Today's Daily Lesson comes from Luke chapter 1 verse 22:
"And when he came out, he was unable to speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the temple."
You don't know, you don't know you don't know; and I can't tell you just how blessed I feel this morning. Over these last several days our family has received dozens of Christmas cards now crowding the too-small table in our den. They come from near and far away, with fond memories, well wishes and and photographs of children still growing in wisdom and in stature. I paused yesterday to take them all in. I picked up one which signed, seemed to speak for the entire multitude: "From your extended flock". And what a flock it is. And what memories.
As I stood there the words of the carol came true, as it always does at Christmas: "the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight."
And then, after that experience before the table, Irie and I drove across town to a Deacon's Christmas party at the old church building. We've been in our new building for 15 years and our Deacon chair Jim thought it would be fun to take a trip down memory road. And indeed, when I first opened the door to the building which is now a Seventh Day Adventist Church, a rush of memories came flooding back. This is the building where as a child I had my first spiritual connections and as the door swung open I smelled a smell of an old building which I in my subconscious sometime attributed to the holy incense of God. There was the long hall of Sunday Schools where my parents taught my third grade Sunday School class and where Drew the new incoming Deacon Chair who will replace Jim first signed my first Bible in 1983. There were the the South steps where as a three-year-old I would walk up every morning for Mother's Day Out wearing boots, cowboy hat, and a pair of six shooters at my sides. Then there was the sanctuary where my father was baptized, my parents married and where my great-uncle, where early on in our church's life, amidst a seminal and defining meeting on whether or not we would accept non-Baptist to the Lord's Table, Uncle Roy swung open the the doors and marched in saying, "I'm Paul of Tarsus. I am not a Baptist. Will you have me at the Table?" As I understand it, that was the end of the meeting and the beginning of what came to be know as Second B.
After a tour of the old building, we gathered in the old fellowship hall, ate and sang carols, then Jim and Drew both shared memories. I was asked to give a prayer to conclude the whole thing and did so following a brief reflection on Wendell Berry's poignant observation: "Things take place". Things do take place, I said, in the Christian life spirit is not without body or Temple. This was our holy Temple, for 40-odd years. And on this night the LORD was in his Holy Temple yet again.
I got home, got the kids to bed along with their new Christmas puppy (I'm sure you'll hear news of that later), then I sat down to open more Christmas letters. There was one from Colchester, VT -- from Fran and Jerry Allyn. Jerry, another of my former Deacon chairs, included his annual Christmas letter which I always receive and read like a Pauline epistle. News this year of another very special church building -- the Colchester Meeting House, built in 1838 and with Civil War veterans buried in the cemetery behind, it was the place of my first call, the place where I pastored my first flock. Jerry's letter told of the old church being refurbished -- the repair of two major trusses in the attic, and the installation of six new steel lintels over the windows, a new raised seam roof, insulation, and repaired ceiling and walls. "It looks like our venerable sanctuary is good for another hundred years," Jerry's letter said.
And I thought of the birch and pine beams, all hand sawn nearly two centuries ago, holding up that church as pillars do and the generations of sturdy Vermonters who have stepped in and out of the old brick church Sunday by Sunday for a day or a lifetime, baptizing, teaching, supping, marrying, and burying in that holy temple and I hoped that it is true, that all these things shall be taking place there for a hundred or thousand or ten thousand more. I hope the flock will still be there, and with them the hopes and fears of all the years gathered also.
And I thought of one other thing, poem Irie wrote about that old brick church which I share now:
This Church is rickety
Lives and bodies
halting speech and movement
Stained glass -- and carpets
Centuries of prayers
Slipping out of whitewashed pews
and crumbling bricks
I am this Church, somehow
Prayers and incantations
Sliding through a weathered Temple
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