By Rev. Dr. Peter Ives
Sermon delivered Sunday, Sept. 1, 2018
TEXT: Luke 4: 16-21
We are calling a new minister to our church sometime later this Fall, or early next year. Calling a new minister is a deeply moving experience both for the persons applying to be our new minister, and for the search committee we’ve elected and given the awesome responsibility of conducting this search.
And I believe with all my heart that over these next months we will find that new minister whom we have been looking for, and that there will come a day when we will be able to say of our search and call process: “Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place, I can feel God’s might power and God’s grace.”
And today I am going to ask you to let me share with you from my own personal experiences what this experience has felt like from me who has been called to ministry and called to three different churches over the past 43 years.
I was first called to be a minister in the city of Glasgow, Scotland in 1972. At the time I was in charge of a community center in one of the poorest sections of the city of Glasgow. The homes were in wretched conditions, many having no indoor plumbing or even baths. Children played in dirt lots unsupervised by adults. Teenage gangs roamed the streets at night with knives and other weapons. Domestic abuse rates were some of the highest in the world. Most adults in this area were unemployed.
It was at that moment Jenny and I became members of a house church called the Gorbals Group. The Group included doctors, nurses, social workers, lawyers, youth and community workers, pre school teachers, nursing mothers, university professors, and ministers of the Gospel. And every Thursday evening we met together for worship, and we read together one very special passage from the Bible about Jesus’ own called to ministry.
You can find it in Luke 4: 16-21. He had just gone to the synagogue in Nazareth where he had been asked to preach and he read these words from the Book of Jeremiah that describe the ministry he knew he was now called by God to do: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed and to proclaim the year of the Lord when there will be liberty and justice for all.” And this was Jesus’ own call to ministry described by the Gospel of Luke, but the Gospel of Luke extends this call to all of us, and it soon became Jenny and my own call to ministry in the city of Glasgow and our call to ministry where ever God has called us to serve.
We lived in Scotland for five years and Jenny and I had our first two children, Liza and Jen there, but then we made a decision that would shape our future. We decided to come to live in New England. But we had no parents in New England, no car, no home, and no job at that
moment. But God was with us. My brother, Bobby and his wife, Ruth, wrote us and said, could live with them on an Island 3 miles off the coast of
Round Pond in Maine with no phone, no mail boxes, no indoor toilet or bath, only a small wood stove and a tiny motor boat to get from Loud’s Island to the mainland where we found our only form of communication with the outside world: a coin phone on the dock of Round Pond in Pemmiquid Point that took dimes and quarters for long distance calls. But God was with us.
Three months on Louds Island, with three months of searching, and the snows of December coming, we got a call from a congregation in Cambridge, Massachusetts who wanted us to come down 2 weeks before Christmas for an interview. So off I went to stay at my step sister’s apartment in Central Square in Cambridge on Saturday night. But on Sunday morning when I woke up and there was 4 feet of snow on Mass. Avenvue. I walked through all that snow from Central Square past Harvard Square to Porter Square to meet the Church Sexton who said to me, Reverend, we just called off Church today.
“OH NO!” I said.
“Come Next Sunday” he said not knowing that I had to go all the way back to Maine, back to Round Pond, to Louds Island for one more week before with my wife and two children before I could come back to Cambridge and preach my candidating sermon; which I did that Sunday with a vote by the congregation calling me to be the new Minister of the North Congregational Church in Cambridge one week before Christmas of 1975 now here in the United States of America by the Grace of God.
For the next 8 years I served as pastor of this Church in Cambridge. But the time came when I was invited to go to New Haven to interview for the position of Senior Minister of Center Church on the Green in downtown New Haven. Once again, I was invited to preach my candidating sermon at the Church. But by this time Jenny and I had 3 children, and Jenny was nine month’s pregnant with our 4th child. I called the Search Committee and told them that Jenny might be having a baby on our way to New Haven that Sunday. The Search Committee said, “Come anyway, we have midwives in New Haven.
Jenny and I made our own arrangements with midwives we knew who lived along the way. So we arrived without a birth, I preached my candidating sermon, I was then called to be the next Senior Minister of Center Church on- the-Green in New Haven, following the coffee we said goodbye for now, and drove back safely to Cambridge and the next day at our home in Cambridge, Jenny gave birth to our youngest daughter in our home whom we named Martha. And God was with us on this awesome journey.
I served as Senior Minister of the New Haven Church until the Spring of 1989 when I received a phone call from the head of the Search Committee here in Northampton who we now know as Mariel Addis here at the Haydenville Congregational Church. Mariel told me that they were looking for a new minister for The First Churches of Northampton, and that the profiles for the Search Committee were now closed, but that the Search Committee was willing to give me one last chance when Area Minister for The Hampshire Association of the United Church of Christ agreed to drive my profile as quickly as possible to the offices of the First Churches for the Mariel’s Search Committee to read the next day.
Two days later, I was invited with Jenny, and by now our four children, to come to Northampton to meet with the Search Committee at the home of the Dean of SmithCollege. We saw down and immediately they said they had a very Important question for me. Do you believe that women could be ministers?” Little did I know that it was one of Mariel’s trick questions. Several members of the Search Committee had reported ahead of time that they knew my grandmother, who was the first woman Congregational Minister in the State of Maine. We all laughed and it was a wonderful way to start our evening with the Search committee. The next week Jenny and I and Lisa, Jen, Katie and Martha were invited back to Northampton for me to preach my sermon as the sole nominee and again, it felt like God was again with us and the congregation.
I share these personal stories with you of my call to three different churches to help you see how God can be at work with us right now with our search committee and the candidates whom they are interviewing at this very moment in time with our search process. For right now they are interviewing candidates who, like myself years ago, have now submitted their profiles to you, the members of our Search Committee. For there are ministers out there who have read our Church Profile and would love to have our Search Committee right now invite them here for their first interview. There are people out there who would just love to preach their candidating in this pulpit very soon. Trust that at this time that there are ministers out there who would just love to be your next pastor of the Haydenville Congregational of the United Church of Christ and it is all going to happen very soon, right here in front of you.
And the day will come when we will say to each other, “Surely, the presence of God is in this place. We can feel God’s power and God’s grace.”
Amen
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