refuge & remembrance (a sermon on Psalm 71)

My home church is selling their building and dissolving the congregation at the end of this month, so I was grateful to get a Saturday afternoon call to pinch hit preach on Sunday. This is the last-minute sermon I preached, on Psalm 71.

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About twenty-five years ago, I left Roanoke for college across the state. I lasted approximately two weeks in the lonely dorm room before giving up and coming home, a classic case of “failure to launch.”

That was a weird time. All my friends were gone, off at college having what seemed to me the time of their lives while I returned to my childhood bedroom and got special dispensation to be a late-registering commuter student at a school here in town. I hung out with my grandparents a lot that semester. I was pretty ashamed and uncertain and unhappy.

That season didn’t last long: I transferred back to the school on the other side of the state the next fall, and the second try worked out. But it was a weird year of feeling left behind, out of sync and just, well, WRONG. One part of that year that I remember with real clarity is the way this congregation became a refuge for me. Pastor David Miller met me on campus to talk about what was going on. More than one person sent me notes saying that they had had very similar experiences in their own young adulthood, people I would never have guessed struggled with leaving home like I did. And the church made specific space for me, asking me to teach Sunday School and finding room for me to be something other than a youth group alumnus.

In that weird year, this congregation was a real refuge for me. The last couple of years have been another weird season (I suppose we all get a few of them in our lifetimes), as I’ve left formal ministry and struggled to find work and community that makes sense for whatever is next and, once again, predictably, you all have been a kind of refuge.

The concept of “refuge” is such an interesting one. It’s something we need when we are in danger, when we are lost, when we simply don’t know what comes next. It’s a safe space to catch our breath, a protected place where we’re sheltered from whatever trouble is presenting itself or pursuing us.