You get so focused on Christmas Eve, Christmas, even New Years Eve, and you focus so intently on all of the church and family responsibilities associated with those dates, that you can lose sight of what comes after. Yesterday I got an email reminding me of something due for the worship service on January 5th. I hadn’t forgotten it. I never accounted for it to begin with.

As weighted as the holiday feels, it’s not the end. January is right behind it.

My colleague Judy Watt retired, and yesterday was her last Sunday leading worship. I shared the following with the congregational meeting dissolving her pastoral relationship with the church.

I want to be more like her in the years of ministry I have left.

I have had the privilege of serving alongside Judy Watt for just shy of four years now, and it occurs to me that my experience of this church can’t be disentangled from my experience of Judy; I’m not the only pastor on this staff for whom that is the case. And though the time we have spent as colleagues here represents a short interval in Judy’s fruitful career of ministry, it has been very significant to me. 

I have had in The Rev. Judy Watt a joyful, at times even playful, colleague. The demands of ministry are many, and they are often heavy, and yet Judy reserves space for whimsy and for spontaneity, and that, for me, has often meant the difference between a bad day and a good day. Against her better judgment, Judy has agreed more than once to be conscripted into some juvenile shenanigan–almost as frequently as she has initiated one. 

I think this levity is one of the things that has lent Judy’s ministry here authority. You sense it even in the way she leads worship, when she calls us to the prayer of confession, for example, with words we all know, words she has uttered countless times. Yet every time she savors the words. Not a one comes out carelessly or automatically, still less dramatically. They are the church’s words, but we have also known them to be irreducibly Judy’s words, to us, spoken with a pleasure and a care that is deeply authentic. 

But you do not mistake levity for frivolity when you work with Judy. In my early days and months here, whenever I would feel unsure about how to interpret some unique aspect of our life together—some quirk in our very full calendar, for example—I found myself taking my cue from Judy. Very often without saying a word, Judy embodies the right posture, the appropriate posture, toward people and circumstances: not silly, but also not stifling in its seriousness. She has taught me how to regard this extraordinary context for ministry, often unaware she is doing so. 

And there have been times when she has taught me quite aware that that’s what she was doing. Just two weeks ago I wore my little rectangular nametag on my stole during worship—I don’t know why; I’d never done it before—and the following Tuesday Judy made a point to come to my office to tell me I should not do that, that it was distracting. A minor thing, for sure, and from a less mature colleague such a correction could have felt petty. But coming from Judy it was kind (of course it was kind) and it was clear. Such is her way, and I was more the once the beneficiary of it. 

I have learned from Judy’s voice, not only when it has been directed to me, but far more frequently when it has been addressed to you, as it was from this pulpit this morning. I have learned by watching her with the Deacons, with the staff, and even with her family. This congregation has been well-served to have you as one of its ministers, and I count myself fortunate that, though for only a few short years, I got to be one of them with you. You have no doubt earned a fulfilling retirement, and that is my prayer for you, for Dave, for your kids and grandkids. Blessings and God speed.

Yesterday I wrote a very brief address to be read at the final worship service of the first church I served as pastor. I was only there three years, and that was 12 years ago. Still, it didn’t feel good to write. Something I had a hand in leading is ending, and that’s not what the people who gave themselves to it wanted. But it’s reality.

I found myself ruminating on the “redevelopment” grant we got. Writing the application was one of my first projects as pastor. We used it to hire a young contemporary music director and a seminary student youth worker, so the entire staff was under 40 for nearly two years. Then, within a span of six months, we were all gone. Youth was not the most urgent variable in that equation, though it sure felt like it.

Most days I felt like everything I was doing to lead that church was wrong, that where I spent time on the things I had been trained to do, preparing sermons and visiting with congregants, I should have been launching enterprising new initiatives in the community. The weight of my own expectations was heavy. It was measured in the pounds of books on my shelf about “missional” leadership and its promises.

I appreciate more than ever the many complicated forces affecting the viability of churches in North America today. Thinking about the closing of this one causes me to lament an emphasis on youth and novelty where wisdom and experience are sorely needed.

I’m back home after three days with my continuing education group, six colleagues who I’ve joined for two days of mutual discernment for six years now. We’re a mixed group: some of us serve churches, some don’t. Some have kids, some don’t. Some are in their 30’s, some in their 40’s, some in their 50’s. We live in Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Florida, and Oklahoma.

If you have a people like that who you can solicit for advice and perspective in a structured environment, you’re livin’ well. If you don’t, you can fashion one; we didn’t always have this. We made it. And we keep choosing to make it, even though some years it feels well nigh impossible (and some years is for some of us). It will serve you well this year, in five years, and probably well beyond, which is not even to mention the service you will render it.

The opposite of stress is purpose.

My experience of stress–at least the lose-sleep-at-night-and-eat-your-feelings kind of stress–is that it visits me when I’m afraid of failing and afraid of letting people down, afraid of disappointing people. There is no technical fix for that; you can’t drink enough water or eat enough vegetables to conquer that. It’s not a technical problem.

That kind of stress is a spiritual problem. Can we experiment with translating our fear into purpose? Instead of chewing my nails off because I’m worried about a deadline, can I find what I love about the project that’s due, why I’m even doing it, and feel free to produce something that reflects what I love about it?

That feels like such a luxury, a privilege even. Maybe it is. But the stoic acceptance of eat-yourself-inside-out stress as an indicator of significance will kill us. Worse, it will leave all those people we’re worried about letting down in the lurch.

The opposite of stress isn’t relaxation. It’s purpose.

“Realize” is a weak verb that we shouldn’t use to describe meaningful work. Nothing important ever happened because someone realized something that didn’t know before in a moment of unsolicited epiphany. People experiment and investigate in order to learn and better understand. They ask questions and test assumptions. They get help.

It sounds so simple: “And then I realized . . . ” Too simple. You’re selling yourself short and making it sound like you were simply the passive recipient of some Copernican insight. You (and Copernicus) did so much more than realize; you probed and risked and dared.

Don’t stop. There’s more work to do.

“Let all mortal flesh keep silence,/and with fear and trembling stand;/ponder nothing earthly minded . . . “

The words got into my shoulders while I wasn’t looking and loosened them up. It’s a low enough melody for a poor singer like me to sing confidently, so my pleasure in the melody lulled me into complacency, and the words snuck up on me.

On the first Sunday of Advent, Thanksgiving weekend, the 1st day of December (December!), there is good news hiding in the ancient hymn: though there is much to do and much to say, activity and speech are not always what is required.

I listened to the congregation singing, and I took its verse as instruction. I breathed out long and full, and for the remainder of the verse I rid my attention of any thought about the words I was supposed to say in the service, typed and scrawled on white pages in my black folio.

Gratitude is a communal effort. We all have things we’re thankful for, and to a large degree the communities that shape our values have told us we should be grateful for those things.

I think that’s good. Gratitude isn’t entirely on you. It’s on us.

Happy Thanksgiving.