Seven Sundays ago, I sat at this table with a cup of coffee and looked across the room at Oonagh’s artwork sitting on the mantle. It seemed appropriate that a series about the space between ministries should begin with something created by my daughter hanging in the ordinary space of our home. I did not know then where these Sundays would lead. I only knew that one chapter had ended, another had not yet begun, and I had been given a little time between them.
Now I am sitting at the same table, coffee beside me, preparing to write the final Seven Sundays Between.
On Monday morning, I will begin a new chapter as the Interim Minister of North Community Church in Marshfield. The waiting will be over. There will be an office to enter, people to meet, stories to hear, and the ordinary work of ministry to begin. I am excited about what lies ahead, but I would not be honest if I did not also admit to some sadness about what is ending and some uncertainty about what the coming weeks and months will bring.
That is the nature of a threshold. We stand with one foot resting upon familiar ground and the other reaching toward a place we do not yet know.
When these seven Sundays began, I thought I was waiting for something to start. Looking back, I wonder whether the waiting was itself a beginning. These weeks have caused me to slow down and pay attention. They have given me room to reflect upon where I have been, what I have learned, what I have had to release, and what I might carry with me into the future.
Each week, the appointed Scripture opened a door into a deeper conversation. We followed Jesus through fields and gardens, sat beside the sea, crossed through storms, and watched the Kingdom emerge in places that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Along the way, I returned to sermons I preached years ago and discovered that the person who wrote them was both familiar and strangely distant. I recognized his voice, but I also recognized how much that voice has changed.
That is not a rejection of the past. It is evidence of life.
A living faith should grow. A living theology should be capable of being challenged, deepened, and transformed. If God is still speaking, then faithful listening must include the possibility that we have not yet heard everything God has to say.
This week’s Gospel brings us into one of the most difficult and revealing encounters in the ministry of Jesus. Before it begins, Jesus has been arguing with religious leaders about purity. They are concerned with what people eat and whether they have followed the proper customs. Jesus turns their attention inward. What defiles us, he says, is not what enters the mouth but what comes out of it, for our words reveal what has taken root within the heart.
Then Jesus travels into the region of Tyre and Sidon, beyond the familiar boundaries of his people. A Canaanite woman approaches him, crying out for mercy because her daughter is suffering. She is an outsider by ethnicity, religion, and gender. The disciples do not hear a mother pleading for her child. They hear a disturbance. They ask Jesus to send her away.
Jesus initially remains silent. When he finally responds, he tells her that his mission is to the lost sheep of Israel. Still, she refuses to leave. She kneels before him and says, “Lord, help me.”
His next words are painful. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
We should resist attempts to soften this exchange. The woman is not receiving a term of endearment. She is being reminded of the boundary separating those considered children from those regarded as outsiders. Yet she does not accept the boundary as the final word. She answers Jesus from within his own image: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”
She does not ask anyone else to surrender their place at the table. She does not deny the history or covenant of Israel. She simply insists that there is enough mercy to reach her daughter too.
And Jesus listens.
“O woman, great is your faith,” he replies. Her daughter is healed, and the horizon of the Gospel grows wider. The woman who was supposed to remain outside becomes a theological voice. She speaks from the place of exclusion and reveals that the table of God is larger than those already seated around it had imagined.
I preached this passage in 2013. At that time, I focused on the woman’s persistence, her love for her daughter, and her humble submission to the will of God. Those themes remain present in the story, and I do not need to dismiss what I saw then. But thirteen years later, I notice something else. I see a woman who will not permit those with power to define the limits of mercy. I see someone who speaks until she is heard. And I see Jesus listening to a voice from beyond the boundaries of his original understanding of his mission.
Several years later, preaching from Mark’s version of the same encounter, I reflected on the command, “Be opened.” I wrote that God calls us to remain open to encounters in which we might make a difference in another person’s life—or in which that person might make a difference in ours.
I do not think I understood then how much I would need that message now.
On Monday, I could enter North Community Church as the minister who knows what should happen next. I have been doing this work for more than twenty years. I have studied theology, preached hundreds of sermons, led congregations through change, sat beside hospital beds, buried the dead, baptized children, celebrated marriages, balanced budgets, organized programs, and attended more committee meetings than anyone should reasonably be expected to remember. Experience matters, and I would be foolish to pretend that I arrive empty-handed.
But experience can become its own kind of boundary. It can persuade us that because we have seen something before, we already understand what is happening now. It can tempt a minister to enter a congregation carrying answers to questions no one has asked.
Love requires something different.
Love requires me to listen.
Before I can understand where this congregation is being called, I need to hear where it has been. I need to listen to the stories of those who built it, sustained it, loved it, argued within it, grieved within it, and kept its light burning through difficult seasons. I need to hear what people hope for and what they fear. I need to listen for the hurts that may never appear in an annual report and the desires that have not yet found words.
I also need to listen for the voices that may have been pushed toward the edges of the conversation. Who has been trying to speak but has been heard only as a disturbance? Who has been told, directly or indirectly, that the table was not set for them? Whose gifts have gone unnoticed? Whose questions have made others uncomfortable? What might God be saying through the person we did not expect to become our teacher?
Listening does not mean abandoning leadership. It is where faithful leadership begins. The task of an interim minister is not to impose a prefabricated vision upon a congregation. It is to help a community listen—to its history, to its neighbors, to one another, and to the voice of God—so that together we may discern what faithfulness requires in this moment.
These seven Sundays have given me a question that I intend to carry across the threshold:
What does love require of us now?
The question begins with love, but it is not sentimental. Love may require patience, but it may also require urgency. Love may call us to preserve something precious, or it may ask us to release something that has completed its work. Love may require comfort, confrontation, repentance, resistance, courage, or change. The answer cannot be determined by personal preference, institutional survival, or the desire to avoid conflict.
Nor can we answer it alone. We return to Scripture, prayer, tradition, reason, experience, and the sacraments. We remember that every person bears the image of God. We remember that we have been gathered into covenant and made responsible for one another. We listen for the Spirit and remain willing to be changed by what we hear.
That question will remain at the center of my preaching. In light of who God is, what Scripture reveals, and what our neighbors are experiencing, what does love require of us now?
It will also remain at the center of these writings.
The Seven Sundays Between must come to an end because the season between is ending. A threshold is not meant to become a permanent dwelling place. Eventually, we have to cross it. But I do not believe the conversations awakened during these weeks should end here.
I have enjoyed following the deeper theological threads these essays uncovered. We returned to what I have begun to think of as my theological library: old sermons, inherited traditions, convictions that have endured, ideas that have changed, and questions that remain unresolved. We brought old and new treasures to the table and listened for what they might say to the present moment.
The sermon will continue to belong to the congregation gathered on Sunday morning. It will emerge from our common life and speak to the particular moment we share. But there should also remain a place for the wider conversation—for reflecting on the questions that continue after the benediction has been heard, for tracing the theological threads that cannot be contained within a single sermon, and for asking what the living Word might be saying beyond the walls of the church.
I do not yet know what form that conversation will take. Perhaps not knowing is part of the discipline these Sundays have been teaching me. I do not need to arrive at the next chapter with every detail settled. I need to cross the threshold with my eyes open, my heart attentive, and my certainty held a little more lightly.
Seven Sundays ago, I looked across this table at Oonagh’s artwork and wondered what the time between might teach me. Today, I see that it has not given me greater certainty about the future. It has taught me to pay closer attention. It has reminded me that theology is not a collection of answers preserved upon a shelf. It is a continuing conversation among Scripture, tradition, experience, community, and the God who is still speaking.
On Monday, the new chapter begins. There will be stories to hear, relationships to build, wounds to tend, traditions to honor, questions to welcome, and possibilities we cannot yet see. I do not know what the coming weeks, months, or year will bring. But I know how I want to enter them.
Not as the minister who already knows everything, but as one prepared to listen.
Not carrying a finished vision, but trusting that vision will emerge through covenant and conversation.
Not asking first how things have always been done, but listening together for what love requires of us now.
The seven Sundays between have ended.
The conversation continues.
