Recently my wife, Lin, and I got into an organizing mood at home in our storage space and one of the first tasks we determined to tackle was to sort and categorize all of the photos that we have which had been sporadically pasted into scrapbooks, but mostly stuffed into shoeboxes in a haphazard fashion. This was a neat exercise in nostalgia which made me feel old but also blessed. One of the ‘categories’ which old snapshots fell into was a folder entitled Our Ministry. Into this folder we placed photos we have saved of memorable church events like the time I judged a greased pig contest, or the time I participated in an outhouse race (don’t ask). One of the photos in this box became meaningful to me as I thought about the theme for my Sunday morning messages for the season after Easter which we are about to embark upon. The photo was a picture of the tiny parsonage that we moved into in my first church as a seminary graduate in Kennett, MO. Now that I have turned 50 years and gotten a welcome letter from AARP in the mail this photo is from a time 1/2 of my life ago. As youngsters answering the call of the church to serve a church in a part of the state far from home we were both very pensive as we pulled into a town we had never been to before. After we got down below about Festus on the highway enroute to our new home I recall thinking that it looked as if God had taken a pin and let the air out of the landscape because the terrain was so flat! As we pulled into the lot of the church which
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would be my first full-time pastorate as a minister and, as we viewed the house next door which would be our new home we were
an emotional mixture of anticipation, enthusiasm and dread! All of our misgivings, however, melted into a sense of peace inspired by the providence of God when we saw the scene in the doorway of the parsonage which would become the snapshot that sent me off on this trip down memory lane. There, in the doorway of the parsonage someone from the church’s welcoming committee had taped up a homemade sign which read,
“Welcome Home.” That simple anonymous message of hospitality gave us the immediate assurance that God had arrived there ahead of us and would dwell there with us to help us feel that we were indeed at home no matter where we wound up because we had one another, we had a community of faith, and we had God himself to greet us. All of this, I mentioned has something to do with the messages I am preparing for us to share in coming weeks in worship. The New Testament book of 1 Peter figures prominently in our lection for this month and I am planning to spend some time helping us to get to know this proclamation attributed to Peter. The apostle Peter is considered the first leader of the ancient church ( in some circles he is even called the first pope). In his biography of
Peter, Michael Grant writes of the apostle that he is an astonishingly complex and many-sided man. He is a missionary, a fisherman, pastoral shepherd, martyr, recipient of special revelation, confessor of the true faith, magisterial protector and repentant sinner. Besides the
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