Musical Prelude and Service.

By Ellie Bloomfield

August 27, 2023 Sermon
Good morning. I am a proud member of the United Church of Canada, and of Dunnville’s Grace United in particular, but today I’m kind of returning to my Baptist roots. My talk today is planted firmly in the tradition of ‘witnessing’.
In the scripture reading from Genesis this morning, we hear that God told Abram: “Leave your country, your family, and your father’s home for a land that I will show you…so Abram left just as God said…and he took his wife with him…”
We don’t hear what Sarah had to say about this. But I can kind of picture her—it’s early evening, maybe she’s stirring a little something over the fire, and in comes Abram. “Honey—you’ll never guess who called me today!”
We don’t get to hear what Sarah had to say. If it had been me, I might have said “Abram—I’ve told you! Wear a hat when you’re out in the sun all day!”
I can’t help but notice that we don’t hear from Abram either. We have heard what God has to say, and then we see what Abram does in response. He leaves, just as God has said. As Paul points out in Romans 4, verses 17 and 18, “When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do, but on what God said he would do.”
When I heard this story from Genesis as a child in Sunday School, it sounded pretty simple: God speaks, you move. The older I get, the more powerful the story becomes. I know from experience that change isn’t easy. We talk about aging and how people get ‘set in their ways’. Abram and Sarah weren’t 21st century newlyweds, heading off to start a new life in a far-off city but still easily able to maintain contact with family and old friends through phone calls or e-mail or Facebook or Zoom. They were old. They’d been married for decades, and they were leaving their homeland and people that they had to know they would never see again.
It wasn’t as simple as packing a bag and getting a limo to the airport, either. I imagine a lot of work, as they gathered their possessions and prepared to leave. I wonder what Sarah was thinking as she packed her bags. Did she decide to just bring everything with her? Or did she go through her stuff, picking and choosing what would be suitable for life on the road. What did Sarah bring with her?
I have to say that I am here this morning with a little baggage.
I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. I suspect some of you may have jammed a carry-on or two under your pew.
I don’t know what is in your bag, what you need to take with you to feel safe or comfortable on your journey, but I do know that I’ve spent a lot of time over the past 20 years doing some packing and unpacking of my own.
I say 20 years, because it was some time in 2004 that my husband, Warner, came home one day and told me that he was entering the discernment process to begin answering God’s call to become an ordained minister. To be honest, I can’t remember where I was or what I was doing when he made that announcement, but I do remember my first thought: What do you mean you are going to be a minister? I just planted perennials!
And I do remember my third, fourth, and fifth thought—which was also my second thought—I didn’t sign up for this!
Uh…to be my husband, for better for worse, in sickness and in health, ‘til death do us part… Yeah, well, okay, I guess I did.
Yeah. I didn’t always like the hours Warner had to work during his years as a reporter, but he was well liked and respected in the community, and I liked that. I liked it when he became the editor of the paper too, with somewhat better hours—and it was useful that he always knew what was going on in and around town. But now I was going to be married to a minister.
A minister? You know, we need them for weddings and funerals and they usually give us a little something to think about on a Sunday morning, but, like, to actually live with one?
Oh yeah, when it came to being married to a minister, I had a really big suitcase right there, tagged and ready to go. I can’t list everything that was in that suitcase, but a lot of it had been packed when I was a kid going to First Baptist Church in Kenora. That suitcase was jam packed with assumptions I had somehow made about what a minister’s wife should be and do. Okay– I can deal with the sensible shoes—I already had those packed in my “I’m a drama teacher” suitcase—but I had a very uncomfortable feeling that Ellen Bloomfield was about to disappear and replaced by: the minister’s wife.
I didn’t want to carry that suitcase around with me—I didn’t even see the need to take the trip. Just carrying that suitcase was burden enough, but then I found out about the lost luggage department. Warner brought me to his first discernment meeting, where I was told that statistically, the people going through this situation—one partner in an established couple being called—had a 50% divorce rate. I don’t know if this is, or was, true, but to hear it…. I was devastated.
Here I am, happily planting perennials in the yard of the house in which I assume I will die one day—not soon—but someday—and my world is turned upside down. I didn’t even know I had written a script for my future life until it was ripped out of my hand. The worst thing of all—people kept coming up to me and saying, ‘isn’t it wonderful’!
All I could do was smile and nod. On the inside, I was in misery, and it was weeks before I could tell my friends. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep myself together if I actually voiced it.
I’m travelling a lot lighter, now. A few years—or decades—of prayer will do that for you. I’ve been able to throw away a lot of stuff I didn’t need to carry in the first place—thoughts like, how can someone really be a man of God if he leaves his socks balled up on the floor of the bedroom.
Change is difficult. Whether that change is something we choose or something that happens to us, dealing with change, making the transition from one state of being to another, is stressful. I had the luxury of time in adjusting to the big changes that came our way as Warner completed his studies. But when I retired in 2016 after 28.5 years of teaching, I was diagnosed with diabetes…and then with cancer.
The realities of living in Dryden mean that you travel to Thunder Bay to see an oncologist –
a four-hour drive. That was a trip I made a few times in the early summer of 2016, and then I learned that my surgery was scheduled in September, at Juravinski. Well, that meant a four-hour drive to either Winnipeg or Thunder Bay for a flight to either Toronto or Hamilton, with all the logistics of finding a place to stay, hopefully close to the hospital…A huge challenge altogether, and a huge expense. But, in the meantime….God spoke. Warner answered a call to come here, to Grace United in Dunnville. Yes, we would be leaving our home and family and friends to come to a completely new place, but there were blessings too. We had a daughter at Brock, and a daughter at Mac. We would be able to see them more than just at Christmas or in the summer break. And as for my surgery, a 45 minute drive from Dunnville to the Juravinski was easy-peasy! Thank goodness, because I woke up with a cold the morning it was scheduled and they cancelled it. How does that story end? Well, here I am. And I am grateful to be here. I am also grateful for the wealth of friendships I have here in Dunnville, all because Warner “left as God said…and took his wife with him”. I am also grateful that my husband has learned not to leave his socks in a ball on the bedroom floor—but I think that our dog Ridley’s penchant for triumphantly carrying them around the house when she finds them has helped that process. And you know what? Those perennials I planted in Dryden? The deer have eaten all but the lupins.
Yes, change is difficult. But we can be assured that God is with us on both sides of every change. I don’t know how long Sarah had to adjust to Abraham’s call, but I suspect that she realized, like I have, that on this type of journey, a change of attitude is way more important than a change of clothing, and I thank God for this gift.
I have realized something else as I continue to unpack and redistribute my luggage for my life’s journey. I have realized that a life unchallenged by change is a life that grows complacent, and if I am living complacently in this world, where so much needs to be done, I am ignoring God’s voice – his call to me. Thanks be to God.

 

 

Music provided with permission through licensing with CCLI License number
2701258 and One License # A-731789