While my life as a layperson is still a recent memory, I wanted to share with you some of my first impressions of ministry at Saint Nicholas.

First, I feel incredibly fortunate. Ordained ministry has been my dream for many years and being at Saint Nicholas represents the culmination of many years of work and hope. The congregation has been wonderfully welcoming to Linda and me. Upon our arrival, we received not one but two baskets of goodies! Calvert County seems to be a wonderful place to live, and we look forward to becoming more familiar with it.

It has been wonderful too, meeting the members. Some have dropped by the office during the week, and let me encourage you to do that. It gives us a chance to chat and share a prayer and get to know each other in a less pressured environment than the line going out of the worship service. I’m doing my level best to learn all the names and a little about each of you – help me by wearing nametags and by coming by to visit.

Second, leading worship is an awesomely powerful experience. This is the assembled people of God, the Body of Christ in this place. I’d encourage any of you who have never assisted in worship to take the opportunity to get trained to do it. You’ll get a sense of what we call liminality – being literally on the threshold of a different world, a servant of a Power of which you can see only the outline but of which you are completely certain (read Isaiah chapter 6 – there’s a reason why it is the basis of the “Holy, Holy, Holy” that we sing just before the Eucharistic prayer).

Third, day-to-day ministry is every bit as awesome, if a bit more subtle. In the past couple of weeks I’ve met with a couple planning their wedding, talked with a prospective member about why she wants to be baptized, spoken with a member dealing with a death in the family, blessed a passel of book bags, met an absolutely charming couple in their nineties (married 65 years!), laughed with a bright and funny group of confirmands … you get the idea. It is fashionable to be cynical and fearful, but seeing the world truly as it is, is a cause not for cynicism but for wonder and amazement. That every day we engage a living world, full of people who can cooperate, can care for each other, can discover and even create new realities, people who can live in peace with one another, who can raise children and homes, songs and dreams, that all these things can be true is a source of wonder. There is no question at all that evil is at work in this world (don’t we know it!). But God is at work too, powerfully at work, of that we can be certain.

Fourth, Saint Nicholas is an enormously active and capable community. There is ministry going on here all the time and only some of it is undertaken by paid staff. To be sure, those paid staff are resourceful and dedicated, but there is no way that they could account for the level of activity that I see in and around the building – gardening, painting footprints, pulling off receptions, yard saling, singing and in general living into the future that God is creating for us here.

Fifth, there is an equally enormous amount of work to be done. There’s a world that desperately needs to hear the Good News that we have received, a world that is starving not just for food but also for meaning and promise, starving for any reason for hope. We have meaning and promise in the person and work, death and resurrection of our Risen Lord. We have hope in the promises of a God who has never despaired of us in spite of our own despair, who hopes for us in spite of our hopelessness, who cares for us in spite of our carelessness.

So, thank you for your warm welcome of Linda and me. Ministry in the chancel and out of it is everything I’d hoped for (and more!). Saint Nicholas is a bright, vibrant, capable and desperately needed voice in the community and the world. May our journey together be fruitful, may it be joyful, may it be reverent and may God bless it every step of the way!

Pastor Greg