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Karen Hollis | September 7, 2025 Pentecost 13
Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
O Lord, you have examined my heart
and know everything about me.
You know when I sit down or stand up.
You know my thoughts even when I’m far away.
You see me when I travel
and when I rest at home.
You know everything I do.
You know what I am going to say
even before I say it, Lord.
You go before me and follow me.
You place your hand of blessing on my head.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too great for me to understand!
You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body
and knit me together in my mother’s womb.
Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.
You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion,
as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.
You saw me before I was born.
Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out
before a single day had passed.
How precious are your thoughts about me, O God.
They cannot be numbered!
I can’t even count them;
they outnumber the grains of sand!
And when I wake up,
you are still with me!
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be reflections of your word to us today, in Christ’s name we pray. Amen
How does it feel to be known by God? Does it feel like a warm embrace? A companion even when you’re alone? Does it ever feel a bit much, like someone probing into your business? Or does it make you weep to know that even with all your regrets and imperfections, God is drawn in by you and celebrates the unique journey only you could live? And it’s not your accomplishments, God rejoices in who you are. In God we have one who is endlessly loving and effortlessly relational. It is in God’s very essence to engage with us through love.
The psalmist suggests that before we are even aware, God recognizes our hard earned knowledge and wisdom, where we shine, what fascinates us, those crunchy places, how we engage with other personalities, our activation points, and potential for creativity.
Because God knows and treasures each of us in our own little worlds . . . God also know us as a collective. God knows all the pieces and also the whole. God has a meta-view of our complexity, as well as the fine detail of our interactions and collaboration. God can see potential for engagement and creativity, combinations of people that might be challenging at first, but open a pathway of healing. God can see with us what is possible, and offers us a call to be the body of Christ in this place, and minister from this place.
The thing about community is that we are fluid and dynamic. Whenever someone enters our community of faith, we become something new, and whenever someone leaves, we are new again. When – thanks be to God – leadership shifts within the community and someone is relieved from a lifetime sentence in a particular role, we change yet again. We are constantly in flux. I often think of a murmuration of birds. They move and hang together, following some invisible leader, constantly changing shape, creating newness, revealing something marvelous and magical about the world. Even as they move and change, they are still themselves. Perhaps at our best, we’re something like that . . . or perhaps that’s how God sees us, just a marvel of creation.
If only we could see ourselves with such clarity and hear God with equal clarity. We engage our toolbox for discernment so that we might at least draw out threads of identity, bring elements of truth into focus, and recognize whispers of God’s call. We know from experience that the process of discernment takes longer than we would like, and like the murmuration of birds, the content changes frequently.
Because things do change, it’s good to have a regular look at who we’ve said we are, what we understand as God’s call to us in this place, and see if that still fits.
In 2022 the congregation did a big visioning project, where we identified our values: spirituality, openness, care for the common good and radical love . . . can you believe that was 3 years ago?! When I was hired at the beginning of 2023, the council lifted up all the visioning work that was done the previous year and asked me to lead a process of putting that content into a strategic plan.
I was brand new and took on the role enthusiastically. Along the way, I hosted some gatherings to look at our current structure and ask questions of it, like how can this structure help us to live into our values? Is there a structure that would serve us better? What might it look like for us to live out these values?
We took a long list of initiatives and projects and asked you all to help us prioritize them. Perhaps you’ve been wondering what happened to that list and what we plan to do with it . . . I’m sorry we haven’t kept you up to date on that thread and here’s a bit of what happened next.
We continued asking questions, like how will our structure support us in accomplishing the list of priorities we have identified? Is the structure on paper the same as the one we live out in practice?
Over the course of several months of asking these questions, we became less and less clear on the answers, and at times lost the thread altogether. And then some things at the governance level shifted. We found ourselves needing a chair of council, then a chair of M&P, then a chair of property . . . are you seeing a theme here? It finally became clear to me that the key to our way forward is leadership.
Let me pause here to clarify something. I’m not here to tell you what we are lacking leadership or that we’re broken or insist that someone needs to step up into vacant roles. I’m here to reflect back to you what I see . . . and what I see is amazing. Leadership at this time and in this place doesn’t always arise to fill the roles outlined the structure we’ve inherited . . . and leadership is happening all over this place. Let me frame it differently. Individuals and small groups of people are taking initiative all the time and creating opportunity for people to connect, minister to others, and raise the profile of the church. Here are some examples:
- the affirm committee hosts a gathering each month at Bayside Café for LGBTQ++ folk and allies to gather. They try to offer activities that draw interest from a wide range of ages to encourage relationship across generations. Every time Bruce sends a press release to the paper, the community reads about what we’re doing.
- Serena has been wanting to teach queer history, and the idea, support, calendar, venue all clicked together to do part 2 this fall. Part 1 drew a huge crowd from outside the church.
- The venue team identified and executed a few key upgrades to our building to make it more user friendly for the regular concerts we host. In addition to concerts, there are numerous user groups that are regularly in the building, and many more who rent for one-time gatherings.
- SAGE has been hosting conversation groups about climate change and has helped us to align with our values by greening our building.
- We’ve been thinking differently about how to engage in reconciliation – instead of simply acknowledging the land, I’ve been teaching about its history. And we are honoured by this opportunity to host one of the truth and reconciliation commissioners because of a personal connection.
- We continue to serve the community during election time by reaching out to candidates and inviting them to participate in a forum. People in the community have come to anticipate this from us.
- I was talking to people from some of the other churches over the summer, and was told that we are seen as the standard in town for congregations engaging with social justice. Other churches in the valley see us as a model.
- For the past couple of years, Elaine Brown has been providing a framework with her fundraising initiatives for all of us to connect with new people, try new things, get to know each other better, all while raising money for the mission of the church. With her simple frameworks, we have been able to do so much and have so much fun!
- We have small groups that self-organize around particular interests, like knitting, walking, being men or women or single, and meeting the needs of their members.
- And of course all of the people whose contributions support our ability to gather this way for worship. There is a foundation of support here that is essential to our very existence as a community of faith. We need everyone in order to be our full selves and live out God’s call for us.
The structure we inherited from those who came before us says church initiatives should come through committees, but that’s not really how they are finding their way to manifestation these days. They are coming through ad hoc pathways that originate in the imagination of an individual or group. They often run it by me or Joanne, tell a couple of people and recruit a little help, and find a committee to rubber stamp it. Big or small, I love watching these initiatives blossom, particularly the way the organizers bring together their gifts and skills, ideas, experience, to help these things take shape. It’s beautiful to watch. If you have an idea, please don’t hesitate to share it – come and talk with me or Joanne. We’ll help you find a pathway to bring it into being.
Our discernment continues. With the help of knowledgeable and experienced people in this area, I’m thinking differently about strategic planning. I have a couple of goals for this year. One is to see who and where we are as clearly as we can. Naming it, understanding the way we actually function, and from there, seeing where there is opportunity to make some of the shifts we’ve named. The second is, to bring into alignment the way our structure says we’re supposed do things, and the way things happen in practice. There is a bit of distance there, and I think it’s an achievable goal.
In the meantime, I will not be a gatekeeper. I will support the flow of the spirit through us in this place. God has known us all along, even if we have been trying to see through the fog, through covid, through changes in ministry personnel, through our exhaustion. God has been leading the way the whole time, through each of us individually, through all of us together.
I find myself watching for possibilities and holding gently our becoming. I invite you to do your own noticing. What do you see? What do you see that tells us something about who we are? We might even pray together, God reveal to us who we are . . . through your love, help us to see what you can already see. That we may come into alignment, that we may take further steps in answering your call, and being your life in this place. Amen.