Everything Happens for the Last Time

 

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For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die;
a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted; (Eccl. 3:1-2)

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THE LAST TIME

Our lives have wonderful recurring moments; they provide the rhythm of our days.

Kissing your life partner good morning and good night are beautiful markers in our daily routine. Having all your children home for Christmas is an annual treat. Sharing the anticipation of a cruise with your travel companion is much of the fun of the repeated holidays. Sharing a regular meal with your friends is a ritual that gives a sense of belonging.

There will, of course, be a last kiss. Your children may someday have families of their own, and there will come a year when they do not return to you for the holidays. There will be a final bon voyage celebration. Friends move away, and the meals will cease.

All these good things will happen for the last time. To realize these beautiful moments will someday come to an end is bittersweet. They orchestrate life with joy; their cessation will come as a loss.

Our lives are also punctuated by difficult, demanding, and tedious experiences that come around time after time.

The drive to work each day in rush hour traffic is nerve wracking. The treatments are uncomfortable and leave us exhausted. The monthly report we must produce is tedious to complete.

The day will come when we drive to work for the last time, have the last treatment, and do that final monthly report. The end of these things will be welcomed with relief.

RETIREMENT

I began vocational ministry in the Spring of 1992. I served as a local church pastor for ten years, then as an ABC overseas missionary for the next ten years, and as Executive Minister of ABCNYS for the final thirteen years. On May 30^th this thirty-three-year vocational journey will end.

These days, I am experiencing some “last times.”

We finished our quarterly ABCNYS Board of Mission meeting several weeks ago. As I packed up after the meeting, I realized this was my last board meeting. I am visiting churches these last few months, each one for the last time. I am having conversations with people, many of them for the last time. Sometimes I say, “I’ll see you” or “talk with you later;” then I realized I may well not. 

I have become aware that things are happening for the last time; most of them are good things I will miss.

I will not miss all these things: installing the window air conditioners at the office; sorting the wheat from the chaff in endless waves of email; and heading out early on dark snowy mornings on my way to another church. I am sensing that even the tiresome parts of ministry have been a part of the reliable rhythm of my life and have given meaning and purpose to my days. I will notice their absence even if I do not long for them.

It is because everything happens for the last time, that life is precious.

LIIFE IS PASSING BUT NOT FUTILE

The writer of Ecclesiastes knows that life is like water under a bridge.  The writer finishes chapter 3 with:

 I know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it nor anything taken from it; God has done this so that all should stand in awe before him (15).

Although everything happens for the last time, none of it is futile. What God does through us is not passing. In the rhythms of our lives God is building lasting things.

 

One season of my life is passing. Things are happening for the last time. What will the next chapter hold? I don’t really know. I will see what comes up and treasure it, for I know it too will pass one day.

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister (for now)—American Baptist Churches of New York State

NOTHING WAS SAID THAT SUNDAY

 

You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer

good for anything but is thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. People do not light a lamp and put it under the bushel basket; rather, they put it on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:13-16)

WHAT HAPPENED

One of my earliest memories of church dates to Sunday, September 4^th, 1966. Three days earlier Lester Mitchell, a 39-year-old African American man, was shot in a drive by shooting as he swept his porch on the West Side of Dayton .  After Mitchell was shot, a crowd formed. That crowd morphed into a community uprising with violence and widespread property destruction. Ohio Governor Rhodes sent in the National Guard to quell the uprising.

A member of the Klu Klux Klan had shot Mitchell. Three days later Mitchell died.

In the mid 60’s, Dayton was the third most segregated city in the nation. The residents living in Mitchell’s community, the West Side, suffered from a lack of policing and what policing did take place often involved violence and the abrogation of citizens’ rights. There was a lack of city services, rampant poverty, no community development by city government, segregated neglected schools, and no enforcement of housing regulations against landlords. One 13-unit apartment building reportedly had only 4 toilets and not a single functioning shower or bathtub. Redlining in Dayton was widespread, preventing families from building wealth that could pay for college or be passed on to children—perpetuating intergenerational poverty and unemployment. (For a more in-depth analysis, go to http://daytonarenahistory.org/project/1966-race-riot/.) 

MY MEMORY

I was nine years old at the time, living in a suburb south of Dayton, and had no understanding of the tragic brew of deprivation that had boiled over that hot summer weekend. I remember seeing news films on our 19-inch Zenith black & white television. I was, quite frankly, scared. I thought the world was coming apart, that life would never be the same. One newscaster said it was rumored that any white person crossing the bridge into West Dayton would be shot. I had no idea why they were so angry at people like me. I could make no sense of any of this.

 

CHURCH

Church was the place where I learned what was loving and what was unloving. They taught me how be a follower of Jesus. It was a place where one could find guidance. I was sure when I went to our Baptist church on Sunday morning, the last day of the uprising, everyone would be talking about this. We would pray for the safety and wellbeing of the people in Dayton. I remember waiting to get there so a way could be found to fix this. I had, as a nine-year-old, no understanding of the history and complexity of the situation; I thought there was a “fix.”

There was nothing but silence at church that Sunday. No one mentioned it, and I was listening. It was as if it were not happening. It was just another Sunday morning at church.

THE LESSON I TOOK HOME THAT SUNDAY

So, what was communicated to me that Sunday? It seemed church was mostly irrelevant to the lives we live, to what is happening in the world around us. Church was a place where you go to see your friends, feel welcome, and pretend the suffering of others did not exist, at least those around us; suffering on other continents certainly deserved the attention of our missionaries. This was the message I got that Sunday morning.

 

THESE DAYS

These days, I am thinking about the place of local churches in our lives. I am finishing up 33 years of ministry invested in local congregations, thirteen of those years walking with churches in upstate New York as they cope with declining membership and resources and with being marginalized by the broader culture. Our churches are caught up in the tide of broad societal shifts over which they have no control. These are churches of faithful people who are doing all they can to sustain the ministries of the congregations they love.

 

But I am, nonetheless, haunted by something Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in April of 1963. Dr. King was in Birmingham to participate in nonviolent demonstrations against segregation. In his letter he challenges the white clergy of the city to support this campaign for justice, and King laments their inaction.

King writes about the power of the early church. He observes: “In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.” He goes on to say if the church in his day does not become sacrificially engaged in the cause of justice

it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.”

That church in Ohio did not engage the world around them in 1966 in any sacrificial or even caring way. They took no notice of the people in the broader community. A lot happened in Dayton that weekend in September. They acted as if nothing important was happening.

A lot is happening around us right now. Would we know it if we walked into our church on a Sunday morning?  Are we salt seasoning our world? Is our light shining in the lives of others as we do good work in difficult times? Is there an active connection between the lives of our churches and what is happening in the world around us? Our future may depend on this sort of thing.

Blessings,

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister—American Baptist Churches of New York State