Liminality

One year ago this week I was called to be pastor of National Heights Baptist Church.  One year ago this week was my first sermon and service with them.  And guess what . . . I have no clue what I talked about or said.  I don’t even have it saved.   But don’t laugh too quickly!  Do you remember what you did a year ago this week?  Unless it was a traumatic experience the answer is probably like mine . . . a little hazy.  How about three years ago?  Five years ago?  What made you happy, anxious, or confident this week in those years?  What did you dream about or wish so desperately for yourself and for others?  What did you love and cherish?  How did you embrace romance or seek intimacy?  What were your hopes and fears?  For most of us, what preoccupied our minds then, are a faint fuzz in our conscious memory.  Events that shackled us to the  newsreel seem like flashes from the past.  Some once-current edition of some magazine somewhere on some day captured our attention . .

I conducted a wedding a while back for some friends.  I arrive one hour before the wedding.  The wedding party beats me by about twenty minutes and the bride is no longer speaking to her mother.  It’s a long story and I don’t think I really know all of it, but what I do know is that when I walked through the door I have one of the saddest conversations of my life.    The mother of the bride meets me and says, “May I talk to you in private?”  I take her by the hand and sit her down.  I look at her intently and ask, “What’s wrong?” “I can’t go through with this, Barrett.  I can’t be here.  I’m not upset with my daughter or at anyone else.  I’m upset with me.  Here I stand at my only daughter’s wedding and I’m with a man I met a month ago.  Her father hates me and I don’t look good in this dress.  I’m uncomfortable. I’m out of place.  I just want to go home.” And with tears in her eyes she cries, “I don’t want to walk down the aisle as if I deserve to be honored.”  And