I'd Like To Thank…
Stories
Object:
Contents
What's Up This Week
"I'd like to thank…" by C. David McKirachan
"Glory Road" by C. David McKirachan
"A Young Comforter" by John Sumwalt
"Khodesh, Khodesh" by Sandra Herrmann
* * * * * * * * *
I'd like to thank…
C. David McKirachan
Acts 2:1-21
I'm receiving an award tonight. That may seem like small change to most of you but other than my degrees, a bronze medal in the Mid-Atlantic Conference, and some thank you's, I've never received an award. I didn't really notice that bit of trivia until I realized I had to write an acceptance speech. I've written books, sermons, lectures, essays, poems, eulogies, research papers, treatises, and songs, but I've never written an acceptance speech. That's when it occurred to me, I'd never been given an award.
"I'd like to thank the judges and my wife and my mom…" Somehow the models that I'd gleaned from the few times I'd stumbled or been pulled into the Oscar show didn't seem to fill the bill. I was puzzled and none pulsed.
Now what the heck does all of this have to do with the second chapter of Acts? I've always thought Peter's speech after the shakin' and rattlin' has to be one of the most in your face, lack of tact, slam dunks I've ever seen or heard. Then again such slam dunks rarely win hearts or influence people. I didn't think his was a good model either.
This award is from the American Conference on Diversity. The rabbi and I are both getting it for our work in "… championing the cause of encouraging, facilitating, enhancing, and helping to create inclusive communities." There's no mention of eating, drinking, laughing, supporting, sharing family ties, or being human together. But we're getting the award anyway.
On Pentecost the diversity of the world stopped being an issue. The Spirit blew through it like tissue paper. So much for all the reservations and prejudices that had taken who knows how long to build. People didn't stop being different, it just became secondary.
Okay, maybe that was a good way to start. So I did. Here it is, you get it first.
"Three years ago, I got married. I learned that being different is good. I'm a slow learner. She's a good teacher.
If communities of faith are to have any authenticity or integrity in this post-modern age, we must reach toward something more than a recitation of our version of history or sad litanies of dogma. We must remember that faith is an affirmation of something far beyond our understanding or our limitations. We represent the presence of something that can never be limited or boxed. These two communities of faith have had a close relationship for decades. They will never be the same. But because of their relationship and because of their difference, they learn. And because of our learning, and in the midst of it, we rejoice. And I know that our God does too. Thank you."
It's not Jack Nicholson, but it's got a flavor of Pentecost. Did you know that's a Jewish holiday too?
Glory Road
C. David McKirachan
Romans 8:14-17
When I was a young and impressionable teenager I tripped over a book called Glory Road written by a guy named Robert Heinlein. At the time I was on the fencing team and the hero was a fencer. Needless to say, I identified. This guy went through hell, all for the love of a woman. No sacrifice was too much. Nothing mattered except staying close to her and keeping her safe.
The other night I ran a new members' class and asked them what the word sacrifice meant to them in relation to being part of the church. They all talked about giving up something, but they also said that it wasn't a negative thing. They said that it was more about deciding to be part of something that was important and sticking with it.
Once in a while what you hope will come out in a class actually does. I was trying to get to covenant, to what it means to be part of the family of God. What's it worth? Why would anyone want to do all of this?
There are very few reasonable justifications for the basics of our faith. There are even fewer answers that pin down the eternal issues that are woven through our community of faith. So where are the motivators that have moved the saints beyond the bounds of reasonable daily life? To site the simple answers of Holy Spirit and God's will are to evade how and why we as human beings do anything. I never did appreciate Deus ex machina as a literary technique. If we are not free, fine. But that seems antithetical to all of what Jesus taught and did. And if we are free, then there has to be at least a part of this that makes at least rudimentary sense.
Here I turn back to this business of sacrifice and glory. There are moments in our lives when it makes perfect sense to reach beyond the reasonable or sensible or even practical expectations and justifications. Some of these are desperate moments that reduce our options to attempting what seems impossible for our personal survival or for those precious to us. But to give up that which is reasonable or sensible, to give up the very logic of cause and effect, to lay it down for the purpose of being in relationship with something that we cannot see or touch, now that is a sacrifice beyond the boundaries of any sort of... Reason. Exactly.
And in the process of this sacrifice we find something that is exactly that, beyond reason. We call it Glory. It resonates with power that cannot be explained or justified. Why should it? It comes from beyond our categories. How can it be explained by them?
For all this language, it comes back to the people in that new members' class. They know that sacrifice is not a simple cause and effect. They may not have experienced many of the resonant or in-a-mirror-dimly moments of Glory, but they surely see beyond the limitations of our logic and the truth that those limitations don't only speak in negatives but of the possibilities out there beyond them.
The guy in Glory Road found out that the woman he'd given his everything for was empress of the known parts of the galaxy. There were a few hold-out systems, but she was working on them. You kind of have to read the book. What can be told is how his sacrifices lit everything that defined him and created for him a way of life, the Glory Road. I guess I still identify.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
A Young Comforter
John Sumwalt
John 14:8-17 (25-27)
I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.
-- John 14:25-26
My mother's father was killed in an auto accident four years before I was born, so my paternal grandfather was the only grandfather I knew. He worked as a carpenter in Madison until he retired at the age of 67. He and Grandma moved back to their house in the little village of Loyd just one mile from our farm. I was very excited because Grandpa had promised that now he would have more time to take my brothers and me fishing and hunting. I couldn't wait till spring and the first day of fishing season.
Then Grandpa became ill with a nagging cough that wouldn't go away. He was hospitalized and died within a few days from what the doctor called pleurisy. March 7, 1961, is a day I will never forget. I had been praying all day for a miracle as we waited for Dad to come home from the hospital where all of the adults in the family had been summoned to Grandpa's bedside. Kids were not allowed in hospitals in those days. My brothers and I were sledding, just after dark, under the yard light on the hill between the house and the barn, when Dad came home, walked up to meet us and with his voice breaking, said, "Daddy's gone." I looked at the world differently from that moment on. My daddy had lost his daddy. Tears come to my eyes even now, almost fifty years later, as I remember the deep sadness I heard in Dad's voice that day.
Deep sadness characterized all of our lives in the days that followed as we said good-bye to Grandpa. What happened next was to have an even more profound impact on my young life.
Grandma did not want to be alone at night in the big house after Grandpa died. So, at ten years old, I was appointed to stay over with Grandma for several nights. I listened as Grandma talked about Grandpa. "James," she called him, "the boy I fell in love with." Everybody else called him Archie.
I was seeing a side of my grandmother I had not known before. She told how she and Grandpa met in Nickerson, Kansas. Grandma was in Normal School studying to be a teacher. Grandpa was a student in the business college there. This was before typewriters. He was going to be male secretary in a business office in Kansas City.
They met one Sunday night after church. Grandpa came up to Grandma and offered to walk her home. "Well," she said, "I don't know you."
Grandpa said, "Well, let me introduce myself. I'm James Archie Sumwalt." They shook hands and went around and sat on the back steps of the church and got acquainted. They began to go together. Grandma told how James would send her notes in short hand, which her girlfriend would have to translate for her. She started going to the basketball games to watch him play. He was the star free throw shooter in a time when they still shot underhanded and each team had a designated penalty shooter.
It wasn't long before young James and Nellie were in love and had decided to spend their lives together. The year was 1913. Grandma said that Grandpa wanted to get married right away, but she said, "I told him I'm not going to marry anyone in 1913. I'm taking enough chance as it is." They got married on January 1, 1914.
I was a little sad when Grandma got a dog and my services as the designated comforter were no longer needed. It wasn't until many years later, after Grandma joined Grandpa in heaven, that I realized what a great privilege I had been given.
John Sumwalt is the pastor of Our Lord's United Methodist Church in New Berlin, Wisconsin, and a noted storyteller. He is the author of nine books, including the acclaimed Vision Stories series and How to Preach the Miracles: Why People Don't Believe Them and What You Can Do About It. John and his wife Jo Perry-Sumwalt served for three years as the co-editors of StoryShare. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary (UDTS), Sumwalt received the Herbert Manning Jr. award for parish ministry from UDTS in 1997.
Khodesh, Khodesh
Sandra Herrmann
Acts 2:1-21
A generation ago, the charismatic movement was enlivening and splitting American churches. Pentecostal practices like speaking in tongues, miraculous healings, and being "slain in the Spirit" (in which people simply fell over, supposedly overcome by the Holy Spirit) were suddenly invading the white middle-class. Everywhere, clergy and laity argued over their suitability in worship services, or even private worship.
I believed that if we were called to do the same things that Jesus had done, as John's gospel claimed, that we ought to see the kinds of events recorded in the book of Acts. I felt a fresh wind of the Spirit would heal the church. Friends kept pressing books into my hands about people who had stepped out in faith and established vital ministries in some of the most violent neighborhoods of our major cities, relying on God for all their needs, which were met, often miraculously.
I wanted a faith like that: a faith that could keep going in the face of whatever the world could throw at me. I wanted to see the hand of God moving in my life, in my church, in my denomination.
So at the invitation of a member of my church, I started attending a multi-denominational charismatic prayer group. A dozen of us, from all strata of society, we met one evening a week, sharing our struggles, asking for prayers, studying the Bible and modern books on the work of the Holy Spirit. We always had lively discussions, and closed with a prayer circle. And almost always, someone would pray in tongues.
While I loved the group, believed in intercessory prayer, and had seen and heard of healings, the speaking in tongues bothered me. It seemed to me that people could pretend to be speaking in tongues, or might simply be babbling nonsense. How would one know? None of the people I'd heard praying were speaking languages I would recognize -- no French, German, Spanish, or Italian. They shook their heads in sorrow. I just didn't know what I was missing. How wonderful it feels to be praying in tongues. They expressed suspicion that I was resisting this gift because it would be under God's control, not mine.
I shook my head back at them. This was only one small part of the work of the Holy Spirit, and Paul said it certainly wasn't the most important gift of the Spirit. The apostles hadn't just burst into praying in tongues on Pentecost, after all. They had stepped out of that upper room into the street to preach about Jesus as the Messiah, and the languages they spoke were known to the people listening. They didn't do this to feel good, but to reach out!
Well, they were right that I was afraid to get into having this spooky thing happen to me, but it was also true that I saw no need for praying in an unknown language. There was too much emphasis on this spectacular gift, and too little on the gifts you have to work on, such as patience and gentleness and kindness.
Then one night, I asked for prayers for myself. I had been hospitalized for a pinched nerve in my neck, followed by traction at home and therapy twice a week for three months. I had done well, but a few days before, the pain was back. My doctor was talking surgery on my spine. Three of our members immediately laid hands on me and prayed, and the pain was instantly gone! My gratitude to God and my friends was overwhelming. As I drove home, I was thanking God -- out loud -- and finally told God that maybe it would be okay for me to "try out" a little praying in tongues.
Instantly, a string of words came out of my mouth in a language I didn't know. I repeated that string of words several times, and then stopped. I was amazed! But, being the person I am, I immediately started analyzing the experience: Had I ever heard a language that sounded like that? Maybe I'd just been babbling to make myself feel good. Could I even remember the words I'd been saying? I could remember just one word that repeated itself three times: Khodesh.
This was not a one-time event. Over the years, I would from time to time feel called to simply open my mouth and let the words of prayer flow, whether I understood them or the reason for them or not. But as I moved into parish ministry, I let go of most of my Pentecostal experience. It had no place in the congregations I was serving, and although I was supportive of those who talked about their experiences, I hesitated to talk about my own.
Thirty years later, I was able to take a course in Hebrew at a nearby Jewish school. I loved it! Eventually, we began to read prayers in Hebrew. It greatly enriched my prayer experience to use the Hebrew words. And my parishioners and I were learning more about our faith as I preached about what I was learning.
And then my Hebrew class was reading the sixth chapter of Isaiah. The Hebrew teacher read the song of the angels around the throne of God and talked about a game that Israeli children play, bouncing and repeating the first three words of their prayer: "Khodesh, khodesh, khodesh" -- "Holy, Holy, Holy." I learned all of that Hebrew prayer there in that class: "Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory." It had been the perfect response for my release from pain back then.
I had hesitated to speak in tongues for fear I was fooling myself. I had finally quit worrying about those things as, over the years, I praised God in a language that was foreign to me. Foreign, that is, until I studied Hebrew thirty years later.
Sandra Herrmann is a retired United Methodist pastor living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
**************
StoryShare, May 23, 2010, issue.
Copyright 2010 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
What's Up This Week
"I'd like to thank…" by C. David McKirachan
"Glory Road" by C. David McKirachan
"A Young Comforter" by John Sumwalt
"Khodesh, Khodesh" by Sandra Herrmann
* * * * * * * * *
I'd like to thank…
C. David McKirachan
Acts 2:1-21
I'm receiving an award tonight. That may seem like small change to most of you but other than my degrees, a bronze medal in the Mid-Atlantic Conference, and some thank you's, I've never received an award. I didn't really notice that bit of trivia until I realized I had to write an acceptance speech. I've written books, sermons, lectures, essays, poems, eulogies, research papers, treatises, and songs, but I've never written an acceptance speech. That's when it occurred to me, I'd never been given an award.
"I'd like to thank the judges and my wife and my mom…" Somehow the models that I'd gleaned from the few times I'd stumbled or been pulled into the Oscar show didn't seem to fill the bill. I was puzzled and none pulsed.
Now what the heck does all of this have to do with the second chapter of Acts? I've always thought Peter's speech after the shakin' and rattlin' has to be one of the most in your face, lack of tact, slam dunks I've ever seen or heard. Then again such slam dunks rarely win hearts or influence people. I didn't think his was a good model either.
This award is from the American Conference on Diversity. The rabbi and I are both getting it for our work in "… championing the cause of encouraging, facilitating, enhancing, and helping to create inclusive communities." There's no mention of eating, drinking, laughing, supporting, sharing family ties, or being human together. But we're getting the award anyway.
On Pentecost the diversity of the world stopped being an issue. The Spirit blew through it like tissue paper. So much for all the reservations and prejudices that had taken who knows how long to build. People didn't stop being different, it just became secondary.
Okay, maybe that was a good way to start. So I did. Here it is, you get it first.
"Three years ago, I got married. I learned that being different is good. I'm a slow learner. She's a good teacher.
If communities of faith are to have any authenticity or integrity in this post-modern age, we must reach toward something more than a recitation of our version of history or sad litanies of dogma. We must remember that faith is an affirmation of something far beyond our understanding or our limitations. We represent the presence of something that can never be limited or boxed. These two communities of faith have had a close relationship for decades. They will never be the same. But because of their relationship and because of their difference, they learn. And because of our learning, and in the midst of it, we rejoice. And I know that our God does too. Thank you."
It's not Jack Nicholson, but it's got a flavor of Pentecost. Did you know that's a Jewish holiday too?
Glory Road
C. David McKirachan
Romans 8:14-17
When I was a young and impressionable teenager I tripped over a book called Glory Road written by a guy named Robert Heinlein. At the time I was on the fencing team and the hero was a fencer. Needless to say, I identified. This guy went through hell, all for the love of a woman. No sacrifice was too much. Nothing mattered except staying close to her and keeping her safe.
The other night I ran a new members' class and asked them what the word sacrifice meant to them in relation to being part of the church. They all talked about giving up something, but they also said that it wasn't a negative thing. They said that it was more about deciding to be part of something that was important and sticking with it.
Once in a while what you hope will come out in a class actually does. I was trying to get to covenant, to what it means to be part of the family of God. What's it worth? Why would anyone want to do all of this?
There are very few reasonable justifications for the basics of our faith. There are even fewer answers that pin down the eternal issues that are woven through our community of faith. So where are the motivators that have moved the saints beyond the bounds of reasonable daily life? To site the simple answers of Holy Spirit and God's will are to evade how and why we as human beings do anything. I never did appreciate Deus ex machina as a literary technique. If we are not free, fine. But that seems antithetical to all of what Jesus taught and did. And if we are free, then there has to be at least a part of this that makes at least rudimentary sense.
Here I turn back to this business of sacrifice and glory. There are moments in our lives when it makes perfect sense to reach beyond the reasonable or sensible or even practical expectations and justifications. Some of these are desperate moments that reduce our options to attempting what seems impossible for our personal survival or for those precious to us. But to give up that which is reasonable or sensible, to give up the very logic of cause and effect, to lay it down for the purpose of being in relationship with something that we cannot see or touch, now that is a sacrifice beyond the boundaries of any sort of... Reason. Exactly.
And in the process of this sacrifice we find something that is exactly that, beyond reason. We call it Glory. It resonates with power that cannot be explained or justified. Why should it? It comes from beyond our categories. How can it be explained by them?
For all this language, it comes back to the people in that new members' class. They know that sacrifice is not a simple cause and effect. They may not have experienced many of the resonant or in-a-mirror-dimly moments of Glory, but they surely see beyond the limitations of our logic and the truth that those limitations don't only speak in negatives but of the possibilities out there beyond them.
The guy in Glory Road found out that the woman he'd given his everything for was empress of the known parts of the galaxy. There were a few hold-out systems, but she was working on them. You kind of have to read the book. What can be told is how his sacrifices lit everything that defined him and created for him a way of life, the Glory Road. I guess I still identify.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
A Young Comforter
John Sumwalt
John 14:8-17 (25-27)
I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.
-- John 14:25-26
My mother's father was killed in an auto accident four years before I was born, so my paternal grandfather was the only grandfather I knew. He worked as a carpenter in Madison until he retired at the age of 67. He and Grandma moved back to their house in the little village of Loyd just one mile from our farm. I was very excited because Grandpa had promised that now he would have more time to take my brothers and me fishing and hunting. I couldn't wait till spring and the first day of fishing season.
Then Grandpa became ill with a nagging cough that wouldn't go away. He was hospitalized and died within a few days from what the doctor called pleurisy. March 7, 1961, is a day I will never forget. I had been praying all day for a miracle as we waited for Dad to come home from the hospital where all of the adults in the family had been summoned to Grandpa's bedside. Kids were not allowed in hospitals in those days. My brothers and I were sledding, just after dark, under the yard light on the hill between the house and the barn, when Dad came home, walked up to meet us and with his voice breaking, said, "Daddy's gone." I looked at the world differently from that moment on. My daddy had lost his daddy. Tears come to my eyes even now, almost fifty years later, as I remember the deep sadness I heard in Dad's voice that day.
Deep sadness characterized all of our lives in the days that followed as we said good-bye to Grandpa. What happened next was to have an even more profound impact on my young life.
Grandma did not want to be alone at night in the big house after Grandpa died. So, at ten years old, I was appointed to stay over with Grandma for several nights. I listened as Grandma talked about Grandpa. "James," she called him, "the boy I fell in love with." Everybody else called him Archie.
I was seeing a side of my grandmother I had not known before. She told how she and Grandpa met in Nickerson, Kansas. Grandma was in Normal School studying to be a teacher. Grandpa was a student in the business college there. This was before typewriters. He was going to be male secretary in a business office in Kansas City.
They met one Sunday night after church. Grandpa came up to Grandma and offered to walk her home. "Well," she said, "I don't know you."
Grandpa said, "Well, let me introduce myself. I'm James Archie Sumwalt." They shook hands and went around and sat on the back steps of the church and got acquainted. They began to go together. Grandma told how James would send her notes in short hand, which her girlfriend would have to translate for her. She started going to the basketball games to watch him play. He was the star free throw shooter in a time when they still shot underhanded and each team had a designated penalty shooter.
It wasn't long before young James and Nellie were in love and had decided to spend their lives together. The year was 1913. Grandma said that Grandpa wanted to get married right away, but she said, "I told him I'm not going to marry anyone in 1913. I'm taking enough chance as it is." They got married on January 1, 1914.
I was a little sad when Grandma got a dog and my services as the designated comforter were no longer needed. It wasn't until many years later, after Grandma joined Grandpa in heaven, that I realized what a great privilege I had been given.
John Sumwalt is the pastor of Our Lord's United Methodist Church in New Berlin, Wisconsin, and a noted storyteller. He is the author of nine books, including the acclaimed Vision Stories series and How to Preach the Miracles: Why People Don't Believe Them and What You Can Do About It. John and his wife Jo Perry-Sumwalt served for three years as the co-editors of StoryShare. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary (UDTS), Sumwalt received the Herbert Manning Jr. award for parish ministry from UDTS in 1997.
Khodesh, Khodesh
Sandra Herrmann
Acts 2:1-21
A generation ago, the charismatic movement was enlivening and splitting American churches. Pentecostal practices like speaking in tongues, miraculous healings, and being "slain in the Spirit" (in which people simply fell over, supposedly overcome by the Holy Spirit) were suddenly invading the white middle-class. Everywhere, clergy and laity argued over their suitability in worship services, or even private worship.
I believed that if we were called to do the same things that Jesus had done, as John's gospel claimed, that we ought to see the kinds of events recorded in the book of Acts. I felt a fresh wind of the Spirit would heal the church. Friends kept pressing books into my hands about people who had stepped out in faith and established vital ministries in some of the most violent neighborhoods of our major cities, relying on God for all their needs, which were met, often miraculously.
I wanted a faith like that: a faith that could keep going in the face of whatever the world could throw at me. I wanted to see the hand of God moving in my life, in my church, in my denomination.
So at the invitation of a member of my church, I started attending a multi-denominational charismatic prayer group. A dozen of us, from all strata of society, we met one evening a week, sharing our struggles, asking for prayers, studying the Bible and modern books on the work of the Holy Spirit. We always had lively discussions, and closed with a prayer circle. And almost always, someone would pray in tongues.
While I loved the group, believed in intercessory prayer, and had seen and heard of healings, the speaking in tongues bothered me. It seemed to me that people could pretend to be speaking in tongues, or might simply be babbling nonsense. How would one know? None of the people I'd heard praying were speaking languages I would recognize -- no French, German, Spanish, or Italian. They shook their heads in sorrow. I just didn't know what I was missing. How wonderful it feels to be praying in tongues. They expressed suspicion that I was resisting this gift because it would be under God's control, not mine.
I shook my head back at them. This was only one small part of the work of the Holy Spirit, and Paul said it certainly wasn't the most important gift of the Spirit. The apostles hadn't just burst into praying in tongues on Pentecost, after all. They had stepped out of that upper room into the street to preach about Jesus as the Messiah, and the languages they spoke were known to the people listening. They didn't do this to feel good, but to reach out!
Well, they were right that I was afraid to get into having this spooky thing happen to me, but it was also true that I saw no need for praying in an unknown language. There was too much emphasis on this spectacular gift, and too little on the gifts you have to work on, such as patience and gentleness and kindness.
Then one night, I asked for prayers for myself. I had been hospitalized for a pinched nerve in my neck, followed by traction at home and therapy twice a week for three months. I had done well, but a few days before, the pain was back. My doctor was talking surgery on my spine. Three of our members immediately laid hands on me and prayed, and the pain was instantly gone! My gratitude to God and my friends was overwhelming. As I drove home, I was thanking God -- out loud -- and finally told God that maybe it would be okay for me to "try out" a little praying in tongues.
Instantly, a string of words came out of my mouth in a language I didn't know. I repeated that string of words several times, and then stopped. I was amazed! But, being the person I am, I immediately started analyzing the experience: Had I ever heard a language that sounded like that? Maybe I'd just been babbling to make myself feel good. Could I even remember the words I'd been saying? I could remember just one word that repeated itself three times: Khodesh.
This was not a one-time event. Over the years, I would from time to time feel called to simply open my mouth and let the words of prayer flow, whether I understood them or the reason for them or not. But as I moved into parish ministry, I let go of most of my Pentecostal experience. It had no place in the congregations I was serving, and although I was supportive of those who talked about their experiences, I hesitated to talk about my own.
Thirty years later, I was able to take a course in Hebrew at a nearby Jewish school. I loved it! Eventually, we began to read prayers in Hebrew. It greatly enriched my prayer experience to use the Hebrew words. And my parishioners and I were learning more about our faith as I preached about what I was learning.
And then my Hebrew class was reading the sixth chapter of Isaiah. The Hebrew teacher read the song of the angels around the throne of God and talked about a game that Israeli children play, bouncing and repeating the first three words of their prayer: "Khodesh, khodesh, khodesh" -- "Holy, Holy, Holy." I learned all of that Hebrew prayer there in that class: "Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory." It had been the perfect response for my release from pain back then.
I had hesitated to speak in tongues for fear I was fooling myself. I had finally quit worrying about those things as, over the years, I praised God in a language that was foreign to me. Foreign, that is, until I studied Hebrew thirty years later.
Sandra Herrmann is a retired United Methodist pastor living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
**************
StoryShare, May 23, 2010, issue.
Copyright 2010 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
