Groundbreaking

In both senses of that word/phrase. The breaking of the ground on the new/old site as well as a breakthrough moment. We're building on the old site at 413 Wisconsin Avenue. It was a bit of a controversy. There was some who would like us to have gone out beyond the so-called "59 corridor" (the loop that surrounds the city of Waukesha and defines its suburbs). But we decided to stay -- to, as the prophet Jeremiah put it, "seek the welfare of the city..."


On a rainy Sunday morning, following our worship service at the Masonic Lodge, we gathered at the site of the old church. We stood on property which has been in the hands of this congregation for about 140 years. In the midst of a soft rain, we prayed, sang and listened to the Mayor and our alderman tell us how grateful they are that we have decided to rebuild in the downtown area of the city. Several of us spoke of the groundbreaking ceremony that took place in May of 1891 and how great a risk those good folks took in those days just before the turn of the century.


It was a great day. One year to go to that day when the keys are handed over to us. It's hard not to overstate our joy.

Was it really God's fire?

There is a theological presumption in assuming that this fire was God's. Or "of God." Or howsoever we might style it. This is always the problem with disasters and it has been our problem from the beginning. It reminds me of the public argument between the Niebuhr brothers (Reinhold and H. Richard) in the 1930s. Or a more recent wrestling by N. T. (Tom) Wright, bishop of Durham, England, on the place of God in the war on terror. If God is sovereign over all things and God is "all in all" and (most difficultly), God is good then God is present in all things and it is our most difficult work to discern God's presence and God's will for our time.

The problems that Tom Wright addresses are only tangentially related to this Waukesha fire of December of 2007. It is a kind of conceit to place our small problems of the loss of a 114 year-old building in the same context or breath as Darfur, Gaza, 9-11 or Baghdad. In a certain way, this fire, like the collapse of the Minneapolis bridge yesterday, is just an accident and we shouldn't try to find any larger theological motifs in it. A good friend of mine who also pastors a church which was consumed by fire, wryly observed that he was glad that the fire officials in finding a cause for the fire didn't call it "an act of God." Fires, collapsing of bridges and the like are not, of course, "acts of God" as insurance companies like to label them.

Still, there is somewhere in all of this, the presence of God, the will of God and, I trust and I know in my very marrow, the goodness of God.

To return to Tom Wright's article cited above, the most important problem for most Christians is the inability of most of us, especially mainstream liberal Christians, to speak of God at all in public. Or even to suggest that God has a role to play in any public event, good or evil. For Wright, Jesus gives us a clue as to the whereabouts of God and the role God plays in public:

It means that whenever we ask the question of where God is in the world – whether in the world in general, or in the Tsunami or the Holocaust or the War on Terror, we should look first for God where the night is darkest and the pain is worst, not in the blaze of glory and the blast of trumpets but in the cry of the baby and the scream of the tortured.

To say that our fire of December is a "fire of God" is only to say that we will understand our current dilemma differently if we somehow understand that it is "of God" in some deeply mysterious way. Our journey thus far--still homeless as we are--has been largely about that process of discovery and hope.

Exile

After the fire, our congregation went into exile. We were in every respect, homeless. There are many churches in our situation. Our insurance company says that there are as many as 2,400 churches each year which have been the victim of a fire (just insured by them!) and have had to find temporary quarters for some period of time. I call it "living out of a suitcase" if a church could have something like a suitcase. Some of us rent space in a school, others camp out in other churches, some in convents or hospitals. The creative possibilities are almost endless. But none of them are home.

We are homeless. In exile. Living out of a suitcase.

You've traveled. You know what it's like. Your soap, toothbrush and pillows are not where they should be. Your underwear no longer have their own drawer. Socks keep moving to another part of the case. Sorting out dirty laundry from clean becomes a major complication. People who are professional travelers may have a sophisticated regimen of identifying their belongings in strange situations, but for those of us who like the settled life, this is not much fun.

I've had some horrible dreams about getting ready to move to the next phase of whatever dreamy journey I'm on and the bus is leaving in 5 minutes and everything I have is scattered all over the room I'm in and I don't have time to get it all together. I wake up in a sweat.

Ground Breaking

We're breaking ground for our new church on August 19th of 2007.

Here's the backstory. Our church, the Evangelical and Reformed United Church of Christ in Waukesha, Wisconsin, burned to the ground December 4th of 2005. A Sunday night it was. About 10:15 or so. Or at least that's when I got the call from a church member who said, "Our church is burning... I mean, it's really burning." I was not yet undressed for bed, so I rushed out the door. It was a bitter cold night and I was not altogether prepared for the cold. It was a horrible night and the cause of the fire would not be revealed for some weeks.

It was finally, a carelessness on our part. We left candles burning on the communion table after a funeral in the afternoon. It had been a long day. Worship for the second Sunday of Advent at 9 a.m. then a funeral for a dear woman at 4 in the afternoon. We had a marvelous meal with her family following the service and no one went up to check to see whether or not the candles on the table had been extinguished. They weren't.

Then the youth group met at 6 p.m. and we left at 7:45. The fire had been in its infancy at that point, but there were no hard-wired smoke alarms that would have warned the youth group that a fire was in the making. We all went home.

Then the call at 10:15 and the long night of running from one fire command post to another began.

But just now we are breaking ground.