Paul finds himself fiercely engaged in defense of his ministry. He wants more than anything else to tell his beloved church in Corinth what makes him tick. They wonder about his calling, his vocation, his career. What lies behind it? What endows its authority? To religious skeptics, institutional cynics, even for those working closely with him, Paul mounts a prodigious apology for the intensity, the broad dimensions and authenticity of his ministry. And in preparation for this morning, as I brooded about our ministry together over these nearly three decades, I thought why not remind myself and this wonderful people about who we are, why we dare even tentatively call ourselves Christian, with what authority we serve this world, what undergirds our life and mission in God's world.

I

Dare we begin anywhere else but from Paul's ringing assertion: "Therefore since it is by God's mercy we are engaged in this ministry . . " "By God's mercy we are engaged in this ministry. . . " Of course. How many times over these years have we announced our morning offering with the words, "The Christian life is an act of gratitude?" Gratitude. Gratitude for what? Gratitude for mercy, for undeserved love, for grace, for a Divine embrace taking us as we are, reaching us where we live, granting us stature we frequently deny ourselves, and when we find ourselves down, discouraged, despairing and ask, in our heart of hearts, if anyone gives a damn-and that is where Paul found himself-then, like him, we lean on God's mercy alone.

God's mercy? Is it a religious buzz word? Is it a "warm-fuzzy" we church types toss casually around? Not on your life! As we approach this table this morning we see what God's mercy entails. When we break bread, symbolically breaking a body, when we pour the cup, indicating the spilling of blood, we see what love can cost; we see mercy drips from wounds.

Who here with children, for instance, or with family, with partners or loved ones, who here has not gone through the bleak, aching moment when love, for all of our imagination, ingenuity and subtle strategy, has not ended in a broken heart? Who here does not know the pain and vulnerability love bears with it, the risks it takes for the loved one, the hurt it accepts, the bruises it brooks to restore a relationship gone askew, thrown out of kilter, careening down the drain. I will wager no one lives without that wounding experience.

When Paul asserts his ministry grounds itself in the mercy of God, he confesses his surrender to One who reaches, searches, plunges in pursuit, risking everything- everything: life itself. Mercy!

May I tell you again a story illustrating the mercy lying behind our ministry? They say it comes from Reinhold Niebuhr. I am not sure. In any case, we learn of a little boy who spends most of his childhood years in foster homes. He is sent from home to home and in each one he becomes more recalcitrant, hostile, disobedient until his foster parents can bear the ordeal no longer and return him to his sheltered residence. Time and again this happens. The child finds himself moved, transferred, sent here, dispatched there, assigned somewhere else. Finally, we find this little boy invited into a new home, and just as he did in all those former homes, he puts up a battle. He tears the living room apart, he upsets furniture, he throws food, he leaves the place a wreck. And his foster father? What does he do? What does he say? He says to that chaotic, woebegone child: "No matter what you do- no matter what you do -we will never let you go!" And guess what? The boy calms down. His behavior changes. His family ties deepen. He is saved, saved by mercy, by love that will not let him go. That kind of love roots and grounds your life and mine. Wow! What can we do but say "Thank you," and in gratitude offer it to others. "By God's mercy we are engaged in this ministry. . . "

Yet in my life God's mercy takes on an additional dimension. Mercy suffused my childhood home. Emil Brunner once remarked he devoted his life to the searching of the Gospel in order to understand the impact that two people made on his life when he was a child. As I told you when installed in October, 1974-but today I must tell you again-I am one of those able to say his father is the greatest man he ever knew. A loyal churchman, radiating strength, high ideals, humor and joy, he brought self discipline, high responsibility and overflowing modesty to our family and to his public life. The best thing he ever did for my sisters and for me was to love our mother and treat her with tenderness and respect. I wanted to be like him, and over the years I discovered that this did not mean being, as he was, a superb orthopedic surgeon, a gifted artist, an able cellist, an amateur magician, a versatile raconteur, (Oh how he loved, when taking a dive on water skis or pulling a dime out of my sister's ear, how he loved to repeat that hoary aphorism, "You're only young once but you can be immature all your life!") No, for me becoming like him meant becoming a Christian and trying to find out why he believed the church to be the last best hope of humankind. God's mercy: for me, alive and at work in Henry Baker Crawford.

If our father was a tower of strength in our family, our mother was its heart, its enchantment, its grace. Music flooded our household. Elizabeth Crawford could play-and still can play at 91-"Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring" on her Steinway-grand with the aplomb of Dame Myra Hess herself. It was our mother who said our prayers with us, and while our father made his Sunday rounds at the hospital, my mother dressed us, prodded us, helped us get ready for church school. I cannot believe she did not lose her faith over it. In any case, she directed our Sunday School's Junior department for at least ten years. And later, herself by the sickbed, she offered succor, encouragement and care as her husband died of esophageal cancer and her two daughters of ovarian cancer. It is hard for sons to talk about mothers, but let me say, as much as any person I have ever known, she, along with Linda-talk about God's mercy, 41 years of it washing over me from Linda!-they are possessed by the Spirit of Christ. To this day, people who met my mother years ago, high school classmates, college friends, miscellaneous basketball clowns, professional colleagues, members of this congregation, to this day one of the first questions they ask in our conversations is, "Jim; how's your mother?" A rare, rare commodity. One whose life and presence is evidence enough that exclusively male metaphors for the depth and quality of God are simply inadequate.

II

But Paul goes on. Embraced by this unflagging, indefatigable love enabling his ministry, he asserts with confidence and joy, "We never lose heart." He's got it! We never lose heart! You see, in faith, Paul knows-we, in faith, know-that if the love of God can take the worst we can dish out, break its body, spill its blood, let its life dribble away in the desert sun on a cruel Friday afternoon, mock it, hold it in contempt, reject it, leave it a bloody mess-Paul knows that if we can do that to the love of God, and yet that Love, on Easter Day, declares itself unwavering, steadfast, the last word against all other words that would subvert, wound, ignore, devastate, kill it, Paul knows that in light of this kind of circumstance in the service of this victorious, triumphant Love, we never lose heart.

III

Oh to be sure, there is a lot we can lose heart over. Our ministry can stumble over a ton of obstacles. Much of it trivial. Take my ministry, for instance, obstacles causing loss of heart, in-house stuff, like some of the things that show up in church bulletins. You have seen them on occasion. For instance: "There will be a pot-luck supper on Thursday night. Prayer and medication will follow." Or "Don't let worry kill you. Let the church help." Or, Bertha Belch, a UCC Missionary from Africa, will be speaking in Mary Norton Hall tonight. Be sure to come and hear Bertha Belch all the way from Africa."

Who can forget those odd encounters over nearly three decades, if not taking a chunk out of your heart at least causing it to skip a beat. Weddings, for instance, such as when the groom, the best man and I waited at the head of the aisle for the bride and her entourage, Greg Peterson thundering the wedding march, and Janet Butler-Janet Butler, for years our house mother-Janet, our wedding hostess, insisting over the Bride's vehement protestations that her two-year-old flower girl march down the aisle post-haste . . . notwithstanding her bulging diaper."

And in our increasingly secular world, the place of the clergyperson has diminished, all to the good, I would say, but at one point, I have lost a little heart. When the new owners of the Boston Red Sox took over this spring I wrote to the President, Larry Lucchino, with all due respect, humility and deference to his position and prestige, asking in timid fashion if the Sox were going to continue that great Yawkey tradition of issuing clergy passes for the regular season. (You can see it coming.) Not only did I not hear from Mr. Lucchino, no pass was forthcoming. The first season of retirement! The team in first place. Talk about losing heart. He has clipped a piece of my right ventricle.

And just once more, some time ago I found myself on the train to New York City. On my passenger car there sat a group of men and women from a ward in one of our state hospitals. The attendant began to count them to make sure all were aboard and present, "One, two, three four, five . . ." When he came to me he asked, "And who are you." "I am the Sr. Minister of the Old South Church in Boston," I replied. The attendant smiled poignantly, and continued counting, while pointing directly at me: ". . . six, seven, eight, nine . . ." The left auricle-gone. Pretty small potatoes in a tough world.

IV

But a world, really, where we in the churches-we in Old South-dare never lose heart. In talking with a reporter from The Boston Globe this week, he asked what I considered a satisfaction here during these last years. I told him it lay in your public sensibilities. I said the men and women of this congregation understand Old South as a public church. I told him this understanding came, not from me, it represented something bequeathed to me and to us through the 333 years of our mission and ministry, through the very mandates of the Biblical faith. I told him, as I've told many of you, the reason we relish being known as "Historic Old South Church," reflecting on this congregation's participation in the Boston Tea Party, or reminding ourselves of the legacies of Deacon Samuel Adams, the Father of the American Revolution, of Benjamin Franklin who was baptized amid this congregation, of William Dawes, another Deacon, who took the Southern route through Brookline while Paul Revere took the northern route through Cambridge-I told him our historical reflection has nothing to do with the worship of antiquity. Heaven forbid! It has everything to do with the people of the Old South Church in Boston taking seriously the crises of the time, engaging themselves in social service and action aimed at establishing justice and a decent social order. I informed him that the stated purpose of this church begins with our intention "to worship God, preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and celebrate the sacraments," but in addition, we purpose "to realize Christian fellowship and unity within this church and the church universal, to render loving service toward humankind and to strive for righteousness justice and peace." Hear that? That is our purpose. Each phrase ending with a semi-colon, so that the worship of Almighty God and the striving for righteousness justice and peace become all of one piece, an organic whole. We cannot do one without the other.

Thus in a world where one nation this very day threatens another with the possibility of nuclear war; where the birthplace of our Savior turns into a chronic battlefield of violence and blood; where terror takes the place of dialogue, negotiation, compromise, mutual respect; military threat laces the rhetoric of so-called world leaders; and where religion provides the building blocks for raising barriers, justifying land grabs and promoting homicide; in a world where legislators work almost punitively against poor families and their children; where moguls of industry cook their books, cunningly stealing from their own employees; where this week we discover, for instance Henry Aaron's legitimate home run record of 755 is under threat by some juiced up slugger, and drugs subvert and turn to fraud much of America's athletic life; where the clergy- the clergy! -my kind-the clergy operating under the mask of trust, high purpose and human service are found to be masters of felonious assault, some of us messing with minors, some of us with men and boys, some of us with men and women. It is enough to make one lose heart, enough to compel some of us to throw it over, to mock the Gospel for its irrelevance, its weakness, its shroud for hypocrisy, its veiling of self deception.

Please God, No! From Old South's founding to this day we are a public church with a public responsibility. Our dream is to go out of business because Boston, our nation and world are become the community of grace and peace envisioned by our Lord. We take on the worst the world throws at us because operating out of the mercy of God, from hope 'mid the brokenness we see illustrated at this table, we insist with Paul, "Come at us with everything you've got, ours is a ministry of justice and reconciliation and, by God, in this public ministry we never lose heart!"

V

And finally, we never lose heart as we provide support and encouragement to one another. I want you to know I have appreciated the many notes coming across my desk from you on the occasion of my retirement. Some of them include references offering me great consolation. They refer to a moment of encouragement during some encounter over the years; they recall a nudge in a new direction or some word giving you a lift. For that, we can only thank God. But a not irrelevant question: do you know who my favorite New Testament character is beside Jesus and Paul? No, not Mary, not Peter, not Mark, not even John, the beloved Disciple, whom I do love dearly. It is Barnabas: Bar-Nabas, Son of Encouragement. Barnabas! He saved the church in Antioch. He served as Paul's advocate while the early church organized to throw Paul out, questioned his credentials, sought to put him on ice. I am pleased to have been a Barnabas to any of you. But listen, you magnificent people: you have been Barnabas to me! Talk about encouragement! Oh, my soul! You for me: bail-outs, advocacies, taking the heat, running interference, intervening, covering for me, quashing a stupid idea, finding the money, giving the money, leading me by the hand through real estate labyrinths, construction contracts, renovation paperwork with nary a note of condescension, explaining bureaucratic complexities with zeal and transparency. And more: coming to church in blizzards-Oh, 90 year old Janet Halvorsen, how I treasured your presence in that pew when the rains came and the snow piled up! Advice and counsel at six-thirty breakfasts, jumping into the pit and standing shoulder to shoulder when the going got tough, telling me when I believed a sermon to rate somewhere between E- and a flat F, that you caught the gist through the profusion of words, it altered your thinking and you were grateful for it. Incredible! You harbored the love of my life, Linda Lovett of Glendale, Ohio, with affection and respect, the aspiration of any pastor's spouse; you taught my children in your church school, granting them a secure base and sensitivity to ethical issues making them all, bless you, liberal Democrats. Yes, while I studied the numbers, some of you made them add up, never forgetting my confessing to you the deal my calculus teacher offered me in my freshman fall of 1954, as I told the Globe reporter, "Mr. Crawford," that professor said, "If you promise to take no more mathematics at Dartmouth College, I will give you a D-." You brought determination for organizing paperwork; aptitude for finding stuff lost in my piles-and being nice, at least to my face about it; you exercised gifts for representing this congregation at pressure points of public decision and public policy with intelligence, peripheral vision, clarity-always making me proud to be on your side.

O, my friends, when I lost heart, you never did! Barnabas! Children of encouragement! That is what you have been to me for 28 years. Fantastic! Thank you.

And so we close. I took the Red Line across the Longfellow Bridge the other day, and there on the other side of the Charles estuary with its sailboats sprinting across the water, there stood the silhouettes of the Pru, the Hancock, Copley Place, the new commercial fixtures of the Back Bay. And, yes, there, right in the middle of all that granite and glass, there stood the tower of the Old South Church in Boston; our tower, right where we belong, on the greatest corner of North America, the Hub of the Hub of the Universe, the tower of the Old South Church in Boston, a congregation by God's mercy engaged in ministry, living by the promise chiseled into the wall of our Boylston Street porch, "Qui Transtulit Sustinet:" "The God who Brought us Thus Far will continue to sustain us." Is it any wonder we never lose heart?!