Gratitude and Good-Byes

As many of you know, it's been a tough year. After a bout with shingles in January, I had a miscarriage in April and a second miscarriage in June. I've been away on leave since our second miscarriage, and missed the church very much. I'm so grateful for the outpouring of love we've experienced in these months, and for the time away.

This time away has also been a time of deep prayer and reflection, and I've come to a difficult decision. I’ve discerned that God is calling me away from pastoral ministry. I'll be at Battle Ground Community UMC as the pastor for the next month, through September 27, and then the church will have a new pastor; our District Superintendent, David Nieda, is looking for someone now. I'm going to miss the church so much. I also believe in this church with all my heart and I know God will be with you.

Below, I've posted the manuscript from the sermon I shared this morning. Thank you so much for being part of my faith story, and thank you for the wonderful ministries of this church.



Scripture: Philippians 1:3-11

I thank my God every time I mention you in my prayers. I'm thankful for all of you every time I pray, and it's always a prayer full of joy. I'm glad because of the way you have been my partners in the ministry of the gospel from the time you first believed it until now. I'm sure about this: the one who started a good work in you will stay with you to complete the job by the day of Christ Jesus. I have good reason to think this way about all of you because I keep you in my heart. You are all my partners in God's grace, both during my time in prison and in the defense and support of the gospel. God is my witness that I feel affection for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus.

This is my prayer: that your love might become even more and more rich with knowledge and all kinds of insight. I pray this so that you will be able to decide what really matters and so you will be sincere and blameless on the day of Christ. I pray that you will then be filled with the fruit of righteousness, which comes from Jesus Christ, in order to give glory and praise to God.

Our scripture today comes from Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi. As he wrote this letter, Paul was in prison. Things were not going well for him. But he wrote this letter, and the whole thing is just full of joy and gratitude. In fact, after a short salutation, the first words of the body of the letter are, “I thank my God every time I mention you in my prayers.” Paul is so grateful for that church.

And today I want to share how grateful I am for this church. In the past two years here, I’ve gotten to know a community of people who really look out for each other, who are completely committed to Christ, and who love above all. Thank you for being who you are, for facing challenging conversations head-on, for listening to the call of the Holy Spirit. Thank you for joining me in trying new things over the past two years, for your courage and creativity.

Thank you for your wonderful support when I had shingles, and then in May and June when we shared that we had had a miscarriage, and that we were pregnant again. It meant so much to us to share those things with such a loving church.

And I want to thank you for the love you poured out toward us when we had a second miscarriage, barely two months after the first one. The notes and cards meant so much, and we could feel the love and prayers being sent our way.

I want to thank you in particular for allowing us to have this time away. I know many of you have had pregnancy losses. I don’t know if you felt this too, but for us, we really believe that Agnes and Micah are our children. We really, 100% believe that, and at the same time, we had them for such a short time – we knew we were pregnant with Agnes for less than two weeks before she died, and we knew about Micah for barely a month. They were here for such a short time, and even that time was more a feeling than anything else, we didn’t get to hear their voices or see their faces, I wasn’t even very pregnant. And that makes it all seem very unreal, almost like a dream.

But having time away to say good-bye – time that was different from everyday life, time that was separate and strange – that made Agnes and Micah feel more real. If we had just jumped right back into normal life, we would have been denying the very real impact those two babies had on us. For us, it would have been like saying they didn’t really count, they weren’t really our children.

So thank you for saying that they did count. That’s the gift you have given us this summer. You have allowed our children to be real people, even though they were here for such a short time. I cannot thank you enough. There is no greater gift you could have given us.

When things like this happen, you start to look at your life. I have complete confidence that God called me into pastoral ministry. I am so grateful for these past four years as a pastor, and I know that I was called into pastoral ministry.

But I also believe that our callings can and do change over time. We can’t just listen once and then go and never look back. God keeps speaking to us, keeps guiding us, and what was right at one time in our lives may not be what is right today.

I don’t think it would be possible to live through this past year without being transformed, without being changed. And these past months as I’ve prayed and listened, I’ve heard God calling me in a new direction.

I don’t know all of God’s reasons for calling me away from this now, but I’d like to share some of my ideas of why that might be. I also want to share this because there are moments in your life that become part of your faith story, moments that have lasting significance as we walk with God. I think it’s important for us as Christians to share those moments, to share our faith stories. This year has become one of those moments for me. This moment will be part of my faith story all my life. So I want to share that faith story with you, as I’ve gotten to hear and share in yours for the past two years.

I don’t know how to be a pastor without being 100%, all-in. I think that’s good and right, a pastor should be all-in, but for me, that also creates quite an emotional roller-coaster. Every week, every day, every hour – for me as a pastor, in every moment, everything is at stake. Every day is the best day ever, if I saw evidence somewhere that someone was growing in faith. Or else it’s the worst day ever,

if what I saw that day was a barrier to growth. And if it’s a best-day-ever, then I have to hold on really tight to it, figure out how to duplicate it, improve on it, figure out what happens next to help us all keep growing in faith. And if it’s a worst-day-ever, then I have to figure out how to fix it, how to help remove the barrier to growth.

You might be thinking that maybe I should relax a little about the whole thing. And you’re right. And I’ve tried and tried to do just that, and it tends to last about a day, because it matters so much to me. I’ve been all-in.

I’ve known this about myself for a long time. I’ve seen myself go through these cycles, like the cycle I experience each week as I prepare for Sunday; I love preaching, I love thinking and wrestling with a Bible passage, and sharing that, but I hate Saturdays. I think it’s safe to say almost every Saturday the past four years has been a bad day. A really bad day. Because I want Sunday to matter, want it to count. I’m all-in. That same cycle that happens every week, it happens to a different degree every year, and even every day. I don’t know how to be a pastor without being all-in, which makes it an emotional roller-coaster.

For a long time, I just assumed that was how my life would be. It was something I had accepted. Sometimes I would think, “Wouldn’t it be nice if my life were different?” But I would immediately think, “Well, that’s not my life,” and that would be the end of it. I had accepted the roller-coaster.

Well, this year, my whole life has been an emotional roller-coaster.

After we lost Micah, I had no hope. I didn’t care about the future, didn’t even really care if I lived or died. Not that I wanted my life to end or the future to be bleak, I just didn’t care. For a long while, I didn’t have any interest in praying. I felt totally betrayed by God, the God I had trusted to keep my children safe, and who had completely failed at that.

And I knew I had to pull it together to come back here. And that felt even more hopeless, not because I didn’t want to come back, I missed you all so much, but coming back meant re-entering that pastoral roller-coaster, when I felt like I had whiplash already.

And then, for the first time, it occurred to me that maybe I didn’t have to be on that roller-coaster anymore. Maybe I could have a different kind of life. That had never crossed my mind as a real option before. There’s this ride at the Wild Waves amusement park up near Tacoma, the ride is called the Wild Thing. You get in the car and off it goes, it’s got corkscrews and loops where you’re upside-down, drops from a great height, the whole bit, and then you come back to the loading area, and you have an option: you can get out if you want, or you can go a second time. If there's no line, you can just keep going around and around.

What happened for me was like pulling up to that loading area, assuming that I was going to keep going, that that was the only option – and then someone telling me that if my body and soul were sick and sore from too many loops and corkscrews, I had the option of getting off the roller coaster.

When this occurred to me, immediately a Bible verse came to mind, you might know it, it’s from Jeremiah 29, “I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the Lord; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope.”

A future filled with hope. When I thought I had no future and no hope.

There’s a story about John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, after he had been preaching and leading Methodist societies for quite a while, he still always felt far from God, no matter what spiritual practices he used, no matter how he prayed and read the Bible and gave generously, and he did pray and read the Bible and give. He did all those things – he did them religiously, so to speak. But he still didn’t feel close to God.

And then one day he went to a Bible study meeting at a church in Aldersgate. They were studying the book of Romans, using Martin Luther’s writing on it. Wesley recorded this in his journal: “While [the reader] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

This moment in Wesley’s life is famous. It’s the moment when Wesley’s faith went from knowledge of God to trust in God, trust that God really loved him, as he had helped so many others to believe.

Over the past four years, I’ve found myself preaching about grace, God’s free gift of love for us, and how we never have to earn that. I’ve found myself preaching about the holiness of ordinary life, the holiness of regular things like eating lunch and going to work and just regular time with the regular people we love. I’ve found myself preaching about how we don’t have to earn God’s love, we don’t have to be extraordinary, that God loves us as we are already.

But like John Wesley, the things I’ve been preaching about – I’ve believed them, I’ve known them to be true, but I haven’t felt them to be true for me.

I’ve believed in the holiness of ordinary life, but I’ve also got voices in me that say “Rachon, you have to be extraordinary.” Voices in me that have told me that ordinary life is not enough for me to earn God’s love.

And when I thought of that Bible verse from Jeremiah, about a future with hope, and when it occurred to me that I could get off the roller-coaster, it was like God gave me permission to be ordinary. Like God was saying that I was already loved 100%, and didn’t need to earn or create that love. I didn’t need to earn my place in the world. It was okay to be ordinary.

Having permission from God to be ordinary – it feels like a miracle.

So I’m looking for a job in the accounting field, because you know what? I love data entry, and math, Excel spreadsheets. As in, I actually do these things for fun whenever I can. Some people read books or watch movies for fun, and those things are okay, but what I really want to be doing is sorting data. And I’m not going to be embarrassed about it anymore, I’m not going to think it’s not good enough anymore, because, well, someone’s got to sort the data, and it might as well be someone who’s really going to get a kick out of it.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the service, I’ll be here through the end of September, through September 27. After that, the church will have a new pastor. In the United Methodist system, most pastors who are switching churches in any given year make the switch on July 1. That means that most likely, what will happen is that the church will have an interim pastor, starting in October and staying here through the end of June, and then a new permanent pastor on July 1 of next year. I know that’s a lot of transition.

And one thing I want to say today is that I’m sorry. I do believe this is the right thing to do, I do believe this is where God is calling me, and I trust that God wouldn’t call me in this way unless it was also good for this church. But I know that transition is difficult, and this year of much transition will not be easy. I’m so sorry for that, and for how my being away these past months has impacted all of you.

I’m sorry, and I’m also hopeful for this church, even for this year full of transition. I hope that you’ll find that even with all the transition, an interim pastor can be a real gift. When churches approach interim times intentionally, they can be times of great growth and transformation. I hope that you will ask questions like: “How is God calling us to grow this year? What is God preparing us for? What good transformation does God have in mind for us through this? What is our mission this year and into the future?” Because God does have a future with hope in store for you and for this church.

I know this sermon hasn’t been following the Bible passage all that much, but let’s get back to it now. After Paul expresses his gratitude for the Philippians, he says this: “I’m sure about this: the one who started a good work in you will stay with you to complete the job by the day of Christ Jesus.”

Whoever your pastor is, the one who started a good work in you is the Holy Spirit. Whatever this year looks like, the Holy Spirit is present in this church, and the Holy Spirit is not going to leave you. I am confident that the Holy Spirit, who started a good work in you, will stay with you to complete the job.

And I’d like to echo the final words of this passage: “This is my prayer: that your love might become even more and more rich with knowledge and all kinds of insight. I pray this so that you will be able to decide what really matters and so you will be sincere and blameless on the day of Christ. I pray that you will then be filled with the fruit of righteousness, which comes from Jesus Christ, in order to give glory and praise to God.”

My heart is filled with gratitude for you. May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, now and forever.

Amen.