As I write this article, I am preparing to board a plane for South Dakota, where I have been invited to preach at the 50th Anniversary of the Scotland United Church of Christ. This church was built in 1963, formed from the merger of three German Congregational churches and an Evangelical and Reformed church in and around the small town of Scotland, South Dakota, my ancestral home. Having grown up in the Petersburg German Congregational Church, located about a half a mile from our family farm, this move was a symbol of following a “still-speaking” God who yearns for unification rather than division, unity encompassing our diversity.
For a theologically conservative group of people, still remembering the formation of the Petersburg church in 1876 by my forbear, Jacob Orth, (a circuit minister who literally ‘died in the saddle’) this move was a difficult one. Closing this church asked for a vision and faith that pulled at the heartstrings of my parents and relatives. It came as a harsh and dreadful love, indicating the letting go of a great deal of the familiar and known. It took deep faith and trust that God had a new vision for our community. “God is still speaking” does not mean we always are happy with what we may be hearing. But as Scripture says, “The truth shall set you free,” to which we wryly add, ‘but first it will make you miserable.’
As a ninth-grader in the Scotland High School, the move was an exiting and joyful one. Here I could enter the community of many other students my age and share in the youth group activities. I even could play the new organ at the church, sharing the Sunday worship music with two adults. At that age, it was hard for me to understand the agony and heart-break of many of the people from the four churches who could not move into the future with open hands and hearts, and who left the congregations before the merger occurred. My own parents were instrumental in responding to the “still-speaking” God, and saw their way through the grief and letting go of the old, believing in the transformation of those feelings into compassion and a hope renewed. Little did we know that the new sanctuary would be the place of my father’s funeral in just three years, when I was a senior in high school. But God’s promise that “death itself cannot separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus” took on a visceral reality in that time, one that continues to offer me hope in the midst of dangers, toils, and snares of a fully engaged life.
So now I return to that congregation to try to offer back some of the love that God and that community shared with me. The stories from the Bible held the keys of forgiveness, grace, love, reconciliation, hope, and justice, even when they were interpreted in ways with which I did not agree. The kernel of the story is Love, and the Paschal Mystery of life, death, and resurrection prevails.