Unfold: Claiming New Possibilities
Matthew 16:13-20
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
May 7, 2023
Image by Alfred Schrock on Unsplash.com
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1u3bAItrzE
You may remember that I attended a storytelling conference back in March. I heard something there that has stuck with me. What I heard was this “You never know when a story is over, especially if you’re in it.”[1]
That sentence came back to me this week. I thought about it for Peter. His name was Simon when Jesus called him from his fishing. But then one day, Simon shared this important insight about who Jesus was, and Jesus renamed him Peter, which means rock. On this day, Jesus said that Peter was the rock on whom Jesus was going to depend. Maybe, with that name change, Peter thought that he had arrived, that this was the truest truth about who he was. It was certainly a better image than the recent one that the others were still giving him a hard time about. You remember that time when he had tried to walk on the water to Jesus and succeeded for a minute, but then sank like a stone when his fears got the best of him.
Jesus says that he is going to build the church on Peter the rock. That’s a high point, but then almost immediately, Peter gets it wrong again. Jesus tells the disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, and Peter vigorously argues against it. That time, instead of calling him the reliable rock, Jesus calls him Satan. On the night that Jesus was arrested, Peter swore that he would never ever desert him. Within a few hours, he had insisted three times that he didn’t know him at all. Peter was living a story in progress. It kept changing. If he had introduced himself that day outside Caesarea Philippi, he might have said “Just call me the Rock.” If he had told his story on Good Friday, he might have identified himself as a deserter of Jesus, or as a former fisherman who was going back to the trade. But Peter’s beautiful, complicated story wasn’t over. Because resurrection came and with it, another chance to follow Jesus in a new way, to become the leader that Jesus anticipated he was. Peter’s transformation unfolded over a long time.
You never know when a story is over, especially if you’re in it. I learned that firsthand recently.
In 2002, I was serving a church in rural Illinois. It was my first solo pastorate. I had been there about three years when I found myself in conversation with a search committee from a church in another Baptist denomination in Canada. I was interested in that church. They were interested in me. We both thought that God might be calling us together, so we kept talking. After a couple of phone interviews, Jim and I went up and met with the committee in person. We saw the city and had a private tour of the empty church building. We attended worship on Sunday morning, incognito, looking just like ordinary first-time visitors. That was in October.
In January, the committee invited our whole family to spend several days getting to know the church and letting them get to know me. This is the process called candidating. I was there as the search committee’s final candidate for the position of pastor.
There was a full schedule. On Friday night, we went ice skating outdoors with our families and youth. I concentrated on not falling in case being the American who couldn’t skate would rule me out as a pastor. On Saturday morning, I met one-on-one with members of the staff. On Saturday afternoon, I went to someone’s home and talked with individuals in a kind of speed-dating style. Every ten minutes or so, the person in the chair to my left would move and another person would occupy the chair while I was chatting with the person on my right and then when I turned to the person on my left, the chair on the right would be vacated and another conversation partner would be seated. I don’t even remember all the groups and events. On Sunday morning, I preached, which felt like a test, because it was, but as soon as I gave the benediction, members of the staff and search committee were hastening to tell me that I had passed.
From the sanctuary, we went to the fellowship hall for lunch. And after lunch, there was another scheduled event. This was an open mic, question and answer time with me in the hot seat. I responded for about 40 minutes and then came the one that changed everything. Canada was, at that time, just beginning to consider legalizing same sex marriage. The earnest young man who took the microphone wanted to know how I would respond if that happened, would I perform such a wedding?
My first response was to acknowledge the difficulty of finding unity on this question. Because I had met a lot of people over that weekend, I knew that there was a lot of theological diversity in the congregation. And so, I said that no matter how I answered the question, some people were going to disagree with me. And the question I asked them to keep in mind was whether they could work with a pastor with whom they disagreed on this issue, especially since they were already in disagreement with each other. Then I outlined my own conviction that all persons are made in the image of God and are to be welcomed and affirmed and fully included within the body of Christ regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity or several other categories.
That was the end of my candidacy. The Q & A ended shortly and within 15 minutes, there were outraged calls to pastors of other churches in the region and to the denominational staff. I learned later that the rumors about me and my own sexual identity spread across hundreds of miles. The church did vote to call me, but at least 15% of the congregation voted against it. The denomination brought me back to Canada a few weeks later to make sure that they had understood my position correctly and when they confirmed that they had, they refused to recognize my ordination. With the mushy vote from the congregation and the denomination’s labeling of me as a heretic, the church did not extend a call to me, which I agreed was wise.
It was wise, but also painful. I was quite disappointed. This was a progressive Baptist church with an exciting urban ministry. I had been in conversation with them for more than 6 months when everything fell apart. I had believed that God was calling us together. Over the next few weeks, I received phone calls and letters from members of the search committee who were also in deep distress. I felt responsible for their pain as well as my own.
Within a few months, I resigned from the church where I was serving. Depressed and discouraged, I told myself that I was done with professional ministry. We moved to a new state where Jim got a teaching job, and I was a stay-at-home Mom. We joined a church. I was a person in the pew. After several months, the pastor told me that he had been hoping to add an associate pastor to the staff and would I consider the role? I accepted the invitation and served that church and another one before ending up as your pastor here in 2010.
You never know when a story is over, especially if you’re in it.
Two years ago, we began the 5-year anti-racism project called Thrive with the Alliance of Baptists. Imagine my surprise when I learned that one of the 26 Thrive congregations is the church in Canada where I candidated so many years ago. Two weeks ago, I went to the Gathering of the Alliance in Atlanta. The event was well designed with lots of good and provocative content. I’ll be sharing some links to recordings on EBC Announce this week. But the best part of the gathering for me was that I got to make a new friend. When we weren’t in workshops or worship, Jim and I hung out with J, one of the pastors currently serving that Canadian church.
J told me that when he candidated 15 years ago, the church did the Q&A process differently because of what they called “the Kathy incident”. He said that it took about 7 years for the church to heal from the wounds created by the church’s internal conflict and their conflict with the denomination, but it did heal. One of the things he celebrates now is the number of trans teenagers who find a safe, welcoming, nurturing place to belong within the church’s youth ministry.
Another celebration is that just a few months ago, that church and about a dozen others in the area joined a group of Baptists based in another part of Canada because they are now fully on board with the conviction that God’s love is to be extended to everyone. They took that step to be proactive. They anticipate that they will be expelled from their home denomination this summer. Emmanuel knows something about that pain, so I invite you to hold them in prayer over that. J has watched his church heal and change and grow over the last decades. He says that it all began with that Q&A time which I experienced as disastrous.
You never know when a story is over, especially if you’re in it.
Gareth Higgins writes “We’re all living a story-in-progress. Our identities are formed and re-formed through the way we construct and revise the story; the version we tell ourselves, the version we tell others, the version we fear is true, and the version we hope for.”[2]
I have told the story about the time we didn’t move to Canada to a few of you, but mostly I haven’t shared it. I thought it was over. Frankly, I actively tried to put it behind me. I only just learned a version of the story that has unfolded with a different, more hopeful ending, twenty years later.
I am realizing, once again, that transformation takes time and patience. It requires us to keep showing up, to being open to re-framing or re-telling the story or receiving someone else’s version of it. It means examining our favorite stories to see if they are still helpful and true. It means being open to surprise -- accepting that God’s possibilities may come in ways we never imagined, expanding our notion of who we are in this world.
Friends, you never know when a story is over, especially if you’re in it. Thanks be to God for this good news.
[1] Gareth Higgins, How Not to Be Afraid: Seven Ways to Live When Everything Seems Terrifying, (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021), p 65.
[2] Gareth Higgins, How Not to Be Afraid, p. 64