Who dares despise the day of small things..? is the question for today. Small things are what it’s all about. Small gestures. Small decisions that are often unnoticed that add up over time and affect things in a big way.

I’m thankful for how far I’ve come in my life and thinking and the love that has attended me every step of the way. I’m a dreamer. I have big ideas. I like to dwell in possibilities and concepts. Once, I had a breakthrough. I led book studies at my old church. I thought the author would probably do a better job at leading a study. So I shared that idea. Book studies, small things. I don’t know how many members of a book group we have here, let me know in the comments. These often go unnoticed. But with a small group, we nurtured the idea. We found a grant, applied and got it! That turned out a lecture series. Which spawned another lecture series.

I got to meet many theological heroes including Marcus Borg. Diana Butler Bass. Wil Gafney. Walter Brueggemann. Jan Linn. These names might not mean much to you, but they mean a lot to me. Small things lead to big things. This idea spawned a group of moms to ask for one certain author. The committee passed on it. So they came to me. I said, “Let’s try and get her.” And they did! The tickets went so fast, the website crashed! We were sold out in under 3 minutes for author Glennon Melton, another person I got to meet and spend time with and be blessed by. Small things lead to big things!

I also got into a leadership group. That group is why I’m now pursuing my Doctor of Ministry. That group of peers has saved me and kept me pushing on. So has my doctorate. These are big things! Achievement!

I could have brought that playbook from the old church here and just repeated what I did six years prior. But I didn’t. There are many reasons for this. Medina is a different place. I’m a different person. I wanted to soak in our culture. The history of our congregation. The love for this unique and picturesque town. To be in it and of it.

And that started from reading a book, Martin Luther King Jr’s Strength to Love. As I opened up the book recently, a letter fell out. The late Rev. George Barber was the best mentor I had in my ordination process. And we kept in touch. I knew he had moved from Lancaster to Florida, so when I was down in Tampa for a leadership retreat we got together for lunch. We talked about family, ministry and all the small things.  A few months later, the Martin Luther King Jr. book arrived with this letter dated May 3, 2012. I have kept the book and letter together ever since.

I revisited that book again last week. And re-read the letter. The letter contains his upcoming travel plans and how he and Gail were thankful I had dinner with them. Nothing big. All small little things, but now that letter is big. A snapshot of when my mentor was still available on the phone, and not just through prayer. I grieved a little, wishing I could call George up again and fill him in on all the things we’re doing here in Medina as a church. I prayed a prayer of thanksgiving for God placing George and his wife Gail in my life, that our paths crossed.

George saw me. I always got the feeling like he heard me. Sometimes better than I heard myself. He was a deep listener, a wonderful pastor who reflected back. He made no demands and posed really hard questions. He was as Christ to me and so many others in his ministry. These small things helped shape me in big ways.

In the book he gave me, the Rev. Dr. King writes, “The real tragedy… of narrow provincialism is that we see people as entities or merely as things. Too seldom do we see people in their true humanness.”[1]

George saw my humanness. He encouraged me to preach from that place. My temptation is to preach from my strength and certainty. To prove to you that I have it all figured out. The truth is that I don’t.

I could make demands that you believe like I do. Lots of churches do this. They list their beliefs out with neat Bible verses. There’s a “what we believe” section on their website. The Bible is this. Christ is that. God usually has masculine pronouns. Humans are usually worms in need of divine redemption. There’s a whole list of presuppositions.

You might believe some of those things. You might not. You might even be healing from such a church. I know I am. I never thought I’d find a community. Then I did, and it has made all the difference in my life. I changed career paths and went to seminary. Kate never signed up to be a pastor’s wife. We never thought we’d have pastor’s kids. But we do. And here we are. And it has been amazing. We didn’t see it coming, yet we’ve always felt right about it.

Zechariah saw something coming. He receives a vision and was asked by the angel, “Do you not know what these are?” He replied, “No, my lord.” This kept happening over and over again.

These crazy visions of gold lampstands and bowls and seven lamps and all this rich imagery. Then the line, “Who dares despise the day of small things…” Another translation puts it this way, “Does anyone dare despise this day of small beginnings?”

Small beginnings. Our congregation was founded in a log cabin built in a day. The modest cabin could fit in most of our living rooms. Then they went off to the Courthouse on the newly built Square. The courthouse at this time was on the corner of Liberty and Court. It’s where Courthouse Pizzeria is now. It’s so named not because it is across from the courthouse but because it used to be the courthouse. Each Sunday, our ancestors would worship. Sometimes the worship would be interrupted by hecklers who mocked the church. This caused a lot of pastors to come and go. They just couldn’t hack the wild west that was the Western Reserve.

So the congregation bought some land and built the old brick church on this spot on the square. Then that one fell down, and they built this structure. We had some giants of the town as members: Eliza Northrop, A.I Root and H.G. Blake. Sidney Fenn family. That’s half of the school names in this town named after our folks.

These are the big things. The small things would be the cards sent and shared. Time in prayer and bible study. Countless baptisms, confirmations, weddings, and communions. Funerals and memorial luncheons provided by the bereavement team. All the women’s circles that effectively ran the church from the post war era to the mid-1980s. So many small stories that make up the big narrative of our congregation. Who dares despise the day of small things?

The dreams. The visions. The lives shared. Even the church fights. The disagreements. Those who moved onto other churches. That’s a part of all this, too, as painful as they are. We will and do disagree. That’s a part of this.

The Endowment is part of this story. Your gift is a small investment in the future of our church. As this fund grows, we’re able to take some of the interest we earn to begin new things. One of those projects about 3 years ago was this streaming service that you’re watching today. We are able to try and innovate and fail and learn and fail better. This is the small way the kingdom comes. We stumble our way to the life of Christ.

We work at being community. A community that is attempting to see each other in our true humanness. We make no demands that you believe what we believe. We are about values—values that serve God, witness to the work and mission of Christ, and resist evil and oppression. How you do that is up to you. And we believe that you’re gifted to do that work! The tools are already in your hands. Everything you need to get started, you already have.

We start with the humanity only to be surprised by the divinity. Peter, James, and John just thought they were on a prayer retreat with Jesus. Then he is transfigured before their eyes. They see Moses and Elijah and hear the voice that Jesus heard at his baptism. They SEE it. Then they have to go back down the mountain to work.

We have this endowment. We have this building. We have the story of our congregational ancestors here in the story of our city. We are adding to that story with 20 new members joining. Adding their stories to ours. This may look like a small thing, but it’s a big deal. Some are joining without ever setting foot in our church building.

Some are joining even though they were wounded in their last church.

Some are joining full of passion and expectation.

All have felt an echo of home here.

We are embarked together. Our lives entwining. Only God knows for how long. Some may join and be around and fade off. Some might join and start something that becomes this huge thing. Does anyone dare despise this day of small beginnings? Only God knows what lays in store for us. Our job is not to know, but to trust and love one another.

It takes a lot of guts to walk into a church. It takes even more courage to join one. To tell one’s story in all its humanness. All its faults and failures and learnings and humanity. And once we tell it, we can hear it reflected back from someone like a beloved mentor. Tears running down their cheeks as they can see the divinity within our stories that was there all along… but we didn’t have the senses to perceive it.

That is the great promise that our congregation has offered to our community over the 202 years of its existence. All the countless ways it has unleashed God’s people on an unsuspecting world to welcome, love, and serve.

To the new members, welcome. You are loved here. You have excellent taste in people.
To the seasoned members: you are still worth joining. Your story is strong and relevant.

To All Congregationalists: you are loved. I recall the words of Pastor John Robinson who stayed behind in the Netherlands… he said these words to the departing Mayflower voyagers. This is the Pastor Luke 2021 paraphrase: “I am very confident that God has more truth and light to break forth from us and in us.”[2] Thanks be to God! Amen.

Works Cited

^[1][1] Strength to Love, Page 24.

^[2][2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1507747?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents I changed the last line, “From God’s Word” to reflect the church which is the Body of Christ, and it’s Christ who is the word.

Jan Linn’s Unbinding Christianity is  the basis of saying we’re about values, not beliefs.