Those of us who find ourselves in the Reformed Tradition-Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, Congregationalists, the United Church of Christ, children of the Reformation arising in John Calvin's Geneva, no less so than in Martin Luther's Wittenburg-we of the Reformed Tradition confess a high doctrine of Providence. In simple terms, we confess the hand of God presiding over and moving through our lives and history: shaping, recreating, redeeming, wiping old slates clean so we might begin again. We seldom recognize this Providential activity as it proceeds, but as we look back, as we exercise hindsight, we frequently understand in bad times no less than good, that some new opportunity, some rich possibility came our way in the most lottery-like of circumstances, and we attribute it to the Divine hand.

And thus, many of you know, as I look back on a certain Board of Directors Meeting taking place at Union Seminary, New York City, in November, 1973, I can attribute to luck, chance, coincidence, fluke, accident, a conversation in a buffet supper line with Avery Post, at that time President of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ and a member of Old South. Our casual encounter began like this: "Hi Avery. What's up?" "Oh Jim," he replied, "I'm looking for a pastor to serve a great, big old congregation in downtown Boston and . . . would you be interested?" Luck? Chance? Providence! And so began in that fall of 1973 a liaison with a probing, questioning, skeptical search committee, well trained in interrogation, verging on the third degree, chaired by one of the great saints of this church or any other, Catherine Dauber, leading, if you will to a sort of marriage between a man and a congregation whose 28th-and final-anniversary, May 1, we note in passing this morning.

Now, I trust you will forgive the personal nature of what follows. But these twenty-eight years represent exactly seventy percent of what will be on June 3, my 40 year career in the ordained Christian ministry-in some ways nothing unusual for this congregation, and in other ways pretty small peanuts. Indeed, you have called here just four ministers since 1884, 118 years, for tenures of 43, 18, 27 and 28 years (it doesn't add up because there were years you were looking for successors), and compared with Joseph Sewell's 56 years, (can you imagine that, after twenty-eight years I'm only half way there; I'd be 94 as you, in great relief, witnessed on some Sunday morning in 2030 my head slowly sink behind this pulpit, or perhaps in pity and frustration you burned this pulpit down hoping I'd get the message.) In any case, when I arrived here one of the matriarchs of the congregation, Mrs. Leroy Parkins, Ted's mother, Lida, sent a splendid, beautifully composed welcome note. It went something like this: "Dear Mr. Crawford. It's nice having you among us. I hope you will stay for many decades." Many decades! When you begin to count the years in decades, I can imagine some of you muttering under your breath, "Jim, one is enough. Two is overkill. Three strikes and you're out!" But let's be on with it.

I think what I want to do with you this morning is to share the joys of the Christian ministry in this place. You should know this is a great job, in a wonderful church, at, what I believe, to be the greatest corner in North America. Why? Because as you have heard me expostulate a thousand times, we are at "the hub of the hub of the universe," and the diversity in this place provides both its challenge and its joy, its pain, and its promise. In a church like this, at a crossroads like this, we live on different wavelengths, socially, politically, and spiritually. People wander in here bearing a variety of needs and aspirations, expectations and concerns. Anyone serving a congregation like this, and any one joining a congregation like this finds themselves living within tensions unique to a relatively broad-based, pluralistic, shifting, churning, occasionally boiling, downtown church stew. As I have suggested before, when I was ordained, one of the questions asked by the presiding officer went as follows: "Do you promise to uphold the peace and purity of the church?" I answered by the book, "I will, God helping me." Well, after four decades in the ministry, almost three of them here, I discover the question to be ingeniously phrased, and in the parish ministry, a constant challenge to my job, as the by-laws have it, as Chief Executive Officer and Spiritual Leader of this congregation. "Peace and purity?" Are you kidding? You can hold them together in an ideological tyranny with armed force, bribery and cover-up. But in a congregational church, where, again, as our by-laws so brilliantly state, "The government of this church is vested in the members who, in accordance with the Congregational tradition and these By-laws, exercise the right of control in all its affairs." (My grief, Roman Catholics in this Diocese, as we worship this very morning, discover themselves fighting for the very thing we treasure and take for granted.) In any case, peace and purity come head to head all the time. And in our case, to keep the peace of the church we compromise what some people see to be the purity of the church. And pursuing the purity, we occasionally jeopardize the peace of the Church. One person's purity is another person's heresy; one person's peace is another person's sell- out.

And friends, most of you have hung on through this challenge, trying to remain faithful to Christ, yet sustaining solidarity with one another. I consider it a process beautiful to watch and a high privilege to share with you. Heaven knows some in this congregation count me as one who endangers the peace of the church, and others consider me as disloyal to the purity of the Gospel. Just the other day, one of the true saints of our congregation informed me, using the expression of a recent speaker here, that I had seemingly "rented a part of her brain," and that whatever she found herself doing, whether the laundry, mopping the floors, hanging curtains, she always found herself arguing with me. But she comes back! What a fantastic woman! We all know others for whom the heresy or the sell-out becomes so infuriating, demoralizing or corrupt they cannot stand it anymore and give up or go elsewhere. God bless and be with them as they pursue the purity of the Gospel and peace of the church in a new and more conducive setting; but for your hanging in there, for your gritty tolerance and your readiness to forgive me, for your ardent dream that the Gospel be preached and that this church be both a loving family and a faithful servant in God's world despite me, I offer my gratitude. I trust the Spirit of Christ holds us together as we pursue in our earnest yet bungling ways the peace and purity of the church.

But the joys of ministry here go far beyond walking the tightrope between the peace and purity of the church. The joys accumulate, they stack up as a minister watches and participates with his brothers and sisters in the ministry of hope and compassion, friendship and peace. To be sure, I love the bookwork of the ministry. How others envy me for a congregation assuming study and reflection as a major component of the work of ministry. I look forward weekly to talking with Greg Peterson, with Lael, Jen, Brooks, just as I did a long line of their predecessors, I look forward to designing and choreographing occasions for worship enabling all of us to join, as Calvin would have it, in the glorification of God and the amendment of life. But finally, the joys of ministry in this church emerge from encounters with others in what the great Exodus saga might call the journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land, your pilgrimage and mine through the contingencies, reversals and challenges of human life to their courageous resolution, their patient acceptance, their joyous endurance. In a kind of a secularization of the Gospel of hope, I have found myself working with men and women who in fair weather and foul believe "things turn our best for those who make the best of the way things turn out." Confidence in the Providence of God.

The joy of being part of a church like this, you see, is sitting limp and exhausted in a strenuous meeting, watching a good resolution get bombed, battered and booby-trapped until a usually silent, unsteady and gentle voice shames the rest of us with its sanity, wisdom, perception and great-heartedness, carrying the day.

The joy of serving as pastor of a church like this can be understood by one whom you enabled, and partially released to assemble a new hymnal for the United Church of Christ . . . and then held my feet to the fire as our hymnal committee altered the great memory bank hymns of your childhood and mine. It proved to be the theological task of a lifetime as we fielded hymn texts from a raft of litmus test "oldies but goodies," always conflicting with someone's insistence on textual conformity to the Nicene Creed. One of our own members came close to insisting we include that ultimate liturgical masterpiece: "Jesus, Dropkick me through the Goal Posts of Life." What were we really doing? We struggled to recover the Gospel of inclusion, shedding Eurocentric lenses, catching up with the tide of women's emancipation, understanding the grace of the Gospel-the fatherhood and motherhood of God to intentionally include the entire range of human being-a vision reflected in the little box on the back of your bulletins describing the inclusive dimensions of God's Grace.

We operated with a general rule of thumb: when it came to questions of aesthetics and justice, we tried to choose justice. And as I told you, and then told the General Synod in 1995, the wrestling with such matters as new hymn texts in a tradition where so many of us learn our faith through the singing of hymns, the wrestling with such matters leads to heated disputes, contentions, quarrels, friction, politicking, vituperation, tears, pleas, diatribes, extended treatises, shouting matches, poisoned pens, rudeness, posturing, inflexibility, intransigence, obduracy, perversity, stubbornness, wrongheadedness and just plain stupidity-the chair no less vulnerable and a culprit than anyone else-the proceedings convincing anyone who gives a darn that producing new hymnals verifies the truth of two primary Christian doctrines: the doctrine of total depravity and the dauntless Providence of God.

And here you all chipped in to purchase The New Century Hymnal for this church and you will find the bookplates in the front spreading across this splendid constituency, each of you blessed by a gift from the other, many of you blessed by the gift of one extraordinary, anonymous woman who put the project over the top.

And yes, the joy of ministry in the Old South Church in Boston arises when you stick your neck out, whether it means riding the buses in the terrible and violent and absolutely necessary school desegregation struggles of Boston in the mid and late 1970s, searching with members of this congregation for what a later history of the crisis labeled "Common Ground;" joining the efforts to change the direction of the South African conscience to reverse the oppression, the terror, the violence of Apartheid through economic, political and spiritual pressure; wrestling with the Gospel confronting this post 9/11 world-wide demon that terror is the answer to terror; making sure this church, this place, this congregation provides a safe haven for all those mocked, diminished, dehumanized, labeled "disordered," believed in some way second class by the doctrines, the canon laws, the creeds of other religious societies, convinced that the host in this place is not finally the minister, nor the Deacon, nor the greeter, but Jesus Christ; and discovering your officers and congregation, whether or not they agree with your particular stand on a particular issue, or with a particular tactic, do respect, honor and protect the integrity of your conscience, always offering you the benefit of the doubt. What a great place!

The joy of ministry is going to the beside of the desperately ill, the dying, praying that in some way you may be Jesus to them, and discovering they are Jesus to you.

It is discovering men and women married for decades, now facing the loneliness and breakdown of old age, a capacity to fight for one another, serve one another, bear one another's burdens, never giving up on each other or God. It is discovering among these people why the New Testament uses the marriage metaphor as most adequately conveying God's faithfulness to humankind.

The joy of ministry in this church includes working shoulder to shoulder with men and women immersed in the world of business, medicine, the law, education, telecommunications, real estate, all of you invested heavily in the hurly-burly of institutional and urban life, then on Sunday morning telling the Biblical Story to 10-year-olds, worrying about the pointing of the walls in our alley, crafting a set of by-laws absolutely crucial to ordering authority and responsibility, gathering late into the night or at 6:30 breakfast to discuss deploying resources, to assemble the protocols necessary to carry out the mission and the ministry of this congregation. The minister of this congregation stands in awe of men and women who brood about organ design, recruit ushers, polish silver, arrange flowers, deal with church decor, those who build Habitat houses, sing in the choir, feed the hungry, call on shut-ins, teach teenagers, reveal truth through poetry, music and drama.

And yes, over these years I treasure participation in the wedding services of many of you here and the joy of witnessing you build your own families; or the glorious opportunity to administer the sacrament of baptism, affirming the inclusion of your children or yourselves in the embrace of Divine love and the encompassing of the Christian family.

And I count it no less a privilege, walking with some of you through that last days of a friend's or a spouse's life, celebrating with prayer, music, personal reflection the meaning of that life and its now refashioning through the power and in the presence of our welcoming, transfiguring God. Of course, ministry here includes its odd little twists and ironies. How about preaching on a Reformation theme on the last Sunday of October-justification by faith, the priesthood of all believers, the primacy of scripture, the whole kit and caboodle-and later greeting a guest shaking my hand, enthusiastically saying: "Father, I enjoyed the mass."

Or carefully crafting an argument of war, peace or social welfare meeting someone later who turns your argument exactly upside down and backwards and who says, "I couldn't agree with you more."

And yes, the joy of ministry is seeing familiar faces in their chosen places, as I believe, anchoring the house Sunday after Sunday: Pam and Scott down here in the second row; Merle and Terry and Barb over here in their pew; Lois Corman, Doreen Siddal, and when he's not teaching Sunday School, Dave Vogan at the foot of the stairs to the balcony; Jean Jackson and Kay Davis three or four rows from the rear; Janet Halverson in her pew right here in the center aisle; Jean Knudsen in the back row under Sam Adams; Eleanor Jensen a few rows in front of her; Dave Clark in his wheelchair over in this aisle; the Spitzers and Davises (they're over here today! They'll get to know the other people on the other side today!) down here; Saideh and Mrs. Caribitsen here front and center-people, some of whom after 28 years and over 1000 sermons-(bless your hearts) at least feign alertness and trust the spirit to shed new light on the meaning and destiny of your lives while that clown in the pulpit stumbles through some abstruse observation. What incredible faith you have. You succor and encourage your pastor, and I am eternally grateful.

And yes, the joy of being among you includes your serving as the Church School teachers of our four children and the liberating and loving impact you made on their lives. And who dares gainsay the respect, affection and honor you offered Linda, that most fantastic teammate and partner of mine, who loved this church-and loved me-even as the church drew my overriding concern and became from time to time the equivalent of a mistress.

And finally, the joy of this ministry resides in my growing gray among you with all of its dismaying consequences, like missing appointments, mistaking names, and oh, heaven forbid, forgetting names, or blundering egregiously time and again, preparing to face the worst and discovering someone else: a staff member-I can never forget the consummate gifts of Bob Christenson and how he ran interference for me, for all of us, time and again-and these days it's Lael Murphy, Elisa Blanchard, David Clark or one of you, Florence or Mary, Bob Wulff, Roger Burke, Janet Butler, Rusty Aertsen, Larry Bowers, Janet Bayley, Suze and Ken Campbell, John Weingartner, Evan Shu -- and so many more of you at one time or another -- who has moved surreptitiously to pick up the pieces, heal the breach, sympathized with the circumstances, empathized with this preoccupied, amnesia-prone dotard and offered a needed word, another chance, an open door. Through you I come to know the grace and blessing of Jesus Christ.

Do you see why we read that wonderful passage from Corinthians this morning? It describes us perfectly here at Old South; The Body of Christ: here a leg, there an arm, now a foot, an eye, a hand: each with an integrity of its own, each almost worthless without connection to the other making up the whole, interdependent, functioning organism. This Body of Christ, a diverse, variegated, multitasked missionary enterprise, a glorious assembly living by gratitude and hope, a body far greater than the sum of all its parts. Oh, that I might begin with you again!

And so we close. In a few minutes we will sing together our closing hymn. It's a beaut, a terrific text, a smashing Arthur Sullivan tune. It describes perfectly, if I may use some street language, it describes perfectly where this church is at, what its mission looks like, how this congregation will be cherished, emboldened, and led by Christ's spirit. The first verse goes like this:

Standing at the future's threshold, grateful for God's guiding hand;
asking no protected stronghold, called to be a pilgrim band.
Seeking ever for new vision of the gospel for our day,
We move forward in God mission with our faith to show the way.

Hey! Hey! That sounds like us . . . like you!

SCRIPTURE READING
I Corinthians: 12:12 - 27

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body-Jews or Greeks, slaves or free-and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you." On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.