The worship celebrations at the beginning of the last three months of the calendar year can be seen as a cross.
October provides the horizontal bar with "World Communion Sunday" when we and our contemporaries around the globe, celebrate the sacrament that gives the Sunday its name.
November gives us the lower portion of the vertical bar when it begins with "All Saints Day," on which we look back, remember, and celebrate those who have gone before us.
That leaves the upper portion of the vertical bar for December which begins with early Advent, a time when we look forward to the celebration of Christ's coming and the change it will bring.
Thus in our end of the year cross, the present is supported by the past and in turn provides the foundation for the future.
This is November. Accordingly, my thoughts drift to the past.
This is the month when I can comfortably admit to you that I took a vacation day, added it to my Monday day off, and used the combined time not to lounge at the beach, hike in the mountains, nor sit at ballgames eating hot dogs and peanuts, and Cracker Jax. Instead I drove nearly 500 miles to visit the graves of persons who had served as pastors of this congregation, and of other congregations that I have served. Adam, who accompanied and directed me, planned the excursion.
The trip reminded me that the work you and I do for Christ is built upon the work of others (pastors and laity) who have come and gone and have left us with a foundation of faith and Christian service.
Thus I was awed and moved (as I indicated during worship on October 16) to visit the grave of Josiah Keyes in Cazenovia and the grave of William Rundell in Mexico. For these two men were the first to serve in the first building built for worship by Potsdam Methodists, the little white church that sat where the Fire station is located today.
Over the last two years, Adam and I have paid our respects at the graves of seven of the pastors who served in that building, our congregation's home from 1820 - 1860, including the grave of Jessie Peck (1835-1837), later a Methodist bishop and a founder of Syracuse University
[Note: On our 2011 trip we didn't ignore pastors who served in the brick church or in our present stone building. We visited graves of three who served in the former and four who served in the latter.]
But even before they built the white church, there were Methodists worshipping and serving in Potsdam. One of them was a man named Calvin Flint. He was a circuit rider who served here in 1818, two years before the white church was built. I was amazed to discover that this man who served here so long ago, is buried in Canastota, a village located halfway between Chittenango (my boyhood home) and Oneida (where, as an adult, I lived for 23 years before accepting the call to the ministry).
At each of the graves I visited, I received the loud and clear reminder that this congregation did not magically come into existence on July 1, 2007, the day my appointment was effective.
Pastors that served this congregation long before my great grandparents were born. And too, there were lay people in the congregation long before yours were born. If you and I do our jobs right, there will be people serving with and through this congregation long after our great grandchildren are with Josiah, William, and Calvin.
Because those who came before us were good and faithful servants, stewards, and examples, you and I worship and serve here today. We are indebted to those pastors, and to the people who made up the congregation at the times they served.
This month, we who sit and move and have our being as the horizontal bar of the end of the year cross, have used my trip to look backward and downward at the lower portion of the vertical bar. We have focused on those who came before us and on whose shoulders we stand.
A month from now, as we prepare to celebrate the coming of Christ, our worship and our thoughts will look forward and upward at the upper (future) portion of the same vertical bar. Today, as we contemplate all this, we cannot help but ask ourselves whether those who will need to stand on our shoulders will, at our graves and elsewhere, give thanks for our being good servants, stewards, and examples.
Christ is alpha and omega, but you and I are neither the beginning nor the end, the first nor the last.
Jim