My name is Erika Lundin.  I've been a member here for 22 years.  I joined the day my son was dedicated here.  I got to pick the words for the responsive reading during his ceremony, so I used lyrics from a song by the band Entrain).  The refrain sums up what I found here: "We are all connected, all one."

“Life calls us on,” the choir just sang, “Love calls us on.” I could preach almost every Sunday about calling, about vocation, because I truly believe that there are callings coming to us all the time, inviting and urging us to be more of our true selves, to turn toward what is good and live-giving, to not be seduced and led astray by all those voices promoting their own narrow and divisive interests. 

I can’t tell you how good it is to be back here in this sanctuary, under this roof together, after being online the past two weeks because of snow. This, right here, is one of the things I am going to miss most when I retire—an ordinary Sunday in this place, with you good people. Including those of you on Zoom; all of us gathered together.

If you pause and look for it, there are rituals to Sunday morning, and to all of church life. And there are rituals to daily life too; things you may take for granted, like morning coffee or tea, practices like prayer or meditation or filling the bird feeder, like kissing your spouse or children goodbye, like saying “I love you.” Aren’t these practices as holy as any ritual in any church faith community?

I’m always grateful when people come here for the first time, I often tell them that I think it takes some courage to enter a church for the first time; you don’t know what you’re going to find. Are people going to be welcoming and kind, or indifferent and inattentive? If you take a further risk and venture into coffee hour, will you be standing there all alone? Is anyone going to come up and talk to you? It’s like that saying, that some of the bravest words you can say are, “May I have this dance?”

These days I keep asking myself, “What is needed? What is required? What does it mean to be faithful?”

Is it to filter the news, and find ways to be informed and engaged without losing your mind? Is it to be out in the streets, protesting the injustices against immigrants and others who are at risk? Is it to be spending nights accompanying guests at our warming center downstairs? Or making a meal for the hungry, like our Board members did yesterday? Is it to be coming to church, and praying for equal justice under the law and freedom for everyone? And staying afterwards for our conversation about social justice?

I wrote my sermon a week ago and it was ‘pretty good.’ I had my wife read it over. I can always tell when I’ve hit it out of the park, she gets this cute look in her eyes like she knows she picked the right one to spend her life with. 

She didn’t have that look after she read my sermon. 

She told me it was good. That she got teary eyed. That I made some good points. And she told me I didn’t share enough of my own story. That I’d kept what was most compelling - the personal-  to a minimum. 

This hymn, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” makes me think about Martin Luther King, Jr., and a story he told from back in the winter of 1956. He was 27 years old, less than two years into his pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and in the thick of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Every day King and his family were getting threats, and they were wearing him down. One night, just as he was going to bed, the phone rang. An angry voice threatened him, invoking the N word and saying, “Before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.”