The Bungee Cord 8-7-23

Hello,

“What’s your faith like, now that you’ve retired?” That was the question that I was asked as I was sharing a glass of wine with some folks.

I retired from my vocation of being a pastor last September after nearly 40 years of ministry. When I decided to go to seminary, or as we pastors say, “felt the call”, I was a freshman in college attending the University of Illinois. My intention when I enrolled at Illinois was to become a corporate lawyer where I would be destined to be wealthy and powerful. It was in the cauldron of my college experience when I decided that wealth and power were rather flimsy and thin things on which to build a life. As Jesus said, building a house on sand is not a very good idea, but rather when one builds a house on rock, that is a house that can endure the mightiest storms and be an anchor for life. So, that is what I decided that I wanted to do for my own life, and also help others build their lives on a rock, but not just any rock, but a rock so strong that it could even hold tight during the greatest hurricanes of life.

I don’t know how things were for you when you were in your late teens and early 20’s, but for me, I was pretty idealistic. As I considered the place of faith in my life, I was pretty unquestioning about the certainty of the one who claimed to be the rock, Jesus, and the strength it possessed with its divine might. When I went to seminary, I expected that my four years there would be years of tempering my faith, reinforcing the idealism and solidifying the naïve understandings of my youth. Seminary was far from that. In seminary, we wrestled with the hard questions, questions that I thought you weren’t supposed to ask, but instead, just believe. How do you know that God exists? Was Jesus really who I had learned him to be? What did the Christian faith have to say about who I was and how I would lead my life? How does the mess of life mesh with the promise of God’s dominion over all creation?

Simple answers did not survive these questions in seminary, and in those years, it felt like the rock that I thought was the ultimate building site was crumbling with cracks and fissures. As a matter of fact, it was crumbling right under my feet. And good that it was, because, in truth, I had set my sights not on gold, but on fool’s gold. Fool’s gold that sparkled with the confidence in my understandings, the confidence in my vision for what a good Christian looked like, and the confidence in my abilities to make things right. I discovered it to be fool’s gold, because in seminary I found myself being handed real gold, God’s grace. What I had thought was the Christian faith, was not. It was really faith in something far less than Jesus. It was ultimately faith in me, and Jesus was nothing more than a personal trainer who I had hired to make me stronger.

In seminary, I learned that there’s nothing wrong with holding on to Jesus with all my strength, but far more important is it to live feeling the grip that God has on me, a grip that nothing can sever. That is grace, and that is the core of faith in Christ Jesus. Over these years of being a pastor, I have seen how weak my grip is. The tragedies of life have no answers to hold onto. The increasing awareness of my less than microscopic place in the universe is humbling. The pain that I have brought to myself and others is sapping. The never-ending judgment of the world is crushing. There have been times in my life where I have felt my grip on God slipping to the point of looking for something else to hold on to, even disbelief.

But it is at those moments of my weakness of grip, that I have found that I am not falling into oblivion or self-destruction. I have readied myself to be crushed and broken by the collision with the ground, but my dismantling never happens. Instead, I feel the embrace of the one who rose up out of oblivion and total destruction on a Sunday morning, holding onto me, and the echo of the words that splashed on my head in Baptism and slid down my throat in Communion saying, “I’ve got you!”

What is my faith like, now that I have retired? My faith is ever full of questions and littered with doubts. My faith is wind battered by storms and pummeled by waves of despair. But nonetheless my faith is stronger every day, because my faith has been built on a rock, the Rock, Jesus who grips me with his love and in that grip, I feel the truth of his promise, “I’ll never let you go.” I have come from seeing Jesus as the rock that one has to build on, to seeing Jesus as the one who out of grace has taken me unto himself, the rock, and has shown me that he, Jesus, is worth building on.

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

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