When I Grow Up

Here's the first sermon I preached at The Dover Church.

When I Grow Up
May 3, 2009 – Fourth Sunday of Easter Scripture: Psalm 23

I love listening to children talk about what they're going to be when they grow up. Their whole life lies before them and anything is possible. Take our son, Leo, for example, who is almost five and tells us that he is going to be either Spiderman or Kung-fu Panda when he grows up. Wouldn't that be something? When I was a boy, I wanted to be a sea captain. Having a Swedish sea captain for a maternal grandfather was a powerful influence. His stories started me dreaming of going off to sea and having adventures in far away places.
Because I loved boats and sailing so much, I also wanted be a naval architect. By the age of nine, my father, an MIT graduate, was taking me to see the school of naval architecture there. I would sit for hours in my room, reading books about ships and then drawing them at my desk. There was one problem though. Year after year my math teachers pointed out my glaring incompetence in basic mathematics. I got it into my head that I just could not do math, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy by high school. I could dream and I could draw, but I could not think mathematically. I only learned later that naval architects have naval engineers to do the math for them, but I didn't have a naval engineer to get me into either MIT or the Naval Academy, so I did not go to sea or become a naval architect.
When I was in my early to mid teens, I wanted to be a minister. I grew up in the First Congregational Church of Shrewsbury and loved it. As a junior in high school, I did an internship with our associate minister, the man who would preach at my ordination almost twenty years later, to see what being a minister was all about. He took me behind the scenes of ministry, at least a little bit, bringing me with him to visit people in hospitals, showing me how worship was planned, and telling me how he came to be a minister from a career in investment banking. I was just about hooked. But then, the Senior Minister was fired at Annual Meeting the next year. I did not know all the facts and only learned later that the relationship between the church and minister had been rocky for a while. The vote to dismiss was only the last gasp of a long process. That put a damper on my youthful idealism. While I kept my foot in religion over the years, going to church regularly and developing my own private spirituality, becoming a minister had lost its attraction.
When I was in college, I wanted to be a national champion in rowing and maybe even a member of the Olympic team. I rowed, worked out and talked rowing all the time. I lived with rowers, ate with rowers...I became, in short, a monomaniac with a one track mind. With many practices on Sunday mornings, this was my sabbatical period from church. That was just fine with most of my team mates, who were Catholics and had presumably done their duty on Saturday night. It didn't really bother the two of us who were Congregationalists either. We knew God would understand.
As it became apparent to me that while rowing was fun, I was not going to become what I had hoped to become, I decided to find out what I would do next, so I signed up for a study abroad year. I wanted to do just about the opposite of what I had been doing in college, so I went to art school in Sweden; Sweden because of my family back ground; painting and drawing, because that also ran in my family, and the little island in the Baltic where I ended up, well... that was just a coincidence. But what a coincidence it turned out to be! While out drawing and exploring the island that year, I discovered a lot of Viking rune stones and burial sites. I went to museums in Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Oslo to see more Viking things and I was hooked. I had always loved reading and boats and studying Vikings would give me plenty of both. I was going to become a professor of Vikings, maybe even the next J. R. R. Tolkien.
I came back to the states and studied Old Norse and Viking history, first in Seattle, Washington, then in Lund, Sweden, then in Berkeley, California, and finally in Iceland, where I worked on my dissertation. While in Iceland, I came across an advertisement posted by the University of Colorado looking for someone to start up a program in Scandinavian Studies. I sent in my curriculum vitae, not expecting much, and was surprised to receive a round trip ticket to Denver in the mail. I left Keflavik in March, where it was dark, cold, precipitating, and blowing a low grade gale, as it did just about every day from September until May, and arrived in Denver, where it was sunny and 60, as it is most days in March. The Rocky Mountains looked glorious and I remember thinking to myself as I waited for the limo outside the airport, “Oh God, let me get this job.”
And I did. I moved to Boulder and started a Scandinavian Program. It was great fun and I was a big success. I told my chair that Vikings and Old Norse mythology were a no-brainer. Of course undergraduates were going to flock to these courses, and they did. I was on top of the world during those years in Boulder. My teaching was a success. Research and traveling around to academic conferences was great fun. The fly fishing in Colorado was almost too good to be true. There was a trout stream right down the hill from my office. And yet, with all of this, somehow, something was not quite right. In my frenzy of work and achievement I thought I had everything I had dreamed of, everything I had worked so hard for, and yet something was wrong. I was both inordinately happy and deeply discontented at the same time. The paradox of the whole thing was lost on me at the time. All I knew was that something was wrong or missing.
Which is where God came back into the picture. As I said, over the years since Shrewsbury I had remained a regular church goer and dabbled in spirituality, but on the second Sunday of Advent in 1999, I was sitting in the First Congregational Church of Boulder, where I was an active member, and the preacher was preaching the Great Commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Suddenly he paused, asked us to close our eyes and consider where we were with this. I did, thinking to myself, “this is silly.” And then, in the silence, well... to borrow a phrase from Leo's superhero lingo: “WHAMMO!” In theological terms, it's called having an experience of the immediate presence of God. It was intense and all at once it dawned on me that my career was my god, that all the love I had to give, all the yearnings of my soul and every thought in my mind (except those I devoted to fly fishing), everything I had to give, I gave to my career. I remember thinking to myself in a sort of bemused way, “So this is what idolatry is like! I though that only happened in the Old Testament and here I've been worshiping a false God all these years.” I didn't understand the implications of any of this, but talk about an eye opener.
After church I went up to the minister. Clyde was one of the very few smokers in Boulder, so he spent coffee hour standing outside by himself smoking. I told him what had occurred to me, leaving out the part about God showing up (I didn't want him to think I was totally crazy) at which point he chuckled, looked intently at me, and asked, “so what are you going to do about that, young man?” I told him I didn't know. He told me to pray on it. I did have an active prayer life at that point, so I had an idea of how to follow his advice, which I did. I prayed for a couple of weeks and talked alot with Clyde, with David the associate, and with my best friend who is a Methodist pastor, and then I knew. I was going to learn how to love God. I had no idea how one did that, but seminary seemed to be the logical place to find out. I'm sure most people thought I was nuts, but I tendered my resignation, went home to Massachusetts for Christmas where I visited seminaries, came back to teach the last semester, and moved home to start grooving with God.
One of my favorite poets and literary critics is T.S. Eliot, who once wrote: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” That pretty much sums up my journey. With all the work and education, all the travel and adventure, I ultimately arrived right back where I started, in the 5th grade Sunday School class at the First Congregational Church of Shrewsbury where I first memorized the 23rd Psalm. Now I knew for the first time what the words meant because they described what my life had been like, except for one thing. For the first 30 years, I had not noticed God that much because I had been thinking that it was all about me, by me and for me. Before I thought that I had been the sole author of my life, but now I knew that God had been with me through it all, leading me into many green pastures and beside many still waters, filling my cup to overflowing and anointing my head with oil. There had been plenty of dark valleys and gatherings in the presence of my enemies over the years. While before I thought I had been lucky, now I came to see all the reversals and apparent failures as something else, as the prods and goads of that divine rod and staff comforting me. It hadn't felt comforting at the time, but it does now in retrospect. With all the seminary training and all the experience of serving three churches, all I have really done is return to God and know him for the first time. The 23rd Psalm is a statement of faith for me, a statement of gratitude about how my life has been and a statement of confidence in the future: “surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” When I grew up, all I did was return to where I started and discover for the first time who I had been all along, which is to say, me, a child of God, created in God's own image, living God's intention for me, living my way into love with God and my neighbor. Just like you. That's what it's all about. Knowing that, to quote another favorite poet of mine, Robert Frost, “has made all the difference.”