Growing up in a Southern Baptist Church, I, of course, learned the Biblical story of creation. The notion of God creating the world at the beginning of time fascinated me.  I would lie in bed at night, kicking the covers and wondering, “If God created the world, who created God?  And what came before time?”   Once I asked these questions in Sunday School, but not expecting the queries of a budding theologian, my poor teacher looked like she had seen a meteor streaking through the classroom.

A couple of years later, my older sister, who loved astronomy, saved her money and bought a telescope.  One clear night she took my parents and me into the backyard and showed us the craters on the Moon, the rings around Saturn, the red color of Mars, the light of a binary star.  Later she told me the most mind-blowing fact I had ever heard:  what we see in the sky is really the past.  Distances in the universe are so vast that it takes light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, over four years to travel from the closest start, Alpha Centauri, to our solar system. Most of the stars, much further away, radiated the light we see long, long ago, and some of them might not even exist now. When we look into the sky, we think we are looking at a place, but we are literally looking into time.

My fascination with those two perspectives – place and time, creation and the cosmos – should have warned me.  If I had known they were pointing me toward ministry,  I probably would have run.  But, really, why shouldn’t the two be entwined?  And why shouldn’t they stagger a young person’s mind?  In the backyard of a small post-war house in Knoxville, Tennessee, looking through an instrument advertised for amateurs in Sky and Telescope Magazine, I saw other worlds.  Other worlds!   I had no concept then of the billions of stars and galaxies or of black holes.  What I had was wonder.  And wonder is a religious experience, an experience of what Rudolph Otto called the numinous, something totally other than ordinary life, the holy.

Now if you’ll allow me just one further bit of cosmology, in an article in the New York Times science writer Dennis Overbye explained that the beginning of the universe also happened not in space but in time.  Sure, the Big Bang started with “a grapefruit-sized ball of energies,” but it didn’t expand into space, because space is defined by where the universe is.  In fact, the Big Bang expanded the energy into time.  Again, the further we look into space, the more distant is the past we see.  Here’s the other piece, though.  All the “information and history available at any one place/time is slightly different from that in another.”  The person sitting in the pew next to you never has exactly the same information you do. All of that means the center of the universe, for you, is wherever you are.  “Yes, says Overbye, “you are the center of the universe.”

This came as good news to me. Because occasionally, in a very loving and gentle way, my husband tells me I am not the center of the world.  He says it when I am feeling too much weight on my shoulders, responsible for everything a congregation does.  You’re not the center of the world.  Now I can tell him that he’s wrong became I am in fact the center of the entire universe!

Seriously, all of this cosmology has implications, in a beautifully metaphorical way, for this interim period.   At this moment, we perceive the light reflected from what this congregation did in the past.  And what we do, the decisions, the work, the experiments, will shine into its future, determining and shaping how people experience their congregation and engage their world ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now.  It’s all held in the present moment which makes each of those moments incredibly important.

Consider one living illustration.  Most people don’t think about the fact that Puritan congregations, as which this congregation began, failed to address the needs of children in any way. There was no physical place for them – no classrooms, no play area, no chapel – and no time set aside for them.  The young people sat quietly in the pews with their parents for very long worship services.  Life changes, though, and instruction for young people first happened here in Newburyport, in a combined community effort in a room at the courthouse.  By 1824 First Religious Society members, evolving away from their Puritan theology, contemplating a new world, a world budding with Transcendentalist thought, felt dissatisfied with the community effort.   At a meeting one cold winter night they decided boldly to go where no local congregation had gone before and establish their own Sunday school. They accomplished it that very year.

Because of those children, they also began to move outside the walls, exposing children to nature and celebrating with church picnics, the first one daringly held at Devil’s Den and Devil’s Basin in Newbury.  The picnics became so festive, with great spreads of food and flowers, and they attracted so many people, that they scandalized this town with its Puritan roots, as smacking of outright “popery.”  The people of the town “ridiculed” one First Religious Society procession down High Street consisting of thirteen carriages until these same detractors soon organized their own congregational picnics.  Don’t you love it?  FRS liberated picnics!  (By the way, I noticed downstairs last Sunday that you are still consuming great quantities of food.)

This isn’t only about history, though; it is about the future.  Right now, across mainstream religions in America, including many Unitarian Universalist congregations, attendance in religious education has declined.  Religious professionals pull their hair out trying to figure out what they can do to involve people in a changing and stressed culture.  Sunday soccer and other sports leagues, school projects, and busy weekdays induce people to sleep in on Sunday.  Your Young Church has thrived and pulled young people into community.  If you attribute it to the gifted professional leadership of Julie-Parker Amery, I will agree wholeheartedly   Cite committed, enthusiastic volunteers, and I will say, “you bet.”  I would insist, too, though, that there is a commitment to children and youth in the star stuff of these walls, right along with an explorer’s determination not to be bound by the laws of organizational gravity.  People here keep making new beginnings for our young people.  I’m not trying to give you a mandate, but if I put my imagination to work, I could envision an effort to use social media to move your ministry to young people beyond the walls and keep our youth connected to this community during college years.  I could see the strengths of the present, inherited from the past, taken boldly into the future.

You know what I am saying.  Great congregations don’t spend years waiting:  they dream, and they keep going forward.  Every moment in a congregation’s life, even during an interim period, is the center of the universe for that congregation then.  And on this day, when you as a congregation and I as an interim minister make a covenant, a set of promises for this time together, you need to know that although I am here for a set time, I am fully here for you, in heart and soul.   As I have talked with people these past weeks, two or three have asked me a thoughtful question:  As an interim, knowing you will have to leave, don’t you hold back?  I understand the question. Sometimes interim ministry feels like falling through a wormhole in time:  you get to know people, build trust, love them, begin to detach, turn them over to someone else, and say goodbye in a very compressed time, shall we say at the emotional speed of light?   But let me tell you a non-secret.  I carry the congregations and people I have served as an interim minister very close to my heart. Every day I remember them, offer prayers for them, and let my heart break for them if I hear they are having a hard time.

That our time together with people is short does not mean we don’t do it with complete heart and soul.  If that were inevitable, we’d have to deny that teachers who see students come and go every year, or parents who have children with illnesses that will shorten their lives, can devote just as much passion and commitment to their relationships.  And isn’t this the way of life for everyone?  Dennis Overbye writes that because of the nature of the universe, “there is not a direction in which we can look to see the future – except perhaps in our own hearts and dreams.  All we know is right now.”  All any of us knows, my friends, is that we are here right now, at the center of our particular universe, with a chance to live and love fully and to make a difference to those we will never know in the future.  You could call it simply carpe diem, “seize the day”, but I prefer to think of it as “savor the day.”  To savor is to appreciate, to stand in the face of the universe and feel wonder that we are here.   It is a holy thing to do.

What I ask of you during this interim period is to participate, not just with your feet, but with passion and commitment as well.  Be willing to look into your own hearts, and your collective heart, and dream.  If you do that magic will shine through to anyone who considers ministry in this congregation.

Thursday night the Transition Team was gathering here, in this building, for our usual meeting.   One of its members came in and asked, “Did you see that moon?”  We said no, we hadn’t noticed it.  He said, “It’s worth taking a few minutes.”

So outside we trooped to look at a breathtaking Harvest Moon shining above this sweet, lovely seaside town.  Have you ever thought how it never grows old, the sight of the moon and stars, how it never fails to inspire awe?

As we walked back into the building, someone said, “We live in an amazing place.”

And an amazing time.   So much further than the eye can see, we surely do.

Copyright, M. Susan Milnor, 2016.