible for his own actions, and that not all people with his particular family history acted in the same way. I don’t know what was in his heart.

His death has left me mostly confused and overwhelmed. I am not sure what to feel. I feel many things. I feel partly relieved. I can’t deny that. I feel sad – sad for the father he wasn’t, and for the father he was. I feel a loss of what will never be, a relationship that I will never have had with a father. I feel overwhelmed by all that his death has stirred up – memories and anger and pain that have caught me off guard. I feel sorry that my brothers and I are not simply mourning the loss of a beloved father, no strings attached, that things are so complex and muddled. I don’t hate my father. I have, of course, some good memories too, that I try to set aside, apart, if such a thing is even possible. I can honestly say that I have wished him wholeness and healing. And I believe that God’s amazing grace is available to us all, even him, even me.

If you’ve made it to the end of this, I thank you for letting me share these words with you, even if they were hard to read. I have been so blessed by the kind words and thoughts and prayers of so many of you during this difficult time. You’ve made me feel overwhelmed with love, and strengthened on every side. Thank you. 

Nina

Deaths always seem to come in clusters. When I started at my first appointment in Oneida, I had several funerals right away, which were the first for the congregation in a while. At my appointment in Franklin Lakes, I've had fewer, thankfully. And in my time since leaving Oneida, to my knowledge, no member of the congregation has died, except family of members, folks less directly connected to the congregation. That is, until this week, when one of my dear former parishioners passed away after a long struggle with cancer. Her funeral will be next week, and the new pastor in Oneida has graciously extended an invitation for me to be involved in some way, which I greatly appreciate.

Nina was one of a handful of folks at St. Paul's who I knew before arriving. She was active in district and conference UMW activities, and I'd met her through some of the UMW women at my home church in Rome. When I was appointed to Oneida, these Rome friends asked Nina to look out for me, and she certainly did, no questions asked, making it clear to everyone that they better be ok with me!

Nina was a character - a joker, a fighter who battled cancer with courage even after it returned again and again, a dedicated church member, stubborn and humble. She was our lay member to annual conference, and I was especially pleased to have her as a stole presenter, along with my mother, at my ordination. And I know she loved being there for me! When I was about to announce my new appointment to New Jersey, Nina was one of a very few people I made sure to tell before the offical news came out.

In some ways, I feel blessed that over a year has passed since I left Oneida without experiencing this kind of loss. I think that's a gift to me, something that makes it easier to leave one place and move to the next. And it's a gift to still be able to be a part of celebrating her life.