Month: September 2020

Twenty years ago, Tracy and I spent a year in Cornwall, England, where I served five British Methodist churches in the seaside town of Penzance. Cornwall – like Scotland and Wales – has deep and ancient Celtic roots. It was in Cornwall that we learned about “thin places,” what the Celts called those times and places where the familiar lines between heaven and earth, day and night, darkness and light, become fuzzy, faint, indistinct. Many was the twilight evening when we would be driving through the countryside and we wouldn’t be able to tell where the land ended and the sea began, or where the sea ended and the sky began.

I came across this concept of “thin places” again in a book that Andrew and I found recently. It’s called How To Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going: Leading in a Liminal Season, by Susan Beaumont. The title caught our eye, because that’s certainly where we find ourselves as pastors these days – not really knowing how to lead in these strange times and not really sure where we are heading. 

As her subtitle suggests, we are in a “liminal season,” or as the Celts would have called it, a “thin place.” The word “liminal” comes from a Latin word meaning “threshold.” A liminal season is when we are in-between the familiar, known, predictable world we’ve lived in, and the unfamiliar, unknown, unpredictable future that is ahead of us. It’s when we are betwixt and between the old ways of life that are coming to an end and the new ways of life that are beginning to be discovered.

Our lives are also punctuated by liminal seasons. One of the examples Beaumont provides is pregnancy. That’s a season for parents of transitioning from being a couple to becoming a family. We can make all the preparations in the world, but we still can’t know what parenthood really involves and requires until what we have been watching and waiting for is brought to birth. Graduations can propel people into a liminal season. The first few months or years of retirement can be a liminal season. That year that Tracy and I spent in Cornwall was a liminal season in our lives and in our marriage (we were newlyweds that year).

The scriptures are full of liminal seasons – the Israelites wandering in the wilderness for 40 years between their former life as slaves and their future life in the promised land, the Israelites in exile for 70 years in Babylon before returning back home, the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness between his baptism and the beginning of his public ministry, the three days he spent in the tomb, the 40 days of his resurrected earthly presence. As Beaumont suggests, God does some of God’s greatest work with God’s people in liminal seasons.

Clearly, the COVID-19 pandemic has us all in a liminal season. It’s becoming clearer that we won’t get back any time soon to “the way things used to be” – however much we might want to go back there – but it’s also not yet exactly clear what “the new normal” will look like. We are in-between. We are in a “thin place,” a liminal season.

It can be very frightening for us to be in this liminal season, very frustrating and disorienting, and we are all experiencing the anxiety of this time. But liminal seasons can also be very energizing. It can be a time for trying new things, for experimenting, for re-imagining and re-envisioning, and for more flexibility and fluidity than perhaps we’ve experienced before.

That’s where we are in our nation and our world. That’s where we are in our communities, with our schools, our businesses. And that’s where we are as a church. I don’t have a crystal ball as to what our “new normal” will be as a church – when we’ll when we’ll be able to worship together again indoors without wearing a mask, when we’ll be able to sing again, or what our worship services and Sunday school classes and small groups will even look like a year from now. We’ve been doing our best to keep things going as close to “normal” as well as we can for as long as we can, but we are beginning to realize things may look very different whenever we emerge out of this liminal season into whatever the “new normal” is, and that we might be in this season for quite some time.

Liminal seasons have their own timetable. They operate on their own schedule. There’s no telling how long this season will last. I’m praying it won’t be 40 years or 70 years like it was for the Israelites. But however long we are in this liminal season, let’s try to make the most of it. To paraphrase an old saying, “when God gives you liminal seasons, make lemonade!” So let’s work together, pray together, talk together, to discern together what God may be envisioning for us whenever we emerge from this liminal season.

Andrew and I believe this work is so vital and important that we’re going to be basing our fall sermon series, starting Sunday, September 13, on what living in a liminal season faithfully and hopefully in Christ can look like. We hope this series will be helpful to all of us not just as a congregation, but also to you as you navigate this season in your own life, in your family, in your schools and workplaces and throughout our community. 

Fall itself is a liminal season, no longer summer but not yet winter, and we hope and we pray that this exploration together this fall will help us discover and live into maybe what the year 2020 was meant to be all about anyway – a new, clearer vision of a new reality into which the Spirit of God in Jesus Christ can lead us all together.

The last song in the musical “Hamilton” opens with the apparition of the deceased George Washington singing words that he’d sung earlier in the musical to his then-assistant Alexander Hamilton as they were in the middle of the War for Independence in which so many of his soldiers had died,

Let me tell you what I wish I’d known
When I was young and dreamed of glory
You have no control
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story

He sings these words again here at the end, after he himself had died, after Hamilton’s son Philip had died, and now after Hamilton himself has died from his duel with Aaron Burr. It’s a profound recognition by this military general, first president and founding father of this nation, that there is much – in life, in death – that simply is beyond our control.

This is a hard fact for us to admit. We like to think we have control over things in our lives, like our health, through our diet and exercise. And while it’s true that there are some things in our lives that we can control, most of us live under the illusion that we have more control than we really do.

This has become especially apparent throughout this pandemic. Though many of us are doing the best we can to try to control the things we can control – we wash our hands, we wear our masks when we’re out in public, we maintain safe distances from others, etc. – we still cannot completely control who gets sick and who doesn’t. Who has symptoms and who doesn’t. Who goes to the hospital and who stays at home. And even who lives and who dies. This virus, which seems to have gotten out of control, at least here in this country, has reminded us how out of control we really are.

We also can’t control, Washington sings, who tells our story. History, it is often said, is written by the winners, told by the victors. Thankfully, the colonists won the War for Independence, and the story that was told of Washington was of a hero and not a traitor. But what if it had gone the other way? So Washington recognizes that we ultimately can’t control who tells our story. But in a way, we do have some control over how our story gets told, because, in a way, every one of us writes our own story.

One of the things we do as pastors is preside at weddings. One of the very first things I’ll ask a couple when they ask me to preside at their wedding is for them to tell me their story – to tell me the story of how they met, how they fell in love, how they “knew” that the other was “the one,” and always the story of how they “popped the question” and got engaged. And I try to work elements of their story into their wedding, as a reminder to them not only of the love story they’ve already been writing together but also of the love story yet to be written and woven even more fully into God’s love story.

Another one of the things we do as pastors is preside at people’s funerals. Part of that responsibility involves composing a eulogy, a word which literally means “a good word.” In preparation for that, I usually try to find some time to sit down with the family where I ask them to tell me about their loved one. Even if I’d known the person pretty well, there are almost always things I discover about them when their loved ones tell me their story. And then my job is to get up at the funeral and tell the story of their loved ones’ life as faithfully as I can and to try to point to intersections between their story and God’s story. There’s no way to tell the whole story, of course, of either God’s story or theirs, and sometimes there are chapters that we can’t go into too much detail about. But one of the things I’ve discovered is that people pretty much write their own eulogies.

To a large degree, we write our own stories. We are the primary authors of our own lives. Now, admittedly, there is much we cannot control – when we’re born, where and to whom, and how we’re genetically wired. And there is much – especially in our early lives – that we had very little or no say in, no choice in the matter. But as we grow older, we gain more freedom, more control, more choice. We become not just the leading actor on the stage of our lives but the primary author. We are able to make decisions about how the rest of our story plays out. So no matter what may have happened to us in the past, or what bad decisions we may have made in the past, or what is happening all around us, the future is always an open book, and the question always before us is “where do we go from here?”

This is powerfully portrayed in the musical by Eliza. After learning about her husband’s infidelity, she furiously burns all the love letters he had sent her. She sings, “I’m erasing myself from the narrative. Let future historians wonder how Eliza reacted when you broke her heart. You have torn it all apart. I’m watching it burn.” And we can empathize with her anger and her desire to remove herself from his story, to separate her story from his. But then, by the end, after her husband has died, she has a change of heart. She sings, “I put myself back in the narrative, I stop wasting time on tears. I live another fifty years.” And that’s when she sets out to make sure Hamilton’s story gets told. 

She interviews soldiers who served with him. She publishes his voluminous writings. And she tells his story. But at the same time she also tells her story and how she went on to speak out against slavery, to raise money for the Washington monument, and to establish the first private orphanage in New York City where she helped raise hundreds of children who were going through what Alexander himself experienced early in his own life. So not only did she tell his story, but she told her own story as well. She reclaimed her own authority – her own authorship – and wrote the rest of her story. And her doing so allowed the creator and star of the musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda, years later to tell their story for us.

So who tells your story? To a large degree, you do. And no matter how smoothly or how horribly your story has gone up to this point, you get to say how it’s written from here. You get to choose where it goes from here. You get to write the next chapter. Maybe you have some co-authors who will help you write your story, even as you help them write theirs. And there’s also the joy of writing the story of a shared life together. And maybe you’ll discover some of the ways in which the story of your life intersects with the story of God’s life, the ways in which the story you are telling resonates and reverberates with the story God is telling. Because, after all, God is the greatest storyteller ever, and however much we may be the author of our own stories, God is the Author of it all.