Ecumenical and interfaith guests, UCC colleagues and friends, the community of Old South and the Old South Choir, and members of my family: thank you for taking time today to witness and affirm the covenant between Old South and its new minister. Your presence and participation mean more than I, and we, we can say.

As you know, the Pilgrims who set sail from England were aiming for Virginia when they were blown off course into these northerly waters. Although they were not where they hoped to be, and the climate was much colder than they would have liked, their need to drop anchor was urgent. After all, as journal entries attest, they were running dangerously low on an indispensable provision, beer.

If you look at it in a certain light, you can see that this whole endeavor – the New World, a city set on a hill, the Colonies, democracy – it all began as a beer run.

The point is that we sometimes find ourselves in waters we had not expected to inhabit. The New Testament warns us not to be blown about by every wind of change … yet, sometimes the wind is God’s wind, and the change is God’s will.

God, who works in mischievous ways, sometimes plays havoc with our charts and navigational devices and we find ourselves in strange and wondrous new waters. So it is for me today. I keenly feel the honor, privilege and surprise of having been blown into these waters. (If you know how buildings in the Back Bay are constructed, you know that this is more than a metaphorical flourish!)

It is not possible to inhabit these waters without befriending the saints of old whose stories are so much with us: Benjamin Franklin who, on the day of his birth was baptized at Old South. Members Samuel Adams, who initiated the Boston Tea Party from a meeting at Old South; Samuel Sewell, who penned the first anti-slavery tract; and Philis Wheatley, the first published African American.

But the thing about them is that, while we count them among the saints of our past, their gifts and genius had to do with their investment in the future. They wrote, thought, published, argued, acted and risked on behalf of a future that they dared to believe could be more just, more enlightened, and more faithful to the will a gracious God.

Encouraged, therefore, by the best of our forebears – and chastened by the worst of them – we hoist our sails in this new day. And not just Old South; but all of us: the churches and synagogues, the organizations and families that we represent, for we are in this together. We sail the same seas and are imperiled by the same storms. For these are perilous times: the expansiveness of the Enlightenment, giving way to dangerous absolutisms; the promise and beauty of pluralism, succumbing to violent tribalism; a grand experiment in democracy, reverting to a mean and narrow theocracy whose power is not in moral force but in weapons; and a vision of “we the people,” falling prey to an aristocracy of the wealthy.

All is not well with God’s world. Yet, we are beckoned by a future we dare believe can be better than what we have come to.

Therefore, open to God’s winds of change, let us set out.

BENEDICTION

The God of Abraham and Sarah,
God who loves justice more than liturgy and mercy more than praise:
May God touch us with a wind to keep us strong for all the days to come.
 

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Copyright © 2005, Old South Church and by author.
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