The Bungee Cord  8-7-17

Hello,

     I was rummaging through some boxes in my garage attic and came upon a baseball that was signed by my teammates from the All Star team that I was on when I was 12 years old.  Although I am not certain, I think it was the game ball from the game that I pitched against the other All Star team from our town, a game that we won….a game where I hit a home run off of Rick Bouchard, and struck out my best friend, Mike Kripner, on a curve ball in the dirt.  Some of the names on the ball I remember well, other’s have passed through my memory.  Back in those days I had dreams, and so did others of me, of going somewhere in my life with baseball.  Of being a baseball success.  Well….only dreams….as it turned out that I peaked out in my high school years.  (Not so for my friend, Mike, who played in the Cincinnati Reds and Pittsburgh Pirates systems for a number of years.)

     It would be fun to find out what all those other guys who signed that ball are doing in life.  I suspect that I might be surprised where life has taken many of them, as they might be surprised to see me standing in a pulpit rather than on a pitcher’s mound.

     As a pitcher, success was fairly easy to measure.  If we won the game…if I struck out a bunch of batters…if I pitched the whole game, I knew I had succeeded.  As a pastor, I have discovered that success was a far trickier mark to claim.  When I look out at a congregation and see some people dozing off as I preach my sermon….when I visit the hospital and sit with someone who is in rapidly declining health and I can only watch it happen….when I invest myself in the lives of young people only to see them pulled away from Jesus by other things in life…when I lose my patience and become cynical …….all of these things cause me to wonder, “Have I succeeded as a Pastor?”

     I know that the primary question to ask of myself is, “Have I been faithful as a Pastor?”, because that is what I hear God asking of me in the Scriptures, but amid the faithfulness that I have striven for, it would be nice to see that I have had some success in my vocation.  Early in my ministry as I pondered what a successful pastorate might look like, I decided to measure my degree of success in this way: If I, with the grace of God, have made a difference in one person’s life….that is enough to count my ministry and life successful.

     The world, of course tells us differently.  The more people who know your name….the more toys that one collects…the stores that you shop in…the breadth of influence that you have…the neighborhood that you live in….these are the things that the world has marked as signs of success,  marks that always leave us always falling short of success.  But when I consider what it means to see a person who has been overwhelmed in hopelessness take the next step in life with courage ….when I see a person who has fallen into a deep pit of their own making leave the shame and guilt behind having experienced the power of God’s forgiveness to amend their lives…when I see a person engaged in a battle with death with eternal confidence in Christ’s love say to death, “Death be not proud.”…..if, by the grace of God, I have been part of these things happening even in just one person….I will lay myself down at the end of my days and say of my time in this life, that I have been a success.

     You don’t have to be a pastor to make such a mark in a person’s life.  As a matter of fact, I think that those who are not pastors find themselves maybe more often on the front lines of life.  So, let me encourage you to plug your ears to the world’s depiction of success, and with the power of the grace of God step into today with the hope that you might be blessed to make a difference in one person’s life…and be thankful that you can count yourself as a success.

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

The Bungee Cord 7-31-17

Hello,

     It’s not a big deal when your cell phone dies?  Is it?

     It is when you are driving to Brooklyn to visit your son, and you have no idea where you are going because you are trusting on the GPS in your cell phone to get you there.

     That is what happened last week when I was on my way from Baltimore after visiting a friend to Brooklyn to visit my son.  About 20 miles out of Baltimore my cell phone warned me that it was on its last legs.  I had been having problems with it taking a charge, a problem that was about to become a bigger problem as I was hemmed in thick traffic on I95, traffic that would be going 80mph one minute and then standing still the next.  Of course, the simple answer would be to call my son and have him guide me in….but….not only was my cell phone dead, I don’t know anyone’s telephone number….they are all in my phone’s contacts.

      I decided that my only chance was old school, so I stopped at a rest stop and dug into my trunk and found an old atlas and began looking for New York City in hopes that I could follow the map to my son’s place, whose address I had also forgotten, but whose street name was miraculously in my foggy memory.  I came upon a map of New York City, located Brooklyn and started hunting for the street…..and I couldn’t find it, apparently my map only listed the “important” streets.

     I had been to my son’s place a couple of times, so I decided that I would have to trust my memory.   I remembered that I had made a quick right exit when I had come off the bridge into Brooklyn, and with memory, I hopped back into my car and hoped for the best.  I95….I278…traverse a couple of bridges, and there I was, in Brooklyn….and…as I had remembered, there was an exit just after I got off the bridge!  Unfortunately, the buildings were not the ones that I remembered at that exit, so I thought maybe I had misremembered how close the exit was, so I proceeded to the next….which didn’t look right either.  Fearing that I may have gone too far, I decided to get off, anyway, and I wound up in a neighborhood that was clearly not the one I was looking for.  Back to the interstate….which was a bit of an adventure ….to try another exit…and another, but neither was anything close to familiar in looks.  As I hopped back onto the interstate, I found myself coming upon another bridge….uh oh…that was clearly not where I wanted to be, so I got off and decided that maybe if I just drove around, I might stumble on my son’s street.  Right!  After about an hour of blind driving…and wondering if I would ever locate my destination…and figuring that by now, my son was wondering if something had happened to me….I came upon a stopped ambulance that fortunately was not busy saving someone’s life.

     Bringing my map with me, I walked up to the ambulance and asked the medics, “Can you show me where Gold Street is?”  They couldn’t find it either, so the driver started to rattle off directions to get me there, naming streets and turns.  “I’m sorry.  I won’t be able to remember those directions.  Could you just write them down on this map?”

     “No,” he said, “I’ll just write them on a rubber glove,” and he did.  So, with rubber glove in hand, I wove my way through Brooklyn…not knowing where I was going….and a wave of peace and joy came over me when I found myself at my son’s apartment building.

     All this brought Psalm 121 to my mind.

Psalm 121
¹ I lift up my eyes to the hills—
   from where will my help come?
² My help comes from the Lord,
   who made heaven and earth. 

³ He will not let your foot be moved;
   he who keeps you will not slumber.
⁴ He who keeps Israel
   will neither slumber nor sleep. 

⁵ The Lord is your keeper;
   the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
⁶ The sun shall not strike you by day,
   nor the moon by night. 

⁷ The Lord will keep you from all evil;
   he will keep your life.
⁸ The Lord will keep
   your going out and your coming in
   from this time on and for evermore.

     This mis-adventure was a reminder to me that things human made (phones, governments, relationships, and the like) are often great and wonderful and certainly well worth having, but they are always prone to breaking, running out of steam, and letting me down.  So, as I wander through life, I am thankful that there is one upon whom I can always count on to lead me through….through times of great confusion, through times of boundless despair, through times of glaring joy, and even through the gates of death.

     As I have come to understand God, I would not say that those firefighters were divinely placed there to rescue me.  I would say that they were simply there doing their job, being the hands and feet of God in every thing that they do. (Just like all of us are.)  But I would say this: I lived through a parable akin to those Jesus told, a parable that makes it all too clear to me that to place all my trust in things made of human hands is far less wise than to trustingly place myself in the hands of God.

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

The Bungee Cord 7-24-17

Hello,

     I was in Baltimore this past weekend to celebrate the 60^th birthday of a childhood friend, a birthday that I will be marking next month.  Needless to say, Baltimore life is more than minimally different from my life on top of my rural Pennsylvania hill.  So, I really didn’t know what sort of celebration I was going to be part of when I ventured to the neighborhood bar where the birthday festivities were going to be held.

     Mixed among storefronts and row houses, there on the corner was the bar.  The door of the bar was painted red, but was plastered with all manner of bumper stickers.  I walked in and found myself in a room the size of the TV lounge from my college dorm days (I don’t think TV lounges exist in dorms today where TV and internet hookups are part of every dorm room’s provision….advancement?), with the bar slicing the room in half.  There was just enough room on the patron side of the bar for stools to be placed at the bar and against the wall leaving a narrow corridor for movement.  I later found out that the interior of the bar had recently been renovated, accounting for the nicely painted walls, ceiling and unmarred bar.  In their renovation, either the owners wanted to provide a contrast for the nice/new look or they ran out of money, because the bar stools were tattered and torn, only remnants of vinyl covering the bare threads holding the foam padding in place.

     Apparently, this bar was the neighborhood gathering spot for those who called it their second home, a place where “everyone knows your name” (for young readers, as in “Cheers” of TV fame).  One of the attractions of this bar was that at the far end of the bar were two turn tables where patrons could spin records and share an evening of their music, which is what my birthday friend did once a month, and which he was doing that night to celebrate his birthday.  As my friend spun his records the bar’s patronage ebbed and flowed, many people coming up to him and concurrently wishing him a happy birthday and thanking him for his “spinning”.

     Sitting on my dilapidated bar stool watching and hearing all this happened, it occurred to me that in my 34 years of being a pastor, this was the first time that I had rendez-voused with a friend in a bar.  Being a Lutheran who finds himself aligned with the perspective of Christianity expounded by Martin Luther, there is nothing that prohibits me from frequenting a bar …. Martin Luther regularly did!  It just so happened that in the course of my ministry, bar frequenting just never found its way to my daily schedule.

     So, as I took in the sights of this “alien” place, I noticed a picture on the wall behind the bar between a couple of the mirrors and amid the bottles of liquor on display.  It was a familiar picture, one that I suspect many of you have seen, the picture of Jesus knocking on the door depicting the Bible verse, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock…”.  Except the artist’s rendition of this picture had a unique twist to it.  The door at which Jesus was knocking was the red, bumper sticker clad door of the bar.  And it suddenly occurred to me that the painter of this picture was letting it be known that this bar was regularly visited by Jesus, too.  There, in that neighborhood bar where everyone knows the other’s name, was the one who intimately knows everyone’s name.  He is there where people bring their lives, sharing the wondrous milestones of life, like a 60^th birthday celebration, and bearing burdens in which they are drowning in sorrow.

     And how is Jesus there?  He is there through people who either knowingly or not are dispensing his grace….. bar tenders, fellow patrons, and painters of pictures.  Granted, there are many things that go on in bars….and even churches….that do not bear the imprint of Jesus, but that painting that sat on that liquor filled shelf reminded me, that the work of Jesus mercy extends far beyond the confines of a church.  Indeed, Jesus calls us to join him every Sunday in church, not to be part of a hidden club, but to empower us to bring the light of divine hope to every corner of the world.

     As Jesus said, the grace of God is not meant to be a candle only lighting the interior of a bushel basket, the interior of a church.  Jesus did not die for something so small as that.   The grace of God is meant to be a candle on a lampstand that brings light to every corner of a darkness shrouded world…a workplace…a school…a home….a team….and even a bar.

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger