God said to Abraham, “As for your wife Sarai, you will no longer call her Sarai. Her name will now be Sarah. 16 I will bless her and even give you a son from her. I will bless her so that she will become nations, and kings of peoples will come from her.” 17 Abraham fell on his face and laughed. He said to himself, Can a 100-year-old man become a father, or Sarah, a 90-year-old woman, have a child? 18 To God Abraham said, “If only you would accept Ishmael!”
19 But God said, “No, your wife Sarah will give birth to a son for you, and you will name him Isaac. I will set up my covenant with him and with his descendants after him as an enduring covenant. 20 As for Ishmael, I’ve heard your request. I will bless him and make him fertile and give him many, many descendants. He will be the ancestor of twelve tribal leaders, and I will make a great nation of him. 21 But I will set up my covenant with Isaac, who will be born to Sarah at this time next year.” 22 When God finished speaking to him, God ascended, leaving Abraham alone. (Common English Bible)
First Christian Church 90th
Anniversary
I
still remember the garish yellow chairs. They were almost a punchline in the
church plant I was raised in. Bright canary yellow and patently uncomfortable,
they were so memorable an eyesore that for several years, the church would give
them away as gag gifts to our graduating high school seniors.
But
that is what I associated church with as a child. The bright yellow chairs that
fit into a trailer that we took with us from one elementary school to another
for the better part of a decade while the church went about the long and
painstaking process of searching for a piece of land, saving up the funds for
the down payment, hiring architects to design the church building, and then
saving up to have that built.
Those
memories make my love for a solid, historic home even stronger, because I know
exactly what it is like to belong to a homeless church. Home matters.
It
is easy to forget, because it was so long ago, that even our congregation did
not originally have this historic building. It was planted in 1928 as a house
church before worshiping temporarily at the Longview YMCA while architect
George Macpherson was making the design that led to this structure being built
in 1930 and 1931 on land that R.A. Long donated.
We
turn ninety this year. First Christian Church is older than Moses was when he
went to Pharaoh to demand the release of the Hebrew slaves, we are older than
the prophetess Anna when she blessed the newborn Christ in Luke 2, and we are
now as old as Abraham’s wife Sarai when she was renamed Sarah by the Lord and
told that she would bear a son and name him Isaac.
But
the ninety-year-old Sarah would do even more than that. Even though Abraham
disagrees here with God over the rejection of Abraham’s son with Hagar,
Ishmael, God is still poised to make Sarah a mother of nations through her son,
Isaac.
Abraham
and Sarah don’t really know what to do at first with this pronouncement—after
all, Sarah is ninety and has been barren up to this point, which is why Abraham
had a son with Hagar to begin with—but that matters not to God. Whatever your
age, God manages to find a purpose for you, and for each of us. And that age
tends to come with it some truly astounding stories and impact.
That
is something I have never stopped being grateful for as the pastor of a church
with such a deep past. People visiting on Sundays for worship, or on a Saturday
for a wedding, or even amid their tears for a funeral, will tell me about how
they once attended children’s church here, or were baptized here, or were
married here. They became regular, living reminders to me of the Holy Spirit’s
presence not just across space, but across time.
It
also makes it impossible to count the number of people who have been impacted
or affected in a positive and beneficial way by the presence in Longview of
First Christian Church over the past nine decades, but I would be willing to
bet that such a number is in the tens of thousands.
That
is a nation that this church is, in some sense, the mother of. We are a mother
of nations.
And
if we scoff at how this could really be the true scope and scale of our impact
across time, it is likely because we ourselves cannot grasp just how great that
impact has truly been.
From
our home across from Lake Sacajawea here at 20th Avenue and Kessler
Boulevard, out into the mission field and the kingdom, have gone tens of
thousands before us. From our home here today, we too shall issue forth to love
and serve in the name of Jesus Christ, making ourselves a part of that selfsame
nation, and children of that selfsame mother.
Abraham
and Sarah responded to God’s call in their own way, just as we do now, just as
we did reaching all the way back First Christian Church’s inception in 1928,
and just as all churches do. I cannot say for absolute certainty that FCC never
had some version of the garish yellow chairs as prank gifts in our past. But it
would be pretty illuminating if we did!
Because
such an artifact would add to the many we already have that lend tangible
witness to how our congregation has changed and evolved over these nine decades.
We have experienced the leadership of eight different settled senior pastors,
and the three of whom who are here today represent a combined twenty-seven
years of ministry here. We have gone from being a congregation with an all-male
lay leadership to being a congregation with a majority-female lay leadership. We
have experienced changes in in our worship music, in our choice of Bible
translation, and so much more. And still additional important decisions on the
direction of our congregation’s future lay ahead of us.
But
what has not changed is the presence of God whom we worship, the God who has
been revealed to us in Jesus Christ, and the God who guides us still today by
the light of the Holy Spirit. That God has always been present here among us,
and if we are a great church, it is only because we serve a great God.
May
we continue to celebrate that divine greatness in our days and weeks to come
together while I still remain your pastor, and may our affirmation of the great
story and history of our congregation be a part of that celebration. May we
forever give thanks to God for the mother of our own nation of sorts, of loved
ones and neighbors, of friends and family: First Christian Church (Disciples of
Christ) of Longview, Washington.
Thank
you for being here today. Thank you for celebrating with us today. May God
bless you.
Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
February
11, 2018
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